Platforms

When fans visit the newly built Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, they immediately face an entranceway deliberately stacked with visuals: a giant falcon statue, a halo-shaped video scoreboard and a view of the city skyline. The first thing many do is take a photo and blast it across social media. And as they do, stadium staff […]

The latest fire at Facebook has been lit by Russia, which allegedly bought ads to destabilize the US, and the fallout might force Facebook to change the way it does business. “If Facebook really wants to respond to the public outcry, it’s going to have to leave money on the table,” said David Carroll, a […]

Facebook’s decision to disable segments around self-reported user information, including employers, won’t significantly change the amount of spend the platform gets from B2B marketers, according to numerous agency sources. Facebook disabled targeting around self-reported segments after ProPublica revealed Thursday that advertisers can target users with anti-Semitic and derogatory terms. The ban includes employer and education […]

Zefr, a contextual targeting software platform for YouTube, has appointed Toby Byrne as president. Byrne, the former president of ad sales for Fox Networks Group, including its broadcast, sports and cable networks, vacated his post last September. During that time, there was a heavy transition in top sales talent at several linear TV networks as […]

To be a modern broadcaster, CNN believes it has to distribute content everywhere and be a launch partner when platforms like Snapchat Discover, Apple News and Facebook Messenger roll out publisher products. In the past two years, CNN has added roughly 20 platforms to its distribution list and, in the past year, it spent $20 […]

John DeVine, Oath’s newly minted CRO, faces a steep challenge in integrating Yahoo and AOL’s sales organizations. “Priority one is cultural alignment and making sure we have clarity on who our clients are and where we’ll win in the marketplace,” DeVine told AdExchanger. “We’re going through the process now to bring the two sales teams […]

In a blog post Wednesday, Facebook’s VP of global marketing solutions, Carolyn Everson, acknowledged that some marketers are “feeling uneasy” about viewability, online ad metrics and brand safety. She outlined updates meant to address that discomfort. First, Facebook intends to give advertisers more control over where their ads are running by tightening guidelines on the […]

WPP CEO Martin Sorrell called out Twitter’s revenue potential – along with the social platform’s positioning amid Google and Facebook’s ad dominance – in an interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey onstage at Dmexco in Germany on Wednesday. “Twitter does not seem to have achieved the prominence Twitter [and the industry] would want,” Sorrell said. […]

Spanish-language broadcaster Univision hopes to offset declines in local TV ad revenue by doubling down on its digital ad business. It was an early adapter of Facebook Watch, Snapchat Discover and Snapchat Live Stories to reach its audience of millennial Hispanics, but Univision is emphasizing multiplatform campaigns to boost digital revenue. (Univision’s digital ad revenue […]

Advertisers want measurement that assesses video brand safety. And the latest beneficiary of that need is OpenSlate, a video analytics company that can determine if ads were placed alongside appropriate video content on YouTube. The YouTube measurement partner said Thursday it’s bringing a new brand safety auditing tool for YouTube to market, partnering with independent […]

AppNexus and Index Exchange have the broadest adoption of their adapters and wrappers, according to the first-ever Header Bidding Index – a report from ServerBid, an Adzerk spinoff that builds wrappers for the demand side. Seventy percent of the top 1,000 publishers running programmatic advertising use header bidding, according to the report, which ServerBid created […]

The accuracy of Facebook’s reporting is under the microscope again courtesy of Pivotal analyst Brian Wieser and an Australian trade pub called AdNews. In a note to investors on Tuesday, Wieser called attention to Facebook’s claims that it reaches more people than exist within certain age groups, based on US Census data. Wieser was tipped […]

Before Yieldbot CEO Jonathan Mendez laid off one-third of the company’s employees in mid-July, the company had suffered a series of setbacks. With $10 million in funding last year, Yieldbot bet on a header bidding wrapper that didn’t pay off. Instead, AppNexus won the header bidding wrapper wars with Prebid. Then it had a bad […]

LinkedIn on Wednesday launched the LinkedIn Audience Network, a platform enabling advertisers to serve sponsored content on sites and apps beyond its own feed. These properties include desktop placements on parent Microsoft’s properties like MSN and Outlook.com, as well as on third-party publishers through integrations to exchanges like MoPub, Google’s AdX, Rubicon and Sharethrough. LinkedIn […]

The second-price auction is crumbling. All the major exchanges/SSPs – with the exception of Google AdX – are rolling out or are deep in experiments with first-price header bidding auctions. The tests vary in aggressiveness and scope from exchange to exchange, with AppNexus, Index Exchange and OpenX leading the charge, and with visions of much […]

Consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands are threatening steep investment pullbacks if higher standards aren’t met on marketing measurement and transparency. And those Fortune 500 CPGs, including Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Mondelez, Nestlé and Kraft, seem to be holding to their lines in the sand. In the past few weeks, holding companies like IPG, WPP and […]

Many advertisers want reach, but when Canada Dry executed a campaign with Spotify and Adobe, it optimized against a softer metric: mindset. “We don’t think of consumers as just 18-49-year-olds or young millennials,” said Brit Sundberg, programmatic media and data strategy manager for Dr Pepper Snapple Group, which owns Canada Dry. “We think of our […]

PepsiCo’s fitness water brand Propel wants its digital messaging to reach consumers while they’re working out, so it’s focused its media investments around music and mobile. Propel has a deep relationship with Pandora as well as Under Armour’s fitness tracker app, Map My Fitness. “Propel as a brand has centered itself around uniting fitness tribes and […]

Google’s latest anti-fraud measure aims to stamp out ad fraud by clawing back money from the exchanges where its DSP purchased fraudulent inventory. In Q4, DoubleClick Bid Manager will give advertisers the option to buy only from exchanges that will refund media spend for fraudulent inventory. Over the past month, Google’s DSP has issued advertisers […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by David Jakubowski, director of publisher solutions at Facebook. The benefits of header bidding on the web are well documented: Publishers receive an average increase of 15% to 30% – even as high as 50% […]

The MRC kicked off the second phase of its three-part Facebook audit at the beginning of August: an assessment of the quality of Facebook and Instagram viewability metrics as reported by viewability partners like Moat, Integral Ad Science, comScore and DoubleVerify. Specifically, the MRC is examining if Facebook’s API accurately transmits what’s happening on Facebook […]

While Google claimed advertisers are returning to YouTube, new data from Standard Media Index reveals advertisers really did tighten their purse strings after the video platform’s brand safety scare. YouTube ad spend declined about 26% YoY in Q2, while ad spend spread across digital video platforms such as Hulu or network-owned video services, in comparison, […]

LinkedIn is rolling out native video, which will allow users to record and upload video directly to the platform, the company said Tuesday, after a beta test that began earlier this year. The tool will gradually be available to all individual LinkedIn members over the next few weeks. LinkedIn expects to make the tool available […]

Facebook is giving advertisers a bit more control over how they buy in-stream video ads within the news feed, through Audience Network and on Watch, its newly launched video tab. In the past, advertisers that wanted to purchase in-stream placements delivered into ad breaks were required to run them in the news feed. Starting Thursday, […]

Inc. Magazine released its annual 500/5000 revenue survey on Wednesday and the theme is: There is no theme. At least not from an ad tech perspective in the Advertising & Marketing category. (Click here to read coverage of last year’s list.) “The list does feel a little random,” said Melissa Parrish, VP and research director […]

Facebook Watch, the social giant’s video hub that went live for select users on Wednesday, already has a roster of digital video launch partners – like Time Inc., Hearst, Brit & Co., Tastemade, Quartz and McClatchy. But Facebook also wants to broker content deals with the likes of big TV companies like Univision, Major League […]

The NBA’s Sacramento Kings are entering the second season in the Golden 1 Center, the centerpiece of the team’s new data-driven fan experience. “We tend to think of the stadium as a platform,” said Ryan Montoya, CTO of the Kings organization. “Everything plugs into an operating system, and the data can be shared throughout the […]

Snap again came in below analysts’ expectations for its Q2 earnings announced on Thursday. Year-over-year, revenue grew 153% to $181.7 million in Q2 and 200% to $331 million for the half year. Quarter-over-quarter, revenue was up roughly 21%. Analysts expected Q2 revenue to clock in at $186 million. Daily active users (DAUs) grew 21% year-over-year […]

Videology revealed Wednesday that it received an $80 million credit facility from lending and payment services provider FastPay and Tennenbaum Capital. Since its founding a decade ago, Videology has raised about $121 million in capital financing, but at this advanced stage in the company’s lifecycle, it didn’t necessarily make sense to raise another round of costly […]

As its sell-side business takes off due to the success of its Prebid open source wrapper, AppNexus’ buy-side operation is treading water relative to rivals such as The Trade Desk. Now the company is considering downplaying it further. In recent months, AppNexus executives have pondered using parts of its buy-side business as a bargaining chip […]