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 […]
Just weeks after acquiring HookLogic for $250 million in an all-cash deal, Criteo is pushing into paid search. Criteo played primarily in performance display until now, but its Predictive Search product marks its first major move into a different part of the marketing funnel. It’s a $33.2 billion market that’s dominated by Google, whose Shopping […]
The football site Scout attracts avid fans who congregate en masse during the season but spend the offseason elsewhere. That seasonality adds complexity to Scout’s advertising sales business. Scout employs a small sales force on the direct side, focusing on custom integrations and some display. Most advertisers buy direct in-season. It sells the rest of […]
LaMusica knows its largely millennial audience likes to snack. “It’s very hard to get their attention,” said Jesus Lara, EVP of digital media at Spanish Broadcasting System, one of the largest Spanish-language radio broadcasters in the United States and owner of LaMusica, a free streaming music app aimed at Hispanic millennials. “Our strategy is to […]
Dunkin’ Donuts’ marketing might be known for big awareness campaigns like “America Runs On Dunkin” and “Keep On,” but the brand also breaks down media into smaller, product-specific activations. For instance, when Dunkin’ began serving cold-brew coffee this past summer, it let consumers unlock custom geofilters through a special code on Snapchat. “Coffee is such […]
When online infrastructure company Dyn got hit by three DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks Friday, it shut down major sites using Dyn, including Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify and The New York Times. The attack also disrupted the ad industry. Even if a publisher wasn’t affected, the attack impacted many of the tech partners delivering and […]
To even the most casual observer, AT&T’s $85.4 billion bid for Time Warner appears to accelerate the multiyear land grab between telcos like Verizon and the media and ad tech hybrids like AOL. Although the deals have obvious similarities – both AT&T and Verizon are mobile carriers seeking to grow subscribers and diversify their infrastructure […]
The cable model may be going online, if last week’s reports around a possible Snapchat licensing model are true. (Snapchat declined to comment.) Publishers would receive a licensing fee for their content on Snapchat Discover, instead of selling ads themselves and taking a share of revenue. By moving to this model, Snapchat would consolidate all its […]
This year, Facebook appeared to abandon its plan to develop an ad tech stack to rival Google’s DoubleClick. It shut down its SSP (LiveRail), closed the Facebook Exchange and threw away its DSP before it got off the ground. All that remains is Atlas, a former ad server repurposed as a measurement tool, and the […]
Adidas-owned Reebok is in a unique position, both as a challenger to Nike and as a target of other challenger sports and apparel brands like Under Armour. As such, it invests heavily and consistently in content – despite its fluctuating ad spend over the years. Because content must generate larger, measurable performance results, Reebok bets the […]
LeEco, the Chinese electronics company that shelled out $2 billion for smart TV manufacturer Vizio in July, held a splashy event Wednesday in San Francisco to mark its entry into the US, where it could one day give Apple a run for its money. Beyond making a selection of its smart devices available in the […]
Metamarkets has raised $14.25 million in growth capital from Wellington Financial and City National Bank. The company’s analytics software is designed to help clients like Twitter, Nanigans, AOL, OpenX and Drawbridge gain insight into their programmatic marketplaces. Metamarkets got the funding in part because investors are looking more favorably at ad tech, said company co-founder […]
“AdExchanger Politics” is a weekly column tracking developments in the 2016 political campaign cycle. Today’s column is written by Michael Balabanov, account director at AOL. If we treated political advertising the same way we treated consumer advertising, we’d pull wide swaths of demographic data – female, 18-34 years old, educated – and spray them with […]
Facebook is changing the way it values ad placements across its Audience Network as part of an ongoing transition from proxy ad metrics to actual business conversions. “The dominant proxy for the industry, and it’s been true as well for us, is the click,” Facebook ad tech head David Jakubowski told AdExchanger. “[Except] no marketer […]
MaxPoint helps marketers in the CPG, retail, finance, insurance and auto sectors deliver messages to customers near local stores that need a marketing boost. Now those marketers are itching to use all the first-party data they’ve collected. To activate advertisers’ CRM data, MaxPoint developed Customer Catalyst, a product that matches brands’ CRM with data showing […]
AT&T, which completed a $49 billion merger with DirecTV last July, is relatively behind competitive carrier Verizon in acquiring (or building) an ad stack and monetizing its mobile data set. AT&T has been largely silent on the mobile data front following its shift away from building a mobile ad network in 2013 in order to prioritize […]
InStyle fans tuning into Facebook Live earlier this year watched a La Mer expert conduct a skin consultation with an InStyle editor. The editorial video with brand integration became one of the first examples of Time Inc.’s Social Now ad product. “We are providing very authentic and transparent ways for advertisers to play [with Facebook […]
Virtual reality may have a way to go before it hits mass scale, but it’s just had a big week. Last Tuesday, Google unveiled Daydream View, its lightweight, low-cost answer to Oculus Rift, and announced its Daydream View-compatible Pixel smartphone. And on Thursday, Facebook followed with its own series of announcements at the Oculus Connect […]
App distribution platform ironSource launched a solution Tuesday to give mobile carriers, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and developers an alternative to pre-installed apps – sometimes called “bloatware” by consumers. Dubbed Aura, the platform aims to revamp the onboarding process for users when they buy a new Android or Windows phone by presenting recommended content to […]
Local advertising is undergoing dramatic change. Because this presidential election has relied on earned media instead of TV, revenue for local broadcasters who aren’t in swing states has gone down. And it’s not an anomaly. This pattern has “forever changed political advertising,” said Gordon Borrell, CEO of Borrell Associates. Facebook is making a play for […]
Cross-device identity match rates have shot up in recent years, but brands and agencies remain skeptical of the results. “We were consistently disappointed with cross-device identity matches,” said David Kohl, CEO of the digital media advisory firm Morgan Digital Ventures. “There’s a gap in understanding of what’s possible between vendors and the buy side, [which […]
On Thursday – amid strengthening rumors of an IPO – Snapchat finally released its anticipated ads API to enable better automation, targeting and measurement. It is running with nine partners. Advertisers can buy Snap Ads – full-screen, sound-on, vertical video ad units – programmatically on the platform. “Advertisers [can now] glean insights and better optimize […]
Forget ecom platform Demandware and data management platform Krux. Investors only want to know why in the world Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has any interest in Twitter. The pounding Salesforce’s stock has taken since Benioff expressed interest certainly reflects their skepticism. So while the little blue bird hasn’t been an explicit presence in this year’s annual […]
TelevisaUnivision and Disney took over Day Two of upfronts week in New York City on Tuesday, and the throughline was data quality.
Warner Bros. Discovery used its upfront stage to announce two new ad measurement efforts, including that it’s joining a CAPI-focused initiative led by OpenAP.
AdExchanger Senior Editor Alyssa Boyle and Associate Editor Victoria McNally traversed the island of Manhattan on Monday to scope out upfront presentations by NBCUniversal, Fox and Amazon.
Viant’s modest growth story took a backseat to a far louder claim: that fed-up advertisers are finally ready to ditch the rigged economics of Big Tech’s walled gardens.
Amazon Ads expects this year’s television upfronts to be an outcomes-focused affair. That may explain why the company preempted its Monday evening presentation by announcing the launch of a new ad product called Dynamic TV Creative.
For companies like Shopify, Criteo and Instacart – and even for giants like Amazon and Walmart – figuring out if the agentic oasis is real or a mirage is their priority No. 1.
