Platforms

Ad networks are on the outs in the desktop world, but they still have a stranglehold on the mobile app ecosystem. That’s beginning to change, though. Mobile app publishers are transacting more of their impressions through programmatic auctions in a setup that mimics header bidding on desktop. The momentum has been growing over the past […]

Jack Dorsey was clearly enjoying himself when we tweeted at the end of October about Twitter’s plan to ban political advertising on the platform. But Twitter released its guidelines on Friday for what that will mean in practice, and although Twitter’s policy, which is set to go into effect on Nov. 22, does what it […]

If Instagram permanently removes public likes – a test that went global Thursday – it will greatly impact the influencer marketing industry by forcing influencers to embrace more sophisticated marketing metrics. Marketers will push even harder to evaluate influencers based on clicks, view-through rates and swipe-up engagements with stories, said Daniel Schotland, chief operating officer […]

Amazon introduced a new way for its cloud customers to buy and use third-party data with the launch of the AWS Data Exchange on Thursday. There are about 90 data companies as launch partners, including PlaceIQ, Epsilon, Acxiom and Foursquare. Unlike data marketplaces such as those operated by The Trade Desk, Oracle or LiveRamp, the […]

There’s a reason Facebook doesn’t provide granular brand safety controls for news feed – it doesn’t think they’re necessary. “We don’t believe ad adjacency matters in certain environments … and we designed the platform with that in mind,” said Erik Geisler, Facebook’s director of North American agency partnerships, speaking Thursday at 614 Group’s Brand Safety Summit […]

MDC Partners is the latest holding company to place its programmatic, search and social talent into a team that spans across its media network, MDC Media Partners. The group, which doesn’t have a name, was announced internally on Thursday and contains roughly 100 experts across biddable media and digital planning from agencies Assembly, Unique Influence […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Strong Cards Cardlytics shares jumped almost 40% on Wednesday, pushing its market cap above $1 billion. The company partners with banks to create cash-back offers – so banking app users can be served promotional deals, and the discount is credited by the bank when […]

Though new to advertising, the video app TikTok is learning from competitors’ mistakes to forge strong relationships with buyers and to build a clear sales pitch. Unlike Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snap, which focused on audience growth over advertising opportunities at first, TikTok understood early on how to successfully work with media buyers. Facebook and […]

Buyers increasingly want transparency into their programmatic buying. But undertaking the project of requesting log-level data from exchanges themselves requires resources many brands don’t have. Lucidity wants to be the tech solution to demystify and audit the programmatic supply chain. Lucidity stitches together information from the buyer’s ad server (where it inserts its own pixel), […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. You Down With CDP? Microsoft is throwing its hat in the CDP ring (that ring’s getting pretty crowded) with the launch of Dynamics 365 Customer Insight, a cloud-based data and customer identity portability service. Data analysts and marketers are the obvious targets for a […]

Facebook seems to exist within two alternate realities: The one in which it’s battered almost daily by a relentlessly negative news cycle, and the one in which advertisers, particularly performance marketers, never seem to put away their checkbooks. That second reality could be under threat. Facebook has been sounding the warning on privacy-related “ad targeting […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. That’s Settled Disney reached a deal with Amazon to carry Disney Plus on Fire TV sets. The two companies were at an impasse on a distribution deal because Amazon was demanding a substantial percentage of the media giant’s ad revenue, The Wall Street Journal […]

DoubleVerify purchased Ad-Juster for an undisclosed amount Thursday in an all-cash, all-stock offer. The analytics platform gives publishers a stitched-together view of their programmatic ad performance. “A lot of our work today is with advertisers to maximize their quality and performance,” said DoubleVerify CEO Wayne Gattinella. “Ad-Juster extends our platform to the supply side.” Ad-Juster […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Political Ad Firestorm Google is considering changes to its political advertising policy, according to The Wall Street Journal and Axios. The reports come as Facebook is under pressure from users, issue groups and regulators to block some (or even all) political advertising. Twitter banned […]

Rubicon Project missed revenue projections for the quarter as programmatic changes, including the new transparency standards App.ads.txt and sellers.json, affected its topline revenue growth. Rubicon Project’s Q3 revenue grew 27% year over year to $37.6 million. Year to date, its revenues are $107.9 million, which represents 30% growth compared to the same period last year. […]

Content is king. And great content gets readers to sign up. The content analytics company Parse.ly has long captivated publishers with its intuitive dashboard to track how articles perform. In October, the 10-year-old company added functionality that tracks conversions. Parse.ly clients can now analyze the type of content people read before they convert. Then they […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Castree Out GroupM North America CEO Tim Castree has stepped down from his role after less than a year on the job, Business Insider reports. Castree was promoted to CEO in late 2018, after leading the merger of media agencies MEC and Maxus, with […]

Google is taking advantage of all the product discovery happening on YouTube. The company said on Tuesday that advertisers buying Shopping Ads can extend their campaigns so those ads show up on YouTube’s home page and search feed. Google first let marketers use its search data to inform YouTube targeting back in 2017. User behavior, […]

Over the last year and a half, Facebook has been embroiled in so many controversial issues, it’s hard to keep track: privacy problems, the spread of misinformation, election interference, improperly secured data, antitrust concerns and, most recently, Facebook’s policy on paid political advertising, which is rubbing nearly everyone, including some of Facebook’s own employees, the […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Hiding In Plain Sight Facebook and Twitter have opened up a very public debate about political ads, but where is Google? The internet giant was still working on its pitch to lure political ad buyers away from Facebook and onto YouTube with new tools […]

“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 Kunal Gupta, CEO at Polar. Several political, business and tech leaders have called for the break up of Facebook, usually suggesting that Facebook split its core social networking app from […]

Subscribe to AdExchanger Talks on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts. This week on AdExchanger Talks, Smaato CEO Arndt Groth discusses the changing rules of in-app advertising. The company – with offices in New York, Hamburg, Berlin, Singapore and Shanghai – has Chinese backers and a monetization deal with […]

Facebook’s controversy over its decision to allow politicians (but only politicians) to promote lies in ads has led to Twitter saying it would forbid political ads and Scott Galloway, a prescient tech industry analyst, predicting Facebook would ban political ads by Thanksgiving. Yet, if such a ban materialized, Democrats would feel the brunt of it. […]

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Distribution Dilemma AT&T is leaning into its 34 million HBO subscribers to drive sign-ups for its forthcoming HBO Max streaming service. But it may face roadblocks in working with competitive cable providers on distribution, Digiday reports. AT&T has yet to sign on any distribution […]

Privacy regulations have the potential to consolidate market share among large technology platforms. Aka, when publishers reduce the number of ad tech, audience measurement and other web technology vendors they work with, Google and Facebook win, according to new academic research examining the unintended consequences of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The skittishness with […]

Facebook’s ongoing PR nightmare didn’t impact its quarterly earnings – yet again. On Wednesday, Facebook reported $17.7 billion in revenue for the third quarter, up 28.6% year over year, beating the consensus by a cool $300 million. The company’s stock rose nearly 5% in after-hours trading. Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the earnings call with a […]

Twitter will ban political advertising as of Nov. 22. CEO Jack Dorsey broke the news with a tweet storm on Wednesday, citing conflicts of interest that occur when politicians use targeted advertising to influence votes. Read it. “We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought,” he wrote. “A political message earns reach when […]

For Placed, life at Foursquare is a lot different than life was at Snap. Case in point: Foursquare and Placed completed the integration of their first-party audience data sets into a single attribution product within 90 days of the acquisition, which closed this summer. Snap sold Placed to Foursquare in May after acquiring the company […]

Alphabet continued its long run of revenue growth, earning $40.5 billion in Q3, up from $33.7 billion in the same period last year. But its profitability dropped by almost a quarter to $7.1 billion as the company’s expenses increased, according to its quarterly report. The biggest cost center is headcount growth. The company has added […]