Platforms

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 […]

Ever click on an ad by mistake? You and the rest of internet-connected humanity. On Tuesday, Facebook said it’s going to stop counting those errant clicks in its reporting for ads served through Audience Network and start barring publishers from including clickable white space in the background of their native ads. Beginning next week, if […]

While P.F. Chang’s first order of business is stir-fry, it’s also cooking up a fresh data strategy to support its new brand push. As the owner of 212 Asian-themed concept restaurants around the globe, P.F. Chang’s strategy – and its custom-built technology stack – once primarily catered to the dine-in audience. “As takeout and third-party […]

Lorne Brown, former CEO of Operative and president of SintecMedia, will ascend to the CEO position at Sintec Media. Outgoing CEO Amotz Yarden will assume a seat on the board. As CEO, Brown plans to continue executing the vision he and Yarden laid out last November when SintecMedia acquired Operative for $200 million, about six […]

AT&T just hired an ad platform whiz kid to take charge of its new TV and video ad business – but that’s the easy part. On Friday, AT&T revealed that Brian Lesser, GroupM’s CEO of North America, will helm a new business unit so the telco can attempt to realize the potential of its vast deterministic […]

Mobile app install ads are still a multibillion-dollar business for Facebook. But is Facebook taking too much credit? It’s hard to say, because Facebook is what’s known as a self-attributing network, i.e., a walled garden. A self-attributing network is just what it sounds like: a platform that, usually because of its scale, has the power […]

Rubicon Project has been steadily lowering its take rate over the past year to make its tech more appealing to publishers and buyers, who have pushed back against hidden fees. During its earnings call Tuesday, the company revealed that the declining take rates are one part of its strategy to offer the most value for […]

Pandora’s active listeners in Q2 declined 2.7% YoY to 76 million, the company reported on its Monday earnings call. That’s down from 78 million active listeners during the same period last year. To bolster its user base, Pandora will refocus its marketing efforts on getting users to sign up for its ad-supported tier and upgrading […]

Twitter’s revenue and user growth story – especially US user growth – is grounded in a harsh reality. Overall revenue for the quarter came in at $574 million, down 5% year over year. Ad revenue was also down 8% on a YoY basis, clocking in at $489 million. This is the third quarter in a […]

The New York Post has a love-hate relationship with pre-roll. While pre-roll typically commands high CPMs when sold directly, too often it’s hard to monetize because it’s either in short supply or locked up in private marketplaces. Sometimes the supply issue is technical. The New York Post recently found it had missed half of its […]

Facebook is pretty much minting money at this point. Despite concerns over ad load maxing out in the news feed, Facebook posted revenue of $9.32 billion for the second quarter, up 45% year over year from $6.43 billion. Mobile ad revenue at $8 billion was responsible for the vast majority of Facebook’s overall revenue in […]

Facebook ads are effective within Facebook, but how good are they within a mixed-media campaign, or when assessed over the entire customer journey? That’s the fundamental paradox of the walled garden: Marketers get great data inside of it, but hardly any outside. But Facebook is trying to shed its reputation for impenetrability. The company has […]

Sovrn CEO Walter Knapp sat down in a conference room on June 27 and told 27 staffers it would be their last day. Knapp told AdExchanger the layoffs were proactive. Before the layoffs, the company had grown from 50 people to more than 250 staffers in two years. It raised $18 million in August 2015, […]

Ask Facebook for access to its data and the official answer is going to be, “Nope.” But under certain circumstances, a limited number of advertisers and agencies are tapping into impression-level Facebook campaign delivery data, AdExchanger has learned. The data-sharing arrangements are euphemistically referred to as “clean rooms.” These clean rooms are safe spaces where […]

Time Inc. knows that producing magazine content requires data – like seeing how many issues sell based on the cover story. But digital allows for an additional level of analysis the magazine-native publisher hadn’t fully embraced. Which is why Time Inc. pruned down its more than five dozen analytics tools and focused on just a […]

Back when real-time auction app Tophatter was founded in 2012, it spent as much as 95% of its user acquisition budget on Facebook. But with a solid user base of around 12 million registered users, it’s been making a concerted effort to mix up its UA strategy. “In the beginning, Facebook was a big gorilla, but […]

For smaller publishers or influencers, ad revenue isn’t always the strongest path to monetization. Many want direct relationships with consumers. They want to stake out their own URL to build on a social media presence. On their own site, they prefer to charge for subscriptions, accept donations or sell products in order to support their […]

Mobile creative is a Catch-22. While rich media units are engaging, they’re expensive to make and tougher to scale than programmatic banners. But banners look bad on mobile and get a bad rap for ruining the user experience. Shazam and Waze are two apps championing beautiful mobile creative, but they can do so by relying […]

By Sarah Sluis, Kelly Liyakasa and Alison Weissbrot Some publishers excel in programmatic in ways that make buyers take notice. The best way to stand out in programmatic is by integrating sales teams so it’s easy to buy programmatically and direct with a single conversation. Smart publishers don’t create incentives that make salespeople push direct […]

Episode, a choose-your-own-adventure storytelling app, is choosing a road to revenue centered on the user experience first. Monetization is delicately balanced with the demands of UX for the interactive app, which allows users to immerse themselves in fictional narratives. “But there is a lot of revenue to be made if we can get people engaged,” […]

Outdoor gear retailer REI is hitting the slopes with personalized local advertising. The brand, working with dynamic creative optimization (DCO) platform Jivox, is running hyperlocal campaigns on social channels informed by weather data, interests and past purchases. In particular, REI has been piloting a new Jivox product that allows brands to add new targeting dimensions […]

As the marketing chief at a sprawling enterprise software company, SAP CMO Maggie Chan Jones has unique insight into marketer pain points. At the top of the list: fragmentation. “There are thousands of marketing technology providers across different marketing functions,” Jones said. “One of the biggest headaches a marketer has is trying to sell one […]

The best-laid plans of app developers are often belied by the actions of actual users. When Guy Tal, CEO of Bel Media Group, an Israeli app publisher with around 100 gaming, social and utility applications, soft-launched Tinder-like Android dating app WeMeet, he and his team assumed users would be easily attracted to the service because […]

The public comment period for ads.txt, the initiative by IAB Tech Lab to cut down on domain-spoofed traffic, is now over. But are marketers, their agencies and DSPs ready to adopt? Yes and no. To be fair, it’s still quite early. Publishers are actively creating ads.txt files and DSPs are scanning them. The IAB Tech […]

For Snap, there are benefits to being a latecomer to ad tech. The app, which entered the programmatic playing field last year when it launched APIs and self-serve tools that allow marketers to place automated buys on its platform, is avoiding many mistakes made by a predecessor that it’s often compared to: Facebook. “Snap has been […]

Twitter’s ad tech fortunes haven’t been great. Most recently, it took its 479-million-dollar acquisition TellApart for a long walk behind the barn. However, Twitter isn’t giving up on ad tech, at least not as an investor, said co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey at a Wednesday panel hosted by Omnicom’s OMD in Cannes. “We’re definitely not […]

Yahoo’s new parent, Oath, will have to make do without one of the acquired company’s key ad platform executives. BrightRoll CEO Tod Sacerdoti is exiting the video demand-side platform and exchange he founded in 2006, according to a source with knowledge of the company. Yahoo bought BrightRoll for $640 million in 2014. An unconfirmed number […]