Longtime AppNexus President Michael Rubenstein will leave the business at the end of the year. Rubenstein is the latest top executive at AppNexus to leave since the company was acquired by AT&T under its Xandr unit for $2 billion in June 2018. Founder and CEO Brian O’Kelley left the company in October 2018. Rubenstein joined […]
What does physical commodities trading have in common with programmatic advertising? Quite a lot. So it makes sense that ad tech godfather and AppNexus founder Brian O’Kelley is revving up a new startup called CMDTY (pronounced “commodity”) that aims to apply data and technology to the old-school industry of supply chain and logistics management. His […]
The programmatic advertising ecosystem is a mess – even its main architect agrees. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Brian O’Kelley, founder and former CEO of AT&T-owned AppNexus, shared a three-pronged proposal for how he’d start to fix the tangled web he helped weave. First, give consumers control and transparency over their data. […]
AdExchanger Talks is a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. The godfather of programmatic has retired from advertising. Or has he? In his first interview since selling AppNexus to AT&T for an estimated $1.6 billion (and stepping down), former CEO Brian O’Kelley comes on the AdExchanger podcast for a nice long talk. O’Kelley, known to friends […]
Brian O’Kelley’s departure as CEO of AppNexus surprised few in the industry who know him. His sharp opinions and independent mindset made him an ad tech provocateur and a fearless leader. But that same personality seemed incompatible with taking a subservient role to Xandr CEO Brian Lesser within the AT&T mega-corporation. After all, this is […]
A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…
AT&T has big plans to operate a programmatic exchange for the advanced TV advertising industry. Its Monday acquisition of AppNexus gives AT&T the infrastructure and relationships with content owners and buyers to operate that exchange at scale. But it remains to be seen if AppNexus clients will be spooked by its loss of independence and […]
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 […]
AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley has been waiting 10 years for ad tech to become transparent. Less than a week after Rubicon Project slashed its take rate in half, to 10% to 12%, by doing away with buy-side fees, AppNexus said its fees are even lower. The company revealed it charges an 8.5% average to the […]
AppNexus has banned right-wing publisher Breitbart from selling on its exchange for violating its policy on hate speech – an order endorsed by CEO Brian O’Kelley, and depending on who you ask, also instigated by him. The ban was first reported by Bloomberg. According to an internal source, at some point last week O’Kelley demanded that his ad quality team […]
AppNexus has long been the grand poobah of indie programmatic media platforms. But lately it has begun to look like a company under siege. There’s the fraud issue, which became an albatross after competitors Rubicon Project and OpenX cleaned up two years ago while AppNexus continued to allow blind impression resale. It has since fixed […]
An AdExchanger story published Wednesday describes the persistent problem of fraudulent ad impressions in the AppNexus inventory supply, and the company’s plans to fix it. Its plan of attack includes a new certified supply program that will clearly label inventory AppNexus has deemed “valid.” Buyers can choose to purchase only the good stuff, while ignoring the uncertified […]
The independent ad tech company that powers more than 30 billion ad impressions per day through its platform is now, officially, a $1 billion-plus business. AppNexus revealed Monday it has closed a $60 million investment round from an unidentified Boston public equity and asset management firm, valuing the company at about $1.2 billion. At the […]
If you made it to AppNexus’ New York Summit on Wednesday, you might have come away feeling that the programmatic frontier has been largely colonized — at least as pertains to traditional display — and the remaining work to be done is along the lines of tree clearing and swamp draining. VC investment has slowed […]
