If you’re a mature marketing technology platform: Congrats. 2018 was your year and the future looks bright. But if you’re an ad tech company without a unique value prop that’s jonesing for an exit, apologies, the outlook remains fairly bleak. Although digital advertising is still growing – it’s a $100 billion market today – Google and Facebook […]
Audio ads should be personalized, too. That’s the thought behind Adobe’s partnership with A Million Ads, which powers dynamic creative optimization in digital and programmatic audio, announced Monday. Adobe launched programmatic audio capabilities in July 2017, after receiving an uptick in demand from its customer base, said Justin Merickel, VP of media optimizer at Adobe […]
When Adobe acquired the B2B marketing company Marketo for $4.8 billion last week, investors pressed CEO Shantanu Narayen to explain the gulf between Adobe’s price tag and Wall Street’s valuation of Marketo two years ago, when Vista Equity Partners snapped it off the stock market for $1.8 billion. Private equity investors have shown they have […]
Despite the massive steps the ad industry has made in figuring out addressable TV just this year, advancement comes not from stunning breakthroughs, but simply from attaching a few additional pipes and freeing a new trickle of inventory or data. On Thursday, Adobe Advertising Cloud TV soldered together a few more of those connections by […]
Adobe said Thursday it has agreed to acquire the B2B marketing platform Marketo for $4.75 billion. It’s the biggest deal in Adobe’s history. And the cloud technology giant may be shelling out so much because Marketo’s B2B category strength could help as Adobe moves into media buying and ecommerce, à la TubeMogul and Magento, where […]
If Adobe is actually in talks to buy Marketo from the PE firm Vista Equity Partners, as Reuters reported Wednesday, then it would suddenly become a major player in the B2B marketing space. To be clear, there’s no deal in place. The report, citing anonymous sources, said Adobe would pay “significantly more” than the $1.8 […]
Less than two years after Vector Capital sealed its $122 million deal to acquire Sizmek, the private equity firm is already looking to divest. Multiple sources with direct knowledge told AdExchanger that Vector has been shopping Sizmek, possibly as early as April, and just a year and a half after the deal closed. Vector denied […]
When IPG acquired Acxiom’s managed services group, Marketing Solutions (AMS), for $2.3 billion last week, it marked the end of a five- months-long strategic review of the business – and the start of the next big sales review process with LiveRamp. Acxiom already had opened a strategic review of LiveRamp but was intent on selling […]
Adobe said Monday it will buy the ecommerce platform Magento for $1.68 billion. Magento’s 2017 revenue was $150 million, and the deal is expected to close by the end of August. Ecommerce has long been a big hole in Adobe’s tech, even as competitors spent heavily to acquire Magento’s competitors. SAP has owned hybris since […]
In the National Football League, the whole team has to know the same playbook for the plays to work. And the same is true for the NFL’s marketing group, which in 2017 began centralizing its audience data to improve team-level marketing and the value of league sponsorships. “We’re building a data co-op, in a sense,” […]
“Everyone Wants To Be A CDP. Here’s Who’s Actually Doing It.” is presented by mParticle. Customer data platform (CDP) capabilities borrow attributes from CRM, tag management and even more traditional data onboarding. Consequently, they are often conflated with ad tech systems like data management platforms (DMPs), despite having use cases that go beyond paid media and into […]
24 Hour Fitness is trying to transform into a brand that customers will consider even outside of the gym. “The goal is to keep people engaged with fitness and to be this companion along their fitness journey,” said CMO Tom Lapcevic. “That’s where digital really enters the picture. We now have the ability to provide […]
Despite broad concerns about the viability of online media and advertising, M&A in the sector is heating up thanks to the growth of ecommerce and commerce-based media solutions, like Apple’s purchase of digital subscription service Next Issue Media for an undisclosed amount. The total number of deals in media, marketing and technology dropped by 7% […]
Salesforce’s data management platform (DMP) continues the strong ascent it began last quarter, according to Advertiser Perceptions’ Q4 Programmatic Intelligence report, and has moved closer to catching Oracle. Oracle DMP, despite leading in marketer use and intent, lags behind in the selection factors relevant to marketers. Advertiser Perceptions Chief Strategy Officer Kevin Mannion noted that Oracle inherited […]
One would think Time Inc., which under new parent company Meredith will lay off 1,200 as well as restructure its ad sales org, wouldn’t be in the market for new vendor implementations. Nevertheless, the publisher is testing a publisher tool called Audience Manager Reporting for Publishers, which Adobe will roll out over the next few months. The […]
Adobe has placed a new exec in charge of its advertising cloud. TubeMogul’s longtime CMO and head of strategy, Keith Eadie, now oversees product, engineering and overall go-to-market for Adobe’s media and advertising business. His title is VP and GM of Adobe Advertising Cloud. Meanwhile his predecessor, TubeMogul CEO and founder Brett Wilson, is now […]
Paris-based ecommerce analytics platform ContentSquare has raised a $42 million Series B round from a series of investors including US VC firm Canaan and Highland Europe. ContentSquare previously had raised $20 million, bringing it to a total of $62 million after this round. The company will use the financing to support research and development of […]
The advertising industry has been plagued by a lack of trust, with vendors, agencies and marketers looking at each other askance. Ad fraud, bad traffic and hidden fees have taken their toll, and while industry players have taken measures to reinstitute their good standing, their work isn’t nearly complete. During a panel Thursday at AdExchanger’s […]
Adobe and AppNexus plan to give marketers supply-chain transparency from the DSP to the SSP by partnering on a pilot program. Adobe Advertising Cloud will reveal all fees taken by the DSP, including the platform fee and any add-ons, as well as AppNexus’ bill to the publisher, which will help marketers track media dollars through […]
MGM Resorts International’s media, ecommerce and analytics teams used to work in silos. “You’d have one team in analytics sending out reports … and separate product owners doing A/B testing and data management,” said Sylvester Obafunwa, the company’s director of digital analytics. “In the past, a lot of our [tech] integration was also primarily focused […]
As Gartner analyst Martin Kihn recently predicted, the big enterprise marketing clouds are beginning to pursue divergent product strategies with clear points of distinction. While Salesforce heralds its CRM data and hooks into other categories like sales and commerce, Adobe’s differentiator is creative with growing emphasis on digital experience. In the case of Oracle, which […]
Salesforce has set up a market of second-party data so advertisers can buy data directly from publishers. The subscription-based Salesforce Data Studio, which debuted on Wednesday, evolved out of the product Krux Link, a data-sharing platform Salesforce inherited when it bought the data management platform Krux. Salesforce’s goal is to give advertisers more validated data […]
Many advertisers want reach, but when Canada Dry executed a campaign with Spotify and Adobe, it optimized against a softer metric: mindset. “We don’t think of consumers as just 18-49-year-olds or young millennials,” said Brit Sundberg, programmatic media and data strategy manager for Dr Pepper Snapple Group, which owns Canada Dry. “We think of our […]
There’s been no shortage of ad tech M&A lately, and video’s been one of the biggest drivers of deal activity. “Thirty-six months ago, YouTube MCNs [multichannel networks] were the video solution of choice to reach audiences with compelling content,” said Elgin Thompson, managing director for investment bank Digital Capital Advisors. “Now, solutions intended to monetize […]
Every year, 75 million passengers travel through Heathrow Airport, shopping, eating and engaging with services as they wait to board their flights. But despite the thousands of interactions passengers have with its concessions, Heathrow itself knows very little about those people, said Simon Chatfield, head of eBusiness and CRM at Heathrow Airport. “Most of that […]
“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Chris Hock, head of business strategy and development, media and entertainment, at Adobe. EMarketer pegs the US addressable TV ad spend at $1.56 billion for 2017. That’s double the rate of 2016, which was double […]
Adobe is looking to get schooled on AI and data science. While many technology giants foster relationships with academics by offering them lucrative part-time consultancy positions. Adobe is pursuing a different tack: dishing out $50,000 no-strings-attached grants to professors and doctoral students working on projects of joint interest. “What academia provides is more the advanced […]
Microsoft is beta testing a feature on its Bing search engine called Custom Audiences. It is designed to improve targeting by letting advertisers upload first-party files like CRM, purchase history and subscription data. If advertisers want to participate in the beta test, which has been underway for several months, advertisers must upload their data via […]
Marketing may be a trillion-dollar industry, but its supply chain needs a makeover, says Microsoft’s CMO. “What makes marketing such a unique case is that the labor component is much higher than any other industry,” said CMO Grad Conn. “I think there’s a lot of opportunity to optimize the way we’re working in marketing and […]
Until late 2016, Dr. Pepper Snapple Group had partnered with an agency to manage most of its programmatic and data capabilities. But like many marketers, the beverage brand sees value in making media its own remit. “It made more sense to pull that in-house so we’d have more transparency into how everything was working, what […]
