Platforms

When Undertone released its programmatic platform Virtuoso in September, the goal, according to co-founder Eric Franchi, was for it to eventually become the primary console of brands and agencies that want to purchase high-impact ad units, or ads that use unique formats designed to snag the audience’s attention. The onetime ad network has hired George […]

At Pandora, the watchword is “engagement.” “At a certain point, it’s not how many people you bring to your product, it’s about how much engagement you see, and for us, engagement means time spent,” said Heidi Browning, SVP of strategic solutions at Pandora. The same sentiment was expressed by Pandora CEO Brian McAndrews during the […]

Rubicon Project has snapped up iSocket and Shiny Ads, two companies in the rapidly emerging category of automating direct, negotiated deals between ad buyer and publisher. The total cost of both deals is less than $30 million, mostly paid in stock, according to a press release. The bulk of that $30 million likely went to iSocket, […]

Engagement metrics are all well and good, but before someone can be engaged by an ad, that person has to be able to see it. And with more time and money shifting over to mobile, the viewability debate is heating up there. “Viewability is the first step towards engagement, and we’re starting at the front […]

What do telcos and YouTube talent have in common? Not a lot right now, but that will change once video and TV ad budgets converge. Consider the YouTube multichannel network (MCN), Google content partners that are responsible for both production and audience monetization and which get 55% of banner and pre-roll ad revenue. The digital […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Brian Mikalis, senior vice president of monetization at Pandora. Looking back about 10 years, marketers either focused on driving brand metrics or worked to achieve immediate direct-response results. The sell side often tried to […]

Video demand-side platform (DSP) TubeMogul posted Q3 revenue of $27.4 million, up 112% from $13 million during the same period last year. Total advertiser spend through its platform was $62.5 million, up from $25.7 million last year. TubeMogul stock was up 6% in late trading. TubeMogul gained considerable business via its self-serve model “Platform Direct” used by […]

Sizmek had another disappointing quarter, with Q3 revenues increasing only 3% YoY to $39.5 million – results that “were lower than we had expected,” according to company CEO Neil Nguyen. The decline was driven by the company’s faltering rich media business, which decreased 35% YoY. The ad management company found a silver lining in its […]

Yahoo’s ad stack had been under a microscope, as CEO Marissa Mayer sought ways to appease shareholders and prove she had reached “parity” at last with competing ad tech stacks. On Tuesday, Yahoo’s announcement that it would acquire video demand-side platform (DSP) BrightRoll for $640 million enhanced this portfolio. “We now have scale with Flurry […]

Rocket Fuel is adding SaaS to its revenue mix, but slowly. During the company’s Q3 earnings call with investors on Wednesday, CEO George John said Rocket Fuel now has 137 “licensee customers” buying through one of its three software-as-a-service channels. Those channels are: Rocket Fuel’s self-serve offering, called Mission Control; the company’s partnership with Dentsu subsidiary CCI in Japan; and [x+1], the […]

SHIFT is among the first Facebook marketing partners to integrate with the newly rebuilt Atlas ad platform. CEO James Borow said the company’s customers will soon be able to leverage Facebook’s data within SHIFT’s new platform to reach people in mobile apps outside of Facebook-owned mobile apps. “The inventory is not just locked within the […]

Online sales during China’s annual discount event topped $9 billion this year, once again thrusting the country into the spotlight as a commerce powerhouse, and not by a little bit.  Singles Day, which was originally created in the late ’90s by a group of Chinese college students celebrating their singleton status, falls on Nov. 11 […]

Yahoo will indeed acquire BrightRoll, a video ad network turned platform company, as TechCrunch first reported in October. (See the release). The transaction, priced at $640 million, fires up Yahoo’s ad tech strategy after a dry spell when the company’s M&A was focused primarily on consumer-facing mobile platforms. It also provides a partial answer to those wondering […]

As fraudsters swarm like so many bees at the display advertising picnic, the industry is trying to blunt their stings with a combination of automated and manual solutions. Google has been among the most proactive ad platform players, hiring legions of real humans to review websites submitted to DoubleClick Ad Exchange. It recently acquired Spider.io, a […]

Twitter analytics and targeting platform StatSocial isn’t CEO Michael Hussey’s first trip to the customer data rodeo. Back in 2006, Hussey founded PeekYou, a people-based search engine that aggregates publicly available information – Twitter handles, Facebook URLs, blogs, physical address, phone number, interests, schools attended – into customer profiles that are then available for purchase. […]

MediaMath has snapped up Rare Crowds, a small, 2-year-old startup founded by ad tech trailblazer Eric Picard, AdExchanger has learned. Under the all-stock transaction, Picard will join MediaMath as VP of strategic partnerships as the media-buying platform builds out products around private marketplaces and “automated guaranteed” inventory (i.e., direct site buys). The deal has the […]

Considering two of the usual pure-play suspects in Forrester’s Cross-Channel Attribution Wave (Convertro and Adometry) were snapped up by AOL and Google on the very same day in May, its latest release Friday had all kinds of new implications – media neutrality and a platform mentality among them. The report, authored by Forrester analyst Tina […]

Last month AdExchanger reported on plans by AppNexus to roll out a “Certified Supply” stamp of approval for demonstrably valid impressions, and thereby cut off the flow of spend to impressions that are fraudulent, nonviewable or otherwise undesirable. The certified program came amid growing industry concerns about the persistence of fraud in the AppNexus supply. […]

CEO Tim Armstrong thinks AOL’s bets on programmatic are paying off. Programmatic grew to 37% of non-search ad revenue, compared to 12%. Forty seven percent of revenue from AOL’s network Advertising.com was programmatic, compared to 18% during the same period last year. Advertising revenue grew 18% YoY to $473.4 million. Armstrong attributed the increase to larger shifts in the […]

However one feels about the merits of FarmVille, it’s undeniable that the game’s creators know a thing or two about app monetization. To that end, Red Hot Labs – a game dev startup founded by the team that created back-in-the-day blockbusters FarmVille and CityVille – released Toro on Wednesday, a new tool aimed at helping […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.  Today’s column is written by Dennis Buchheim, vice president of programmatic advertising products at Yahoo. It seems that almost every day, marketers are faced with a new trend or media channel where they must ask: […]

It’s been one year since Criteo went public and the overall growth experienced by the company last quarter is holding steady. The French retargeting firm announced a 71.9% year-over-year uptick in revenue in Q3 2014 to roughly $243 million. (Full earnings release.) Part of that sustained growth is thanks to Criteo’s expanding client base, which […]

Gigya, a customer identity management platform, has raised $35 million in growth financing led by new investor Intel Capital, bringing its total to $104 million. Common Fund Capital, Vintage Investment Partners and existing investors, also backed Intel in this round. The new financing will go toward additional hires and to fund international expansion. Gigya’s headcount […]

Sometimes, a standalone app might be more trouble than it’s worth – especially if we’re talking about a branded game as part of a single activation. For WWE Studios, a subsidiary of World Wrestling Entertainment that focuses on film development and production, that proved to be the case for “Road to Wrestlemania,” its first-ever mobile […]

Mobile ad targeting start-up PlaceIQ is prepping to enter its next phase – or as Nadya Kohl, the company’s new SVP of business development, says, it’s about to enter adolescence. This is where Kohl – who started the job on October 20 and who previously drove global strategy and business development for Experian Marketing Services […]

Pandora’s Q3 mobile ad revenue had president and CEO Brian McAndrews singing from the rooftops – but the singing stopped when he got to the verse about monthly active users (MAUs). Total revenue for the quarter clocked in at nearly $240 million, a 42% YoY increase. A whopping $188 million of that sum is mobile ad […]

We live in a world of media fragmentation, said Nielsen CEO Mitch Barnes during the company’s Q3 earnings call. And Nielsen, which reported Q3 revenue of $1.6 billion, a YoY increase of 13.3% (excluding its recent acquisitions of consumer research company Arbitron and market research firm Harris Interactive), wants to help measure it. Net profits, however, continued their slump from last […]

What do you think of when you hear the words “marketing cloud?” Most likely, your mind conjures up Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle. Maybe even IBM. Then there’s Teradata. As noted in the first Forrester Wave evaluating enterprise marketing software suites (aka marketing clouds) released Tuesday, Teradata is more often recognized for its data warehousing solutions. Over […]

Facebook is unraveling its preferred marketing developer (PMD) program, its platform for organizing and referring key partners to prospective advertisers. In its place will be a new classification system, called simply Facebook Marketing Partners (FMP, for the acronym-addicted), with no badges but with a list of nine “specialties” – including ad tech, content marketing, and […]

LinkedIn has plans to make marketing leads “more quantifiable, and attributable” across the Web and through a company’s own sales channels, and in a year’s time will enable a much deeper view of conversions. “If you have a tool that can import all of your prospects to a LinkedIn tool, why wouldn’t you want to […]