Platforms

Update 1/27: MediaMath said some employees were let go in December, but insisted those layoffs were not related to the executive reorg. The company said 13 were released in total, and seven were hired. MediaMath’s executive shuffle Friday, originally reported by Business Insider, was meant to improve its ability to sell enterprise technologies and services, said CEO […]

Google is enabling  YouTube targeting based on search data, and will also release a proprietary YouTube measurement system. The company discussed the first development in a Friday blog post that went live just minutes before the US presidential inauguration. “Now, information from activity associated with users’ Google accounts may be used to influence the ads […]

Any publisher who is not a big platform company is on the express train to becoming a niche ads business, predicts Meredith Kopit Levien, EVP and CRO of The New York Times. “Up until now, we’ve been a niche consumer business with a $1 billion-plus newspaper ad business,” Kopit Levien said, speaking Thursday at AdExchanger’s […]

The point of advertising is to provide value to consumers, but by its nature “advertising doesn’t do that,” said Gary Vaynerchuk, a serial entrepreneur and founder of VaynerMedia. Vaynerchuk’s observation, shared Wednesday at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview event, highlights the cognitive dissonance experienced by many ad tech practitioners, whose job security depends on metrics rather than […]

Brad Smallwood, VP of marketing science at Facebook, will take the stage Jan. 19 to talk all things measurement at Industry Preview in New York City. Facebook is at a crossroads in the way it relates to the media, thinks about monetization and measures ads. Right before Advertising Week, Facebook admitted to what became a […]

Arun Kumar, global president at Cadreon, will take the stage Jan. 19 to share Cadreon’s full vision for the future at Industry Preview in New York City. Walled gardens are cropping up across the digital ecosystem. “It’s just the way the world is going to be for the foreseeable future,” said Arun Kumar, global president at Cadreon. […]

Pulpix, a video platform that aims to increase the time consumers spend on publishers’ properties, has raised $850,000 in “pre-seed” financing. The two-year-old, Paris-based Pulpix is a Y Combinator startup whose backers include Studio VC, Ace Capital and angel investors such as Chon Tang, who invested early on in the video DSP TubeMogul. The startup […]

Instagram will allow ads in its Stories section, the company said Wednesday. It also unveiled brand measurement tools. “Over the first holidays with Stories we’ve gotten a chance to peek into what people do when they’re home and with their families, at a level of depth and intimacy we haven’t usually had with Instagram,” said […]

Facebook updated Dynamic Ads on Tuesday, allowing advertisers to target potential customers based on their interests and intent rather than just the specific products they’ve browsed. “We observe demographics and patterns of activity that indicate a person is really interested in a product category or a specific product and then we extrapolate from that information […]

Platforms, which are highly scalable and rely on others’ content, were supposed to have it easier than publishers. But on Wednesday, Medium laid off a third of its staff, a total of 50 people. CEO Ev Williams explained that the sponsored content model offered only “incremental improvements on the ad-driven publishing model,” in a blog post […]