Measurement

This year started out a bit rocky for Tune (née HasOffers), but the app attribution company seems to be moving on with Monday’s acquisition of MobileDevHQ. The purchase is part of Tune’s bid to build out its user acquisition attribution capabilities. The move comes a little more than a month after the company’s rebrand from […]

Digital media measurement company comScore revealed a deal Monday to acquire MdotLabs, a cyber-security startup that uses statistics and machine-learning to fight online fraud. Non-human traffic, click-farms and other “invalid activity” represent a $14 billion assault on the advertising industry and have spurred deals in online fraud detection, most notably Google’s acqui-hire of Spider.io earlier this […]

This is the first in a series of interviews with vendors combating the problem of ad fraud. Other companies participating in this series include White Ops, DoubleVerify, Forensiq, Moat, PubChecker, Telemetry and Integral Ad Science. Videology might not be specialists in ad fraud like White Ops or Integral Ad Science, but preventing and detecting it […]

When it comes to audience, there can never be too much of a good thing. That’s the theory behind a self-serve tool from Medialets, dubbed Servo Total Attribution, released Wednesday. The tool is designed to help media buyers, agencies and exchanges measure mobile ad ROI in real time by tying mobile conversions to impressions served […]

Nielsen’s revenue soared in the second quarter. The company on Tuesday reported a nearly 16% revenue growth spurt in the second quarter of 2014 to $1.6 billion, up from $1.4 billion at this time last year, minus the recent acquisitions of Arbitron and Harris Interactive. Although revenue was up, net profits were nothing to write […]

Publishers using DoubleClick platforms will no longer have to rely on agencies to learn if their ads are viewable or not. Google has made its viewability product, Active View, available for publishers in addition to advertisers and agencies. “We’ve been hearing from publishers that discussions about viewable impressions with advertisers lack transparency making it difficult […]

The cross-device measurement chasm just got a little smaller with the commercial release of mobile ad measurement capabilities, now available as part of Nielsen’s Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) tool. The promise of mobile web and in-app measurement is both an alluring prospect for advertisers looking for a cross-platform view of consumers across digital and TV […]

AdFin co-founder Jeanne Houweling has moved on from her position as the digital advertising analytics firm’s CEO for “personal reasons,” a move confirmed by company co-founder and CTO Milosz Tansky. Tansky, who’s operating as interim CEO, said Houweling will continue her involvement with AdFin on the advisory board. “Outside of that we’re just as focused […]

Remember the scene in the movie “Kill Bill, Vol. 2“ where the vengeful heroine, the Bride, is buried alive in a coffin and has to pound her way out with her bare fists? That’s your video ad. It’s essentially trapped in a box and buried in the publisher’s web page, and whether it can get out […]

On Monday, the Media Rating Council’s (MRC) advisory to avoid buying in-browser video impressions on the basis of viewability will end. Although the MRC defines in-browser video viewability as an ad that is at least 50% in view for at least two continuous seconds, there’s little agreement in the industry on what, exactly, constitutes video […]

Scott Ferris, GM of television and video at Microsoft Advertising, has been in the video biz for around three decades. For seven of those years, Ferris has been at Microsoft, heading up its video business group. Most recently however, he’s taken the lead role in what Microsoft calls its Content and Entertainment business group, which […]

Audience measurement mainstay Rentrak paid homage to the staying power of programmatic when, on its Q4 earnings call just weeks ago, Vice Chairman and CEO Bill Livek credited automated advertising as a growing trend the company is now “catering to.” Rentrak has been on a tear of late, racking up headlines as a (perhaps less-publicized, […]

Vindico, a buy-side video ad server, on Tuesday rolled out the Vindico MatchPoint platform, designed to let advertisers onboard first-party records to match against Vindico’s database of consumer profiles. MatchPoint is integrated with the Vindico Bid Manager, a DSP the company made generally available Tuesday; it has built-in viewability capabilities powered by AdTricity, a video ad-measurement […]

If Oracle will flaunt the tight integration of its Marketing Cloud, so too will Adobe. The company, at its Digital Marketing Summit EMEA in London Wednesday, revealed (among other Marketing Cloud enhancements) tighter integration between its Media Optimizer and Analytics applications. In so doing, Adobe seems to be in the early stages of positioning itself as a […]

As the growing number of smart TVs and connected devices cause further fragmentation, de-duped cross-platform measurement has become the media planner’s imperative. Nielsen and comScore are answering the call by beefing up digital video and mobile integrations in their respective media measurement tools. Nielsen since 1950 has been inextricably linked to TV audience measurement, claiming access […]

Digital marketing attribution is in vogue. AOL will acquire attribution vendor Convertro for approximately $101 million, the company announced Tuesday afternoon. This comes on the heels of Google’s move earlier in the day to snap up competing attribution pure play vendor Adometry for an undisclosed sum. Customers will have access to Convertro in a couple […]

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong addressed a crowd of close to 2,000 media buyers at its NewFront Tuesday night with an exuberant, “tonight is about connecting content with distribution.” It’s clear, with AOL, that much of that connection will happen through video. Ran Harnevo, president of AOL Video, talked up digital video and its intent to […]

Apple has given its tacit approval for the use of its Identifier for Advertising (IDFA) to attribute app installs and post-install actions. The development, welcomed by app marketers and their ad partners, comes two months after Apple spread fear in the app ecosystem by rejecting some apps that didn’t adhere to a narrow ad serving […]

When the Media Ratings Council (MRC) last week lifted its advisory against buying and selling display ads based on viewability, it marked a milestone in determining whether an ad was actually seen. However, a number of industry execs say the problem is far from solved in display (let alone video, which still lacks a common […]

One of PC giant Dell’s first steps as a private company is overhauling its marketing spend. Dell executives unveiled results from its work with marketing attribution firm Visual IQ on Thursday at Forrester’s Forum for Marketing Leaders. “Our goal was to understand the optimal ways to reach our customers through all the channels that we […]

Industry insiders worry that as digital video and television converge, one will cannibalize the other in terms of media allocation. Not necessarily so, said Scott Ferber, founder and CEO of video ad platform Videology, during a panel the company hosted Wednesday. Ferber shared research commissioned by Videology and conducted by Forrester Research revealing that 70% […]

When the Media Rating Council (MRC) recently lifted its advisory against factoring viewability measurement into display ad transactions, one crucial format did not get the green light. The accreditation vendor has urged advertisers to avoid trading on video viewability metrics – at least until the end of June. Question is, will that be enough time? […]

Ad-targeting company Netseer is one of the pioneers in contextual ad targeting, but as advertisers changed their focus from placements to audiences, the 8-year-old company knew it had to keep up with the times. Netseer’s products include media-buying services and a contextual links ad network. And this week it launched a viewability solution called the […]

Target’s December data breach, which exposed the credit card and other personal information of as many as 110 million customers in late 2013, was calamitous for Target, scary for its customers, and an “early Christmas present” for identity protection brand LifeLock Inc., according to the company’s head of media. But rather than sit back and […]

The Media Rating Council (MRC) on Monday lifted its advisory against buying and selling display ads based on viewability metrics. “The state of viewability measurements is much better than it was 16 months ago and viewability vendors have greater insight into the range of ads that are served in campaigns,” said David Gunzerath, SVP and […]

The general consensus is there’s a long way to go before linear TV buys are fully automated. Despite advancements in pushing programmatic into video-on-demand (VOD) environments, the enablement of programmatic transactions in linear TV is still in its infancy. Part of this has to do with the state of the technology. “All the tools in […]

Although an industrywide video viewability standard has not yet materialized, players in the digital ecosystem are making progress. As a marketer, “you need to make sure an ad was viewed and we know we will never make video profitable on a click-only basis no matter what KPI we’re using,” remarked DJ Harman, online marketing manager […]

Viewability – the qualities that convey whether an advertisement was seen by its target audience – remains a contentious issue in the ad tech space. This is why associations like the Media Ratings Council (MRC) give accreditation to vendors offering viewability metrics, and why those vendors have scrambled for approval. One such company is Sizmek, […]

Visible World, which has been developing addressable TV technology since 2000, claims to cover nearly 90% of cable TV households in the US through its targeted ad products. The company has developed a video and TV campaign platform used by advertisers directly or by distributors to sell to advertisers. That same platform is now being […]

Much of the debate about the convergence of digital video and TV advertising has centered on budget and measurement. Members of the advertising industry have wondered whether digital video would cannibalize TV ad dollars and to what extent the right metrics are in place to effectively execute cross-platform video buys. A report from Nielsen and […]