Publishers

Unlike in digital, where marketers can buy across multiple publishers, TV planning is largely limited to a single broadcaster’s inventory. Fox, Turner and Viacom have jointly formed an advanced audience platform called OpenAP, which will roll out to media agencies and advertisers in early April, to try to solve that challenge. While each network has […]

The Economist collects plenty of data, but until recently each type, including browsing or subscriber data, could only be analyzed in a vacuum. That meant The Economist didn’t know the types of content viewed by its most loyal subscribers and couldn’t identify the behavior of readers at risk of dropping their subscriptions. For advertising, those […]

If publishers and platforms often hold contentious relationships with each other, NBCUniversal shows signs of wanting to change that frenemy dynamic. Leading up to last week’s Snapchat IPO, NBCUniversal invested $500 million in the video messaging and content app, CNBC reported Friday. That investment would give the media company an approximately a 2% stake, according to […]

  NBC is putting its money where its mouth is. The broadcaster on Thursday revealed it would commit to sell $1 billion in targeted media based on audience guarantees in time for the 2017-2018 upfront. Although that figure only represents about 17% of the estimated $6 billion NBC transacted through advance commitments last year, it’s […]

Roku generated nearly $400 million in 2016 revenue, mostly from standard hardware sales around its devices. But $100 million of its revenue was attributed to Roku’s media licensing and advertising businesses, which are expected to be its biggest growth drivers. The real MVP of Roku’s media and licensing segment may be the set-top box manufacturer’s […]

Spanish-language broadcaster Univision’s media sales arm has been busy the past six months. In addition to packaging Univision Digital inventory more holistically with sister portfolio properties like The Root, Fusion and The Onion, Univision has tweaked its programmatic stack on the back end. That overhaul is one of the agenda items for Dave Katz, who joined Univision […]

Millennials in search of a side gig read The Penny Hoarder to find ways to make extra money and save. The site earned $20.8 million last year by focusing on native, affiliate marketing. It earns 95% of its revenue from affiliate and performance campaigns, and less than 5% from display advertising. And it expects to […]

TrustX GM and President David Kohl was sitting in the front row with a big smile on his face when P&G Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard laid into the digital supply chain at the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting last month. For the past year, Kohl has been working on a project housed within Digital Context […]

Integrated sales teams are in vogue. Print sellers usually handle digital these days, and IO-focused digital sellers pitch in on programmatic. But Forbes, which integrated its sales team in 2009, switched back to separate lanes for separate mediums at the beginning of this year. “All of this was motivated by what we were seeing when […]

Criteo closed 2016 on a high note. FY 2016 revenue was up 37% to $730 million, excluding traffic acquisition costs. Criteo’s cash flow for the fiscal year also increased 16% to $159 million. The company credits two new products – Predictive Search and Criteo Sponsored Products (formerly Hooklogic, which Criteo acquired for $250 million in […]

Getting ad-blocking users to change their tune and opt into ads isn’t impossible. In fact, for Dennis Publishing, it has worked as much as 57% of the time. The UK-based publisher of The Week, Carbuyer.co.uk, Alphr.com and other sites conducted a six-month test of Sourcepoint’s Dialogue tech, which allows publishers to send different messages to […]

Complementing Comcast’s massive cable footprint is a 750-person technology solutions group, comprised mostly of engineers who build video products for publishers and advertisers. “We’re mostly focusing on video technology solutions that help customers improve how their video operations run,” said Barry Tishgart, VP of Comcast Technology Solutions, a division of Comcast Cable. Projects include powering video-on-demand […]

Erica Schmidt, managing director of North America for Cadreon, will speak about the state of programmatic and advanced TV at Programmatic IO on April 5 in San Francisco. The times, they are a-changing for traditional TV planners. Advertisers and agencies increasingly expect to buy TV, over-the-top (OTT) and mobile on a converged basis. And many want to […]

When Bloomberg writes a story about a public company or commodity, it’s bringing market information dynamically into the adjacent ad. Bloomberg is packaging up this programmatic creative as a new ad unit, which it’s calling DataLock. Bank of Montreal and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group this quarter agreed to be the first advertisers to use it. DataLock is designed to reduce […]

Time Inc. is bullish on digital, even as its print business deflates. The company – which has lately been the object of acquisitive interest from Meredith and other suitors – expects $600 million in digital revenue next year. “We see a path to $1 billion over [our strategic] plan,” said CEO Rich Battista during Time’s […]

Product placements aren’t new, but with the rise of subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services – and a reduction in cable networks’ commercial loads – branded TV content is primed to take off. That said, it’s hard to credit a sale of a bucket of KFC chicken to Jimmy Kimmel peddling it on his late-night show, so one company […]

Turner’s revenue analytics team wasn’t always quickly able to answer questions like whether the presidential inauguration affected advertising revenue. The publisher couldn’t collate data more than weekly or monthly because it worked with more than a dozen programmatic partners, each with their own user interfaces, which supplied ads across Turner’s multiple sites – from CNN […]

News Corp. is shifting allegiance from Rubicon Project to AppNexus. News Corp. offloaded its entire 8% investment in Rubicon Project, or 3.9 million shares, according to an SEC filing on Friday. Last September, News Corp. invested $10 million in AppNexus. It also signed a master services agreement, enabling its publications to switch over to AppNexus […]

Since iCrossing entered the market as a search agency in 1998, digital spend has expanded to social, display and mobile, all of which are table stakes. As a result, iCrossing expanded into a full-service agency, eventually getting acquired by Hearst in 2010. Since then, it’s snagged AOR accounts for clients like Bayer, Church and Dwight and […]

Veteran Tremor Video CEO Bill Day has resigned, effective immediately, and will serve as a special adviser to the company through June. Paul Caine, the non-executive board chairman for Tremor since 2014 and former Bloomberg Media CRO, will step in as interim CEO and lead the search for a permanent replacement, the company said Thursday. […]

Traditional magazine companies believe they have weathered the storm of disruption over their business. They’re now ready to look ahead and use their subscription data to drive results for advertisers. “I think the businesses that got disrupted first are in a good position,” David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines, said Wednesday during a panel at […]

If programmatic advertising has reduced readers to commodities, then Topix wants to be the ultimate trader. The site focuses on slideshows, the best way to get readers to cycle through multiple page views and earn more revenue per user. Topix’s most successful slideshow in 2016 earned $400,000. But getting that $400,000 required buying about $200,000 […]

Last year, the New York Daily News created a new advertising product to give clients a simple way to tap into the benefits of its data management platform (DMP). When clients opt in to the product, dubbed AdLift, the Daily News uses insights from the DMP to target and optimize their campaigns. Six months after […]

The New York Times saw its highest subscriber increase since 2011, the year the publication introduced digital subscriptions, following the November presidential election. It added 296,000 digital subscribers in the fourth quarter, up 19% from the previous quarter and a 45.9% increase year over year. CEO Mark Thompson said digital subscriptions had accelerated even prior […]

“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. Nearly two years after header bidding exploded onto the programmatic scene, we are seeing a race to embrace the next big thing: server-side […]

Year-old video news startup Cheddar is shaking up the current media model in two ways. On the content side, Cheddar wants to be the CNBC for millennials, quickly offering business news about the companies they care about. On the business side, Cheddar doesn’t see advertising as a main revenue driver. Instead, it’s struck deals with […]

Brooklyn-based health and wellness publisher Mindbodygreen is bringing on BuzzFeed exec Tessa Gould as COO to put more juice behind the content and commerce model. Gould, who started Monday, is the former head of commerce and VP of ad innovation at BuzzFeed, where she helped spur around $75 million in ecommerce transactions through BuzzFeed content […]

Chinese advertisers want viewability standards – but the country’s unique media landscape offers unusual challenges. “There is definitely a growing concern among advertisers here about wasted media budget and the transparency of their media buying,” said Martin Zhang, CEO and founder of Shanghai-based verification firm Adbug. Zhang is also chair of a Mobile Marketing Association China […]

IPG Mediabrands’ investment arm, Magna, revealed on Wednesday it is doubling its investment in over-the-top (OTT) TV provider Roku. It declined to name specifics but noted the deal has multiple implications for inventory rates and pricing, third-party research and data. Magna is forming a private deal with Roku to allow more precise targeting between the agency’s […]

Tubi TV knows that not everyone wants to pay for premium content. “We see a strong desire among viewers who want free content, whether they’re viewers in search of value or subscription viewers who can’t find the content they want on their SVOD [subscription video on demand] service,” said Thomas Ahn Hicks, co-founder and head […]