Platforms

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 […]

Index Exchange has for more than a year been doing bid caching, where if its buyer loses a programmatic auction, it holds onto the bid to see if it can serve an ad on the next piece of content the consumer views. Bid caching has enabled Index Exchange to gain market share against rival exchanges […]

RevJet wants to be an operating system for the customer experience, and it’s using a $21 million Series A round to get there. Total funding for the four-year-old startup, which helps marketers manage, test and optimize their digital advertising across touchpoints, is now $30 million. The round, revealed Wednesday, was led by private equity firm […]

Tapping into international markets, particularly the US, is lucrative but far from easy for a mid-size game developer from Indonesia, especially one trying to replicate a viral hit. Jakarta-based game studio Alegrium saw immediate success with a series of trivia apps that have collectively racked up tens of millions of downloads since the first title, […]

Amazon has begun enabling guaranteed private marketplace buys between its DSP clients and publishers using its Transparent Ad Marketplace product. Test deals are just starting to flow from Amazon’s DSP to publishers, AdExchanger has learned. Direct deals work like a guaranteed private marketplace: Advertisers commit dollars and place ads with specific, brand-name publishers using Amazon’s […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Ad Tech Is Consolidating Ad tech shows the hallmarks of a maturing market. Financing for ad tech companies this year is on pace for $1.5 billion, about half what it reached in 2015, The New York Times reports, citing data from CB Insights. Meanwhile, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Right At Home, Out-Of-Home Google is working on deals for out-of-home advertising inventory in shopping centers and transportation stations in Germany, and may expand an OOH offering to the US and UK. The Android mobile operating system, which runs on 75% of smartphones in […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Back To The Bench The US Justice Department is appealing the decision by Senior US District Court Judge Richard Leon to allow AT&T to acquire Time Warner. “Most legal observers believe the government faces an uphill battle in overturning the ruling,” reports The Wall […]

Disney missed its earnings expectations on Tuesday by a smidgen, causing its stock to dip about 1% in after-hours trading. But you can’t keep a good mouse down. Analysts expected $1.95 per share on revenue of $15.4 billion in the fiscal third quarter. Instead, Disney posted $1.87 per share on $15.2 billion in revenue – not […]

Snap’s revenue grew 44% year over year to $262 million in the second quarter. Its average revenue per user – a critical metric where Snapchat lags behind Facebook and Instagram – increased 34% to $1.40 in Q2. Snapchat’s transition to self-serve programmatic has allowed the company to scale its ad business in ways that weren’t […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Money On My Mind Recent data scandals haven’t stopped Facebook from asking US banks for information about their customers, The Wall Street Journal reports. Over the past year, Facebook has approached Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and US Bancorp for data, including user credit […]

Crimson Hexagon is back in business on Facebook and Instagram – mostly. The social analytics platform, which uses AI to analyze public data across social networks, said Friday that most of its customers have had their access restored to both Facebook and Instagram data since the end of last week. The process was far swifter for […]

Google is going full-court press on universal app campaigns (UAC) through a partnership with Unity Technologies, a company that makes development tools for game creators. Starting Thursday, Unity’s more than 10 million developers have access to advertiser demand from AdMob via a direct integration. It’s the first partnership of this nature between Google and a […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Good While It Lasted Facebook’s data partner program will shut down on Aug. 15, a result of policy changes following the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal, and some marketers dread the impending loss. The program included data brokers like Acxiom, Oracle Data Cloud, Epsilon […]