AppNexus has acquired Yieldex, whose platform provides publishers with analytics, forecasting and sales management tools. The deal might help strengthen AppNexus’ relationships with media sellers at a time when direct deals between marketers and publishers represent a growing portion of the programmatic ad pie. The Wall Street Journal placed the deal’s value at approximately $100 million in cash and […]
PlayBuzz, the user-generated quiz and article site, revealed Wednesday it had raised $16 million in Series B financing, bringing its total funding to almost $20 million. It’s the latest win for the Israeli publisher, which surpassed The Huffington Post three months ago to become the most-shared publisher on Facebook. Investors liked PlayBuzz’s growth potential and […]
The Guardian, CNN International, the Financial Times and Reuters have banded together to sell inventory programmatically through a program called Pangaea. The Economist also will sell inventory through Pangaea but is not a founding publisher. Pangaea gives publishers something they don’t have on their own; scale. It marries that scale with the member publishers’ first-party […]
“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Lorne Brown, CEO at Operative. New viewability measurement capabilities and the discovery of rampant fraud in ad exchanges has led advertisers to question whether any online advertising is actually seen by viewers. As a […]
Advanced audience targeting is taking a seat at this year’s TV upfronts. Sellers are lining their arsenals with new products promising cross-platform reach, partially out of necessity. Viewer attention is fragmenting and advertisers want assurance that if they commit an upfront buy, there will be multiple points of execution. It’s unclear the extent to which buyers […]
Five of the biggest media players in France banded together to create a joint venture, La Place Media, to grow their programmatic revenues through a data-sharing arrangement. Between its first and second year in operation, the cooperative’s programmatic CPMs jumped 70%. It’s a trend that will continue as La Place Media closes out its third […]
“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. Read any trade publication and you’ll see an onslaught of coverage about how millennials engage with brands. According to the steady drumbeat of coverage, this generation […]
To power native placements, Condé Nast’s Food Innovation Group selected TripleLift as a technology provider. It will sell native placements directly and through private native marketplaces. In-feed article previews for branded content, such as a recipe, will appear across the Food Innovation Group’s sites. The group reaches 50 million uniques a month across its portfolio, […]
Schibsted Media Group, a Norwegian publisher in Sweden, has lately come to market with a unified programmatic offering. Media agency executive Robert Johansson joined Aftonbladet, the group’s largest Swedish tabloid, in August 2013 as yield manager to work on its RTB offering. Six months later, Schibsted decided to combine and centralize data from across its […]
Being a programmatic salesperson today means tacking between technical and personal considerations. At BBC Worldwide Americas, where programmatic sales channels comprise a full third of ad revenues, the technical end means experimenting with tactics like varying price floors per advertiser in order to maximize yield. “If an advertiser is consistently bidding $20 on our inventory, […]
Sports content consumption fluctuates – down in the offseason, then surging around major sporting events. How can a publisher manage? Gannett-owned USA Today Sports Media Group uses programmatic to pick up the slack. “Programmatic has allowed us to ride those ups and downs of premium sales,” explained Chris Pirrone, the general manager of Sports Digital […]
Yahoo is buoying its push to be a mobile player with a mobile dev suite, revealed Thursday at the company’s first-ever mobile developer conference – but the products, and Yahoo’s plans, are highly contingent on an important factor. Will developers see the value in Yahoo’s app-monetization tools? Flurry’s SDK now includes demand from both Gemini, […]
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Grant Brown, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Rant. We’ve heard a lot about viewability lately, with the IAB, MRC, ANA and other industry leaders passing significant milestones last year to make viewability a reality. Viewability provides valuable […]
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Samantha Price, director of ad products for The Weather Company. In 2001, the Sloan Management Review envisioned a bright future for “m-commerce” and a theoretical young consumer named Tommy. “His cell phone beeps: It’s […]
Jewelry and flower brands who briefly ramp up ad spend for Valentine’s Day love their private marketplaces. In early February, they set up private marketplaces with publishers who can provide the right audience and context. They test which sites yield conversions in the weeks before Cupid’s holiday and dial up the spend the final week […]
Mobile is the mother of all invention at BabyCenter, an online content hub for pregnancy and parenting-related content. Founded in 1997, BabyCenter has always maintained a digital-first mindset – but the changing consumption habits of its more than 40 million global monthly users, mainly current and expectant mothers, means that mobile is fertile ground for […]
Advertisers’ demand for viewability is frustrating for publishers, who must contend with new contracts, new billing structures and new ways to value inventory, all while ensuring meeting viewability standards doesn’t erode ad revenue. During a town hall at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Phoenix, about half the publishers in the packed room said they had […]
Catering to cord-cutters, cable networks and broadcasters are unbundling their content. CBS, HBO and Viacom will all roll out paid subscription services. Ex-Hulu CEO Jason Kilar is launching both a subscription-based and ad-supported web video service, Vessel. And paid TV service Dish is rolling out Sling TV, a $20-per-month streaming service that gives subscribers AMC, […]
The company formerly known as Yellow Pages has worked hard in recent years to transfer its historical strength – helping consumers find local businesses via large printed books – into a business that’s now booking more than $1 billion in digital revenue. YP acquired mobile ad firm Sense Networks one year ago and continues to refine and experiment with […]
Pandora will leverage its data assets and introduce mobile programmatic capabilities later this quarter for its iOS and Android platforms, CEO Brian McAndrews said during the company’s Q4 and year-end earnings call Thursday. “Advertisers are looking for high engagement on mobile,” McAndrews said. “In terms of digital revenue opportunities, we are positioning Pandora to lead the […]
What is digital video going to look like in 2015? Representatives from all sides talked it out at Industry Preview 2015 in a panel discussion led by Rich Greenfield, Media & Tech Analyst at BTIG & Angel Investor. Participants included: Pooja Midha, Senior VP, Digital Ad Sales & Operations, Disney ABC TV Group Dave Morgan, CEO […]
Jeff Lucas, head of ad sales for Viacom Music and Entertainment, likes photo-messaging app Snapchat. Because its user base is dominated by females under 25, the platform that popularized the “fleeting” SMS aligns closely with Viacom property MTV’s young millennial audience. It’s one of the reasons why MTV is test driving Snapchat’s new Discover feature, part of […]
When you put five magazine magnates in a room and ask them about the future of print, things get a little tense. “Fear is not a strategy,” said Condé Nast President Robert Sauerberg, asked if he was afraid of print going away. “I’m not afraid of anything. I have the greatest brand in the world.” […]
The New York Times reported relatively modest fourth-quarter and full-year earnings on Tuesday, but chief Mark Thompson hailed it as “the most encouraging year-over-year trend” for total advertising revenue since 2005. To that end, he touted strong growth in digital advertising, sponsored content and subscription-based revenue. “We were particularly pleased with the strong growth in digital […]
Twitter is finally giving its promoted tweets wings to fly beyond Twitter’s own walls. In a blog post Tuesday, Ameet Ranadive, Twitter’s senior director of product, said that advertisers will be able to syndicate promoted tweet campaigns running on Twitter to non-Twitter properties using the same creative and audience targeting parameters. Twitter didn’t get specific on how the […]
At Industry Preview 2015, a group of top publishers took a crack at what digital publishing looks like in 2015 in this panel led by MediaLink’s Wenda Harris Millard. Participants included: Zazie Lucke, Head of Global Media Marketing, Bloomberg Dao Nguyen, Publisher, Buzzfeed Troy Young, President, Hearst Digital Jon Steinberg, CEO, Daily Mail, North America […]
“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. Two years ago, Tim Armstrong co-opted the expression “barbell strategy” to describe AOL’s approach to balancing programmatic with direct sales. On one side of the barbell […]
Ad tech observers tend to assume it’s early innings in the “programmatic-direct” game, but that may not be the case. Newly reported revenues from one early startup suggest the game hasn’t started yet. iSocket, a programmatic-direct platform company acquired by Rubicon Project in November, posted full-year revenues of just $207,000 in 2013, according to a filing with the […]
When Rant Inc. founder Brett Rosin created RantSports.com out of 150 sports blogs he pulled into one centralized hub, it became the foundation of what would soon turn into a massive portfolio of properties. Rant, founded in 2010, is no longer just RantSports. The media company now includes RantChic (fashion), RantStore (ecommerce), RantFinance and RantPolitical […]
During Yahoo’s earnings call Tuesday, CEO Marissa Mayer went into some detail about Yahoo’s plans to leverage Flurry’s developer connections to launch a mobile ad network. Mayer said mobile app developers who have downloaded Flurry’s free analytics will be able to turn on monetization with Yahoo Gemini, its native solution, as well as BrightRoll video ads. More than 600,000 apps […]
Inside how Jones Road Beauty is trying to turn messy, conflicting measurement signals into a single testing roadmap for its media mix.
IAPP’s Global Summit in DC was a reminder that AI is moving fast – and judges, privacy lawyers and practitioner are racing to keep up.
An upcoming paper from CIMM doesn’t just demonstrate that differences in media quality can be measured. It also argues that tying media value to short-term outcomes has perpetuated longstanding industry challenges.
Not unlike last year, the mood during TikTok’s NewFronts presentation last week felt like cautious optimism, if not outright relief.
Can a good sales presentation offset the impact of a very bad news week? That’s a question for Meta, which collected two guilty verdicts in court this week for failing to protect children and creating additive products.
Meet Clamor, a new social listening product that pulls cultural insights from online conversations in real time. Clamor helped Manscaped freshen up its marketing, including for this year’s Super Bowl.
