Platforms

The former CTO of Disney ABC Television, Michael Napodano, who also spent a decade at NBCUniversal, joined Operative on Monday in the newly created role of Chief Delivery and Information Officer. “Having been on the programming side of the house for so long, I wanted to challenge myself to be a part of a company […]

Amazon’s acquisition of Sizmek’s ad server and dynamic creative optimization (DCO) platform Friday puts it in a better position to compete with Google for advertiser budgets. Amazon will likely gain new clients from Sizmek who don’t want to deal with switching ad servers, as well as some advertisers who don’t like the idea of working […]

Placed has found a new home. Foursquare is buying the location-based measurement company from Snap. Separately, it raised $150 million in fresh funding courtesy of The Raine Group, some of which is going to fund the acquisition. The rest is earmarked for R&D. The deal, announced early Friday morning, comes less than two years after […]

Mark Zuckerberg has four top priorities for Facebook in the year ahead – but stepping down as chairman of the board ain’t one of them. At Facebook’s annual stockholders meeting on Thursday, numerous resolutions to create a check on Zuckerberg’s power – he simultaneously serves as chair of the board and CEO – were vetoed, as expected. Although […]

Today in the podcast studio, Criteo COO Mollie Spilman talks about what makes companies survive and thrive in the ever-changing digital advertising business. Criteo was the emblem of the wild growth in programmatic marketing, and remains the second-largest publicly-traded ad tech companies with a valuation of $1.3B. In the five years since Spilman joined to […]

Facebook is bringing playable ads, an interactive format that lets users demo a mini version of an app before downloading it, to Audience Network starting Wednesday. It’s available within rewarded video and interstitial placements. In the coming weeks, Facebook is also planning to expand access to its rewarded video unit to all publishers across the […]

At any given moment, 1 million people are watching Twitch, tuning in to the half a million people who stream themselves playing video games every day. The audience can be on par with a national cable network, according to a Nielsen study of concurrent viewers conducted in January. Twitch checks three coveted boxes for advertisers: […]

Amazon is primed to splash some color on a new product category: paint. But rather than slap on its own private label, home improvement site The Spruce lent its name and home décor expertise, selecting and naming the 32 colors of paint. Paint manufacturer KILZ produced the line. KILZ and Amazon first approached the digital […]

MoPub released an SDK update on Tuesday that gives app publishers access to impression-level revenue data. Historically, that type of data – which lets user acquisition managers attribute revenue and lifetime value to specific users at the impression level – has been hard to come by. Most third-party ad networks haven’t been set up to […]

2018 was a pretty good year for Twitter, all things considered. Users are growing, if you don’t look at monthly active users (MAUs). Twitter is starting to get a handle on harassment, with machine learning models proactively identifying 38% of the abusive tweets taken down every week. And the platform has been profitable for four […]

Consulting firms like Deloitte and Accenture are forming mutually beneficial business partnerships with Google around selling the Google Cloud platform to enterprise customers. Deloitte and Google expanded their relationship at Google’s Next conference in April. The companies have a goal of driving billions of dollars of business to each other per year, said Tom Galizia, […]

Beyond the money they mint with their owned-and-operated inventory, Google, Facebook and Amazon are, each in their own way, bidding into nearly every programmatic auction that takes place across the open internet. Although programmatic is growing year over year, independent ad tech players are increasingly fighting over the remaining crumbs while the walled gardens cut […]

Facebook says it’s finally going to start rolling out its long-overdue Clear History feature “in the coming months.” That activation means Facebook will have less access to certain forms of targeting data. On Tuesday, Facebook warned advertisers that the tool, which will eventually give people the ability to see and delete the data that third-party […]

What if Microsoft, and not Google, had acquired DoubleClick in 2007? What if Facebook hadn’t given up on its Atlas and LiveRail acquisitions? What if YouTube had stayed independent? In this episode, Beeswax CEO Ari Paparo comes to the studio for a game of “what if,” applying his encyclopedic knowledge of ad tech to a […]

Publishers want to control their header bidding – especially in light of Google Ad Manager’s changing rules and proprietary header bidding wrappers giving preference to their own demand. To serve this need, Rubicon Project built Demand Manager, tech that sits on top of the open-source wrapper Prebid. In addition to analytics and a rich UI […]

As a joint venture between Universal Music Group and Sony Entertainment, Vevo owns the sales and distribution rights to 350,000 music videos from the world’s top artists. Vevo has always had a large distribution partnership with YouTube, but over the past year it’s shut down its owned-and-operated properties to exclusively partner on third-party distribution – […]

It’s been almost a year since Vista Equity Partners acquired a majority stake in ad verification company Integral Ad Science. In the wake of the acquisition, the company appointed a new CEO, Lisa Utzschneider, to lead the company. In this episode, Utzschneider discusses her 20 years in senior revenue roles at Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo, […]

Shopify powers digital marketing for many of the savviest direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands. In addition to its foundational ecommerce services, Shopify provides DTC marketers with a range of creative and media buying tools through an automated chatbot named Kit. It also connects merchants to major media platforms such as Instagram, Amazon, Google and Facebook through a […]

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Scott Swanson, CEO at Aki Technologies. Apple’s move into streaming TV is a significant milestone in the already-in-progress, cord-cutting revolution. It should serve as an important nudge for marketers: Yes, it’s time to get […]

  For YouTube, it’s all about the big TV screen. At least, that was the messaging the Google-owned video platform pushed during its Brandcast event Thursday evening at Radio City Music Hall, where CEO Susan Wojcicki trotted out the stats. “The 2 billion users who log into YouTube each month are watching their favorite content […]

OpenX is testing a platform called OpenAudience that lets advertisers buy using its identity graph, which includes access to unique data from its publishers. It plans to makes its identity graph-enabled buying generally available in Q3. This announcement is unusual in that exchanges like OpenX usually do not offer identity graphs that connect audience data […]

Regulation Nation The Federal Trade Commission is in negotiations on a settlement deal with Facebook that would install a federally-approved privacy official at the highest ranks of the company and launch an independent privacy oversight committee. CEO Mark Zuckerberg would be responsible for enforcing privacy at the company, and Facebook will still have to pay […]

“Today, we’re going to talk about building a privacy-focused social platform,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared, with only a mild sense of irony, as he kicked off the F8 developer conference in San Jose on Tuesday morning. One would be forgiven for wondering if Facebook is even capable of such a pivot, and Zuckerberg recognized […]

Brands are being tough on platforms, pulling advertising dollars after brand safety fiascoes and thinking critically about appearing adjacent to unpredictable content that can expose them to brand-safety risks. Yet Reddit, which languished with minimal advertising for years in part due to those brand-safety concerns, is thriving. Revenue grew by a factor of three in […]

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

Facebook set aside $3 billion for a potential FTC fine, the company revealed Wednesday when it announced its first quarter earnings. Facebook estimates the fine, which stems from its privacy practices, could range from $3 billion to $5 billion. “We are focused on building out our privacy-focused vision for the future of social networking and […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Remember Oath? Verizon Media Group, the company formerly known as Oath, is shrinking as the telco shifts its focus and most of its resources to 5G. The media group, which is made up of Verizon’s acquisition and merger of AOL and Yahoo, saw revenues […]

Snap is seeing a nice bump from performance advertisers. The platform said Tuesday that its revenues from direct-response buyers doubled over the past year, although it did not break out a figure. Total revenue grew 39% year over year to $320 million, beating analyst expectations of $307 million. Snap’s success with performance advertisers is driven […]

Twitter is angling for its sliver of the performance advertising pie dominated by Facebook and Google. A top priority for the Twitter revenue team this year is to work on enhancing its Mobile App Promotion product, the company’s answer to app install ads. The opportunity is ripe, CFO Ned Segal told investors during an earnings […]

While most DSPs let marketers increase or decrease bids based on factors like time of day, Beeswax is upgrading that idea with a product that lets buyers optimize bids based on up to 40 factors from the bid requests. Bid Models, which graduated from beta Wednesday, uses multivariate bidding algorithms to help marketers find “pockets” […]