Platforms

Assembled from acquisitions totaling in the multibillions, Oracle Data Cloud (ODC) had become inefficient, too focused on its declining business selling third-party data. Now, the embattled unit is trying to streamline. ODC cut 10% to 15% of its staff Monday, multiple sources told AdExchanger, after which it will focus on contextual data, brand safety and […]

Google’s advertising chief Prabhakar Raghavan is reorganizing Google’s ads business – and adding new heads of measurement and privacy, according to multiple AdExchanger sources. As part of the reorg, he’s re-visualizing the company as four “concentric circles.” The innermost circle is Google’s owned-and-operated properties, including search and YouTube. The next circle outside of that is […]

Facebook said Friday that it’s suspending “tens of thousands” of apps from its platform for data usage violations. The suspended apps are associated with around 400 developers. The purge is part of Facebook’s continuing investigation into how third-party app developers use Facebook data, sparked by the Cambridge Analytica scandal in March 2018. So far, the […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Is This Innovid-ive? Video ad company Innovid bought Argentinean display company Herolens for $30 million, after raising $30 million in January. “Display is a bad business,” Innovid CEO Zvika Netter told The Wall Street Journal. Huh? Well, Innovid needs a display ad business to […]

While you chill on the sofa trying to figure out what to watch next, there’s a war raging for your attention, and Facebook is the most recent combatant. On Wednesday, Facebook launched the latest additions to its suite of Portal hardware products, including a streaming stick for TV sets complete with video chatting functionality, augmented […]

Advertising in the news feed is set to get more interactive with the introduction of three new ad products: poll ads, playables and augmented reality ads. “This is advertising that users can play with, and I use the term ‘play,’ because it should be fun,” said Mark D’Arcy, VP of global business marketing and chief […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Satellite Down Little over a week after activist investor Elliott Associates criticized AT&T’s operations, including its $67 billion DirecTV acquisition in 2014, the satellite unit might be on the chopping block. AT&T is considering “parting ways” with DirecTV, according to The Wall Street Journal. […]

The Washington Post became the latest publisher to develop a self-serve platform to compete with Facebook when it released Zeus Prime on Tuesday. Zeus Prime adds a self-serve buyer interface to Zeus, The Washington Post’s revenue platform. The software-as-a-service platform emphasizes fast ad load times and high viewability. Most recently, it added the cookie-less contextual […]

YouTube is doing its damndest to appeal to TV advertisers. On Tuesday, YouTube made its masthead ad format available within the YouTube TV app through an open beta. Ford was an early beta tester. The unit will be generally available on TV screens sometime in Q4. The masthead format already exists for YouTube on the […]

After Freestar landed atop Inc.’s 2019 list of “Most Successful Companies in America,” co-founder Chris Stark pointed to header bidding as the reason the 45-person company’s growth exploded 36,680% over three years. Freestar solves for the complexity programmatic and header bidding created for publishers. In recent years, publishers managed bids through AdSense, then waterfalls, then […]

When Japan-based SmartNews raised its most recent funding round – $28 million in August – the company’s valuation hit $1.1 billion. It’s an eye-popping appraisal for a news discovery app. There aren’t many ad-supported unicorns galloping around the digital news biz these days. SmartNews has raised just over $116 million since 2013. The app, founded in Tokyo […]

Big tech can’t swing a cat these days without hitting an antitrust investigation. Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple are all facing varying degrees of heat from the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general across the nation, the House Judiciary Committee and competition authorities around the world. It’s hard to keep track […]

Oracle wants to help marketers bridge the gap between the known and unknown. The company integrated the BlueKai data management platform (DMP) and ID graph with its customer data platform (CDP), it said Tuesday at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. The move is meant to help marketers tie device-level data about unknown prospects […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Cart, Meet Horse Seth Dallaire, Amazon’s global ad sales leader for the past five years, was named chief revenue officer of Instacart on Friday. Read the release. Instacart’s primary business is with grocers and retailers, who use it for online ordering and delivery. But […]

Usually, you’ve got to pay lawyers for legal advice. But between sessions at Fordham University’s annual conference on international antitrust law and policy in New York City on Friday, there was lots of informal chatter about Google’s growing list of antitrust inquiries. The takeaway: This isn’t Google’s first antitrust rodeo, but it might be different […]

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

Longtime AppNexus President Michael Rubenstein will leave the business at the end of the year. Rubenstein is the latest top executive at AppNexus to leave since the company was acquired by AT&T under its Xandr unit for $2 billion in June 2018. Founder and CEO Brian O’Kelley left the company in October 2018. Rubenstein joined […]

The data-management platform (DMP) was sold as a tool with the power to turn publisher data into dollars. Vendors wooed publishers into signing multiyear contracts to use the technology. But the expectations didn’t match reality. As those contracts have expired, especially this year, many publishers aren’t renewing them. Just as marketers are moving from the […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. GDPR Who? GDPR hasn’t stunted the growth of programmatic revenue in Europe. An IAB Europe programmatic sales report finds the category grew 33% in 2018 to $18.4 million, The Drum reports. Even excluding the impact of social media ads, programmatic revenue was up 26.6% […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Obscura Procura Airbnb is leading a $20 million investment in Atlas Obscura, a travel and local oddities media company. More than half of Atlas Obscura’s revenue already comes from the booking of trips and tour experiences, so it’s a natural strategic partnership. The site […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Trust Me, This Is Bad Fifty – count ’em, 50 – attorneys general are planning to work together on a sweeping joint antitrust investigation into Google. Google’s dominance over the online ad market will be the probe’s first priority, the Republican Texas AG told […]

Facebook has warned investors to expect a pronounced revenue slowdown in the second half of the year and into 2020 thanks to “ad targeting-related headwinds.” And Instagram can expect to weather the same challenges. Instagram has been a growth driver for Facebook, both in terms of engagement and ad spend. The two share data between […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Hand That Feeds Big tech may be disrupting linear television and OOH, but it’s also supporting those channels with marketing dollars. As AdExchanger reported recently, tech giants are increasing their ad investments to burnish their reputations and maintain growth in an increasingly saturated […]

New York Attorney General Letitia James is leading a bipartisan investigation into whether Facebook engages in anticompetitive behavior to drive up ad prices. James, a Democrat, is being joined in her work, which will also look into whether Facebook’s actions have endangered consumer data and reduced the quality of consumer choice, by eight other state […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Hold Up In the event of an economic downturn, holding companies – specifically WPP and Publicis – could be in a vulnerable position. Both companies are saddled with debt and plummeting stock values that will be difficult to recoup, especially as clients bring more […]

Goodbye AppNexus SSP, hello Xandr Monetize. One year after its acquisition by AT&T, AppNexus is rebranding its exchange to Xandr Monetize. It’s also adding a slew of new features to support its vision of offering a full programmatic stack for video-heavy publishers. Xandr Monetize is the third Xandr-branded product to launch, after Xandr Community and […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. An Endless Conquest  Google’s allowance of aggressive conquesting on search results is becoming a headache for companies relying on organic search. Jason Fried, CEO of Basecamp, sounded off about the practice on Twitter this week after his company showed up below four paid ads […]

Why pay an agency to concoct expensive creative when your consumers are already doing it for free? For direct-to-consumer bedding and bath brand Parachute, the answer is simple. Its customers regularly tag the brand in their organic posts on Instagram, which Parachute is able to repurpose for campaigns to retarget site visitors. Say someone is […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Divesting Ad Tech  News Corp has hired bankers to oversee the potential sale of Unruly, a video SSP the news company acquired four years ago for about $140 million, Sky News reports. Terms of the potential deal are still unknown, but News Corp’s decision […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Google’s Turn Google will pay up to $200 million to the Federal Trade Commission to settle an investigation into whether YouTube violated children’s privacy law by targeting ads to minors, Politico reports. The proposed settlement, which has been sent to the Justice Department for […]