ai

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. The rapid shift to streaming TV last year significantly disrupted the advertising industry, and was nothing short of transformational amidst the pandemic, social unrest and a divisive presidential election. But despite its vast potential as an emerging advertising platform for brands and marketers, streaming ad […]

Industry Preview is a special, limited-run audio series featuring interviews with key leaders in marketing, media and technology who share their predictions and key priorities for 2021. This podcast is sponsored by IBM Watson Advertising.  Brands have long been sold the vision that artificial intelligence will one day supercharge their marketing plans, but results have been […]

Industry Preview is a special, limited-run audio series, featuring interviews with key leaders in marketing, media and technology who share their predictions and key priorities for 2021.  This podcast is sponsored by IBM Watson Advertising. The term “artificial intelligence” gets tossed around to loosely describe everything from dynamic creative optimization and automated media planning to […]

Ever since MeritDirect partnered with private equity firm Mountaingate Capital in 2019, it’s aggressively expanded its data and service offerings in the B2B space. In November, the Rye Brooke, NY-based company purchased 180byTwo – terms were undisclosed – marking its second acquisition deal this year; it bought Compass Marketing Solutions in January. “Putting these companies […]

IBM has been banging the drum for years about the role artificial intelligence can play to support everything from cancer treatment to retail personalization. More recently, though, IBM has started to prioritize practical advertising applications of its cognitive computing system, Watson. Last month, IBM brought its AI to ad tech through partnerships with Xandr, Magnite, […]

“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 Shiv Gupta, founder at U of Digital. Ad tech is full of BS. Why is that? Because when companies create confusion about their products, to make themselves sound more advanced than […]

Lomit Patel, VP of growth at IMVU, a 3D avatar-based social networking universe, was already planning for an economic downturn in 2017. Growth marketing, he said, is as much about expansion as it is about mitigating risk. “I never only think about the moment, I think 12 to 18 months out,” said Patel, who joined […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Do Not Merge A group of antitrust economists filed comments on the new DOJ/FTC draft guidelines for vertical mergers, calling the new draft “excessively permissive” for large companies. Historically, antitrust cases focus on horizontal acquisitions, when a company buys a direct competitor. But old […]

“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 Orchid Richardson, vice president and managing director of the Data Center of Excellence at the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).  Lexus recently released the first ad written by AI – and […]

Artificial intelligence (AI) adoption is relatively modest across large enterprises, but marketing and sales organizations are embracing the technology most quickly. Forty-six percent of companies are investing in AI for sales and marketing purposes, and 50% are deploying AI projects for commerce and customer service, according to a report released Thursday by Constellation Research. By […]

Like most publishers, The Associated Press (AP) is evaluating ways it can increase video and article output without straining its staff or resources. A few years ago, the AP began researching ways it could leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve its internal processes. The publisher then formed a cross-functional AI committee to vet […]

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 […]

Around this time last year, the chatter around artificial intelligence (AI) was escalating as Salesforce and IBM unveiled splashy programs to help advertisers make sense of massive and complex reams of data, in order to enable more personalized marketing. Oracle, too, announced the creation of Adaptive Intelligence Apps at the time, and at its annual […]

Food brands that want their ad creative to appear next to recipes for quick and easy dinners, Japanese food or gluten-free meals can buy inventory via CafeMedia’s private marketplaces that fits into those content categories. CafeMedia created those content categories using IBM Watson’s artificial intelligence (AI). Traditionally, companies use content management systems to categorize and […]

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 looking to claim itself a spot beside the top dogs competing on the video and cloud front. It says data is the differentiator. “Unlike other providers who use your data to sell groceries or other services that compete [with your business], your data belongs to you,” Martin Wahl, principal program manager for Microsoft, […]

Investors are putting Facebook’s feet to the fire about fake news. At the company’s annual shareholder’s meeting on Thursday, investors questioned CEO Mark Zuckerberg about how Facebook is combatting the spread of false news on its platform. Advertisers have become increasingly sensitive to brand safety issues since the YouTube/Google Display Network debacle kicked off in […]

Google rolled out a machine learning-powered display product called Smart display campaigns on Thursday. The product is now generally available to all advertisers buying native, image or text ads across the Google Display Network (GDN). Smart display campaigns are accessible via AdWords and reach more than 3 million GDN sites and apps on GDN now. […]

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 […]

Nielsen Marketing Cloud has built a new brain. The measurement company unveiled Nielsen Artificial Intelligence (AI) on Tuesday, meant to help advertiser and publisher clients build custom audience segments in real time. Nielsen AI is baked into the Nielsen Marketing Cloud platform and designed to process multiple external circumstances concurrently, which it can then use to […]

T.O by Lipton, Unilever’s Keurig-like tea brewer in France, was struggling to turn analytics from its ecommerce platform into actionable insights. “With [tools like] Google Analytics, I could know what consumers were doing, but I had difficulty knowing why they were dropping off or why they weren’t buying our machines,” said Mathieu Bernard, ecommerce lead […]

Havas Media is going through a brain change thanks to IBM and Watson developer Equals 3. While Havas’s relationship with IBM goes back for decades, it was mostly on the creative side. But Havas Media has over the past year been installing and training a Watson-powered artificial intelligence (AI) solution – in the form of […]

This is the third of three stories in a mini-series on how artificial intelligence is affecting the work that agencies do. Read the previous stories about Xaxis and Publicis.Sapient.  After years of double-digit growth, global lingerie brand Cosabella suddenly lost momentum in 2016. “We decided we needed to cut ties [with our agency] and change something […]

This is the second of three stories in a mini-series on how artificial intelligence is affecting the work that agencies do. The next installment will publish on Friday. Read the first story about Xaxis.  As marketer interest in artificial Intelligence (AI) grows, Publicis.Sapient sees opportunity to provide guidance. It has a dedicated unit that provides AI-related advice […]

Think of IBM and you’re likely imagining heavy technologies managed by an expensive services division. But IBM Chief Digital Officer Bob Lord emphasizes that’s the old company. He’s here to help IBM reinvent itself and, most importantly, its way of doing business. “What I’ve loved doing throughout my career is helping a company pivot,” Lord […]

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which officially kicks off Thursday, is fundamentally a hardware show. It’s a sprawl of new toys that consumers will either really want (drones!) or want not at all (3-D TVs!). “One needs to be careful about CES, as there are a lot of things on display and aren’t relevant for […]

  Artificial intelligence (AI) is surging in ad/mar tech land. Or resurging, depending on how good your memory is. IBM continues to push Watson, and, in the run-up to their respective conferences, Salesforce and Oracle talked up their own AI initiatives. Also, Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon banded together to create best practices around […]

Microsoft underwent big shifts in its platforms and ads business in the last year, first when it shook up its sales structure by outsourcing its direct order business to AOL and again, when it dropped $26.2 billion on LinkedIn. And now, Microsoft is eyeing artificial intelligence. It recently bought messaging app developer Wand Labs to beta test intelligent chat […]

Salesforce wants to “democratize” the development of artificial intelligence (AI) applications. That is, making AI available to as many business users as possible. Consequently, it’s baked an AI system called Einstein into the Salesforce platform – such that its capabilities are available across its various clouds, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud. “AI […]