Platforms

The Thanksgiving holiday shopping weekend showed how mobile has grown from a retail investment-and-innovation channel to a true pillar of US commerce. On Cyber Monday, mobile commerce crossed a new threshold with $2 billion in sales, according to data from Adobe. Black Friday of 2016 was the first time US shoppers spent more than $1 […]

The ad industry needs to check itself before it wrecks itself. That was the rallying cry Tuesday at NBCUniversal’s swanky State of the Industry Forum, where 150 digital and broadcast advertising luminaries gathered in midtown Manhattan for fancy eggs and frank discussion. “I’ll cut right to the chase: We have a problem,” said Linda Yaccarino, […]

The question-and-answer site Quora considers itself a unique hybrid of search and social. Since neither of those platforms open themselves up to programmatic demand, Quora decided it wouldn’t go that route either. Quora’s ads platform officially went live in May with 300 advertisers on board, who could only purchase ads through Quora’s Facebook-like self-serve ad […]

Facebook is gearing up to grab automotive advertising budget with dynamic and lead ads for auto brands, both released on Thursday. Dynamic ads for auto, like Facebook’s other dynamic ad products for ecommerce and travel, allow advertisers –auto manufacturers and car dealerships, in this case – to retarget auto intenders and create lookalike audiences for […]

Oath is switching things up within its ad and platform executive ranks. The company has named Tim Mahlman president of advertising and publisher strategy, Oath revealed Tuesday. Mahlman replaced Bob Lord as president of AOL’s platform business in June 2016 and has manned AOL’s publisher and ad platform strategy since. Rohit Chandra becomes head of […]

Programmatic platform Choozle picked up $6 million in Series B funding Tuesday, and it’s got growth on the brain. “We’re buying time to become a bigger player in the mid-market,” said Choozle CEO and co-founder Andrew Fischer, who sees recent ad tech consolidation and the lack of investment in early-stage companies as an opportunity. Choozle, […]

Yieldbot founder and CEO Jonathan Mendez has vacated that role. “Jonathan and the board came to a mutual understanding,” a company spokesperson confirmed to AdExchanger on Friday. The change was effective in early October, but Mendez is keeping his board seat. Yieldbot has had a tough year. It laid off a third of its staff […]

When Snap reported disappointing earnings on Tuesday, it said revenue was constrained by its shift from a direct sales model to a programmatic, auction-based model. Snap’s excuse mimics one that publishers used in the early days of programmatic to explain their revenue shortfalls, and it doesn’t fully take into account immaturities and nuances in Snap’s […]

AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley has been waiting 10 years for ad tech to become transparent. Less than a week after Rubicon Project slashed its take rate in half, to 10% to 12%, by doing away with buy-side fees, AppNexus said its fees are even lower. The company revealed it charges an 8.5% average to the […]

AI-driven marketing automation platform Artsai came out of a two-year-long stealth period on Thursday with plans to help brands cut down on marketing vendor fragmentation hell. Client Pandora has been using Artsai to help its ad partners with dynamic creative optimization and to gather and apply campaign performance data and insights across touch points. Pandora […]

The French video platform Dailymotion is a fraction of Google’s size – YouTube’s 1.5 billion-plus monthly viewers dwarf Dailymotion’s 300 million. But scale isn’t stopping the company from repositioning its platform to woo US advertisers and publishers from the dominant video-sharing site. Breaking into a video market ruled by streaming video services such as Netflix […]

Former Adap.tv CEO Toby Gabriner, who became AdRoll’s president in April, has been promoted to CEO, effective immediately. The company’s founding CEO, Aaron Bell, will transition to chief product officer. Gabriner has for the past year advised AdRoll, which wanted to evolve from an early retargeter focused mostly on Facebook to a mid-stage, cross-channel performance marketing […]

The push for ad tech fee transparency is in full swing. Last week, Rubicon Project got rid of its buy-side fees, which will cut its take rate in half. While removing buy-side fees will help Rubicon’s reputation with publishers (The Guardian sued Rubicon over the fees) and buyers, the real drive for transparency comes from […]

Snap said during its Q3 earnings call Tuesday that pricing pressure caused its CPMs to sink 60% year-over-year and 20% sequentially, as more advertisers switched from direct buys to using its self-serve programmatic platform. “The auction transition continued to impact Snap ad pricing during the quarter,” said chief financial officer Drew Vollero. “Most of [the […]

Salesforce is partnering with Google for an integration that will enable sales, marketing and advertising data to flow between the Analytics 360 Suite and Salesforce’s Marketing and Sales clouds. Read the Google blog post. The integration of 360 and Salesforce’s Marketing and Sales clouds will be available in the first half of 2018 at no […]

Gaps in Pandora’s ad tech stack slowed growth in the last quarter, CEO Roger Lynch said Thursday in his first earnings call since taking the helm. “One consistent theme I’ve heard from advertisers is that we don’t have all of the features they need to easily transact with us,” he said. “This is starting to have material impact on our revenue.” Revenue […]

Rubicon Project eliminated its buy-side fees Wednesday. “This ties directly to the commitment I made when I joined the company earlier this year to normalize our pricing and bring a higher level of transparency to everything we do,” CEO Michael Barrett said in a blog post released just prior to Rubicon’s Q3 earnings Thursday. Removing […]

When Snap acquired location-based data company Placed over the summer, agencies got excited about the prospect of intermingling the data sets – but that won’t be happening anytime soon. Placed will not share any advertiser or partner data with Snap, Placed CEO and founder David Shim told AdExchanger. “Keeping the data set separate is important if […]

A stark juxtaposition: At the same time Facebook’s general counsel was getting grilled by members of Congress in Washington, DC, on Wednesday about how the platform was abused by Russian election meddlers, Facebook beat revenue expectations for the third quarter. Ad revenue was up 49% YoY, from $6.8 billion to just over $10 billion. Mobile […]

The tech titans have testified about Russian election meddling. And after two days and multiple hours of questioning by members of Congress aimed at top lawyers from Facebook, Twitter and Google on Tuesday and Wednesday, it’s clear that Russian operatives continue to spread propaganda and sow social discontent using social media platforms and that said […]

Facebook and Twitter both took steps last week to provide more transparent paid political advertising on their platforms. But although political ads will be clearly labeled and users will be able to access more information on who purchased the ads and how much the buyer is spending on electioneering, it’s primarily up to the advertisers […]

After a string of lackluster quarters, Twitter seems poised for a rebound and potential profitability, with early plans to launch RTB buying capabilities on its platform – but it’s still slow going. Although the company beat revenue expectations for the third quarter Thursday with $590 million, that number was down 4% year over year from […]

Dynamic creative optimization has thus far largely overpromised and underdelivered. Now Facebook is tossing its hat in the ring. Can it succeed where others have floundered? On Wednesday, Facebook introduced two tools to help advertisers tailor creative assets on the fly: one that automatically throws together multiple ad variants based on the basic components of […]

If lawmakers have anything to do with it, political ads on Facebook, Google, Twitter and other online platforms may soon be subject to the same disclosure requirements as traditional political advertising. Senators introduced a bipartisan bill on Thursday to do just that, prompted by revelations of Russian meddling before and during the 2016 US presidential […]

Most brands don’t want to be the first thing someone thinks of when they get a stress headache or feel pain after exercise – but Tylenol does. As part of a recent campaign to promote the relaunch of its Rapid Release Gels sub-brand after a 2009 recall, Tylenol wanted to be top-of-mind with potential customers in […]

Google is the latest walled garden to be sucked down the Russian rabbit hole. The Washington Post reported Monday that Google has uncovered evidence of ads linked to Russia that were used to spread propaganda via YouTube, Gmail, Google Search and its DoubleClick ad network. Google’s revelations follow similar disclosures by Facebook and Twitter, which […]

The changes that Facebook is making in response to its ongoing Russia-linked ads predicament will impact every advertiser on the platform, not just political advertisers. For one, Facebook’s effort to introduce more transparency into political advertising could start bubbling up information that brands can use as competitive intel to track trends and make suppositions about […]

Around this time last year, the chatter around artificial intelligence (AI) was escalating as Salesforce and IBM unveiled splashy programs to help advertisers make sense of massive and complex reams of data, in order to enable more personalized marketing. Oracle, too, announced the creation of Adaptive Intelligence Apps at the time, and at its annual […]

Marni Walden, EVP and president of global media and the highest-ranking female executive at Verizon, will step down and move into an advisory position as of Dec. 31. She will leave the company in February, according to a Verizon SEC filing dated Sept. 28. CEO Lowell McAdam confirmed the news late Wednesday, stating that Walden […]

Facebook said Monday it will add 1,000 employees to its global ads review teams over the next year to put the kibosh on foreign state-sponsored ads. The company will examine not just the content of the ad, but also the context in which it was bought and the targeting parameters used. Facebook’s ads review system […]