Platforms

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 […]

The on-demand economy gets flack for being a bubble – after massages, meal, tasks and taxis, what’s left to be Uberized? – but on-demand laundry startup Cleanly isn’t concerned. “Our feeling is that if you create a good product, then your marketing will fit in with the value you’re trying to provide,” said Tom Harari, CEO and […]

With Omar Tawakol departing as head of Oracle Data Cloud, Eric Roza, who served as the unit’s co-SVP after Oracle acquired his company Datalogix, will become GM. Roza had previously focused on Data Cloud’s go-to-market strategy and will now oversee product, engineering, operations and data science. But he’s also shepherding Data Cloud through a philosophical […]

There’s no splashy programmatic AOL upfront at this year’s Advertising Week. Instead, the company is addressing more serious matters – like the state of integration with Yahoo amid a data breach. AOL’s senior execs are also talking up consumer-driven content and innovative ad formats. “We had this giant emphasis on algorithmically driven media over the […]

Sourcepoint, a company founded last year to provide publishers with an antidote to ad blocking, has made its first major product release since raising a $10 million Series A round in June. The product, Dialogue, allows publishers to deliver a message to users with ad blockers installed and then test the efficacy of those messages. […]

The numbers are still being tallied, but Monday night’s presidential debate is likely Twitter’s largest live stream ever, according to Adam Bain, the company’s chief operating officer. Not that Bain wants to be braggadocious. It’s still early days for measurement, but Twitter is seeing audience growth. Twitter’s deal with the NFL to stream Thursday night […]

When Celestial Seasonings first redesigned its iconic packaging last summer to attract more millennial tea drinkers, it didn’t go over well. Although the Boulder, Colo.-based tea brand had invested in promotional and brand marketing to reinforce its new brand look, loyal customers weren’t having it. After engaging in consumer studies – and gathering consumer feedback […]

Laura Ipsen walked into the office of Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd on a Monday this summer, and the next day she had a new job as the general manager and senior vice president of Oracle Marketing Cloud (OMC). It’s her latest role in a 25-year career spent at some of the world’s large tech titans. […]

Microsoft underwent big shifts in its platforms and ads business in the last year, first when it shook up its sales structure by outsourcing its direct order business to AOL and again, when it dropped $26.2 billion on LinkedIn. And now, Microsoft is eyeing artificial intelligence. It recently bought messaging app developer Wand Labs to beta test intelligent chat […]

News Republic users read about 200 pages of news stories per month. “That’s like reading a big book of news every 30 days,” said CEO Gilles Raymond, who founded the news aggregator app in 2008, the same year the App Store launched. It’s that level of time spent that attracted Cheetah Mobile. In August, the […]

Banks, brokerages, insurance companies, mortgage providers and the like want to direct their advertising spend toward users they know will convert, which requires granular audience targeting. “The KPIs are just much more performance-oriented,” said Jordan Bick, VP of financial services at Pandora, which recently began working with financial services advertisers. “They want to know how […]

Salesforce wants to “democratize” the development of artificial intelligence (AI) applications. That is, making AI available to as many business users as possible. Consequently, it’s baked an AI system called Einstein into the Salesforce platform – such that its capabilities are available across its various clouds, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud. “AI […]

Six weeks ago, Laura Ipsen – a former Microsoft and Cisco exec – succeeded Kevin Akeroyd as SVP and GM of Oracle Marketing Cloud (OMC). Akeroyd, one of the original architects of the OMC business, had moved on to the CEO role at Cision. Ipsen – formerly an SVP of Oracle’s global industry solutions group […]