Platforms

Any publisher who is not a big platform company is on the express train to becoming a niche ads business, predicts Meredith Kopit Levien, EVP and CRO of The New York Times. “Up until now, we’ve been a niche consumer business with a $1 billion-plus newspaper ad business,” Kopit Levien said, speaking Thursday at AdExchanger’s […]

The point of advertising is to provide value to consumers, but by its nature “advertising doesn’t do that,” said Gary Vaynerchuk, a serial entrepreneur and founder of VaynerMedia. Vaynerchuk’s observation, shared Wednesday at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview event, highlights the cognitive dissonance experienced by many ad tech practitioners, whose job security depends on metrics rather than […]

Brad Smallwood, VP of marketing science at Facebook, will take the stage Jan. 19 to talk all things measurement at Industry Preview in New York City. Facebook is at a crossroads in the way it relates to the media, thinks about monetization and measures ads. Right before Advertising Week, Facebook admitted to what became a […]

Arun Kumar, global president at Cadreon, will take the stage Jan. 19 to share Cadreon’s full vision for the future at Industry Preview in New York City. Walled gardens are cropping up across the digital ecosystem. “It’s just the way the world is going to be for the foreseeable future,” said Arun Kumar, global president at Cadreon. […]

Pulpix, a video platform that aims to increase the time consumers spend on publishers’ properties, has raised $850,000 in “pre-seed” financing. The two-year-old, Paris-based Pulpix is a Y Combinator startup whose backers include Studio VC, Ace Capital and angel investors such as Chon Tang, who invested early on in the video DSP TubeMogul. The startup […]

Instagram will allow ads in its Stories section, the company said Wednesday. It also unveiled brand measurement tools. “Over the first holidays with Stories we’ve gotten a chance to peek into what people do when they’re home and with their families, at a level of depth and intimacy we haven’t usually had with Instagram,” said […]

Facebook updated Dynamic Ads on Tuesday, allowing advertisers to target potential customers based on their interests and intent rather than just the specific products they’ve browsed. “We observe demographics and patterns of activity that indicate a person is really interested in a product category or a specific product and then we extrapolate from that information […]

Platforms, which are highly scalable and rely on others’ content, were supposed to have it easier than publishers. But on Wednesday, Medium laid off a third of its staff, a total of 50 people. CEO Ev Williams explained that the sponsored content model offered only “incremental improvements on the ad-driven publishing model,” in a blog post […]

Publishers like Bloomberg and The Washington Post have raced to roll out non-intrusive ad formats priced on attention and engagement metrics. The IAB’s efforts to curb disruptive ad experiences also reinvigorated the dialogue. Verizon-owned AOL is the latest to join the conversation. On Thursday, it dished up several new ad formats designed around consumer engagement […]

Like other digital publishers, Condé Nast wasn’t immune to the challenges of scaling an upstart, owned-and-operated video property in a climate dominated by YouTube and Facebook. In 2015, Condé Nast’s video hub, The Scene, struggled to hit its stride, despite owning a portfolio of popular titles that includes Vogue and Vanity Fair. That’s changed, according to Joy […]

A year ago, the rise of ad blockers put the online advertising ecosystem into an existential crisis. But not only did the ‘adpocalypse’ never materialize, many of the same stakeholders who were on the defensive now see a chance to reclaim lost ground. “People were literally saying this is the death of the web, and […]

Quick-serve restaurants don’t involve much purchase consideration. You’re either hungry for a burger, or you’re not. “For us, it’s about reaching the right person at the time they’re thinking about making a decision,” said Brandon Rhoten, VP, head of advertising, media and digital marketing at Wendy’s. That’s why, to draw attention to its Double Stack […]

Augmented reality is more than just Pokémon – but it’s got a long way to go before it’s really mainstream. “Pokemon GO created more awareness of augmented reality,” said Rachel Pasqua, North America practice lead of connected life at MEC Global. “But people in our little corner of the business have been aware of AR for […]

A few years ago, when Twitch CRO Jonathan Simpson-Bint would walk into meetings with agencies and advertisers, they’d cock a dubious eyebrow. “That many people engage on Twitch? You’ve got to be kidding.’ That was the reaction,” said Simpson-Bint, who’s been with Twitch since 2011, three years before Amazon acquired the social gaming and live […]

Pandora is increasing its bet on ad tech. The streaming music platform will bring on Eric Picard as VP of ad product management to continue building out display and video products and lead its dive into programmatic audio. Picard is a longtime ad tech executive. In 1997, he launched Bluestreak, one of the first companies […]

Kochava has spent the past year building up the Collective, its audience data co-op for in-app advertising. Last week, it picked up its first DSP partner – The Trade Desk – to carry the data. Kochava’s Collective works by gathering data from three sources: aggregated third-party providers, ad networks that pool audience behavior insights and […]

For YouTube, the recent election cycle was the best of times and the worst of times. Multiple campaign sources think the Google-owned video network remained the single largest platform for political video dollars (aside from TV networks), despite Facebook’s meteoric rise. “YouTube is the second most trafficked site in the US, so it played a […]

Amazon’s ad business is gaining steam. In 2016, the company ramped up its DSP, Amazon Ad Platform, and began to market it more aggressively to holding companies and independent agencies. Then it made a big move this month with the launch of server-side bidding for publishers, a major evolution of its header bidding product that reduces […]

Advertisers get a little antsy when they see headlines like “More Facebook Measurement Problems!” – but the sky didn’t fall when Facebook began what’s turned into an ongoing measurement mea culpa. “I don’t have a single client that doubts the social and economic performance and importance of Facebook and all of their platforms,” said Rob Norman, […]

FuturePlay Games relies primarily on advertising to monetize. But it had a devil of a time attributing ad revenue to specific campaigns. “We knew that an ad had been watched on a device, but we didn’t know how much money we got back from it,” said Camilo Fitzgerald, a games analyst at the Helsinki-based game […]

Bitly was known as the de facto Twitter link shortener back in 2008. As that business commoditized – and Twitter, Google and other platforms released their own versions – Bitly recognized its real value was in the data exhaust left behind by its links. That spurred the enterprise platform Bitly OneView, a tool it launched […]

Want some free tacos? Just go to a Los Angeles Lakers game and hope they win and the opposing team scores less than 100 points. Over the past decade, the Jack in the Box-sponsored promotion for LA Lakers ticketholders has become a fan favorite. During close games, fans chant “We want tacos!” This season, the […]

Despite skyrocketing mobile traffic and climbing mobile conversion rates, British airline Monarch was struggling to determine precisely what was or wasn’t working for mobile media buys. “We persistently got all the data in and still faced the question: What about mobile?” said Robert Foulkes, senior marketing manager for the low-cost airline. Monarch was among the […]

Facebook’s app-install ads got a little face-lift Thursday with the launch of dynamic ads for mobile app installs. The ads, available through the Facebook Audience Network, let advertisers target users with dynamic app-install ads based on their recent product browsing history. Facebook first started testing the ads last summer along with an app event optimization […]

A year ago Pinterest was in the process of winding down its sales and marketing services for all but two partner categories: retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG). But after a year spent working on ad tech product releases – like a CRM match program and an expansion of interest-based targeting – it’s throttling up […]

Pandora will launch in-stream programmatic audio ads later next year, although no timeline has been specified. “We’re really excited about where programmatic goes in 2017,” Pandora Chief Revenue Officer John Trimble told AdExchanger on Tuesday at a company-hosted event in New York City.  “We’ve built a really strong business on the mobile side. We’re looking […]

Glu Mobile wants users who will stick around for the long term. “In the past, a game company could put out a game every month, just throw stuff out there and see what stuck,” said Glu CRO Chris Akhavan. “But now, consumers only have so many apps they actually use regularly, and we’re all fighting […]

After a brief hiatus from television, Birchbox is reinvesting in the medium for a multiplatform holiday campaign. Birchbox, which sends beauty products to its subscribers every month, is using a 30-second TV spot and digital assets to message not just beauty-obsessed women, but also more casual makeup users or men who want gift ideas. Amanda […]

Mobile apps need revenue but have limited screen space on ads. Enter Button, which lets consumers click on an icon to move easily from app to app. It collects fractional fees from its partners, like a toll road connecting different apps. “We continue to see these transactional models embraced in mobile compared to traditional advertising […]

WPP-owned GroupM said Tuesday it will centralize its tech and data expertise worldwide into a unit called [m]Platform. The division will be helmed by Xaxis CEO Brian Gleason with key executives drawn from Xaxis and across GroupM. “The collective mission of [m]Platform revolves around technology, data and expertise,” Gleason told AdExchanger. “The mission is how […]