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  • AOL-Millennial Media Acquisition Shows It Isn’t Always About The Price

    AOL’s acquisition of Millennial Media for $238 million was a coup for its purchaser, if not for its investors. The mobile ad platform went from an opening-day share price of $23.50 to $1.75 when AOL announced its intent to purchase Thursday. But Elgin Thompson, managing director at investment firm Digital Capital Advisors, cautioned not to […]

  • Verizon’s Data Goldmine Is Also A Privacy Minefield

    Does Verizon have access to rich user data? Undeniably. Will Verizon successfully capitalize on that opportunity? Questionable. After all, Verizon’s user data is only as valuable as its data practices. Verizon could certainly benefit in the wake of an acquisition spree that somewhat resembled a line of falling dominos – AOL into Verizon, Millennial Media […]

  • Rubicon Expands Into Automating Out-Of-Home Advertising

    Rubicon Project CEO Frank Addante has long expressed a vision to automate the buying and selling of all advertising. On Thursday, the company took the first step in expanding beyond digital by partnering with out-of-home trading platform BitPoster to bring inventory into Rubicon’s orders platform. “It’s the first foray into media outside of digital,” said Jay […]

  • AOL Confirms It Will Snap Up Millennial Media For About $240 Million

    By Kelly Liyakasa and Zach Rodgers Verizon-owned AOL will snap up mobile ad platform Millennial Media, the companies said Thursday morning. AOL will pay $1.75 per share of Millennial stock, valuing the company at $238 million, as was previously rumored. This price is a considerable premium over the company’s Wednesday close-of-trading market cap of $187 million. As AdExchanger […]

  • Appsflyer – And Attribution – Come To The Instagram Ads API

    Instagram has rounded up a posse of Facebook Marketing Partners since the closed beta launch of its ads API in early August. Mobile analytics company Appsflyer is the most recent addition to a list that includes AdRoll, Adaptly, Ampush, Brand Networks, 4C, Kenshoo, Laundry Service, Publicis-owned agency Mediavest, Nanigans, Olapic, Resolution Media, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, […]

  • Programmatic Has A Pulse: How Traffic And Bid Patterns Manipulate Exchanges

    On any given day or month, the programmatic marketplace is filled with spiky peaks and valleys as CPMs rise and fall and as audiences ebb and flow. The best trading desks, advertisers, publishers, DSPs and exchanges don’t just understand these variations in price, volume and user behavior. They act on them. That action might mean […]

  • Doing Business In The Shadows Cast By Walled Gardens

    Attribution companies Adometry and Convertro are frequently linked because they were acquired in quick succession (by Google and AOL, respectively). And the functionality they provide is increasingly important, as marketers want to justify their digital ad spend across channels and devices. Buyers are wary when attribution technologies – which should be agnostic – are integrated […]

  • Adobe Brings App Analytics Together With Target

    Adobe Analytics and personalization engine Adobe Target can now be consumed as a combo meal. The company said Wednesday that it has integrated the two solutions, also available as separate entities within the Adobe Marketing Cloud, into a single UI to help clients handle what Adobe’s VP of mobile, Matt Asay, called “the mobile problem.” […]

  • NDN, Video Distribution Platform For The AP, Powers On

    Atlanta-based News Distribution Network (NDN) is the quiet video engine that hums behind a host of traditional and new media publisher sites like the New York Daily News, Los Angeles Times and Hearst. Last March, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer contemplated a $300 million bid to buy NDN following its interest in French web video platform Dailymotion, but […]

  • Facebook Fights Back Against Rising Allegations That It Is 'Closed'

    “Closed.” The word is often bandied about to describe Facebook’s ad tech business. It has become a rallying cry for smaller competitors as well as independent observers concerned about what they see as a return to AOL-style walled gardens. It would seem the naysayers have struck a nerve. Brian Boland, Facebook’s VP of advertising technology, […]

  • Hard Rock Is The Latest Brand To Hit Play On Streaming Music, Via Rdio Partnership

    Even if terrestrial radio still has the bulk of audience, the growth – and ability to target – is in streaming audio. And an international brand like Hard Rock Hotels and Casinos needs its tune to reverberate across a global stage. This is one of the reasons why it signed on to use a native […]

  • Hulu Uncorks A Private Exchange

    Beginning this fall, advertisers will be able to programmatically buy Hulu video inventory in a private marketplace across desktop, mobile and connected TV via Facebook’s LiveRail supply-side platform. In its Tuesday announcement, Hulu said it will also use Oracle’s data-management platform (née BlueKai), through which marketers can enrich their buys by combining their anonymized first-party […]

  • As Brands Dig Deeper Into Social Data, Twitter Opens Up To Third-Party Developers

    Brands know the importance of images or videos uploaded by fans and customers on social media. But for many, it’s like dying of thirst surrounded by the ocean. Relevant content might exist on Instagram and Twitter, but it’s meaningless without a filter – that is, if a poster doesn’t tag or mention your business. Even […]

  • Media Fragmentation Should Be On Every Marketer’s Mind

    The director of ad technology for Netflix, Tony Ralph, and director of marketing for Abe’s Market, Michelle Goldstein, will appear at AdExchanger’s Omni.Digital conference on Sept. 10, an event designed to educate marketers on advanced solutions for building seamless cross-channel brand experiences. Cross-channel attribution will be one topic discussed at the conference. As Netflix’s director of […]

  • Terrestrial Broadcasters Downplay Size Of Streaming Audiences

    A troupe of traditional broadcasters has a message for media buyers: Your perception of audio streaming audiences is skewed, according to a study by Advertiser Perceptions released Tuesday. The study, commissioned by terrestrial broadcasters (including Cumulus, Westwood One, iHeartMedia, CBS Radio, Cox Media Group, Hubbard Radio, Radio Advertising Bureau and Radio One) found media buyers […]

  • MobileBridge Beefs Up Its In-App Content Creation Tools

    There’s CRM and then there’s MRM – mobile relationship management. In-app marketing company MobileBridge is looking to span the two with cloud-based tech that combines marketing automation and loyalty to boost app engagement. MobileBridge integrates both with a brand’s app and with its traditional CRM partners, including SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, IBM, Marketo and Salesforce […]

  • How YouTube Became Google’s Inroad To Big Brand Budgets

    “Premium video” is Google’s code for “brand budgets.” Its decision to remove YouTube inventory from the DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) by the end of the year is one more way it hopes to clinch a piece of TV’s $70 billion portion of the overall brand budget. Platform providers were understandably upset when Google revealed the […]

  • Buzzstarter Grabs Attention For Organic Content With Paid Distribution

    “10 Reasons Why You Should…”-type content is usually 10 reasons why you shouldn’t – and don’t. “Content that works is content that enraptures an audience and that means being story-driven,” said Alex Gold, co-founder of Buzzstarter, a programmatic content distribution platform based out of Silicon Valley whose clients include Dove, Yahoo, Axe, Degree, Campbell’s, Absolut Vodka […]

  • Stay Hopeful For Sizmek? Ad Tech Company Revamps Sales Strategy And Bets On Programmatic Growth

    Sizmek has gone through some seismic changes to its sales staff and some of its product offerings. So despite a 9% YoY decline in Q2 revenue to $40.2 million, CEO Neil Nguyen’s word to investors during Sizmek’s earnings call Wednesday was: “Look for efforts to match our results in the second half of the year and even more […]

  • For Attribution Firms, Mobile Needs To Get Moving

    The executives in this story will appear at AdExchanger’s Omni.Digital conference on Sept. 10, an event designed to educate marketers on advanced solutions for building seamless cross-channel brand experiences. It’s still unclear how effective mobile advertising can be, despite its explosive growth. For instance, mobile passed desktop in terms of user content consumption in early 2014, but still […]

  • Facebook Audience Network Adds New Formats, Including Autoplay Video

    Facebook on Tuesday expanded the ad formats publishers can add to their mobile apps via the Facebook Audience Network (FAN). These formats include a native video unit that shows in-feed as well as three interstitial formats: carousel ads, which show up to five ads in a single unit; dynamic product ads, often used by retailers […]

  • Fyber Rolls Out Pre-Cache Controls To Help Optimize The Load

    Berlin-based mobile ad platform Fyber wants to help developers get a better handle on pre-caching, the practice of pre-loading video ad content to reduce load times and ad-serving latency. The company announced Monday that it’ll be releasing a tool within the next few weeks that enables developers to exercise more control over the pre-caching process. App developers […]

  • Ad Tech Insiders Fear Google Tilts The Advantage Further In Its Favor

    When Google revealed plans Thursday to exile YouTube ad inventory from the DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) by the year’s end, many in the ad industry felt betrayed. Google’s reasoning for this change isn’t clear, even to its partners. Its stated motivation is that it wants to devote more resources to developing other video ad products. […]

  • Google To Yank YouTube Inventory Out Of AdX By Year's End

    The writing was on the wall. Google revealed late Thursday it will no longer sell YouTube inventory through the DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX). Neal Mohan, VP of video and display advertising at Google, said in a blog post that the tech giant is yanking YouTube inventory from AdX to focus its development efforts on “the formats […]

  • Hootsuite: ‘We’re Seeing This Massive Shift Toward Imagery And Video’

    For Hootsuite, it used to be all about text links on Twitter. Not so, anymore. The early Twitter client on Tuesday revealed native support for Instagram. So now, users can promote content on Instagram as well as across previously supported platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google pages. It also introduced recently link-to-buy functionality within […]

  • New York Times Uses Editorial Insights To Solve Mobile Monetization Problem

    The New York Times hopes to address mobile advertising problems with a customizable native in-stream ad unit called Mobile Moments, set for a mid-September launch. The publisher built the unit in-house using insights from its editorial team. It will be available both on apps and the mobile web, and a few advertisers have already signed […]

  • Omnicom Taps Merkle Vet Megan Pagliuca As CEO Of Accuen, Replacing Josh Jacobs

    Accuen has a new chief exec in the form of Megan Pagliuca, who comes to Omnicom Group’s trading desk after five years as general manager of digital media at Merkle. Pagliuca replaces Josh Jacobs, who helmed Accuen for nearly four years before leaving in March. Jacobs later turned up as president of Kik Services, where […]

  • Facebook Abandons Plan To Curb Device-Level Data Collection After Advertiser Backlash

    Facebook has pulled the plug on a plan to limit device-level data collection for mobile app campaigns in the wake of a revolt by large app marketers against the policy change. A representative for the company confirmed to AdExchanger that Facebook will no longer stop app marketers – including some of the world’s largest mobile gaming […]

  • Publisher-Centric Mediation Platform AdToApp Emerges From Stealth

    There’s nothing wrong with an 80% or 90% fill rate, unless you’re a cash-strapped medium-sized app developer. “That 10% or 20% can be a killer if you need the revenue,” said Anton Losman, chief product officer at DigitalClick, an indie dev studio with about 10 million downloads. Losman, who handles monetization for DigitalClick’s handful of apps, […]

  • Criteo Continues Growth Streak, Adding 730 Customers And Hefty Revenue Gains

    French performance marketing company Criteo turned in a solid second quarter, growing its revenue ex-TAC by 65% to €110 million (US$120 million), up from €67 million (US$73 million) last year. Criteo continued its client growth streak, adding 730 net new advertiser clients in the last quarter to total about 8,500. It claims those clients are spending more, too, resulting […]

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Garrett McGrath, President, Prebid.org

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Google Had Its Day In Court. Now, It’s Amazon’s Turn

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