Publishers

What happens when your main monetization partner starts flagging your content as spam? Freecycle turned to header bidding to reduce its reliance on Google AdSense, but the company’s one-person engineering team had trouble managing the header-bidding system and the constant stream of Prebid updates on top of web development duties. So, after a 70% drop in ad revenue, Freecycle handed its digital ad business over to PubWise’s managed service.

Keyword blocklists are blunt instruments, and yet they persist in programmatic media buying. It’s time to kick blocklists to the curb and start curating keywords by campaign, says contextual pioneer John Snyder, who sold his company, Grapeshot, to Oracle in 2018.

Why wouldn’t DSPs want to secure the best possible access to OTT inventory through programmatic while accessing the impression commitments and set pricing provided by direct deals? If DSPs want to compete with more traditional advertising platforms, they will need to do just that, writes Doug Huntington, CEO of FatTail.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Paid Upfront NBCUniversal says this year’s upfronts was its highest-grossing since Comcast acquired the programmer in 2013.  Unsurprisingly, streaming media helped break the record. Of NBCU’s $7 billion in ad commitments, per a release, $1 billion is earmarked for its AVOD service Peacock […]

Google’s decision to delay third-party cookie deprecation until 2023 came the day before Salon CRO Justin Wohl’s wedding. Salon had converted its ad business to an open-web programmatic model a few years earlier, so the brief reprieve from signal loss came as a huge relief and another reason to pop some champagne. Since then, Wohl has been laying the groundwork for effective post-cookie monetization on the open web.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Personalization Delusion The ability to dynamically scale creative and A/B test dozens – even hundreds – of ad campaign permutations, all potentially targeting specific audience types, has led marketers away from making a single piece of creative that stands alone and appeals to as […]

Ad agencies are understaffed and their clients – small businesses in particular – often don’t have the time or the technical background to sift through reams of campaign data. And so, increasingly, they’re turning to automation to cut down on the more tedious and time-consuming aspects of account management. Tag, an independent agency based in Iowa, uses a suite of automated reporting tools, including from Basis Technologies, to communicate cross-platform campaign metrics to its clients.

Foundry, formerly known as IDG Communications, wants to shed its old identity and build a new reputation not as a digital publisher but as a provider of data and marketing tech, according to Foundry President Kumaran Ramanathan. Ramanathan spoke to AdExchanger about why Foundry walked away from open-web programmatic, how it’s fusing its first-party data with a marketing and data tech stack and its M&A ambitions.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Get Connected The coveted prizes in programmatic right now are exclusive CTV contracts.  In Cannes, the crème de la crème for handshakers and lunch-takers is Netflix. Google is meeting with Netflix there, Ad Age reports, and is an obvious choice as Netflix purportedly […]

Instead of a funnel that slows traffic, we need to create a ubiquitous, always-accessible “sales superhighway” that provides countless on-ramps. This change of perspective will impact both how we define our potential audiences and the speed with which we have meaningful interactions with them, writes Lance Porigow, EVP of growth at The Shipyard.

The IAB, in collaboration with the IAB Tech Lab and the Media Rating Council (MRC), released its first update to in-game ad measurement standards since 2009. The new standards reexamine the metrics for counting a valid in-game ad impression and add criteria for measuring ad placements in 3D and virtual environments. They also define in-game measurement terms in alignment with cross-channel measurement efforts.

The market is not being kind to digital media companies. The nearly 40% drop in BuzzFeed’s stock price on Monday and the decline of its valuation from $1.5 billion when it went public in December to roughly $300 million now is no doubt causing other digital-native publishers to rethink their IPO plans. But any doom and gloom about the long-term viability of digital publishers in public markets is likely overblown.

Connected TV may be the media industry’s shiniest new toy, but it’s not squeaky clean – it’s rife with ad fraud, and high CPMs only make the channel a better target for con artists. Several industry execs discussed why the industry’s best shot is to increase transparency as much as possible across the bid stream at IAB Tech Lab’s Transcend summit.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Baby Steps Babylist began as a registry to combine a gift registry and services (like helping new parents by arranging dog walks) with an affiliate revenue model. Although the approach worked well, 85% of Babylist’s sales went to a single retail partner, CEO […]

As clients look for alternatives to third-party cookies, ad agency Dentsu can steer them to its in-house Contextual Intelligence tool, which launched today. Although contextual targeting is often considered inferior to demographic or behavioral targeting, it can drive performance. Jewelry retailer Pandora piloted the tool during the 2022 Valentine’s Day season. Ads placed using the solution represented 2% of campaign spend, but drove 36% of revenue, a 24x return on investment.

Cookie deprecation is hanging over the media and advertising industry like a storm cloud. New identity solutions built on first-party data are clearly one solution, but publishers and advertisers differ on whether they’re building their own proprietary solution or a shared shelter that will scale – and explained why at AdMonsters’ Ops conference in New York City.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Brick By Brick-And-Mortar The march of the retail media networks cannot be stopped.  Dollar General on Tuesday announced a rebrand of its advertising business, now DGMN (for Dollar General Media Network), to extend its data to ad-buying across the web. According to the […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Whoop Deduped Open Bidding, Google’s alternative to header bidding that maintains its high take rate, has been in the hot seat since last year, after a state-led antitrust suit revealed the lengths to which Google went to stymie header-bidding adoption.  The Trade Desk cranked […]

You’ve probably heard (dozens of times) by now that first-party data will be the key to post-third-party-cookie ad targeting. But what exactly is first-party data? How does it differ from second-party, third-party and zero-party data? And what makes first-party data more suited to a privacy-centric ad experience?

In order to gain access to performance advertising budgets (and prove out the power of publisher first-party data), Vox Media is relaunching Group Nine’s G9 Direct performance marketing solution under the new name VM Connect. The relaunch is also a milestone in Vox Media’s integration of Group Nine’s digital properties and tech stack following its […]

The programmatic market continues to boom as marketers shift more of their budgets to digital channels. But despite the incredible scale of this ecosystem, the market is still maturing – and true price discovery and price setting at a level of granularity that reflects true marketplace dynamics can help fill some of those gaps, writes Andrew Casale, president and CEO of Index Exchange.

At Programmatic I/O in Las Vegas, CafeMedia’s Paul Bannister, Tinuiti’s Nirish Parsad and Insider’s Jana Meron weighed in on the ad industry’s worsening signal-loss problem due to the deprecation of device identifiers and third-party cookies.

You get what you pay for. This adage is considered way too infrequently in the world of digital advertising, especially programmatic. There is so much pressure placed on gaining efficiency, both in execution and cost, that marketers have begun to prioritize “added value” impressions over meaningful business results, writes Elise Stieferman, director of marketing and business strategy at Coegi.

Under COPPA, businesses can’t target ads based on the data of children under 13 years old. Toy manufacturers like WowWee need other ways to get their products in market via advertising, and after testing a YouTube campaign with contextual ad platform Precise TV, the promising results allude to the potential of contextual in targeting ads effectively without audience data, profiles or cookies.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Four-Minute Mile Details of the new Disney+ ad-supported tier are leaking as Disney lays the groundwork for its upfronts sales pitch.  For one thing, Disney+ will carry about four minutes of commercials per hour, with zero ads for preschooler-aged accounts, The Wall […]

Jay Glogovsky, vice president of revenue operations and analytics for The New York Times, talked to AdExchanger about how The Times relies on direct partnerships to create a positive ad experience for its readers, why open-web programmatic is the wrong choice for a privacy-centric in-app experience and why publishers should double down on close partnerships rather than worry about who will control the keys to monetization.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Titans Are Tired So many entertainment hubs – Netflix, Amazon Prime and Freevee, Paramount+ and sister app Pluto TV, Apple TV+, HBO Max, Discovery+ and the Disney triumvirate of Hulu, ESPN+ and Disney+ – so little time. Which means there just isn’t […]

Less is more for Dotdash Meredith, IAC’s fastest-growing business unit. When Meredith’s Health.com site migrated to Dotdash’s digital platform last week, the impact was immediate. Although the site now hosts 30% fewer ads, its pages load five times faster, and the click-through rate on ads is up by 60%.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Long Live Linear On Friday, Innovid reported its second quarterly earnings since the company went public in December and its first since closing its acquisition of TV measurement provider TVSquared earlier this year. Innovid’s revenue grew 44% YoY to $25.9 million. Excluding TVSquared, Innovid […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Path Less Traveled More publishers have signed up for OpenPath, The Trade Desk’s direct buy-to-sell-side integration. Since launching in February, TTD says it’s “registered interest” (interesting turn of phrase) in OpenPath from more than 100 publishers.  The latest crop to, uh, register […]