Platforms

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in programmatic TV and video. Today’s column is written by Hadrien Bouchrara, solutions architect at Facebook. It’s time for another installment of “Ad Tech: The Acronyms Awaken.” In November, the IAB released VAST 4.0, its new video ad-serving template, for public comment. Since VAST […]

At 1.55 billion monthly active users and growing, Facebook’s audience reach is massive. And Facebook is hammering out constant improvements to the video discovery mechanism in the news feed. But the social platform remains largely in experimental mode with video, and agencies and publishers are chomping at the bit for a clearer monetization path and […]

MSN.com has gone through a lot of changes recently, switching to a syndication-only content model a year and a half ago and having its ad sales move to AOL. To personalize MSN.com’s content and ad experience, Microsoft revealed Tuesday it had signed on with Taboola to bring native ads and personalization to the MSN site […]

Since its launch in 2014, Facebook’s ad network has limited itself to mobile app placements, choosing to avoid working with mobile web properties. Now that’s changing. AdExchanger has learned Facebook Audience Network is one month into a test involving about 10 publishers that would see the ad network’s placements run on mobile web pages. The […]

Yahoo doesn’t have a fraudulent traffic problem, a company leader said Friday. Tod Sacerdoti, VP of display and video ad products and the founder of Yahoo’s video ad exchange BrightRoll, was responding to a CNBC report late last week, which claimed widespread fraud in Yahoo’s ads business and sales “ineptitude” as responsible for the downfall of […]

Sandwiched somewhere between the smart cars and $599 headsets at CES, Facebook dropped a mini-bomb by way of its developer blog when it revealed Thursday that LiveRail – the video ad server, SSP and publisher monetization platform it acquired in 2014 – would exit the ad-serving business. Facebook purports the move will allow it to […]

Like many vendors and publishers at CES, AOL is using the conference as an opportunity to update its agencies and brands on what’s going on at the company and to solidify global partnerships. AOL, after all, had a busier year than most of its peers, having been acquired by Verizon while being acquisitive itself – […]

Snapchat is said to be rolling up its sleeves on an ads API, and agencies, advertisers and tech vendors alike are happy to hear it. “There’s a great deal of interest in Snapchat as a platform,” said Noah Mallin, head of social at MEC North America. “The intersection of video, mobile and messaging, combined with […]

When Taco Bell launched its breakfast option last year, the brand had two main challenges on its plate: driving awareness among millennials and translating that heightened awareness into repeat foot traffic. It was a tall order considering that Taco Bell isn’t known for breakfast and that competition in the quick-service restaurant space is fierce. (See the […]

“The world may have a polling problem,” declared Nate Silver, the former New York Times statistical wunderkind who’s since launched FiveThirtyEight under the ESPN banner, in an article last year. Silver made this claim following the failure of UK polls to predict results of the country’s general election last May. In the US, he noted […]

With a tight marketing budget and a brand on the turnaround, Volvo is open to experimentation. Which is one reason why it’s a launch partner for Time Inc.’s Real Time ad product, which places the Volvo brand next to Time Inc.’s trending content on social media. The advertising product adds Volvo’s logo to Time Inc.’s […]

It’s not easy monetizing kids. Even the words “monetizing kids” are unfortunate. But the developers of kid-focused games still “need to eat,” said Yuri Shilin, owner of KidGames, an Israel-based game developer with a portfolio of dozens of apps for kids, with around 30 million downloads overall. “It’s for sure very hard to make money,” […]

For several months, IPG Mediabrands’ ad tech unit Cadreon has been testing Google’s cross-device measurement system, baked into DoubleClick advertiser products as of June. Krish Sailam, senior product manager of mobile for Cadreon, said the trading desk has run a few beta tests with advertisers, and noted conversion uplift has consistently reached the double digits. Cadreon […]

Pinterest made sense for The Grommet right from the start. The Grommet is an ecommerce site where inventors and entrepreneurs can launch and sell their products – everything from the innovative (lunchboxes that unzip into placemats) to the strange, but cool (liquid that can be applied to the fingertips of gloves to make them touchscreen-friendly). In […]

Chicago-based ad platform company Centro let go 29 of its 725 employees on Monday, or about 4% of total staff. Unlike other recent layoffs in the ad tech sector – including at Turn, Collective and PubMatic – the cuts were not motivated by a shrinking pool of cash, restless investors or slouching revenue growth. Instead, […]

When Pandora announced its intent in November to acquire the assets of Rdio, it was reportedly an attempt to make up an ad revenue shortfall. Though people increasingly listen to online radio, with 143 million each month this year (the number has doubled since 2010, according to Edison Research), streaming services are still working out approaches […]

Header bidding is coming to mobile apps, via a solution Rubicon Project is beta testing with 20 publishers. Early results for the product, FastLane, saw CPM increases of up to 300%. Rubicon will release the product more widely to publishers in Q1 of next year. Unlike the mobile web or desktop, mobile apps bring in […]

Publicis Groupe agency MRY has been working with social media management startup SocialRank to help its clients get smarter about their social audiences and identify niche segments using a tool dubbed Market Intel, which came out of beta on Monday. The company also launched on Monday a product called SocialRank for Teams, which allows agencies […]

Yahoo received yet another blow Friday with the departure of Prashant Fuloria, its SVP of advertising products and engineering, just shy of a year after he was appointed to the role. Enrique Munoz Torres, who leads Yahoo’s search products, will inherit Fuloria’s responsibilities, including oversight of the Gemini and BrightRoll platforms, Yahoo’s advertiser-facing products. Fuloria’s […]

Twitter on Thursday made its first attempt to capitalize on its logged-out audience with the launch of a private beta test program with select advertisers in the US, UK, Japan and Australia to target promoted tweets and promoted videos at users who aren’t logged into Twitter. As of Q3 2015, Twitter had around 320 million […]

Shoppable video is still a novel concept, despite the industry’s efforts to move it into the mainstream (with Google launching shoppable video on YouTube being the most recent example). But NBCUniversal’s Bravo TV still sees the value of shoppable video. The network wanted to expand its digital business and encourage fans to return to its properties on […]

Sell-side platform PubMatic has dismissed more than 100 employees, AdExchanger has confirmed. The layoffs, affecting 20% of the company’s global staff, follow an 8% reduction in October. The combined cuts have reduced PubMatic’s workforce from 600 to about 450. Additionally the company lost two key leaders on the publisher and demand side: Evan Adlman, VP of publisher […]

Consumers don’t want to see repurposed 30-second TV spots in their social feeds, which is why a number of brands and their agencies are investing in content tailored for Instagram. In September, Instagram’s 400 million users began seeing more ads as the image-centric platform turned on 30-second video ads, as well as landscape ads, which […]

When it comes to driving traffic for publishers, Facebook is king. Publishers receive 90% of their traffic from the social network, according to social analytics firm SimpleReach. But what about Pinterest? While the site crossed 100 million monthly active users (MAUs) this year, that’s a fraction of Facebook’s 1.5 billion MAUs, and trails behind Instagram’s […]

Square may be a unicorn – but it’s got its eye on the little guy. “We’re leveling the playing field,” said Kevin Burke, former Visa CMO and now head of acquisition at Square, which completed its long-awaited IPO in mid-November. “We’re helping small businesses close the loop.” Integrating online and offline has long been the […]

Buenos Aires-based game studio Etermax is a rare creature in the app development world. “We don’t focus on user acquisition,” said CEO and founder Maximo Cavazzani. It’s quite a statement considering that Etermax is the developer responsible for quiz app Trivia Crack, which was the most downloaded app in the App Store in late 2014. […]

Tim Armstrong is going to have to look for a new successor. The AOL CEO’s heir apparent, the highly visible Bob Lord, will soon step down from the company, which he joined two years ago to help spearhead an aggressive expansion of the company’s ad technology vision. The Wall Street Journal first reported the news […]

Six out of 10 marketers would reallocate their media spend if digital media owners failed to supply sufficient third-party measurement, according to new findings from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). In an ANA survey of 154 members conducted this summer, 90% of marketer respondents also said they are “not fully confident” that their working […]

Marketers are known for demanding ROI and previous results before they embrace new strategies, but they’re going all-in on the assumption that mobile will be a far more prosperous channel this year than in previous holiday seasons. Industry analysts like eMarketer project a strong holiday for retailers, with mobile commerce expected to grow 32.2% over […]

MoPub is Twitter’s secret weapon – secret because the mobile exchange rarely comes up during Twitter’s quarterly earnings calls. On Friday, MoPub introduced native video mediation to enable publishers to filter their ad requests through whichever native ad network SDK they want, including the Facebook Audience Network and the more than 175 DSPs integrated with the […]