Publishers

Toyota Motors is a big TV spender. It bought, according to Kantar Media, three minutes of commercial airtime during Super Bowl XLIX –trailing only Anheuser-Busch and Fiat Chrysler. Although Toyota will continue to invest in big TV tent poles, it’s test-driving more digital video activation, and is sponsoring premium NBCUniversal video running on AOL’s network. […]

Bloomberg Media is at an inflection point. The business and financial media company has had numerous high-profile exits (including Businessweek editor Josh Tyrangiel and Bloomberg’s chief digital content officer, Verge co-founder Josh Topolsky) following former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s return. A number of layoffs resulted as Bloomberg Media pulled back on nonbusiness content in […]

TheScore, maker of the popular sports app, attributes its revenue growth in a competitive mobile market to one thing: staying focused. TheScore devotes all of its attention to creating the best content and ad experiences for mobile, which includes its mobile app and the mobile web. Desktop exists, but it’s completely an afterthought, making theScore […]

Eyeing a shift to private marketplaces among buyers, Canadian publisher CBC has reordered its tech stack to prioritize its private marketplace over direct deals. Done via an Index Exchange header tag, the move gives CBC’s private marketplace buyers a more favorable setup: the option to look at every user before ad impressions get divvied up […]

Let’s be honest: For all of its success as a business, it’s hard to be impressed with the NFL’s digital presence. Good luck using its overdesigned, slow-loading website to find video highlights of your favorite team’s last game. But little by little, the NFL has opened up its assets to digital experimentation. In January, it […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Peter Spande, chief revenue officer at Business Insider. The hits keep coming. Publishers must contend with so many threats that they all feel existential. The list is long but a handful of very real […]

AdExchanger Research analyst Catherine Oddenino reports on publisher trends in the programmatic advertising ecosystem in her recently-released report, “The State of Programmatic Selling 2015.” Among Ms. Oddenino’s findings:

The New York Times has a solution to the bot fraud problem: “Buy quality.” So declared Michael Zimbalist, SVP of advertising products and R&D at the Times, speaking at OpenX’s session about trust in the supply chain at Advertising Week in New York City. “You get what you pay for,” Zimbalist said bluntly. “We need to collapse […]

When AOL agreed in June to bring Microsoft’s sales organization into AOL, nearly doubling the amount of front-line salespeople to a total of 1,000, head of sales Jim Norton saw an opportunity. AOL knew there were a number of ways it could improve its sales force to better align with the organization’s structure: custom solutions […]

Nielsen’s having a tough week. On Tuesday, comScore and Rentrak, two of Nielsen’s top competitors, announced their intention to merge into a single measurement monolith. And on Thursday, business channel CNBC, a division of NBCUniversal, will officially kick Nielsen to the curb, turning instead to research firm Cogent Reports for its audience measurement. Comcast-owned NBCUniversal […]

If ad blocking is war, long-tail publishers will likely be its earliest casualties. “Ad blocking is a threat to the whole industry, but it has an especially high impact for the small publishers who make up so much of the rich fabric that is the digital experience,” said Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the Interactive Advertising […]

Axel Springer will acquire Business Insider in a deal that values the publisher at $390 million, the companies said Tuesday. The German media company bought 9% of BI back in January, and the new $343 million deal will bring its total stake to 97%. That earlier deal placed the value of BI at $200 million, so the sale price […]

Merkle, which bills itself as one of the industry’s largest privately held agencies, is moving beyond database services into tech territory. The company on Monday launched MerkleOne, its version of a people-based marketing platform for advertisers and publishers, including inaugural sell-side partner News Corp. “M1 will enable advertisers to bring their own data, anonymize IDs […]

With ad blockers increasingly available on mobile devices and adoption increasing, especially among millennials, publishers can’t ignore the issue anymore. But what, exactly, are their options? First, publishers must figure out the extent ad blocking happens on their site – which varies dramatically based on audience composition and the type of site. Gaming sites, for […]

As private marketplaces have taken off, buyers and sellers have struggled to figure out exactly how to negotiate deals and, once a campaign is live, how to optimize so it actually delivers the expected value. None of the existing models quite work. Traditionally, sellers optimize direct-sold deals and buyers control programmatic ones. With private marketplaces, […]

Some luxury automakers that advertise on Bloomberg Media’s properties can drive better business outcomes if they spend more on its radio and digital channels and slightly less on print. To help advertisers best manage their media mix across its portfolio of TV, radio, digital and print channels, Bloomberg Media partnered with MarketShare, a media attribution […]

Imagine adorning a Crest branding video with a custom call-to-action that tells the viewer she can buy the toothpaste on sale at a local Target or Walmart for $3.99. To achieve this, Tegna-owned companies PointRoll and ShopLocal are combining their capabilities under a new entity called Cofactor. If the name Tegna sounds unfamiliar, that’s because […]

“Brand Aware” explores the data-driven digital ad ecosystem from the marketer’s point of view.  Today’s column is by Mike Zeman, director of global programmatic marketing at Netflix. Imagine you’ve walked into a convenience store to buy some milk. The cashier says, “That’ll be $5.” You hand him a $5 bill, only to be told, “I’m […]

In a move that illustrates the fast-growing importance of programmatic video, News Corp. will acquire UK-based Unruly for $90 million, the companies revealed Wednesday. News Corp. will pay as much as $86 million more for Unruly’s social video advertising platform, contingent on meeting certain performance goals. The deal gives News Corp. access to Unruly’s data […]

Publishers distributing their content on Facebook have discovered a way to buy traffic on Facebook – but it isn’t through amplifying their posts. Instead, publishers place their content on Facebook pages that already have millions of engaged followers, such as “I Love Halloween,” George Takei, Lil Wayne or (perplexingly) “Music for Deep Meditation,” giving it […]

The stereotype of parents being behind the times didn’t hold true at “Take Your Parents To Work Day,” an event held in New York on Thursday at data-driven agency Kepler. The program explained to parents how their kids plan targeted advertising campaigns. It also gave parents a better idea about just why that pair of […]

HookLogic raised $15.5 million in Series C funding and will sell AutoHook, a suite of lead-gen and marketing tools designed for automotive companies, the company announced Thursday. Terms of the AutoHook sale to auto consultancy firm Urban Science were not disclosed. In addition to previous investors Bain Capital and Intel Capital, this funding round included […]

Programmatic advertising makes it difficult for publishers like Hearst Newspapers to ensure that users enjoy fast-loading pages and quality ad experiences. Hearst closely monitors its site templates, optimizing for fast load times and ad viewability. But once it starts letting third parties run scripts on its website – aka programmatic advertisers – that can slow […]

Comcast’s drumbeat of new video services is designed to support content parity across devices rather than to create a cord cutter’s alternative, per se. The cable giant recently rolled out to Xfinity Internet customers a $15-a-month streaming video service appropriately dubbed Stream. Comcast has also flirted with a Web video portal to rival YouTube and […]

Media General will acquire Meredith Corp. for $2.4 billion, combining the two companies’ TV and digital assets to create greater reach and efficiency. The new company, Meredith Media General, will own 88 TV stations in 54 markets, making it the third-largest owner of network affiliates. On the digital side, it will reach 200 million monthly unique […]

The digital media industry is mourning Curt Hecht. Hecht passed away this week at the age of 47, ending a brilliant 26-year career at Publicis Groupe and The Weather Company. His death has come as a shock to many, not only because of Hecht’s intellectual and physical vigor but also because he chose to keep […]

NewsCred, a maker of content marketing software for enterprise brands like Barclays, Toyota and Conair, has raised $42 million in growth equity led by FTV Capital – bringing its total to $88.8 million. NewsCred’s co-founder and CEO, Shafqat Islam, has voiced concerns in the past regarding oversaturation in the content marketing technology category, citing $100 million […]

Visitors to Allrecipes’ redesigned mobile and desktop sites, which launched Tuesday, will find what looks like a personalized Pinterest page, complete with social elements including like button variants and the ability to follow other cooks and food brands. Founded in 1997 as a place for home cooks to find and share recipes, Allrecipes needed to […]

Connected TV ads have piqued marketers’ interest, but there is not a watershed of demand – yet – as marketers still cite measurement and inventory challenges. According to a joint study released by the Association of National Advertisers and BrightLine, the maker of an interactive video ad server built exclusively for the connected TV space, […]

Some publishers believe programmatic creates a “race to the bottom” for its inventory. Purch, whose portfolio includes TopTenReviews and Tom’s Guide, is taking the opposite approach by using programmatic to establish the baseline value of its media. This effort, called Purch RAMP (revenue and advertising management platform), will help it create premium, custom advertising opportunities. […]