Platforms

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Brand Safe Enough AT&T is advertising on YouTube again after a two-year hiatus. The telco, one of the world’s largest advertisers, pulled spend from the video platform at the height of its 2017 brand safety scandal with a promise not to return until major […]

After 14 years at Google and DoubleClick, ads vet Jonathan Bellack has joined Alphabet-owned Jigsaw as its first-ever director of product. Google created Jigsaw as a technology incubator with the mission of using technology to make the internet safer. Jigsaw’s projects have protected news organizations from toxic comments, gave readers uncensored access to sites and […]

As Twitter’s video ad business grows, so does the amount of user-generated content on its platform. The challenge for Twitter, and brands that advertise on it, is to keep brands safe from, well, the Internet. In April 2018, 50% of Twitter’s business came from video advertising – and that still holds true today. In Q1 […]

Overcoming the banality of a standard banner ad in favor of a custom unit requires a lot of work. Buyers need to work with creative tech companies to build the units, and publishers need to adjust their ad setup to support the unusual formats. When header bidding became the norm, it cut off these companies’ […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Snap Safety Some marketers have complained about Snapchat brand safety issues now that it’s transitioned to a self-serve ad platform. Last week, an ad directed to a fake news story about Chrissy Teigen promoting weight loss pills, Digiday reports. And last year, an ad […]

Facebook will distribute $300 million across multiple news projects over the next three years to support local newsrooms and help publishers create new business models, the platform announced Tuesday. Donations include a $5 million endowment gift to the Pulitzer Center, $6 million for the UK-based Community News Project and a $20 million expansion of Facebook’s […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Doubled Up DoubleVerify has acquired the Finnish contextual ad tech startup Leiki for an undisclosed sum. Leiki is DoubleVerify’s first acquisition and comes a year and a half after DV was bought by the private equity firm Providence Equity Partners. Other ad tech companies […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Video Jockeys Amazon has a monster ad business, but it’s missing one piece: video inventory. The Amazon Prime video library has the audience, but like Netflix, it’s ad-free. Some recent moves show how Amazon will broaden its video supply. At CES last week, Amazon […]

Amazon’s release Thursday at CES of a free, ad-supported streaming video channel called IMDB Freedive could provide an opportunity for the digital giant to exhibit its targeting capabilities and pose a real threat to the Facebook-Google duopoly. Freedive is currently available on Amazon Fire devices and through Amazon’s desktop site. With about 50 million Fire […]

Piano, whose tech and services gives digital publishers a way to supplement their ad revenue, raised $22 million in Series B funding Thursday to expand its offering and help it buy other companies in the space. “There’s all this ad tech out there, but nothing exists to help publishers treat their traffic as readers and […]

RTL Group is paying up to $33 million for Yospace, a UK-based server-side ad insertion company. The company will operate independently, but work closely with SpotX, which provides video ad serving and advertising demand to video publishers. “This acquisition will go a long way toward solving issues with programmatic and OTT,” said SpotX CEO Mike […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Thinking Inside The Box Amazon is testing a program to deliver free product samples on behalf of brands like Maybelline and Folgers, Axios reports. With its ecommerce data, Amazon says the old-school free sample tactic can lead to “a higher likelihood of conversion than […]

Matt Derella, Twitter’s global VP of revenue and content partnerships, will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference on Jan. 23-24. Two years ago, Twitter was a company in distress. Usage and revenue were in decline, executive turnover was rampant and the company was rumored to be for sale. “For someone who loves this company, and so […]

Verizon Media – formerly Oath – said Tuesday it has increased the amount of native Microsoft inventory it can sell to include Xbox and Outlook, and other exclusive placements. Verizon declined to say exactly how much native inventory Microsoft lets it sell. Buyers can access the inventory via iOS or by using Oath Ad Platforms’ […]

Music Audience Exchange (MAX), a service/tech platform that uses data to pair up-and-coming musical artists with brands, reached into the publishing world to hire Michael Provus as its Chief Revenue Officer late last December. Provus previously held the same title at Wenner Media. MAX connects upstart musicians with brands whose customers listen to the artist’s […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Broadcast Impasse CBS will be without Nielsen ratings after failing to renew a contract that expired on Monday. The dispute began six months ago over pricing, with CBS, which spent $100 million with Nielsen last year, demanding fairer terms and arguing that the metrics […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. F Is For Fake Last year was a point of “inversion” for the Internet, which has become oversaturated with malicious nonhuman traffic, ad fraud, fake news, falsely reported metrics and other forms of digital unreality, according to a New York Magazine story. It was […]

Audio remained an exciting area for programmatic advertisers in 2018 as the medium moved further toward automation. The podcast industry began to mature this year as growing audiences garnered attention from radio broadcasters, streaming audio giants and big brands. But a lack of available audience data still hinders programmatic and measurement. Meanwhile, streaming audio and […]

What does a 13-year-old have in common with a retired woman and a middle-aged man? They all play mobile games. “There’s a misconception that the gaming audience is just kids,” said Brian Ames, president of Activision Blizzard Media (ABM), an advertising division housed within game publishing giant King. “The reality is, though, that gamers are […]

2018 was the year Facebook’s skeletons really came skittering out of the closet, and the drip, drip, drip of bad news is seemingly endless. On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that Facebook shared more data with more partners than previously disclosed, including contact information, private messages and friend lists. Facebook’s response to the Times […]

Building Stories on Instagram and Snapchat is a Sisyphean effort for many marketers. After 24 hours, it all disappears. Brooklyn-based software company Mish Guru is trying to alleviate some of brands’ well-documented pain points with Stories. Its new Instagram Story Builder, which launched in November, helps gather user-generated content (UGC) tagged to a brand. It […]

The EMX exchange, operated by the agency holding company Engine, is offering buyers the ability to transact on its exchange with a flat, transparent buy-side fee. The sliding scale model will allow clients, agencies and DSPs to pay more or less depending on volume commitments. So a buyer may decide to spend more on the […]

OpenX has laid off 100 staffers, a process that started weeks ago and included a massive round on Tuesday. It will also sunset its ad server by the end of the year. The departing staff includes engineering, product and tech employees, and OpenX will shift those roles to Krakow, Poland, which has strong engineering talent […]

Facebook is setting up a kiosk in midtown Manhattan to dole out free hot cocoa and privacy advice. (Yes, privacy advice.) At a one-day public pop-up event Thursday in Bryant Park, Facebook reps will answer questions about how people can use their privacy settings and manage their advertising experience on the platform. The event, a […]

A Nielsen survey released Thursday suggests esports watchers are a prime target for advertisers, but old strategies won’t work on them. The 2018 Nielsen Esports Fan Insights report includes behavior data from hundreds of esports gamers collected over the last year. These fans watched and participated in games like “League of Legends,” “Overwatch League,” “Fortnite” […]

After around a year of avoiding the spotlight, Google CEO Sundar Pichai spent nearly four hours fielding a grab bag of questions from members of the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, discussing everything from the scope of Google’s data collection practices to alleged political bias in search results. The problem, as is often the case […]

AppNexus has been wanting to make its fees transparent, even before it was acquired by AT&T’s ad unit Xandr, but it couldn’t because of how contracts are written and structured. But now, buyers can find out how much of their media budgets went to tech fees when they buy publisher inventory through AppNexus, a level […]

Forrester released a Wave last week examining the emergent location intelligence platform space and here’s your main takeaway: Companies want to apply location data to make decisions across all of their digital touchpoints – but the technology to do that is still in its early stages. Although location data vendors are a dime a dozen – you […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Rob Gabel, founder and CEO at Tubular Labs. Digital-native publishers sailed against strong headwinds in 2018, as continual shifts in the business model forced budget cuts, downsizing, “pivots to video” and more hurdles to […]

What do advertisers outside of China need to know about Tencent? For one, it’s got much more going on than just WeChat – the Tencent app with the most name recognition outside of China. Second, WeChat is more than just a social platform: It’s embedded into the fabric of Chinese life. “Global brands have heard about […]