Yahoo has $6 billion in its wallet thanks to Alibaba’s IPO last week. But investors showed little faith in Yahoo’s core business, sending the stock plummeting. An article in Businessweek went so far as to value Yahoo’s business at zero. That means CEO Marissa Mayer needs to go shopping. “I think she’ll do a big […]
This is the ninth in a series of interviews with vendors combating the problem of ad fraud. Other companies participating in this series include Moat, Sizmek and Asia RTB. Read previous interviews with DoubleVerify, Dstillery, Forensiq, Integral Ad Science, PubChecker, Telemetry, Videology and White Ops. Digital ad fraud isn’t anything new. comScore has been picking […]
Hootsuite, which raised $60 million in new venture financing from an unnamed Boston asset manager Thursday (it has $250 million now in total financing), is at a major crossroads. As it branches into enterprise markets, the company is also planning a bigger push into advertising. As a consumer-facing platform, Hootsuite – a $1 billion company […]
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Put another way, mobile links that don’t link directly to specific in-app content are pretty weak. Deep-linking tech provider Branch Metrics revealed it’s received $3 million in seed funding Tuesday led by New Enterprise Associates, the majority of which it plans to use to build […]
AppNexus wants to rethink the publisher ad server as a holistic platform for yield management, and it’s starting with a rather old piece of technology. The company will acquire Open AdStream (OAS) from Xaxis as part of a major transaction with WPP Group that will also give the holding company a $25 million stake in […]
Do open auctions have a future? It depends which publisher you ask. According to executives from Meredith, Yahoo and AOL, who spoke at the Programmatic I/O Conference on Wednesday, change is coming. “It won’t live on” in its current form, said Meredith’s VP of programmatic sales and strategy, Chip Schenck. “Because it’s used and thought […]
Russian real-time bidding (RTB) engineering firm IPONWEB has largely operated behind the scenes as the backbone of many media-trading platforms. Notably, IPONWEB helped RightMedia build out its ad exchange preceding its 2007 acquisition by Yahoo, and has since constructed 40 more trading systems at a similar or smaller scale. In late August, IPONWEB moved in […]
Marketers generally react to Yo, the one-touch messaging app, with bemused dismissal. Its sole function lets users ping each other with a single “Yo,” the simplicity of which has sparked no shortage of skepticism. But no one took Snapchat seriously when it surfaced, and the ephemeral photo messaging platform is now valued at a behemoth […]
Rather than an isolated channel, programmatic is a means to an end – and it all starts with measurement between devices and across channels. And from measurement comes revenue. “The whole cross-device measurement question is about understanding the broader marketing goal, but we also all know that if it’s not measured, it’s not valued,” said […]
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) wants to know what marketers are doing with segmentation profiles like “urban scrambler” and “ethnic second city struggler.” The potential for advertising segmentation to exacerbate inequality was a central topic at Monday’s FTC workshop, “Big Data: A Tool for Inclusion or Exclusion?” The Washington, D.C., event included representatives from advocacy groups […]
Chango’s new CRO, Keith Lorizio, has an ad tech CV as long as your arm – but it was only a short while ago that he became a convert to the gospel of programmatic. “I wasn’t a fan of programmatic about three years ago back when I was a rep with a big publisher working […]
Twitter’s Tailored Audiences just got a little more more tailored. Advertisers can now augment their customer data using mobile advertising IDs and mobile phone numbers as a way to reach existing customers and increase audience size. In essence, the move is an extension of Twitter’s Tailored Audiences for CRM retargeting, which allows advertisers to use […]
During a presentation at the AppNexus annual Summit last November, Microsoft’s Esco Strong made a promise to beef up its exchange inventory. As of Tuesday, Strong, director of programmatic managements, said that promise had been fulfilled in the form of new mobile inventory being made available in the Microsoft Advertising Exchange (MAX). Advertisers in the US, Australia, […]
Alliance Data Systems’ (ADS) intent to acquire Conversant (formerly ValueClick) for its Epsilon subsidiary might seem like a change in direction. R Ray Wang, principal analyst and founder at Constellation Research, described the intent to acquire as “the right move” to make Epsilon “a legit…tech company.” On a first gloss that seems like a pivot. Epsilon […]
This is the seventh in a series of interviews with vendors combating the problem of ad fraud. Other companies participating in this series include Moat, Telemetry, Sizmek, comScore and Asia RTB. Read previous interviews with DoubleVerify, Forensiq, Integral Ad Science, PubChecker, Videology and White Ops. The battle against botnets is ongoing. Ad tech firm Dstillery […]
Wondering about Conversant’s future? Wonder no more, as the ad network turned ad tech company will be acquired by Alliance Data for $2.3 billion in cash and stock. Conversant (formerly known as ValueClick/Dotomi) will be folded into Alliance’s marketing services division Epsilon. Alliance hopes to close the deal by the end of the year. From the release: […]
Pinterest is one of those up-and-comers in the world of social advertising. The image-based social network doesn’t divulge audience numbers, but comScore pegs it at around 60 million monthly active users (MAUs). Of course, that’s not quite the volume of Twitter’s 271 million MAUs or Facebook’s 1.3 billion, but it’s still nothing to sneeze at, especially as […]
AOL added another premium ad format to its programmatic offerings on Monday. A full-page mobile ad, the Road Devil Interstitial for Mobile, is part of an effort to add more premium, brand-friendly units to its programmatic inventory. The unit offers brands the ability to display a store locator, bring in recent tweets or play a video […]
Rocket Fuel closed on its acquisition of [x+1] Friday, transforming itself from what was primarily an ad network company into a credible platform play focused on the software-as-a-service opportunity in programmatic marketing. The new Rocket Fuel has far more of the attributes of a “programmatic marketing platform” than the old one, providing clients with the […]
Each day, 7 million fans tune in to YouTube to see bubbly video blogger Bethany Mota make breakfast or braid her hair. The breakout video star draws tweens eager for a taste of Mota’s fashion and beauty must-haves, averaging 100 million minutes of video watched per month. She’s equally attractive to brand advertisers, clinching campaigns […]
Facebook and Twitter are keen to build more commerce functionality into the social stream. Earlier this summer Facebook began working with select commerce brands to support direct transactions on its platform, and Twitter has been expected to produce something similar after sharp-eyed users spotted a semi-functional “buy” button on the site in July. Well, now that other […]
Ad management platform Marin Software has partnered with Yandex to let its clients automate and manage paid search campaigns on the Russian search engine giant. Basically, if those clients have similar advertising campaigns running on other search engines, they can clone those campaigns and pop them into Yandex. “We have more global clients looking to leverage the campaigns, […]
This is the sixth in a series of interviews with vendors combating the problem of ad fraud. Other companies participating in this series include Moat, Telemetry, Sizmek, comScore, Dstillery and Asia RTB. Read previous interviews with DoubleVerify, Forensiq, Integral Ad Science, PubChecker and Videology. When it comes to catching bots, higher walls and better locks […]
Apple is laying down the law for app developers through a set of new rules, which are slated to take effect in conjunction with its long-awaited iPhone release on Monday. Apple’s alterations restrict developers’ access to data from HealthKit, its factory-installed fitness monitoring app, and third-party app extensions. The new stipulations will likely apply to the next-generation […]
Following a $50 million infusion of cash Thursday, mobile location vendor xAd appears to be sitting pretty. The money is a combination of equity and debt financing. XAd is not publicly disclosing the split. According to CEO Dipanshu Sharma, the company doesn’t “have any immediate plans for the funding,” which came courtesy of Institutional Venture Partners, […]
LinkedIn’s discontinuation of Bizo’s business data service is an opportunity for data-management platform (DMP) and data services company eXelate. The company revealed plans Thursday for B2BX, a data-as-a-service offering for B2B advertisers. The company appointed Frannie Danzinger, Bizo’s former director of marketplace development, to spearhead the new development as VP of strategic solutions and plans to hire more […]
Ad tech companies Ghostery and IPONWEB have combined their technologies to launch an antifraud service Thursday called Ghostery Verified Domains. The service, designed for an RTB environment, enables advertisers to allocate campaign dollars based on the perceived level of legitimate traffic. These levels include verified, masked, suspicious or unknown. “It’s creating an extra data layer […]
When the privacy app Disconnect, designed to let consumers control what information other apps can access, was kicked out of the Play store last week, Google charged it with unauthorized interference with other apps, a violation of Google’s developer agreement. From Google’s perspective, Disconnect damages the functionality and health of other apps in the Play […]
Mobile is social, social is mobile. Working from this premise, video ad server Mixpo began a strategy review several months ago with the intention to build out its social capability. That process concluded Tuesday when the company closed on the acquisition of ShopIgniter, a social rich media specialist with 15 to 20 employees that is a […]
Triton Digital, which builds ad tech for digital and broadcast radio, unveiled its supply-side offering, Triton Advertising Platform (Tap), available in two flavors: one for traditional broadcasters and an on-demand offering for Internet-based radio stations. Over the next 18 months, Triton is going to onboard its roughly 6,000 stations in the US, EMEA, LATAM and […]
If an AI agent can turn an advertiser’s RFP into a proposal in minutes, what’s left for a publisher’s ad sales team to do? A lot more selling, said Mark Howard, TIME’s chief operating officer. In the recent past, when an RFP would come in from a potential buyer, it would kick off a flurry […]
Why the midterms may not spell doom for ad tech consolidation. Plus, how sports leagues are putting ad revenue before player safety.
Agentic media buying is the No. 1 topic du jour in ad tech discussion circles. But how does agentic buying even work when it comes to buying TV and streaming ads? And how does that workflow differ from programmatic? The startup Swivel aims to address those questions.
AppLovin is growing at a blistering pace, but Wall Street investors remain cautious about the business.
High-end ad blockers mimic some of the same behavior as bot traffic. So WiseGuyGaming repurposed the tools it was already using to identify bots to reveal its ad-blocking audience as well.
Criteo has weathered considerable storms in its day, including a painful moment in March 2020 when its market cap bottomed out below $500 million. Can it pull off yet another turnaround?
