Platforms

Magnetic and MyBuys announced Wednesday they will merge, creating a company with a combined gross revenue of $100 million spanning ad tech and marketing tech. With their dual capabilities, they will be able to leverage first-party and third-party data to inform their 700 clients’ advertising spend and marketing efforts throughout the customer life cycle. At the same […]

Collective CEO Joe Apprendi would rather not describe his company’s shift toward self-service as a “pivot.” “We use the word ‘diversification,’” Apprendi told AdExchanger. “We realize that there are clients out there who want to engage with our capabilities in a variety of different ways.” Historically, Collective didn’t offer that variety. Like a lot of […]

What’s the future of content distribution and monetization, particularly as major players like Facebook, Google and Verizon make strategic moves to capture more share in mobile video? This was the dominant theme at JW Player’s JW INSIGHTS conference Tuesday in New York, where a group of execs from Google and AOL’s likely owner, Verizon, gathered for the […]

Female-oriented publisher SheKnows hired as its first CTO Carl Hixson, who’s built digital platforms for Getty Images, HBO, Pearson and McGraw-Hill. He’ll turn his experience toward Momentum, SheKnows’ data-driven content management system designed to help advertisers “create content [and] manage ad units around content in a single, seamless ecosystem,” Hixson said. Momentum is expected to […]

Pinterest revealed Tuesday that marketers this summer will be able to target audiences, buy inventory on a cost-per-engagement (CPE) or cost-per-action (CPA) basis and run video units called Cinematic Pins. “These solutions map to any marketing objective,” said Tim Kendall, Pinterest’s GM of monetization. He described Pinterest’s ad solution set as “comprehensive” – a trait […]

Taboola is paving the way to enter the Chinese market. On Monday, it revealed it had received a multimillion-dollar investment from Chinese search provider Baidu. Baidu does not name the level of investment unless SEC rules require it. “The goal behind the investment is to work together on launching native advertising in China,” Taboola CEO […]

It’s time for the next can of worms: mobile viewability. And the mobile ad vendors are already on the scene. Less than two weeks after the Media Rating Council (MRC) issued its long-awaited interim guidance on mobile viewability measurement, three separate mobile media sellers – Millennial Media, 33Across and JUICE Mobile – have announced their intention to offer a 100% […]

In a small change that speaks to its huge cross-device aspirations, Facebook is ending its support for mobile app install reporting at the device level. On Wednesday, Facebook called up its mobile measurement partners (MMPs) – a group that includes companies such as Appsflyer, Apsalar and Kochava – and told them that as of August 20 […]

In its first earnings call since going public in March, MaxPoint reported revenue growth of 87% to $28.7 million. Its revenue ex-TAC, which excludes the cost of programmatically buying impressions through real-time bidding, rose 90% to $16.8 million. [Read the earnings release.] The total number of enterprise customers rose 62% to 529. In the first quarter of […]

Facebook has confirmed it will begin displaying publishers’ articles natively in the Facebook mobile app, naming nine initial media partners for the program. (Read the blog post.) Participating publishers are The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, NBC, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Spiegel and Bild. “We’ve been comfortable with experimenting with a variety of storytelling platforms over the past […]

Verizon has access to deterministic data – and now it ostensibly owns the programmatic tech to put that data to work via AOL, which the telecom bought for $4.4 billion on Monday. This isn’t Verizon’s first stab at ad tech. Precision Market Insights, the company’s addressable advertising division, has been groping about, with various degrees of […]

While activist investors like Starboard Ventures LLC had advocated for an AOL-Yahoo merger, Verizon’s intent to purchase the former seems to have dampened that plan. So where does that leave Yahoo? “No different than they were before,” said Pivotal Group analyst Brian Wieser. “In a bad position.” Not everyone has such dire predictions. Cantor & […]

If Verizon closes its $4.4 billion AOL acquisition, it will mark one more marriage between a telco and an ad tech company. It’s also a harbinger of more to come. Last summer, Australian telco Telstra grabbed a majority stake into streaming video distribution platform Ooyala and then bought video supply-side platform Videoplaza. In 2012, Singapore […]

Mobile is big and video is big – and putting the two together presents a gargantuan advertising opportunity that Verizon will be primed to capture if it closes on AOL. “Verizon has been trying to figure out how to grab a bigger share of the ad tech pie, so the move makes sense strategically on […]

As the media and tech worlds absorb news of Verizon’s planned acquisition of AOL, the largest unanswered question revolves around the fate of The Huffington Post Media Group, a unit that includes the eponymous publication as well as TechCrunch, Engadget and others. While Re/code’s Kara Swisher reported “advanced discussions” for AOL to sell its flagship media […]

Kelly Liyakasa contributed. Verizon will acquire digital media and ad tech platform company AOL in a cash transaction valued at $4.4 billion. The deal vaults the telecommunications company into the media and ad tech sectors and gives it a “three screen” relationship with consumers across desktop, mobile, and television. “It’s really one of the moments in time where […]

Just over half (54%) of all video ads across the web are viewable compared to YouTube’s 91% average viewability rate, according to a Google report released Friday. It’s not surprising Google is releasing video viewability figures, given its investment in TrueView formats for brand advertisers, which are sold on a cost-per-view basis. Google claims it […]

AOL reported revenue growth of 7% YoY in the first quarter, for a total of $625 million. Global advertising revenue, which includes AOL’s own properties, search and third-party platforms, climbed 12% YoY to $483 million. Read the earnings release. CEO Tim Armstrong said the company continues to make updates “placing AOL at the center of […]

IBM has big digital marketing dreams. Last spring, those dreams warranted a $100 million commitment to future marketing investments. Wednesday saw the latest development, when IBM hooked its own marketing solutions into various Facebook ad products including the CRM matching program Custom Audiences to enable things like lookalike modeling. IBM also is expanding its Digital […]

Facebook’s mobile ad network seems to be a hit with developers. In the six months since it rolled out Audience Network globally, the number of apps participating has grown by a factor of five, a big jump even from Q4 2014 when the number had grown 3x. Basically, app developers are flocking to Facebook. A […]

Criteo, the French online display retargeter turned performance marketing company, saw its Q1 revenue increase 68% YoY to €105 million ex-TAC, driven by the growth of its cross-screen tools and client retention “consistently north of 90%.” It added 640 new clients in Q1, giving it a total of 7,800. Additionally, market conditions have been favorable for Criteo. CEO Jean-Baptiste “JB” […]

As app is only as successful as its monetization strategy. And an app’s monetization strategy is only as successful as a developer’s cash flow. But sometimes it takes Apple and Google 30 or even 60 days to compensate their developers for paid downloads and in-app purchases. “That money’s just sitting there in the bank of […]

LinkedIn’s display business deteriorated during Q1 2015 and will continue to tumble, the company said during its quarterly earnings call on Thursday. While LinkedIn reported Q1 revenues of $638 million, up 35% YoY, its disappointing Q2 and full-year guidance ($670-$675 million and $2.9 billion respectively) sent shares plummeting more than 25%. During the call, CFO […]

Twitter will pay $532.6 million – all in stock– to acquire digital ad platform TellApart, the company disclosed in an 8K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It’s a large figure for an ad tech purchase, placing TellApart’s market cap above most public companies in the space and making it the spendiest merger deal Twitter has done yet. In […]

Fifty-four stories above New York’s World Trade Center site, 800 media planners gathered Tuesday evening for AOL’s annual advertiser NewFront. The big “reveal” was a new video content and distribution agreement with broadcaster NBCUniversal. Starting this summer, select NBCUniversal videos from network partners Bravo, CNBC, E!, MSNBC, NBC, Oxygen, Syfy, Telemundo and USA will be […]

DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM) clients can soon use the buying platform to purchase Twitter Promoted Tweets across the mobile web, in-app and desktop. Read Google’s blog post. The capability isn’t available yet, but Twitter CEO Dick Costolo anticipated a May release during the company’s earnings call. Google first needs to do some technical jiggering to […]

Twitter is taking cross-device retargeting under its wing with the acquisition of digital ad platform TellApart. “Direct response advertising has been a major growth engine for our ads business over the last several quarters. … TellApart will accelerate that trajectory further,” said Kevin Weill, Twitter’s SVP of product, in a blog post Tuesday. According to […]

Pinterest on Monday announced a Marketing Developer Partners program for its content publishing API, following the lead of Facebook and Twitter. The API will enable brands, who produce two-thirds of the content on Pinterest, to manage workflow and optimization of organic Pinterest content through their preferred centralized marketing platform. “We want to enable the developers […]

The $45 billion Comcast-Time Warner Cable (TWC) deal is officially kaput. If the merger had materialized, it would have created an unsurpassable media and cable conglomerate with massive audience reach. From day one, regulators were wary about one company controlling too much broadband access, resulting in Comcast terminating the deal Friday. “Today, we move on,” […]

True or false: Social data is the largest and least biased set of observational data that ever existed. The answer depends on whom you ask. Twitter sees its platform as a sort of public playground of contextual social conversations. All you need to do is have the right tools to mine the insights. LinkedIn views […]