The Weather Company is a large publisher with lots of first-party data and, with investments from IBM Watson Advertising, it’s using AI technology to mitigate bias in advertising. The goal is to use both to monetize quality content above short-term gains in ad revenue, says CEO Sheri Bachstein.
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Mind Your Own IABeeswax Ad Age dinged the IAB for Meta’s prime placement during the trade group’s Annual Leadership Meeting this week. Three small businesses with the Internet for Growth, an IAB-backed advocacy group, all cited Facebook and Instagram advertising during their presentations. “I […]
“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 Melinda Han Williams, Chief Data Scientist, Dstillery. Google’s announcement that its “data-driven attribution” – that its machine-learning-driven attribution modeling will be the default attribution method in Google Ads – took […]
Erik Huberman, CEO and founder of marketing consultancy Hawke Media, has some pretty strong – if not outright harsh – words for most media agencies out there: “They’re full of [expletive].” Before founding the Los Angeles-based company in 2014, Huberman launched and sold two commerce companies – Swag of the Month and Ellie – and […]
“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 by Sarah Rose, SVP International Digital Operations, Data & Platform Ops at IPG’s Kinesso. Artificial intelligence is a heavy and complex topic with tons of deep ethical complications, confusing applications and unknown […]
Direct-to-consumer advertisers pumping tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars into their Facebook ads each month know the power of a good creative message. The best ad creatives drive ROAS (return on ad spend) that can be orders of magnitude higher than a failed message. But how can busy, short-staffed marketing departments test new creative […]
Ad-Lib.io, a company founded by a group of former Google execs in 2017 and which offers creative workflow tools, has clinched an additional $6 million in Series A financing. The latest round brings its total funding to $12 million in less than two years and will be used to accelerate the growth of the London-based […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Taking A Hit The ongoing pandemic is still throwing IPG for a loop as the holdco rethinks its structure for the year ahead. IPG reported net sales of $8 billion in 2020, a 6.5% decrease compared with the previous year, The Wall Street Journal […]
“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 […]
