Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Ad Tech Is Consolidating Ad tech shows the hallmarks of a maturing market. Financing for ad tech companies this year is on pace for $1.5 billion, about half what it reached in 2015, The New York Times reports, citing data from CB Insights. Meanwhile, […]
Trigger warning: This article contains references to yet another three-letter acronym in the advertising technology ecosystem. Improvado is an extract, transform, load (ETL) data startup focused on the agency and advertiser landscape. The company raised a $3 million seed round with backing from a range of familiar ad tech names, including Auren Hoffman, the CEO […]
Is opportunity fading for ad tech startups to go public or be acquired at a healthy premium? The answer is no, at least not for everyone, said Elgin Thompson, managing director of the technology investment advisory firm Digital Capital Advisors, at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC I/O in San Francisco last week. A look back at IPO filings […]
Elgin Thompson, managing director of Digital Capital Advisors, will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Programmatic IO conference on April 10-11 at the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco. The passion of Wall Street’s 2013-era love affair with ad tech may have cooled, but investment banker Elgin Thompson expects the industry will produce some noteworthy exits yet. “I […]
Criteo has always been something of an ad tech enigma. That French retargeting virtuoso, the golden child of Wall St. as the markets soured on advertising technology. But nothing gold can stay. And now Criteo has its work cut out to convince investors that the company can grow in the face of browser anti-tracking updates, namely […]
While ad tech companies have been accumulating VC funds and growing their stacks – and sales orgs – for a while, many took pains to rightsize over the past year or so. For some, the intent was to recapitalize or to prep for a sale if an IPO was a no-go. For others, it was […]
Twitter’s ad tech fortunes haven’t been great. Most recently, it took its 479-million-dollar acquisition TellApart for a long walk behind the barn. However, Twitter isn’t giving up on ad tech, at least not as an investor, said co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey at a Wednesday panel hosted by Omnicom’s OMD in Cannes. “We’re definitely not […]
Ad tech talent is packing up and moving on. Longtime ad tech insiders – many who started before the dot-com boom – see their peers moving to other industries or fleeing for safety into the arms of the duopoly. When Ari Paparo, founder and CEO of Beeswax, tweeted, “The best people are leaving the business […]
If you work in ad tech, you’ve probably crossed paths with Eric Franchi, co-founder of early ad-net-turned-creative-ad-platform Undertone, somewhere on the conference circuit. Franchi has set his sights on new endeavors, as the longtime investor and startup adviser revealed late Thursday his last day at Undertone will be June 1. Franchi helped carry Undertone through […]
Twitter has hired former Turn CEO Bruce Falck to lead its Revenue Product team, according to a tweet Thursday by company co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey. Falck has earned a reputation as an ad tech turnaround artist, stepping in as COO at BrightRoll a year prior to its $640 million sale to Yahoo and then […]
The Trade Desk first picked up steam in the market around five years ago positioning itself as a pure-play agency toolkit. It won business at the expense of earlier DSPs, such as Turn and TubeMogul, that had frosted their agency relationships by going directly to brands. Now the company is plotting its course as the DSP […]
As header bidding grows, ad exchanges are sending more ad impressions per second and DSPs must evaluate more impressions than ever. The massive uptick in volume, which far outpaces programmatic revenue growth, is straining ad tech infrastructure. With more queries to sift through, it costs more to buy the same ads. And as a result, […]
Many New York City-based ad tech leaders saw Tuesday’s acquisition of Moat by the Silicon Valley titan Oracle as a testament to the city’s distinct startup ecosystem. The Moat deal was a victory for the city and “a validation of the tech scene here,” said DataXu CEO Mike Baker, a prolific ad tech angel investor, […]
With early-stage ad tech venture capital (VC) dwindling in recent years, some ad tech entrepreneurs stepped in to fill that funding gap, forming an angel investor ecosystem. While institutional investors are disenchanted with ad tech, insiders are more optimistic. AppNexus founder and CEO Brian O’Kelley said he hopes to invest “in a space I understand […]
Martin Kihn, Research VP at Gartner, will speak about the state of mar tech and ad tech at Programmatic IO on April 5 in San Francisco. Ad tech and mar tech may not converge after all. Two years ago, Gartner analyst Marty Kihn predicted that owned media (mar tech) and paid media (ad tech) technologies would come […]
Collective promoted its COO Kerry Bianchi to CEO Thursday, as the 12-year-old startup continues to evolve out of the traditional ad network business. Joe Apprendi, Collective’s founder and now its former CEO, will remain on the board as executive chairman. Since 2015, Collective has reshaped its business to meet what Bianchi described as the next […]
This is the latest installment in “PII,” a series featuring the talent that makes the wheels turn in our data-driven advertising world. Read previous interviews with talent from Mindshare, Mediavest | Spark, Razorfish, Essence, INNOCEAN and Clear Channel Outdoor. Former Brightroll and Amazon exec Craig Whitmer recently joined location data company Placed as VP of programmatic. Placed “measures what people do […]
When online infrastructure company Dyn got hit by three DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks Friday, it shut down major sites using Dyn, including Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify and The New York Times. The attack also disrupted the ad industry. Even if a publisher wasn’t affected, the attack impacted many of the tech partners delivering and […]
The Trade Desk expects a valuation between $550 million and $600 million, according to an amended S-1 filed Tuesday. The company will make 4.6 million shares available on the market, with an anticipated share price between $14 and $16. At the high end, it hopes to raise $85.9 million, compared to $86.3 million in its […]
Agencies are straining to recruit and retain data-driven talent. Prospects with a strong background in statistical analysis and data mining – the second most popular skill on LinkedIn as of January – aren’t necessarily looking to work at a media agency. And it’s hard for agencies to retain employees due to a business culture that […]
Verizon won’t complete its $4.8 billion acquisition of Yahoo until next year, but that hasn’t stopped speculation about which pieces of ad tech will come along for the ride. As Yahoo and AOL built their respective ad stacks to serve publishers and advertisers over time, obvious crossovers have occurred. So what’s complementary, what’s redundant and […]
It’s a tale of the haves and the have-nots. Deal values for mar tech are exploding, according to M&A activity surveys from Jordan Edmiston Group (JEGI) and Petsky Prunier, highlighting the first half of 2016. By contrast, ad tech, despite heavy consolidation speculation, is still in a slump. JEGI noted $13.3 billion in deal value […]
The ANA report on agency transparency erupted last week, intensifying a long-expected public dispute between brands and their media agencies. While the report focused on brands and agency holding companies, its findings could potentially affect ad tech companies. AdExchanger reached out to some leaders in the ad tech sphere to see how they viewed the […]
More than a quarter of programmatic decisions are made by agencies for their advertisers – up from 20% since September. The revelation was presented by Mark Mahaney, managing director at RBC Capital Markets, at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC I.O conference in San Francisco on Thursday. The figures, which surprised Mahaney, show agencies make 27% of those decisions […]
Jonathan Hsia will discuss advertiser perceptions of ad tech on April 13 at PROGRAMMATIC.IO in San Francisco. While ad tech capabilities have matured, marketers still need to catch up, said Jonathan Hsia, Mindshare North America’s head of digital investment. “It really is more a question of: What do marketers need to do to leverage ad tech in a […]
A handful of ad tech employees who started out at agencies are now returning to senior-level agency roles. And they’re bringing a particularly valuable blend of skills with them. According to Accuen CEO Megan Pagliuca, that initial agency experience is key. “There’s a big con of hiring people from ad tech [without an agency background] […]
Following a previous Snapchat campaign aimed at campus students from last year, Goldman Sachs is doubling down with a broad investment across the messaging service’s Discover and Live Story channels. Major financial players like American Express, Visa, MasterCard, Bank of America and JP Morgan have also been early adopters to Snapchat advertising. Goldman’s ad buy, which […]
The telco industry’s obsession with ad tech shows no sign of slowing down and Verizon’s corporate venture arm is the latest accelerant. Verizon Ventures has invested $5.5 million in Qualia, a company focused on mining intent data, and which recently merged with cross-device tool BlueCava. The Series B round included support from S3 Ventures. It’s […]
If MediaMath co-President Mike Lamb has his druthers, the convergence of ad tech and marketing tech – the industry’s current inescapable narrative – will manifest in two ways. The first is beginning to happen: a set of integrations that advertisers or their agencies can use to clip together their paid media platform to their marketing […]
Programmatic ad tech companies aren’t properly estimating their total addressable market, said BMO Capital Markets equity research analyst Dan Salmon. Salmon presented a report Thursday at Programmatic I/O in San Francisco that pointed to two areas where these estimates tend to get thrown off. First, most ad tech vendors don’t factor in take rates – the […]
