Platforms

MediaMath will stop buying from supply partners that play auction games, preferring to create an economic incentive for fair, transparent programmatic auctions and put an end to auction manipulation. The DSP sent an open letter Wednesday morning to its 50 directly integrated suppliers. The full letter is reproduced at the end of this article. “Auction […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Sridhar Out One of Google’s key ad executives is riding his horse off into the VC sunset, Forbes reports. SVP Ads and Commerce Sridhar Ramaswamy will depart the Googleplex for a role with Greylock Ventures. Sridhar helped Google’s ad platform business grow from $1.5 […]

Facebook may have to roll out a “sorry” button. In the meantime, there’s Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s global head of marketing solutions. After revelations last week about questionable data-sharing practices capped off by a large data breach, Everson was invited to kick off Advertising Week in New York City on Monday and address Facebook’s most recent […]

Six exchanges and a handful of top publishers who work with Index Exchange’s wrapper say they consistently notice anomalies indicating the exchange prioritizes itself. At least two of those exchanges are composing a letter to Index Exchange CEO Andrew Casale threatening to withdraw from its wrapper unless it takes steps to ensure neutrality, AdExchanger has […]

Jay Seideman will present on programmatic best practices at AdExchanger’s upcoming Programmatic IO New York conference on Oct. 15-16. AT&T’s new advertising and analytics unit, Xandr, is capturing the headlines and Amazon is on its way to making the duopoly a trio – but don’t count out Oath. The Verizon-owned digital media company is avidly […]

Although M&A for data-driven companies slowed before the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation took effect, Salesforce charged ahead. The CRM giant dropped $6.5 billion on middleware firm MuleSoft in March. It followed with a reported $800 million acquisition of data integration company Datorama, which closed Aug. 20. A month later, multiple Salesforce customers are already […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Brick By Brick Amazon’s newest foray into offline retail is a store called Amazon 4-star in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood featuring products that have high ratings and are trending with New Yorkers. The store will be similar to Amazon’s small chain of bookstores, […]

Snapchat introduced ecommerce advertising capabilities on Thursday, including a product catalog ad format called Collection Ads, a performance marketing agency partner program and more than 40 shopping partners, including eBay and Wish. “This is the first time we’re addressing the needs of a specific vertical, as opposed to previously building general products for advertisers,” said […]

Pooja Midha will speak on the future of TV measurement at AdExchanger’s upcoming Programmatic IO New York conference on Oct. 15-16. Founded in 2007, true[X] was acquired by Fox in 2014 for $200 million. Its president, Pooja Midha, has hit the ground running since she assumed the role in March. “I was a true[X] customer […]

AT&T’s promise to connect data, technology, distribution and content to make advertising better for all constituents is exciting. So exciting, in fact, that industry executives from both the buy and sell sides gathered in support of the idea at the Relevance conference in Santa Barbara, Calif., this week, willing to help make it happen. But […]

Snap Fizzle? This year, eMarketer estimates Snapchat will bring in $662.1 million in US ad revenue, a significant drop from the $1.03 billion it had projected last March. “We now expect that Snap will not break $1 billion in US ad revenue until 2020,” according to the revised figures. The downgrade is mainly due to […]

Two multibillion-dollar acquisitions and one Justice Department lawsuit later, AT&T’s advertising and analytics unit finally has a name: Xandr. AT&T revealed the brand at its Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara, Calif., Tuesday, a debutante ball for the new unit that gathered 300 top advertising and media executives at the lavish Ritz-Carlton Bacara. The name pays […]

The Plateau Problem Digital publisher Vox is set to miss its goal of $200 million in revenue this year by more than 15%, though it should still see double-digit growth over last year’s take of about $160 million, The Wall Street Journal reports. The issue came up at a board meeting last week amid investor […]

SiriusXM said Monday it has offered to acquire Pandora for $3.5 billion, a 13.8% premium on the current stock price. Read the release. If the deal goes through, SiriusXM would be able to distribute its content beyond vehicles and gain both a subscription radio business and an ad-supported streaming business. It would have the opportunity […]

Augmented reality is about to hit its stride thanks to large media platforms, which are leading the way. Snap was early, but over the past 12 to 18 months, Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Alibaba and others have all made big bets on AR by either investing in companies or creating (some might argue copying) […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Right Place, Wrong Time Location-based technology fueled optimism about mobile ad revenue, but regulations like GDPR and mobile policy changes from Apple and Google have put a damper on those expectations. Now some location companies are ditching their media-buying business to focus on more […]

What’s a good, succinct way to describe the current US system of data security and privacy regulation? “It’s a mess,” said Daniel Solove, a professor of law at George Washington University. That’s why the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is hosting a series of hearings from mid-September through November to help it rethink its approach to […]

Snap is reorienting its ad strategy in rocky waters. On Monday, Snap’s chief strategy officer, Imran Khan, said he was leaving the company he helped take public four years earlier. Khan’s departure came shortly after the company reported in its Q2 earnings that its daily active viewers had dipped by 3 million, even as revenue […]

Far from Silicon Valley, in a lecture hall at George Washington University Law School on an overcast day in Washington, DC, the clouds are gathering for big tech. On Thursday, the Federal Trade Commission held the first in a series of public hearings running from now through November focused on a wide range of consumer […]

The writing was on the wall, but now it’s written in ink: Oath honcho Tim Armstrong will leave Verizon at the end of the year. Current Oath president and COO K. Guru Gowrappan was named as the new CEO, Verizon said in a release. Armstrong will aid in the transition. When Armstrong joined the telco […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Search Wars, Part 2 Amazon has lit a fuse under the staid discipline of search advertising. With paid placements commanding more real estate on Amazon’s results pages, organic listings have been pushed lower on the page. As Recode reports, this has led to escalating […]

Snap’s chief strategy officer, Imran Khan, is leaving the company to pursue other opportunities, it announced in an SEC filing Monday morning. Khan did not disclose his next role. He plans to stay at Snap for an unspecified interim period to help with the transition and recruit a new chief business officer. “This has been […]

As of Monday, all advertisers on Facebook will be able to see a full list of contextual placements where their ads might appear before a campaign starts and where they actually ran after a campaign ends. Facebook has been testing this capability for more than a year. As of last autumn, advertisers were already able […]

Oath is attempting to deliver on its promise of becoming an alternative to the duopoly. But a question remains as to how compelling its proposition will be to buyers without the full complement of Verizon data at its disposal. On Monday, the Verizon-owned company unveiled the long-awaited fruits of a year’s worth of hard labor: […]

YouTube, watch your back? Facebook said Wednesday that Watch, its video-on-demand service for episodic content, is now available globally. Creators in certain countries – Ireland, the UK, Australia and New Zealand, to start – will also be able to monetize their content with ad breaks, including pre-roll, mid-roll and static image ads. An additional 21 countries will […]

Scruff has a love/hate relationship with programmatic advertising. When the gay dating app, which now has more than 12 million users, first came on the scene in 2010, its monetization strategy could pretty much be summed up in one word: AdMob. But in January, the Grindr competitor decided to remove all its banner ad slots […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Let’s Stay Together A growing chorus of media industry leaders, privacy activists and even legislators have called for anti-monopoly cases against Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook. And those calls have only gotten louder since the European Union hit Google with a record-breaking $5.1 billion […]

Google AMP was supposed to help publishers deal with slow-loading mobile web pages and boost consumption of articles on phones when it rolled out almost three years ago. But publishers such as The Daily Beast aren’t seeing that promised increase in traffic on AMP to justify the lagging monetization they experience on AMP. The Daily […]

Some apps don’t seem to be taking GDPR seriously – or maybe just don’t realize how much they’re leaving themselves exposed. Although mobile apps aren’t necessarily more at risk of GDPR violations, they do have specific and nuanced tasks they must complete in order to comply, and many are noticeably behind. Mobile apps that rely on […]

Advertisers that want to exclude people interested in “Passover,” “Native American culture” or “evangelism” from seeing a campaign on Facebook will soon be out of luck. On Tuesday, Facebook said it’s planning to remove more than 5,000 ad targeting parameters that could be used to discriminate against minority groups. The targeting options will be unavailable […]