Publishers

Advertisers often talk about supporting Black- and minority-owned media companies. It’s Mark Prince’s job to help them turn those pledges into action. As SVP and head of economic empowerment at Dentsu Media, he pushes brands to consistently diversify their media mix – and move away from one-off investments.

The most commonly cited rationale for publisher staffing cuts has been marketers’ hesitance to spend on advertising amid persistent economic uncertainty. But publishers’ latest pivot to video and increased competition among digital channels is also likely to blame.

Google Ad Manager (GAM) was out of commission for about three hours Thursday evening across web, app and video inventory. Any ad placement served through GAM, even ads monetized by a non-Google SSP, went dark, leading to lost revenue for publishers of all sizes at a time when they can least afford to lose out on revenue.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Can You Talk The Tok? With TikTok, it’s like the clone wars. (We’re looking at you, Reels and Shorts.) But TikTok has a special power, which is its seemingly limitless feed of quick, infinitely swipeable, likable, shareable videos. Reproducing TikTok’s success is no […]

DOOH has been thought of as pure branding, according to Elliott Hasiuk, principal for digital media at Part and Sum. That makes sense, considering out-of-home media might just be a big picture of, say, a Big Mac and the McDonald’s arches plastered 40 feet in the air. “Now we’re able to tie that branding to bottom-of-the-funnel metrics that matter more to the business.”

The IAB Tech Lab has updated its OpenRTB standard to include objects specifically designed for DOOH. It also published new DOOH-specific guidelines and technical resources for real time bidding in collaboration with the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA) and Outsmart, the Out of Home Advertising Association for the UK.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. BuzzCuts BuzzFeed is laying off 12% of its workforce, Variety reports, based on an SEC filing. The reduction will apparently help BuzzFeed “weather an economic downturn that I believe will extend well into 2023,” writes CEO Jonah Peretti in a memo.  BuzzFeed’s revenue […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. That’s A Wrapped This week once again saw social timelines taken over by Spotify Wrapped, the audio service’s year-end user roundup of the most-played music and podcasts. In addition to highlighting Spotify’s first-party data, Wrapped has become the company’s most effective marketing tool, […]

Brand safety has a hypocrisy problem. Violence that gets a pass when it’s a fictional TV show becomes flagged if it’s part of an online news story. But to what end? Plus: what Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales results portend for retailers’ prospects in Q4 and beyond.

Thanks to signal loss, recession fears and the “ad tech tax,” publishers of all sizes are seeing their ad revenue suffer. But the problem is more pronounced among local news publishers, many of which were barely getting by before platform privacy changes roiled the digital advertising industry. The Local Media Consortium (LMC) shares how it’s helping its members mitigate these headwinds.

SSPs had traditionally been among the first in the ad tech ecosystem to build profitable businesses. But their future in the programmatic tech stack is uncertain because they’ve evolved from publisher-centric technologies to demand aggregation businesses, often competing with their biggest customers: buy-side platforms or DSPs.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Yahoo? Yahoo has taken a 25% stake in Taboola as part of a 30-year exclusive ad deal (uhh … pardon?) that makes Taboola the primary native inventory seller for Yahoo’s media properties, The New York Times reports. The announcement leaves questions hanging. A […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Hasbros And The Have-Nots Companies like Netflix, Roku, Apple, Amazon and Paramount are thirsting for recognizable brands they can build a content universe around.  Media franchises provide a solution. Because, apparently, people will settle for only franchises and nothing new, ever again.  […]

After a five-year run as GM of Comcast-owned video ad tech platform FreeWheel, Dave Clark made the jump to programmatic ad platform TripleLift, which hired him as CEO in October. Clark spoke to AdExchanger about TripleLift’s IPO plans, how close its ambitious CTV ad formats are to market and more.

Between Amazon blocking beer ads during NFL Thursday Night Football and Meta’s newly introduced restrictions on pharmaceutical advertising, marketers are running into all sorts of unexpected (and perhaps anti-competitive) obstacles. Dan Meehan, Founder and CEO at PadSquad, offers suggestions for marketing around these restrictions.

Pixability started out contextualizing advertisers’ digital video buys on YouTube to make sure they ran in brand-safe environments. But now that consumers are watching more YouTube on TV screens than on web browsers (and CTV buyers are demanding media transparency with proverbial pitchforks), Pixability is expanding its brand suitability metrics to apply more broadly to CTV environments.

As BuzzFeed struggles with advertiser uncertainty and a drop in user engagement, it reported flat Q3 ad revenue. Advertising revenue was $50 million, matching last year’s Q3. Ad revenue growth decelerated compared to Q2, “driven by ongoing price compression and uncertainty around consumer demand,” said BuzzFeed CFO Felicia DellaFortuna.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. What’s For Sale? Amazon has started down the path of “Googlification.” Which is to say, its search engine has flipped from primarily serving up the best organic options to servicing advertisers with the best prospecting and conquesting opportunities.  There were turf wars in […]

Turns out 2022 was a bad year to merge two large media companies into one massive media company. Both Dotdash and Meredith experienced headwinds throughout the year. Traffic was soft compared with the rise in consumption during the pandemic, and the digital advertising market was unexpectedly weak. And next year isn’t looking rosy.

SmartNews uses the first-party data it gathers from its users to create more intelligent content recommendations and serve more relevant ads. It’s also investing in its own ad stack so it can activate its first-party data by creating contextual audience segments that it can sell programmatically on the open web and as part of its new direct sales offering.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Retail Wags The Dog CTV is a shiny object, but retail media is even shinier. Unlike CTV, which is a maturing channel, retail media is still floating down a river of optimism and the hype is swirling. Retail media prices, for example, are […]

Axios eclipsed its overall 2021 revenue as of Q3 this year thanks to its expansion of local-news-focused newsletters. It also added display banners to its onsite inventory in September and launched its Axios Pro paid subscription in February. The long-term goal is for Axios to have about 50% of its revenue come from ads and the other half from subscriptions.

The third quarter wasn’t a good one for Roku, which shared belt-tightening plans in expectation of worse results to come during the all-important upcoming holiday season. That’s what happens when advertisers get nervous and hit the brakes.

The state of advertising at Twitter is a hot mess. And advertisers are starting to react. Plus: a primer on the Google Analytics deadline delay and changes to Google’s clean room, Ads Data Hub.

The New York Times’s subscription-focused strategy seems to be paying off amid a downturn in ad revenue. The Times reported 8% YoY revenue growth for Q3 2022, “with subscription revenue growth more than making up for a slight decline in overall advertising,” said President and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Ad Tech? What Ad Tech? One refrain from Google when it defends its third-party ad tech business is that ad tech is a minuscule contributor to Google’s revenue. Which begs the question: Why not get rid of it? But Google won’t quit ad […]

Bloomberg Media just turned off third-party ads on its site. But as it shuts the door to open-market programmatic, Bloomberg is opening a first-party data advertising platform. The business media giant described the change as part of a broader evolution in how online advertising works. “The reason we chose to make this investment is because […]

Publishers covet business from big brands, but working with small to mid-size businesses (SMBs) can be a major source of revenue growth. That’s why Reddit is shoring up its ad offering for SMB and mid-market clients by improving its onboarding process and launching an advertising API.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. All Of A Twitter Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition must be near, because Musk is sounding like the real-world owner of Twitter and not a troll trying to harm the business.  “There has been much speculation about why I bought Twitter and what I […]

Publishers that don’t buy traffic don’t usually have a problem, but even what you might call “good” or scrupulous publishers do have some invalid traffic, says Steve Guenther, VP of digital auditing services at the Alliance for Audited Media.