Platforms

Facebook made several overtures to openness on Wednesday with tools designed to give advertisers more control over where and how their ads appear across in-stream video on Facebook, Instant Articles and the Audience Network. “Advertisers want separate controls for inside the news feed environment and outside the news feed environment where ads are more deeply […]

Verizon completed its $4.5 billion acquisition of Yahoo’s search, email and digital media assets on Tuesday, almost a year after announcing its intent to buy the first-wave internet giant. Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s embattled CEO since 2012, is leaving the company. Just because Verizon has cleared the first and most fundamental hurdle in creating Oath, the […]

Microsoft is beta testing a feature on its Bing search engine called Custom Audiences. It is designed to improve targeting by letting advertisers upload first-party files like CRM, purchase history and subscription data. If advertisers want to participate in the beta test, which has been underway for several months, advertisers must upload their data via […]

After years of will they/won’t they, MoPub is finally going to take better advantage of Twitter data. The mobile exchange, acquired by Twitter in 2013, is testing so-called audience packages in the form of audience segments powered by proprietary data coming from Twitter. The product is in alpha with a select set of partners. “The Twitter […]

Advertisers buying on the open marketplace often sacrifice viewability, quality and transparency for cheaper prices and scale. But as more buyers decline to make that concession, the pendulum is swinging toward curated publisher lists. And many DSPs now offer to shoulder the burden of setting up private marketplace deals for their clients. Recently Centro, which […]

Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. Spotify walks a fine line with its ad experience. Ads should be relevant and not too frequent, but just annoying enough to motivate users of its free version to convert to paid. “You do see drop-offs in the first several days to the first […]

Don’t call the latest venture from ad vet James Heckman, Maven, an ad network. It’s a tech platform for niche publishers that also handles monetization and subscriptions. “We’ve tested this model several times over the past 20 years and it’s never not succeeded,” Heckman said. Heckman’s history goes back to the dot-com boom and includes […]

As Chemistry Communications’ clients created more content and more ambitious distribution plans, manually distributing that content to dozens of native and social platforms became untenable. Chemistry turned to Story by PulsePoint to make content distribution more cost- and time-efficient. The agency serves clients not only in content marketing, but through media buys across digital, video […]

Snap’s acquisition of location data company Placed, announced Monday, shows the platform is getting serious about attribution. While Snap has robust location data on its 166 million daily active users, Placed’s ID graph, which collects geodata on a panel of 150 million opted-in mobile devices, broadens those insights to people who don’t use Snap and […]

Investors are putting Facebook’s feet to the fire about fake news. At the company’s annual shareholder’s meeting on Thursday, investors questioned CEO Mark Zuckerberg about how Facebook is combatting the spread of false news on its platform. Advertisers have become increasingly sensitive to brand safety issues since the YouTube/Google Display Network debacle kicked off in […]

By Allison Schiff and Zach Rodgers Less than a month after Procter & Gamble pulled its business from the platform, AudienceScience has ceased operations and gone into receivership. CEO Bill Gossman confirmed to AdExchanger on Thursday that AudienceScience has suspended worldwide operations. The news was first reported by Business Insider. Gossman declined to comment further on […]

The Atlantic used to have dueling video strategies – one aiming to improve direct monetization onsite and the other to extend its reach and audience offsite. The Atlantic would first monetize video on its flagship site TheAtlantic.com using the Brightcove video player, then push those clips or cuts of them to YouTube. But because off-platform […]

Kiip is giving SDK-averse apps another option to test its demand. On Thursday, the mobile rewards ad network rolled out the ability to use JavaScript tags as a lighter-weight way to serve campaigns into a publisher’s app. Early test partners include music discovery app SoundHound and The Meet Group, which operates a suite of social […]

Forrester’s 2017 DSP Wave ranking placed six platforms as market “leaders”: MediaMath, DataXu, Trade Desk, Turn, Adobe and Rocket Fuel. Three others straddled the line between “leaders” and “strong performers”: Google, AppNexus and AOL. AdForm fell into the “strong performers” category. Time Inc.-owned Viant, including Adelphic, trailed the rest of the group with a placement […]

Marketers aren’t all that wound up about Facebook’s recurring ad metric errors. Bugs happen, said Alok Gupta, data science manager at Airbnb, speaking at a measurement event hosted by Facebook on Wednesday. “You’re never going to build a perfect system immediately or ever,” Gupta said. “As long as the bugs or problems are identified quickly, […]

Google’s YouTube measurement system, Ads Data Hub, now works with media bought through DoubleClick and the Google Display Network (GDN). Ads Data Hub is designed to provide insights into ad spend and campaign performance across Google properties while respecting user privacy. It is meant to solve inconsistencies in measurement that have emerged (especially in mobile) […]

Facebook is ramping up its publisher-centric strategy by testing a self-serve product powering programmatic direct deals called Audience Direct. In its first iteration, Audience Direct helps publishers sell their video inventory, giving them more control over how they structure direct deals and, eventually, how they guarantee delivery against them. “This enables them to create direct […]

Twitter has hired former Turn CEO Bruce Falck to lead its Revenue Product team, according to a tweet Thursday by company co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey. Falck has earned a reputation as an ad tech turnaround artist, stepping in as COO at BrightRoll a year prior to its $640 million sale to Yahoo and then […]

Mobile-first? Passé, says Google. The future is being driven by artificial intelligence. “Mobile made us reimagine every product we were working on,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Wednesday at Google’s I/O developer conference in Mountain View, Calif. “Similarly, in an AI-first world, we are rethinking all our products and applying machine learning and AI to […]

Major ad platforms like Facebook and Google are soaking up the local and small-business market at an eye-popping rate. And it’s taking business away from smaller platforms like Yelp, whose stock has dropped almost 30% after local advertisers moved spend to Facebook and Google. Facebook, for instance, announced March of last year that it had […]

Promoting reviews and content featuring Brooklinen’s bed sheets drives results for the direct-to-consumer brand. “We’ve struck a nerve with the consumer that does research,” said Justin Lapidus, general manager of Brooklinen. The company has grown by a factor of 10 during the past two years, and it raised $10 million in Series A financing in […]

Snapchat may have disappointed investors in its first-ever earnings disclosure on Wednesday, but agencies aren’t ready to bail just yet. Snap missed the mark on both user and revenue growth as it continued to fend off relentless copycatting from Facebook and Instagram. But because the platform pulls in the highest engagement rates among millennials, it’s […]

Demand-side platforms (DSPs) are putting pressure on supply-side platforms (SSPs) to improve inventory quality and cut out the games that pad the second-price auction. Ad tech insiders have told AdExchanger DSPs are being more aggressive in blocking supply sources until they clean up. The pressure could force the ecosystem to grow up. While DSPs aren’t […]

Snap reported earnings for the first time on Wednesday, and based on the results, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg must be feeling pretty smug. Snap reported Q1 revenue of $150 million, a 286% increase from this time last year but below the expected $158 million. Net losses totaled $2.2 billion. Daily active users (DAUs) for the […]

Facebook’s making it harder for fly-by-night publishers to monetize low-value websites. On Wednesday, Facebook said it’s starting to use artificial intelligence to lay down the law on links that shunt users to websites with too many ads, as well as ads of a “disruptive, malicious and shocking” nature. Frowned-upon ad types include excessively disruptive units […]

While consumers typically don’t convert after their first contact with a brand, many marketers measure as if they do. But specialty retailer Cariloha, which sells bamboo-based apparel and accessories both online and in 50 stores, is taking a different approach. Rather than assigning 100% of the credit for a conversion to the last ad a […]

Despite the wide rollout of its Premium subscription product in April, Pandora is still betting on ads for revenue. Now that Premium has hit the market, Pandora can refocus its efforts and resources on launching new ad products, including programmatic audio, in the back half of the year, said CEO and founder Tim Westergren on […]

Whisper, an app that lets its anonymous users post what’s on their mind, is still going strong after five years – even after other secret-sharing social apps like Yik Yak have closed shop. One reason for its longevity is that it is making money through programmatic advertising. Demand partners include Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, OpenX […]

8 p.m. Katy Perry. That’s all. 7:40 p.m. Google Preferred FTW Google Chief Business Officer Robert Kyncl claimed Google Preferred (translation: Google’s top tier videos) has tripled its number of advertisers. Kyncl credited YouTube for turning publishers like BuzzFeed, Vice and AwesomenessTV into “daily destinations of can’t-miss programming.” Consumers watch over 1 billion of hours […]

Rubicon Project posted another quarter of significant declines as new CEO Michael Barrett attempts to turn around the business. Revenue declined 34% YoY to $46 million in the first quarter. Advertising spend declined 23%, to $191.5 million. Though the revenue slightly beat expectations, the stock slid a few percentage points in after-hours trading. Take rates […]