Publishers

When ads show up next to questionable content, consumers are far from impressed. Sixty-four percent of adult consumers say a brand’s reputation is at risk if its media appears next to hateful or derogatory content, according to research released Wednesday by Omnicom media agency Hearts & Science, which surveyed roughly 1,500 consumers ages 22-45 across […]

Ads.txt research released Tuesday shines a new light on the extent of the harm done to major publishers by inventory resellers and lax supply chain standards. A joint study from Google, Amobee and Quantcast that examined Ads.txt data found rampant counterfeit inventory available to DSPs that seemingly came from 16 media companies, including Turner, The […]

CPG advertisers running on Conde Nast properties will be able to target, optimize and measure campaigns using purchase data from Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS) beginning in Q1 next year. The publisher wants to marry its expertise in creative development and sponsored content with an attention to attribution and the bottom line. “If you are not […]

Wine brand Josh Cellars doesn’t have a taste for traditional media. “We made a choice to stay away from broadcast TV and cable, at least for now,” said Renato Reyes, CMO of Josh Cellars’ parent company, Deutsch Family Wine and Spirits, whose portfolio also includes more household names. Deutsch is the US distributor of Yellow […]

Publishers are getting ensnared in the filters used by many advertisers to combat the YouTube brand safety crisis. Earlier this year, many brands found their ads running next to offensive content on the video platform, prompting marketers and their agencies to enlist third-party monitoring. Now publishers as a whole are feeling the effects. The filters […]

That teens have no attention span is a fallacy. Just ask Wattpad, a platform where people can write and share stories that they’ve written and solicit feedback from their community. The storytelling platform boasts a community of 60 million monthly active users, mainly teens, young adults and millennials under 30, who spend more than 15 […]

Both the adoption of Ads.txt and commercialization of blockchain solutions have the IAB optimistic about the prospects for Ads.cert, a follow-up to Ads.txt that uses cryptographic security measures to authenticate inventory. While Ads.txt helps authorize inventory sources, it doesn’t solve the authentication problem, said Neal Richter, CTO of Rakuten Marketing and co-chair of the IAB’s […]

Want to tap News Corp.’s first-party data to target ads across all of its properties? As of Tuesday, you can, thanks to the release of News IQ, which is a managed service (for now) ad platform owned and operated by News Corp. News IQ unifies inventory from publications as varied as The Wall Street Journal, […]

In the words of Jon Stimmel, the chief investment officer for UM Worldwide, planning an over-the-top (OOT) ad campaign is “a Frankenstein of different methodologies mixed together.” He added, while speaking last week at the Videonuze Shift summit in New York, that buyers need more automation in the OTT planning process: “We are recreating the […]

The interactive video ad server Innovid has acquired Taykey, a company that uses machine learning to extract contextual information about video, text and images to help inform ad buys. Terms of the deal, announced Thursday, were not disclosed. Innovid, which has 220 employees, will take on half – or about 20 members – of Taykey’s […]

BuzzFeed laid off 8% of its domestic workforce, or 100 people, Wednesday as the company diversifies beyond native advertising. Recode first reported the cuts. With 25% of revenue in 2017 coming from programmatic, affiliate links, commerce and non-native ads, many staffers working on the branded content side are being let go. Despite building a nine-figure revenue […]

The ad industry needs to check itself before it wrecks itself. That was the rallying cry Tuesday at NBCUniversal’s swanky State of the Industry Forum, where 150 digital and broadcast advertising luminaries gathered in midtown Manhattan for fancy eggs and frank discussion. “I’ll cut right to the chase: We have a problem,” said Linda Yaccarino, […]

Amazon wants to own a greater chunk of the video supply chain. Its cloud division, Amazon Web Services, released a suite of video tools called AWS Elemental Media Services on Monday, designed to help live and on-demand video content providers manage workflow. It is available only as a managed service for now. “We’re trying to […]

Meredith Corp’s agreement to acquire Time Inc. for $1.85 billion, announced Sunday, will test whether Meredith’s sales org leadership can benefit from Time’s programmatic technology – and vice versa. In terms of ad sales, it’s a tale of two different strategies. Time Inc. struggled in the wake of a chaotic sales reorg that caused ad […]

“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. While ad tech has seen a constant stream of innovation over the last few years, one thing has largely stayed the same: private […]

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 […]