Platforms

In a bid to enhance its header bidding wrapper and improve yield for publishers, Index Exchange has tapped Drew Bradstock as its new SVP of product. Bradstock spent the past five years as group product manager of Google’s Ad Exchange. The move brings Bradstock back to focusing on a fast-growing exchange, he said, that looks more […]

Rubicon Project’s full-year financials paint a picture of a growing exchange. The company’s managed revenue hit $1 billion in 2015. With a growing take rate, 22.6% for the year, that tallied up to $227.3 million, an 81% annual increase. The amount Rubicon takes from transactions on its exchange increased from 19.3% in Q4 of 2014 […]

Affinity Answers, founded under the name Colligent in 2005, has spent a decade building a new metric for brand success. The data measurement company processes the social information of more than 400 million users per day to identify mutual affinities between brands and publishers that help them uncover, target and monetize untapped audiences. The company […]

While big video platforms such as YouTube and Facebook provide unparalleled reach and targetability, marketers aren’t completely sold on the insularity of these environments – or their ability to augment data beyond the platforms’ own four walls. Pixability, which originated as a tool for agencies and marketers to assess high-value YouTube channels and audiences, wants […]

The wave of ad tech consolidation continues with Tuesday’s announcement that Synacor will purchase publisher tech vendor Technorati. The purchase price won’t be revealed until Synacor, a publicly traded company, files its 8-K to the SEC. [Update: Synacor paid $3 million cash.] Technorati posted $7 million in revenue last year, mostly from its aging ad […]

Last September, BrightRoll COO Bruce Falck became CEO of the troubled ad tech company Turn. It’s an interesting time for Turn. The company is not a spring chicken in the ad tech world – an industry often rocked by the mercurial whims of investors, agencies and brands. So how can Turn be a stabilizing force […]

Microsoft’s ad offering is getting a facelift with the addition of premium ad formats from AOL, beginning first with its MSN.com property. MSN will get access to five new ad types, including adaptive mobile units such as AOL’s Devil Full Page Flex. It’s the first major ad update for the company since Microsoft transferred its […]

Google is less than two weeks away from releasing its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) into the wild. The AMP program will move out of its test phase and begin displaying the mobile-optimized content pages in its search results before the end of the month, and possibly as early as next week, according to AdExchanger sources. […]

Yahoo’s bloodletting on Wednesday also included a number of advertising and sales-related roles, AdExchanger has learned. Yahoo is in the midst of executing a board-approved cost savings scheme that will see 15% of its workforce receive pink slips. The layoffs, the first round of which went down last week, continued Wednesday with the announcement of […]

To help publishers manage multiple header bidding partners, OpenX created a server-to-server wrapper dubbed OpenX Meta, which it unveiled Thursday. The advantage of OpenX Meta is that it moves all the action – long, slow bid requests – off a publisher’s page and onto its server. From there, it can quickly ping all the other […]

ComScore has struck a measurement deal with Twitter to enable a tagless integration to its digital audience delivery and analytics system, validated Campaign Essentials (vCE). The integration will take effect in Q2 and will give advertisers access to digital GRPs and reach and frequency metrics. These new reporting features will be available directly within Twitter’s […]

The telco industry’s obsession with ad tech shows no sign of slowing down and Verizon’s corporate venture arm is the latest accelerant. Verizon Ventures has invested $5.5 million in Qualia, a company focused on mining intent data, and which recently merged with cross-device tool BlueCava. The Series B round included support from S3 Ventures. It’s […]

Spotify was a bit late to programmatic, but now it’s raring to go. “2015 was the year we started opening up, which was huge for us, and 2016 is the year we’re going to be fully open,” said Spotify CRO Jeff Levick. “We’re going to keep expanding and investing heavily in the programmatic channel.” In […]

The one thing that investors really want from Twitter – for it to grow its monthly active users – is seemingly something that the platform can’t deliver. Twitter reported on Wednesday that revenue for Q4 2015 was up 48% year over year, hitting $710 million – with ad revenue comprising $641 million of that number […]

Despite the explosion of consumers watching 100 million hours of video every day on Facebook, marketers want more ways to make an impact in a video environment rife with muted autoplay. Consequently, Facebook on Wednesday released automated captioning for autoplay video and a complete integration to third-party measurement provider Moat and rolled out globally a […]

Twitter’s giving its reverse chronological timeline an algorithmic tweak. Rather than automatically seeing the most recent tweets first and then moving backward in time as they scroll, starting Wednesday users will see a curated lineup of roughly one dozen tweets at the top of their timeline culled from the accounts they follow. To determine which […]

Viacom sales chief Jeff Lucas’s affinity for Snapchat dates back a year, to when the broadcast network first explored distribution opportunities with the popular video-messaging app. Now the two have set up a multiyear content and advertising agreement, which gives Viacom’s sales teams the right to monetize Snapchat US-based ad inventory. In turn, Snapchat gets […]

If you take the headlines at face value, Google and Facebook are killing it – dwarfing all others in terms of revenue and scale – and there’s not much reason for other publishers to get out of bed in the morning. But there’s a more nuanced story going on. Certainly, Facebook and Google have become the […]

Say you’re an advertiser plunking down $5 million for 30 seconds of prime Super Bowl ad time. You’re going to want to make sure that campaign drives some sort of action online. But between Facebook, Google and Twitter, how do you choose what to use? According to a report released Monday, Google’s attribution engine, Adometry, […]

Is dynamic ad insertion finally coming to podcasting? New audience measurement guidelines released Thursday by a collection of public radio companies address one of the big concerns advertisers have with the medium – thereby paving the way for new methods of selling and placing ads. “Up until recently, whenever we put an ad into the […]

LinkedIn acquired Bizo in July 2014 with grand visions of making a B2B ad platform. Those visions haven’t panned out. During its Q4 earnings call Thursday, the company said it would kill off Lead Accelerator, the B2B lead-nurturing product that came out of the $175 million acquisition of Bizo. It was a fast death: LinkedIn […]

Yahoo will dismiss around 15% of its workforce in Q1, including, more than likely, a large chunk of its global sales force. Five global offices will also get the chop. The cuts are part of a $400 million cost savings plan that will seek to grow profitability ahead of a likely sale of the business. […]

Magazine publishers need Snapchat, but Snapchat needs them, too. That may be one reason why Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s relatively press-shy CEO, appeared Monday at the American Magazine Media Conference in New York to discuss the origins of Discover and his plans to monetize the platform. Discover, Snapchat’s video magazine product, was created to “remove as […]

Twitter seems to be having a little trouble on the turnaround front – but that doesn’t mean it’s for the birds. “When I talk to agency and buy-side contacts, they recognize the value of Twitter and that the real-time nature of the platform is unique,” said Dan Salmon, managing director of BMO Capital Markets. “But the […]

Remember 2008, when the App Store was full of fart apps? That’s not the sort of inauspicious start Apple has in mind for Apple TV. “Sure, you’ll get lots of weird stuff at the beginning – the Fireplace app was the most popular Apple TV app over the holidays – but we’re going to see […]

Watch out YouTube. Facebook is coming for your video ad honeypot. In his first week back in the saddle after the birth of his daughter Maxima, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors on the company’s Q4 earnings call that Facebook will explore the launch of a video-specific property, possibly an app that would compete with Google […]

When many creative agencies failed to pivot into mobile, tech and media companies converged on their own solutions. “Creative agencies were disinterested in making experiences for mobile,” said James Chandler, mobile director for the GroupM agency Mindshare. After all, app-oriented mobile campaigns aren’t built around flashy art or high-production videos. While this mentality frustrated him […]

Wikia unveiled a new property called Fandom this week at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Desert, Calif. The slick-looking site features news articles contributed by readers, as well as bite-size stories designed for social sharing. CEO Craig Palmer described it as “a one-stop shop if you’re a fan of pop culture.” Behind the […]

OpenX unveiled a new product Tuesday, real-time guaranteed (RTG), with features that fall between private marketplaces and automated guaranteed. The aim is to solve drawbacks to each current buying method. One of the biggest complaints about private marketplaces is that they don’t deliver the scale both sides want. And one of the biggest complaints about […]

AOL rolled a slew of sell-side tools into a unified publisher platform called ONE by AOL: Publishers, which launched Monday, and revealed its intent to acquire French yield management startup AlephD. It didn’t take long for AOL to make good on an earlier declaration by then-President Bob Lord in late October that AOL would remain […]