When Bankrate decided to add header bidding late last year, it chose a server-side solution. “When we did our RFI [request for information], it became clear to me that server-to-server is a much better and more enhanced version of header bidding,” said Irene Kwak, VP of revenue operations for Bankrate. The financial publisher plans to […]
“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Paul Bannister, co-founder and executive vice president at CafeMedia. A new year brings the opportunity to start fresh and kick things off the right way. Often, the resolutions we choose are direct reactions to […]
2016 was the year that header bidding crossed over and became a disruptive force in the ad industry. The wave of publisher adoption spurred tech companies to create header bidding solutions. Vendors that were slow to adopt, like Rubicon Project, saw their stock crash as their rivals scooped up market share in a world […]
A few years ago, when Twitch CRO Jonathan Simpson-Bint would walk into meetings with agencies and advertisers, they’d cock a dubious eyebrow. “That many people engage on Twitch? You’ve got to be kidding.’ That was the reaction,” said Simpson-Bint, who’s been with Twitch since 2011, three years before Amazon acquired the social gaming and live […]
Maureen Bosetti, the chief investment officer for IPG Mediabrands’ Initiative, will discuss dynamics for this year’s upfronts alongside other TV power players at Industry Preview on Jan. 18 in New York City. The 2016 TV upfronts ended with networks posting double-digit CPM increases, but will that momentum carry into 2017? Two key factors could help buyers wield […]
As part of The Weather Company’s shift to a vertical-based sales organization, it has hired Sarah Ripmaster as VP of automotive sales. Ripmaster, who has a decade of experience working with auto manufacturers, will help advertisers use The Weather Company’s location data, weather data and the Watson Ad platform in their ad campaigns. Ripmaster worked […]
One of Piera Gelardi’s personal mottos: “Friction creates sparks.” As executive creative director and co-founder of Refinery29, Gelardi is constantly working to balance quality with quantity and achieve scale while staying true to Refinery29’s roots as a “mission-driven publisher for millennial women.” “There was a point when I was scared to grow because I thought […]
Data-driven editorial just added a new weapon to its arsenal: a Slackbot. Clique Media Group (CMG), which owns flagship style site WhoWhatWear as well as MyDomaine, Byrdie and Obsessee, created a Slackbot in November to alert editors when stories over-index the benchmarks set for each author. The editors receive a Slackbot notification with details about […]
Over-the-top (OTT) television is at an inflection point. While it’s a promising way for media owners to capitalize on changing consumer consumption habits – the number of connected TV users totaled 181.8 million viewers in 2016, a 20% year-over-year increase, according to eMarketer – with reward comes risk. OTT’s lucrative CPMs could also attract bad […]
As more money flows programmatically, Prisa Group and other publishers are changing their sales organizations and ad products to focus on serving data-driven buyers. Prisa Group owns or represents media brands in 22 Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries. Its properties, including El País and the sports site AS, reach 25 million unique users. It also serves […]
Mitú, a digital media company for young Latinos, started out as a multichannel network on YouTube and has since expanded onto Facebook and OTT devices. On Tuesday, the four-year-old publisher will add Snapchat Discover to the mix. “Snapchat recognized a significant portion of their audience, based on demo, is Latino, and wanted to find the […]
Two years ago, Media.net started helping publishers move their header bidding partners to a speedier server-to-server configuration, which has since attracted publishers like The Atlantic, Forbes, The New York Times and WebMD. Media.net had largely not marketed itself, said COO Namit Merchant. But following a $900 million acquisition this past summer by a Chinese consortium, […]
Twenty-First Century Fox revealed on Friday a preliminary bid to buy out the rest of British pay TV provider and telco Sky for $13.51 per share for a total of about $14.1 billion. Fox already owns a 39.1% stake in the company. In 2010, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. attempted to take over Sky (called British […]
“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. Two years ago, I saw the future of programmatic not as a budget channel, but rather a conduit through which all media changed […]
Purch, which first implemented header bidding three years ago, has moved on. The portfolio of product review and tech sites turned off most of its header bidders last month and moved to server-to-server integrations with the same partners. Industrywide, server-to-server is considered a logical next step after header bidding. Amazon is moving server-to-server, and Google’s […]
While private marketplaces (PMPs) and preferred deals are predicted to outpace open exchange buys by 2018, their rate of adoption has been inconsistent – especially when it comes to video advertising. Some ad buyers have avoided PMPs out of concerns over reach, leaving some publishers twisting in the wind to accurately forecast their fill rate. […]
Data management platform (DMP) Lotame has developed a campaign planning and measurement tool designed for linear TV broadcasters. Local broadcast consortium Pearl TV, which represents more than 200 local broadcast TV stations and network groups including Hearst, Cox Media and E.W. Scripps, is the first to test-drive it. While many advertisers want to buy across […]
Since launching “programmatic guaranteed” at the 2015 DoubleClick Leadership summit, Google says demand for programmatic execution of direct deals has skyrocketed. In the last 10 months alone it has quadrupled the number of video impressions served on a programmatic guaranteed basis. More recently, it opened this mode of buying to a wider set of customers, […]
Hearst’s media encompasses magazines, broadcast networks and newspapers, but tapping into its massive scale means logging deals into 17 separate systems or setting up multiple deal IDs. Over the past year, Hearst’s Core Audience division has brought its properties onto the same ad server, exchange and data management platform. Hearst also built its own viewability […]
Mindbodygreen is making a credible run at the content-and-commerce model. The health and wellness publisher, which sees around 10 million unique visitors a month, eschews traditional advertising in favor of a combination of content and commerce, “with community in the middle,” said CEO and founder Jason Wachob. Mindbodygreen has 5,000 contributors, some of whom are […]
Some publishers are raking in the traffic courtesy of Apple News, but not everyone on the buy side is impressed. “I want to be able to upload my own audience, match it to theirs and know what’s running where so I can customize the ad,” said Angelina Eng, VP of media platforms and operations at […]
Investing Media Solutions (IMS), exclusively represents the advertising for 375 long-tail and mid-tail publications that offer financial advice. As the financial network looks to the future, it’s adding first-party data and more compelling ad formats to maintain stride with its sophisticated financial advertisers. IMS helps financial advertisers like Vanguard, Fidelity and Schwab, and brands like […]
The programmatic salesperson only came into existence about five years ago. What started out as an outsider position in the sales organization has become more mainstream as programmatic adoption increases. But the very people holding programmatic sales roles are already predicting its extinction, as the role gets absorbed into the entire sales process. “In three […]
CBS Interactive-owned CNET has long relied on data to make editorial decisions. But its branded content program, Studio 61, also applies editorial insights to branded content. When Motorola wanted branded content to support its Moto Z phone launch, CNET analyzed which content performed best against Motorola’s target segment: Verizon and Android users aged 18 to […]
Criteo says it is beta testing a product that would allow it to directly integrate – and give it priority access – within publishers’ header bidding wrappers. Wrappers help publishers organize tags from multiple header bidding partners and are commonly billed as a way to manage latency and other complexities, like ensuring bid requests are properly […]
AOL, which has signed more than 100 publishers to its header-bidding solution over the past year, is adding a wrapper so publishers can easily integrate multiple header-bidding partners. The company, which works with tens of thousands of publishers, will do the integration work for its wrapper clients. (AOL claims it won’t give an advantage to […]
Epicurious completely rebuilt its app for Thanksgiving, incorporating best practices for designing content and ads for mobile. The first version of Epicurious’ app, launched back in 2009, didn’t show ads. Later, they were tacked on. With the relaunch, Epicurious thought about how content and ads would work together from the start. “We wanted to created […]
As it turns out, a smaller screen size may be more effective at driving purchase intent than larger devices in the living room. Hulu and Magna have released new data assessing the impact of video ad exposures in different channels on overall effectiveness. They found ads on over-the-top (OTT) devices aided the most in brand […]
Google is seeing strong growth in its dynamic allocation exchange bidding, countering the advantages gained by other exchanges via header bidding. Six months ago, Google reversed its DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) policy when it opened the server up to third-party exchanges. Since then, it’s more than doubled the number of outside exchange partners, adding Smaato, […]
The top trending post about ad tech on the Ad Ops subreddit page asks the pertinent question: “Is it safe to assume 95%-plus of ad tech companies are full of shit?” The responses aren’t pretty. “This is the sentiment that our industry has – this post got a 93% upvote,” Jayne Pimentel, Reddit’s revenue and ad […]
Goodway Group has reduced the number of SSPs it works with from about 20 at the end of 2024 to just single digits today.
CloudX, which makes AI infrastructure for app publishers, is expanding from monetization to agentic buying for user acquisition.
The Trade Desk expanded its relationships with a host of travel, hospitality and mobility-focused commerce media partners, including Uber Advertising, Booking.com, United Airline’s Kinective Media and MARRIOTT MEDIA.
It’s long felt like a foregone conclusion that Roku would eventually get gobbled up by a much bigger fish. Now, the day has finally arrived.
To close the gap between digital audio ad spend and audience engagement, audio platforms want to get more deeply embedded in omnichannel campaign planning tools.
How can companies put ads in new places without hurting the user experience? Smart TV makers, like Samsung, are adding programmatic ads to the home screen, and Roblox will now show ads to users under 13. We examine the trade-offs as platforms expand their ad footprint.
