Publishers

Wenner Media, home to an iconic stable of titles that includes Rolling Stone, Us Weekly and Men’s Journal, still subscribes to a true publisher’s paradigm: “When you have great content, it all falls into place.” But it’s innovation in programmatic media buying that will enhance its properties’ brand equity and  “will command better CPMs and […]

Over the past year, many sell-side ad-tech companies have offered publishers solutions around “programmatic direct.” Publisher analytics provider Yieldex has rolled out a simple tool called ” YieldEdge Sponsorship Calendar” that has been adopted in recent weeks by Comcast Spotlight, the local media sales arm of the cable giant. The product sounds fairly mundane, but it […]

In a striking coincidence, Turner Digital Ad Sales’ launch of its private marketplace  comes a day after former ad chief Walker Jacobs, who regarded programmatic methods suspiciously, joined Clear Channel Outdoor as chief revenue officer and president of sales. In an interview with AdExchanger a year ago, Jacobs, who resigned as EVP, Turner Digital Sales […]

Supply-side platform AdSlot’s pitch to help sell publishers’ guaranteed inventory via programmatic methods begins with avoiding anything that acts like a private marketplace. The company, which acquired ad agency workflow provider Facilitate Digital more than a month ago, has launched its Guaranteed Marketplace for direct online display sales this week. And, as AdSlot CEO Ian Lowe […]

In the past week, Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify – two companies whose aim is to ensure that brand advertisers get the kind of exposure and inventory they expect – unveiled their respective tools designed to limit, if not eliminate, the waste caused by fraudulent traffic – namely “bots.” The new tools, as outlined by […]

This morning NBC Universal entered a strategic partnership with Comcast and Twitter to engineer a “See It” feature allowing Xfinity TV viewers to take action around a TV show from their Twitter stream. The integration allows Xfinity TV viewers to take actions such as starting a show on-demand or setting a DVR to record. Executives […]

“The Sell-Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Jeremy Steinberg, senior vice president of digital ad sales for The Weather Company. After attending my very first ANA Masters of Marketing conference, I will never be the same. OK, maybe that is a tad […]

Keeping up with tech-savvy consumers who demand personalized experiences is a challenge for publishers and advertisers alike. Like other companies, health information provider WebMD realized it needed to revamp its advertising strategy with a greater focus on mobile devices and customizable features. Earlier this month, the company launched a new version of its app that […]

Microsoft is hoping to gain more traction with higher priced, direct sales inventory on its network by striking an agreement with its fellow portals, AOL and Yahoo, to support technical specifications for automating the buying process around reserved ad sales. In other words, Microsoft is joining the push toward “premium programmatic” that AOL trumpeted Monday […]

Spotify, the ad-supported music streaming service, has barely scratched the surface of its advertising capabilities, but the 7-year-old company is treading carefully. The streaming service is up to more than 24 million active users, a quarter of whom are premium subscribers, and earned $577 million in total revenue last year. Part of the Stockholm-based company’s […]

Todd Haskell began his new job as Hearst Magazine Digital’s chief revenue officer less than a month ago, joining the publisher of magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Elle and Good Housekeeping to manage the business side of the 28 related websites and 14 mobile properties. He previously served six years as the group VP of […]

In recent months, NYTimes.com has sought to refine its homepage ad strategy with the promise of something “unique” for large advertisers in consumer packaged goods, automotive, electronics and finance. The latest effort is on behalf of Bank of America and builds on the publisher’s evolving video strategy. The twist in this case is an “interactive” […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Alex Linde, vice president of monetization at The Weather Company and board member of the San Francisco Bay Area Innovation Group. In the race from TV dollars to so-called digital […]

Scale continues to be one of the most challenging aspects of native advertising, and a growing number of companies are working to solve it. As advertisers look for solutions, a number of trends are beginning to emerge, according to a new report from the research firm Altimeter Group. “We’re seeing two fundamental ways that the […]

Buying MoPub does a few things for Twitter, potentially. It adds $100 million in 2013 revenue to Twitter’s income statement in the months leading up to a probable IPO. It creates an opportunity to monetize Twitter’s valuable data “off-platform” through an internally run mobile exchange. This could work by creating BlueKai-like data segments that would […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Kristine Welker, vice president, publisher and chief revenue officer of Dr. Oz Magazine at The Hearst Corp. I just embarked on my third startup, and it is as thrilling as […]

Like a lot of midsize independent newspapers, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is starting to see some thaw in the economic downturn that hurt the print business at large. While the climate is better, the challenge of declining print ad revenues has been replaced by the challenge of developing a more mature online ad strategy. The […]

Lori Tavoularis, managing director for Revenue Partnerships at Tribune Digital, said she is ignoring the uncertainty around a possible sale of some or all of the newspaper division that houses her unit. Last week, according to The Daily Caller, Koch Industries decided to give up its pursuit of the newspaper chain, which was split from […]

“Native advertising” is a projection of publisher desires to revamp traditional print advertorials. Advertisers, too, like the idea of doing something unique that dovetails with editorial content and looks good across devices without requiring three creative versions. But scalability remains an issue. Ad-tech provider Appssavvy is one of several players looking for ways to combine the […]

A year after unveiling the Wall St. Journal’s private exchange, WSJ Audex, its parent company News Corp has expanded that model to cover the rest of its global publications. The News Corp Global Exchange, as its known, won’t replace WSJ Audex, but will instead serve as an umbrella over that offering and will include inventory […]

Google is ramping up its focus on online gaming by bringing its video ad-skipping tool TrueView to the space. In doing so, Google is making good on a promise Susan Wojcicki, SVP of advertising, made back in February at the IAB Annual Meeting to expand the use of TrueView, which the company sees as a […]

With 12 years experience in digital, Jeff Burkett has seen his share of sell-side ad tech at The Washington Post.  His latest role, senior director of sales operations, is perhaps a sign of the times for the publishing world in general, as Burkett is now building his reach to the print side of “ops” while […]

Links may be the workhorses of a publisher’s marketing strategy, but to Pete Sheinbaum, former CEO of the online newsletter Daily Candy, they represent a multitude of opportunities. After the publisher was acquired by Comcast in 2008, Sheinbaum founded LinkSmart, which offers tools to help publishers manage and monetize their links. AdExchanger sat down with […]

“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Jeremy Hlavacek, vice president of operations and strategic partnerships at The Weather Company’s WeatherFX Data Unit. Yield is the lifeblood of digital publishers. The primary business goal of all […]

In a surprise Monday afternoon announcement, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has struck a deal with the Washington Post Company to buy its namesake newspaper for $250 million. Read the release. The purchase comes just a few days after WaPo’s Q2 earnings demonstrated some slight income and revenue gains, though, as usual, that was due to […]

With unwavering digital-only focus, Anthony Hitchings, head of advertising technology and digital operations at FT.com, has had a front-row seat to the promises and pitfalls of programmatic media from within a large newspaper publisher’s online unit. “I see the programmatic space as providing a great opportunity for us.  But there are ‘teething troubles,’ if you […]

While the New York Times Co.’s digital advertising revenue could have been worse in Q2, the publisher saw its display strategy continued to be challenged by what the company said was a “complex and fragmented” marketplace. Read the release (PDF). Digital ad sales brought in $51.2 million during the quarter, a decline of 2.7%. In […]

During the NYTCo’s Q1 earnings call in April, executives had discussed the possibility of a turnaround in the newspaper publisher’s display ad sales, particularly mobile, but analysts don’t expect a change any time soon. For now, it looks like more of the same, particularly for the company’s display ad sales, which fell 4% in Q1. […]

The combined media spending of Publicis Groupe and Omnicom would amount to roughly $53 billion, according to separate sets of data from Pivotal Research’s Brian Wieser and WPP analytics unit Kantar Media. That translates into a tremendous amount of buying clout. Major publishers across all media continued to absorb the news from this weekend about […]

After six months in beta, LinkedIn unveiled its “Sponsored Updates” feature for marketers with budgets of all sizes, and mindful of balancing current trends around programmatic, native advertising and content marketing. Alison L. Engel, LinkedIn’s senior director of global marketing, acknowledged that those terms sum up the latest evolution of the professional social network’s advertising […]