Publishers

Viacom on Monday formed a multi-year agreement with Comcast’s advanced ads business, FreeWheel, to expand its use of the tech platform. Previously, Viacom used FreeWheel to power digital ad decisioning, but now, it will also use FreeWheel’s operating system to manage yield and grow revenue across live TV, set-top box and video-on-demand inventory. In addition, […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Rachel Parkin, senior vice president of strategy and sales at CafeMedia. Imagine if every impression could find its perfectly matched buyer. Demand-side platforms (DSPs) are the ultimate gatekeepers for screening inventory, but publishers only […]

NBCUniversal has joined the TV consortium OpenAP. Launched just over a year ago, OpenAP is a joint effort by broadcast networks Fox, Turner and Viacom to create a common data standard and provide a more accurate representation of advanced TV audiences across platforms. Through a multiyear agreement, NBCU will license its data platform Audience Studio […]

In August, E.W. Scripps reorganized its business into two parts: one division focusing on local media – its bread and butter – and the other on national media channels. The move unified Scripps’ digital video service, Newsy, with podcast network Midroll, digital audio service Stitcher and satire and humor brand Cracked, under the national media […]

Brand safety has become such a hot-button issue for advertisers that competing holding companies and agencies are ditching their territorial natures to fight it together. The 4As said Tuesday it has formed an industry consortium called the Advertiser Protection Bureau (APB), a cross-holding company and agency effort to better share knowledge around brand safety incidents […]

A handful of major news companies are trying to figure out how live news broadcasts fit in digital media. The challenges are steep. Streaming live news requires large, ongoing investments, and it’s difficult to monetize audiences, as live news can be a hotbed of brand safety concerns. Plus, Facebook’s recent algorithm shift lowered the ratio […]

NBCUniversal is about to do something TV companies have talked about for years: transact TV in a similar way as digital – on impressions. NBCU revealed Thursday that it would begin to measure live, on-demand and time-shifted TV ad buys using a common impression-based metric called CFlight. CFlight will be part of NBCU’s upfront pitch and […]

Cable conglomerates Comcast, Charter and Cox Communications said Wednesday they will build ad products that extend across their collective footprint. The three are forming a division within NCC Media – a national cable sales group in which they are joint stakeholders – to build data-driven ad products. Comcast’s advanced ads division, Comcast Media 360, is […]

AppLovin is one of the most well-funded indie ad platforms out there – and it’s growing like a weed. The mobile ad network last year received $841 million in debt financing from Chinese private equity firm Orient Hontai Capital. In 2014, AppLovin raised just $4 million in seed funding. Originally, Orient Hontai had intended to acquire a majority […]

During the 2016 US presidential election, news publishers experienced an uptick in engagement. The Trump era has kept that engine going. Politico is no exception, where traffic is up more than 30% year over year. That’s one of the reasons why Politico overhauled its website on Tuesday, showing more stories above the fold and optimizing […]

NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke said Facebook faces big repercussions because it breached users’ trust. “The problem is exacerbated by the fact that Facebook’s business model is based on data people don’t [always know] they’re sharing and then selling that data … to a buyer Facebook [doesn’t even] know,” Burke said Tuesday in response to Facebook’s […]

Business Insider’s parent company, Insider Inc., launched its first-ever ad campaign on Wednesday to make sure its ad partners know what the heck it is. The campaign, created with help from Publicis-owned agency Digitas, includes a new corporate website and a media push targeting agencies with display and video ads across trade pubs, Facebook and […]

Most people know Publishers Clearing House (PCH) for marketing magazine subscriptions and million-dollar sweepstakes prizes, but it’s also a bonafide publisher. The company has scaled to about 1.6 billion impressions per month, and out of its $1 billion in revenue each year, about 50% of its profits comes from media, said Steve Bagdasarian, GM of […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is by Paul Bannister, co-founder and executive vice president at CafeMedia. A few years ago, publishers had a pretty simple monetization stack: an ad server, typically DoubleClick for Publishers, Google’s AdX enabled as their primary remnant fill platform and maybe a tag-based […]

Video supply-side platform Beachfront Media is expanding its partnership with White Ops, the digital verification vendor that specializes in bot detection, to include over-the-top (OTT) inventory. All inventory passing through Beachfront’s marketplace is now vetted and verified by White Ops, according to Frank Sinton, Beachfront’s founder and chief product officer. But is OTT fraud a […]

Pay-TV providers are increasingly investing in paid media to promote new and original programming on their streaming video services. To offset the pricy programming costs, these SVODs must attract a steady stream of new subscribers. Entertainment advertisers have always relied on tune-in tactics to promote new shows. But streaming video services now are also leveraging […]

Condé Nast has appointed the company’s first chief data officer as it doubles down on data and tech across its business groups. Karthic Bala, most recently Condé’s head of data strategy, is also responsible for creating new data-driven revenue streams and expanding ad-supported products. Its acquisition of data solutions company Lighthouse Datalab in late January […]

Here’s the central mystery of our time: What will Amazon let brands do on Alexa? That’s something dressing and ingredients manufacturer Hidden Valley is testing right now, via an integrated marketing product from Allrecipes designed to link its native inventory to grocery orders on AmazonFresh. Clorox-owned Hidden Valley and other grocery brands work with Allrecipes […]

SourceMedia, the Observer Capital–owned publisher of financial trades like American Banker and The Bond Buyer, along with other B2B sites, is taking a page from the B2C playbook. While B2B pubs have been slower to embrace programmatic, SourceMedia plans to buck that trend by being a better steward of its first-party data. A new integration […]

Brevity is the soul of content – and advertising – at Axios. The tech, news and politics site, founded by former Politico execs a little over a year ago, was built on the premise that people are bombarded by info and find it nearly impossible to keep up. “Less than 5% of people who click on a […]

Penske Media, the publisher of WWD, Variety and new majority owner in Wenner Media, acquired multiplatform women’s lifestyle publisher and events company SheKnows Media, the company revealed Tuesday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. SheKnows, which claims to reach 79 million uniques per month across its flagship property, StyleCaster, HelloFlo and BlogHer sites, also […]

When the outdoor recreation retailer REI closed its shops for Black Friday, the biggest sales day of the year for many stores, it was testing brand appeal against strong short-term revenue, as well as its out-of-home (OOH) media and data services. REI has grown its OOH media from nothing two to three years ago to […]

Publishers are rethinking their Facebook strategies in the wake of LittleThings’ sudden shutdown on Tuesday. While LittleThings is the first pub to fall victim to Facebook’s news feed algorithm change, it is likely not the last. Many pubs play Whac-A-Mole with the news feed, optimizing article and video content to fit the whims of a fickle Facebook […]

Although national broadcast networks have led the charge on audience data and automation – at least in the linear TV environment – local station groups aren’t far behind. NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations is laying the foundation for greater addressability at the local and regional level. The division houses 39 NBC and Telemundo local TV stations […]

Product-related content is an editorial anchor at GQ, Condé Nast’s men’s lifestyle pub. People who read about brands on GQ’s site spend twice as much time with its content overall – around 14 minutes – and are nearly 10% more likely to return, according to research commissioned from Skimlinks and Parse.ly. That level of engagement validates Condé’s […]

NBCUniversal is deepening its bench of data-driven executives, revealing on Wednesday that it had hired its first SVP of advertising technology, Ed Kozek. Kozek was previously SVP of ad product and engineering for The Weather Co., where he worked on the audience and data platform WeatherFX. Now he will manage NBCU’s proprietary ad products. NBCU […]

Like most publishers, The Associated Press (AP) is evaluating ways it can increase video and article output without straining its staff or resources. A few years ago, the AP began researching ways it could leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve its internal processes. The publisher then formed a cross-functional AI committee to vet […]

Disney’s bet on BAMTech could signal big advancements for its data and platform strategy. The streaming video provider, once majority-owned by MLB Advanced Media, proved such a valuable investment to Disney that it acquired an additional 42% stake in the company for $1.6 billion in August. It previously owned a 33% stake in BAMTech. “Disney […]

There’s no love for annoying ads on Chrome this Valentine’s Day. Google will release a new version of its browser on Thursday with a built-in ad blocker. Here’s how it works. Chrome will now block all ads on sites that don’t adhere to the ad quality standards set by the Coalition for Better Ads, an […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Rachel Parkin, senior vice president of strategy and sales at CafeMedia. In ad tech, we either spend a lot of time hunting for the next big thing or kvetching about what’s broken in our […]