The US Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against AT&T has thrown a wrench into the $108 billion planned merger between the telco and Time Warner. The complaint, filed late Monday, alleged the merger could “hinder [AT&T’s] rivals by forcing them to pay hundreds of millions of dollars more per year for Time Warner’s networks.” The filing […]
New York Life is in the insurance business – but the brand also has to protect itself. Marketers today have several metrics to juggle in their digital buys: Fraud, viewability and context top the list. But it’s not enough to monitor these metrics; brands need to take action. Natan Cohen, New York Life’s corporate VP of […]
Do ads for STD self-testing kits count as sexual content? If medical and recreational marijuana use is legal in California, why can’t a cannabis advertiser geotarget Californians over the age of 21 on the large social platforms? These are the gray areas that certain categories of advertisers have to navigate on a daily basis, and […]
The ad buyers who will be hurt by the adoption of Ads.txt aren’t giving up without a fight. Publishers are being deluged with emails from “agencies” and “digital marketing solutions” companies threatening to stop buying inventory unless they’re added to the Ads.txt file. The New York Times, Wenner Media, Intermarkets and LittleThings all confirmed to […]
Advertisers, agencies and publishers agree that the bar for better data quality has never been higher. Yet the quality of many third-party data sets is questionable, and advertisers don’t always know what they’re getting when they purchase it. Here’s how Anheuser-Busch InBev, Publicis agency Spark Foundry and the publisher Condé Nast are all vetting data […]
Brands, agencies, publishers and vendors agree that while the industry is rife with ad quality issues, programmatic isn’t the culprit. “Programmatic is not the problem,” said Shaune Kolber, programmatic creative and ad fraud manager at Dell, at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference in New York City on Thursday. “It’s a way of buying. It’s not supposed […]
Purch, publisher of LiveScience and TopTenReviews, added three layers of defense to its anti-fraud system in October. In addition to pre-screening for bots twice, Purch now detects bots, malware and ad quality in real time. “Better-quality traffic means higher ad performance and higher CPMs,” said Purch CTO John Potter. “This is a trend. Demand sources […]
Publishers still struggle to make enough video content and inventory. Text-to-video platform Wibbitz, which announced its $20 million Series C on Tuesday, aims to help them meet that need with technology that automates creation. The round, led by Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments with participation from The Weather Channel TV network, the Associated Press, existing investor […]
Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. As big brands seeking younger audiences move TV budgets online, some have been put off by digital’s triple threat: brand safety, viewability and fraud. Hulu is there for them. Hulu basically offers the benefits of TV in a digital buy, according to Doug Fleming, Hulu’s […]
Although Netflix’s audience is large (and growing), it’s notoriously hard to measure. Nielsen hopes to remove some of the difficulty gauging audience viewership in ad-free environments like Netflix with its launch Wednesday of a syndicated measurement service called Nielsen Subscription Video On Demand (SVOD) Content Ratings. Eight networks and studios, including A&E, Disney-ABC, Lionsgate, NBCUniversal […]
The idea of accomplishing more together than apart sounds like a tagline for a social justice organization, but that’s what Upworthy and Good say happened after they merged 10 months ago to form Good Worldwide. The two publications cater to corporations and nonprofits that want to align their brands with social causes and change. Good […]
As Facebook grabs more mobile and video dollars from the ecosystem, premium publishers are looking for viable ways to compete. For storied publisher Time Inc., one solution is to bring its own mobile-optimized video solutions to market. Using Google’s native framework, Time created a mobile, in-feed video solution dubbed Adapt that is customized to its […]
Texting and messaging friends tends to bring out our inner foodies, and the Food Network has used a Facebook Messenger bot to join that conversation. Food Network has invested in its chatbot since it first launched in November 2016, even after the initial hype dropped off. While other brands and publishers had difficulties being conversational […]
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Jana Meron, vice president of programmatic and data strategy at Business Insider. Jana will present “Insider View From The Publisher” at AdExchanger’s upcoming PROGRAMMATIC I/O New York conference Oct. 25-26. Ad fraud is a much-discussed headache for […]
With header bidding enabled, the open marketplace works just fine for Advance Local. While many publishers and buyers are moving to closed, curated programmatic environments due to brand safety, fraud and viewability concerns, Advance Local is focused on driving yield in the open marketplace. That strategy means improving viewability and giving buyers transparent URL information […]
Every publisher wants to harness its data – but you can’t climb a mountain without a lot of pain. At the Google Publisher Leadership Summit in Chicago, ad execs from The New York Times, Vice Media and the Local Media Consortium (LMC) discussed their often-arduous quests to reach the peak. The New York Times, for […]
Google on Tuesday unveiled its Insights Engine Project – including six products for data visualization, integration and insights – and promised that exchange bidding will be generally available in early 2018. Read the release. For the first time, Google, via an Insights Engine product, will give publishers the types of user demographic and content consumption […]
Demand-side platform The Trade Desk wants a bigger slice of TV ad budgets. The company on Thursday rolled out a connected TV targeting and attribution tool designed to extend digital buying capabilities like retargeting and audience matching into the over-the-top environment. According to CEO Jeff Green, connected TV inventory available through The Trade Desk increased […]
Axel Springer joined the Coalition for Better Ads on Wednesday partially because it didn’t want Google, a member of the coalition, to have an outsize say in what counted as a better ad experience. Despite being a dominant European publisher, Axel Springer is worried about US platforms like Google dictating industry standards or positioning to […]
In a blog post Wednesday, Facebook’s VP of global marketing solutions, Carolyn Everson, acknowledged that some marketers are “feeling uneasy” about viewability, online ad metrics and brand safety. She outlined updates meant to address that discomfort. First, Facebook intends to give advertisers more control over where their ads are running by tightening guidelines on the […]
Slideshows have been hurt by growing demand for viewable inventory, as readers rarely scroll down and often click to the next slide before ads load. Topix, which buys traffic to slideshows that rack up tons of page views, was affected by this shift. Four months ago, the site’s viewability hovered around 40%, so programmatic buyers […]
Spanish-language broadcaster Univision hopes to offset declines in local TV ad revenue by doubling down on its digital ad business. It was an early adapter of Facebook Watch, Snapchat Discover and Snapchat Live Stories to reach its audience of millennial Hispanics, but Univision is emphasizing multiplatform campaigns to boost digital revenue. (Univision’s digital ad revenue […]
Taste of Home amassed almost 6 million followers on its Facebook pages, where readers actively commented and shared posts – without ever hiring anyone to run audience development. That raw engagement attracted Kari Hodes to join in January as Trusted Media Brands’ (which owns Taste of Home) VP of digital content and audience development. Hodes […]
The publication that shunned banner ads reversed course last week when BuzzFeed added programmatic ads. The decision came down to two factors: increased advertiser demand for programmatic and a better user experience, said Ken Blom, BuzzFeed’s VP of branded distribution, who leads the 30-person team that will handle the programmatic logistics. “We don’t want to […]
AppNexus and Index Exchange have the broadest adoption of their adapters and wrappers, according to the first-ever Header Bidding Index – a report from ServerBid, an Adzerk spinoff that builds wrappers for the demand side. Seventy percent of the top 1,000 publishers running programmatic advertising use header bidding, according to the report, which ServerBid created […]
Although Roku’s device sales make up 59% of its revenue, the growth of the segment is declining as Google, Amazon, Apple and other competitors push for more market share. However, its platform business, which consists of ads and subscription revenue, has expanded rapidly and now represents 41% of Roku’s total revenue. Advertising accounted for 67% […]
“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. Supply-path optimization (SPO), or, as I like to call it, supply pathing, might not sound like the sexiest topic, but is suddenly the […]
In its short, two-year lifespan, FuboTV, a streaming video service specializing in live sports content, has mostly monetized through paid subscriptions. But after raising a $55 million Series C round in June – and pushing to grow subscribers for its new skinny bundle, Fubo Premier – it’s turned its attention to its tech stack. FuboTV […]
Engaged readers make for loyal subscribers. The New York Times’ mobile app, which the publisher once feared would cannibalize its desktop subscriber rate, has proven to be the watering hole where many of the Times’ young, engaged readers hang out. Readers within the app rank among the most loyal and committed, in terms of the […]
While Google claimed advertisers are returning to YouTube, new data from Standard Media Index reveals advertisers really did tighten their purse strings after the video platform’s brand safety scare. YouTube ad spend declined about 26% YoY in Q2, while ad spend spread across digital video platforms such as Hulu or network-owned video services, in comparison, […]
Google won’t have to break up its ads business after being declared an online monopolist. Meanwhile, Amazon faces a lawsuit from the FTC alleging that it charged advertisers more than necessary for ecommerce ads.
Buy-side experts said it’s another example of a Big Tech platform taking advantage of the lack of transparency built into programmatic ad auctions. And they’re not optimistic change is coming.
This week, the Commerce Media Newsletter catches up with a startup from outside the world of data-driven advertising, but with an interesting position when it comes to ecommerce advertising. That’s Clearco, a Canadian fin tech company founded in 2015.
Halo Collar, a dog collar brand with direct-to-consumer origins, is preparing for its retail expansion by honing its first-party data strategy and incrementality measurement.
The company is launching an accelerator program to help tech vendors pitch their solutions in a way that makes sense to advertisers.
TWC is building a monetization model that treats weather as both a contextual and an emotional signal, and it’s using AI sales agents to bring it to market.
