Platforms

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 […]

Reddit spent most of 2015 in a state of turmoil – executive shuffles and users in revolt over policy changes amid concerted and ongoing efforts to cut down on trolling and unsavory content. Reddit’s reputation: not necessarily the most brand-safe environment. That instability led to the return of Steve Huffman as CEO of Reddit last […]

Adobe might have won TubeMogul’s hand in marriage, but there were several other strategic acquirers involved in the courtship. According to a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing dated Nov. 18, TubeMogul’s sales process really began last November. Up until the time Adobe agreed to acquire the DSP in mid-November, 16 entities – including […]

AppNexus has banned right-wing publisher Breitbart from selling on its exchange for violating its policy on hate speech – an order endorsed by CEO Brian O’Kelley, and depending on who you ask, also instigated by him. The ban was first reported by Bloomberg. According to an internal source, at some point last week O’Kelley demanded that his ad quality team […]

App publishers expect their inventory to fetch a pretty penny during the holiday season as marketers furiously funnel their remaining budget into hardcore user-acquisition efforts. “There’s an enormous amount of volatility during Q4, more than anything because of a desire to get up the charts,” said James Peng, head of mobile and social acquisition at […]

Oracle is buying domain services provider Dyn. While Oracle didn’t reveal the sale price in its release, former Forbes columnist Dan Primack pegged it at just north of $600 million. Dyn made waves in recent months after it was hit by a massive DDOS attack, which temporarily shut down major websites including Spotify and Twitter […]

When Atlas served ads, the industry shrugged. On Friday, Facebook made the inevitable official by retiring the ad-serving component of Atlas, thereby making it primarily a people-based measurement pixel. The ad-serving capability will be phased out over the next couple of months so as not to be disruptive to users. Facebook’s ad stack looks quite […]

Snapchat is credited with jumpstarting the vertical video trend earlier this year, but now the format is really starting to hit its stride. That’s out of necessity, said Ari Brandt, CEO and co-founder of mobile ad platform MediaBrix, which on Thursday rolled out a new version of its SDK that supports vertically shot in-app video […]

The Verizon/AOL vision is starting to take shape, and it looks a whole lot like Facebook Custom Audiences. But there’s a FCC-shaped question mark looming over the endeavor. The Federal Communications Commission passed sweeping online privacy regulations in October that will require internet service providers to obtain an affirmative opt-in consent before using a customer’s […]

  Facebook admitted additional measurement errors Wednesday, along with policy and organizational changes meant to narrow the trust gap between marketers and the mobile world’s leading ad platform. The news comes less than two months after Facebook disclosed that it had been overstating video engagement results, prompting backlash from agencies and concern from other digital media […]

Agencies across WPP’s network will gain access Spotify’s audience insights for better targeting across creative and media. The multiyear partnership between Spotify and WPP’s Data Alliance, announced Tuesday, will grant WPP access to anonymized and aggregated data from Spotify’s 100 million listeners across 60 countries. “The data we have from Spotify will resonate across WPP,” […]

As many have pointed out, Donald Trump won the presidency while spending a fraction of what Hillary Clinton did on ads and technology. But his campaign had a more concrete paid media strategy than some may have realized. The Trump campaign worked with Cambridge Analytica on polling, digital media and data. The company’s head of […]

Facebook will disable targeting based on ethnicity for credit, housing and employment advertisers. ProPublica first reported the development. The move, announced Friday in a blog post by Erin Egan, Facebook’s VP of US public policy and chief privacy officer, follows criticism from policymakers about the legality of “ethnic affinity marketing,” which Facebook introduced two years […]

Adobe will acquire the video demand-side platform TubeMogul for $540 million in debt and cash, the companies said Thursday. [Here’s the deal release.] The deal gives Adobe a sophisticated DSP capability for the first time. Though Adobe had display and search-buying capabilities via the Efficient Frontier acquisition (now Media Optimizer), Adobe has never been lauded […]

Pandora launched the Harmonic Audio Network on Thursday, in partnership with streaming platforms TuneIn and AccuRadio, to offer advertisers mass reach on premium inventory across digital audio platforms. The network will sell exclusive in-stream audio inventory from its own as well as partner platforms. Both TuneIn and AccuRadio will commit roughly 95% to 98% of […]

LinkedIn is going all-in on automation – promising to activate all display ads programmatically starting in 2017. In the meantime, it is expanding the number of native ad units that are available in a self-serve capacity. While advertisers could previously buy Sponsored Updates and text ads via LinkedIn’s self-serve campaign manager, they now can buy […]

The programmatic salesperson only came into existence about five years ago. What started out as an outsider position in the sales organization has become more mainstream as programmatic adoption increases. But the very people holding programmatic sales roles are already predicting its extinction, as the role gets absorbed into the entire sales process. “In three […]

It’s illegal to display political ads or messages, solicit supporters, hand out campaign paraphernalia or try to affect voters’ preferences in almost any way once they’re within a roughly 100-foot radius of a polling location. But sophisticated location-based mobile advertising has exposed a loophole in those laws, wherein campaigns target mobile ads to people while […]

Despite being one of the world’s largest commercial real estate firms, CBRE has a low profile in digital media. Until 2014, all of the 110-year-old company’s marketing was executed through traditional media. Then it hired Paul Suchman as chief marketing officer. An agency vet with a history at Young & Rubicam, OgilvyOne and BBDO, Suchman […]

Buyers can now purchase Meredith’s shopper marketing display units programmatically through a private marketplace set up through The Trade Desk. The units used to be available only through direct buy. “There is a lot of talk of the IO business migrating into programmatic, but a lot of that IO business is custom opportunities like this,” […]

As expected, Facebook enjoyed dramatic revenue growth in the third quarter on the strength of its massive mobile user base. Ad revenue grew 57% year over year to $6.8 billion. Mobile ad revenue accounted for 84% of that figure, or $5.7 billion, up from 78% one year ago. Read the earnings release. The company’s desktop […]

Rubicon will lay off 19% of its workforce, totaling 125 jobs, completing the reorganization it began in Q2. The company is also lowering its guidance for Q4. It will be the third ad tech company with an SSP to make large cuts this year. PubMatic laid off 100 last December, and AppNexus laid off 150 […]

AOL, which has signed more than 100 publishers to its header-bidding solution over the past year, is adding a wrapper so publishers can easily integrate multiple header-bidding partners. The company, which works with tens of thousands of publishers, will do the integration work for its wrapper clients. (AOL claims it won’t give an advantage to […]

Although Neustar’s marketing services division saw 54% Q3 revenue growth YoY to $63.3 million, CEO Lisa Hook noted Thursday that new client wins in its marketing analytics business, MarketShare, had fallen short. As a result, the company lowered MarketShare’s full-year revenue guidance for 2016 from $70 million to $55 million-$60 million. “Our overall results for […]

The top trending post about ad tech on the Ad Ops subreddit page asks the pertinent question: “Is it safe to assume 95%-plus of ad tech companies are full of shit?” The responses aren’t pretty. “This is the sentiment that our industry has – this post got a 93% upvote,” Jayne Pimentel, Reddit’s revenue and ad […]

With swirling acquisition rumors sidelined for the moment, Twitter announced during its Q3 earnings call Thursday that it’s cutting 9% of its workforce, ending the quarter with 3,910 employees. The restructure, which is being made with an eye on eventual profitability, will mostly affect its sales, partnerships and marketing teams. Product and development and R&D […]

Snaplytics, a third-party Snapchat measurement vendor, came out of beta Wednesday after spending more than a year developing the hardware and software needed to pull marketing insights from Snapchat accounts. “It’s not similar to fairly straightforward API analytics like with Twitter and Facebook,” Snaplytics co-founder and CEO Thomas Cilius told AdExchanger. “You need some custom […]

In lieu of a quarterly earnings call, Pandora invited investors to Terra Gallery in San Francisco on Tuesday for an in-depth discussion of its new product suite, developed to breathe life back into its struggling platform. Pandora, which has long monetized on in-stream audio and display ads, now faces a multiplying set of competitors that has […]