Sovrn’s acquisition of VigLink last week will make 2019 Sovrn’s first year when subscription software services outearn its traditional advertising exchange. Sovrn began in 2014 as an SSP offering scale and analytics on its aggregated publishing data, growing to be one of the largest ad networks with tens of thousands of blogs and publisher clients. […]
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The old adage applies to the new media landscape, where sweeping technology changes have scattered US audiences across new devices but has also greatly increased the amount of content consumed per year. The average American adult watches 5 hours and 24 minutes per day of […]
Keith Weed announced Thursday that he will step down from his role as Unilever’s chief marketing and communications officer in April. Weed has worked for Unilever for more than 35 years, the last eight as Unilever’s top marketer. His departure, which he announced in a tweet, has been planned for more than a year. It […]
Forrester tried to acquire SiriusDecisions, a B2B market research and analytics firm, five years ago, so closing a $245 million deal for the company last week felt like a natural step. But SiriusDecisions was the third acquisition in the past half-year for Forrester, which historically buys a company every three years or so, said founder […]
LiveRamp, dataxu and Index Exchange launched the first commercial proof of concept for the Advertising ID Consortium on Thursday. The product places LiveRamp’s IdentityLink directly in the bidstream, skipping the cookie syncs typically required for a DSP and SSP to match against LiveRamp in a campaign. Additionally, Bill Simmons, dataxu’s co-founder and CTO, is joining […]
When Gap Inc. launched the men’s activewear label Hill City in September, it marked its first new brand in a decade, and its first-ever foray into digital-first territory. Hill City has some notable differences compared to other DTC companies – like corporate ownership and a running start with distribution in 50 Athleta stores (Gap’s activewear […]
Thanksgiving holiday shopping trends have shifted from surprising to predictable. At this point, the big news will be in some hypothetical, future November when ecommerce sales stop growing hand over fist. Ecommerce sales reached $18 billion combined for Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, according to Adobe. Cyber Monday alone cleared about $8 billion, the […]
Thanksgiving and watching football on Thanksgiving are American traditions. But this year will be the first celebration of what you might call Ticketmaster’s football Thanks-for-giving-us-your-business day. The ticket-sales company has secured the exclusive ticketing rights for the NFL and transitioned the league to digital-only tickets this year. Now Ticketmaster is spiking the football – which, […]
The publisher tech startup Blockthrough, which specializes in retrieving revenue lost to ad blocking, acquired its rival and category pioneer PageFair on Thursday. Terms were not disclosed. PageFair was one of the first startups offering technology for publishers to counteract ad blocking, either by circumventing the ad blocker or by creating new direct audience agreements, […]
Direct-to-consumer brands like Mack Weldon, Manscaped and Peloton have expanded beyond their Facebook and Instagram roots – but don’t expect them to start advertising with or selling most of their products on Amazon. Though Amazon seems like a natural expansion for ecommerce startups, reducing the impact of the world’s biggest ecom platform is a strategic […]
The Trade Desk reported Q3 revenue of $118.8 million, a 50% year-over-year increase. The company has maintained growth of 50% or more in the past two quarters, matching its growth rates from the same periods last year. With an upward revision to the company’s revenue forecast next quarter, CEO Jeff Green said he expects the […]
The 2016 election was a disaster for the reputations of political pollsters, many of whom missed badly. With the midterm elections now in the bag, how well did the pre-election surveys match Tuesday’s results? Pretty well, actually. Public polls and data aggregators like FiveThirtyEight were, broadly speaking, closer to the mark in 2018 than they […]
The online clothing retailer Bonobos is at the center of upheaval in US retail and ecommerce. The company was acquired by Walmart last year for $310 million and has opened 58 brick-and-mortar stores in the past seven years. Bonobos also exemplified the direct-to-consumer category in September when former CMO Micky Onvural was promoted to CEO. […]
With the midterm elections less than 24 hours away, some of the Democratic Party’s top digital advertising evangelists are worried that liberal candidates have squandered opportunities by siloing digital media and failing to adequately spend online. Conservative groups account for seven of the ten highest-spending political advertisers on Google and Facebook, according to data collected […]
Google and Amazon still dominate the demand-side platform category, but next-tier players have opportunities to win market share and for the first time there are signs that Google’s iron grip may be softening, according to the half-yearly Advertiser Perceptions DSP Wave released Wednesday. The report is based on surveys of almost 500 brand and agency […]
LiveRamp began trading as $RAMP on the New York Stock Exchange on Monday and hosted investors and analysts when the company reintroduced itself to the market following the sale of Acxiom Marketing Solutions to IPG for $2.3 billion in July. LiveRamp is embracing its position as a subscription-based middleware technology, a category that comes with […]
Amazon is testing a program that lets advertisers use search queries to retarget across the web, according to agency executives briefed about the pilot program. This capability is only available through Amazon’s DSP and it is the first time that Amazon search data is being used off of Amazon’s owned and operated platform. While Amazon […]
Online spending records have shattered across the country during this year’s midterm election cycle, but no campaign has brought more attention to digital media than that of Democrat Beto O’Rourke, a Texas congressman running for Republican Ted Cruz’s Senate seat. No candidate this year has raised more money online or spent more on Google, Facebook […]
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 […]
When The Trade Desk IPO’d in September 2016, it nearly doubled its own value projection and quickly became a $1 billion company. Fast-forward two years and the company’s market cap sits at around $6 billion. The question for many analysts and ad tech observers is: How long can this ride last? Investors have pumped a […]
Since Oracle Data Cloud’s creation four years ago, following the acquisitions of data sellers Datalogix and BlueKai, it has taken a central role in powering Oracle’s core products. Oracle Data Cloud further enhanced its ability to measure the digital media supply chain with its $850 million acquisition of Moat and the $400 million acquisition of […]
AppNexus’s new telco owner, AT&T, has withdrawn it from the Advertising ID Consortium, a shared industry cookie ID it co-founded last year, along with other independent ad tech platforms. Adweek first reported the move on Thursday. Does the withdrawal spell curtains for the independent identity graph before it really got off the ground? The consortium […]
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 […]
Oath COO Guru Gowrappan will take the reins of Verizon’s media and advertising subsidiary following the departure of Tim Armstrong, the former AOL CEO who has overseen the telco’s consolidation of AOL and Yahoo into a single platform, at the end of the year. Verizon hired Gowrappan earlier this year from Alibaba, where he had […]
Development of the Advertising ID Consortium, a shared cookie-based ID service for programmatic companies, has stalled as two of the key backers, AppNexus and LiveRamp, undertake protracted M&A processes. The consortium is still moving forward, according to sources with knowledge of the nonprofit group’s product development, but the already complicated politics of ‘co-opetition’ are exacerbated […]
The German software company eyeo GmbH, which owns Adblock Plus (ABP) and created the Acceptable Ads whitelisting program, will launch its first programmatic technology for reaching ad-blocking audiences on Wednesday. The Acceptable Ads Exchange (AAX) has been in in alpha testing since February with three DSPs – one in the US and two in Europe […]
The Wall Street Journal’s revelation Friday that Tim Armstrong, leader of Verizon’s Oath media and advertising group, is in talks to depart the company is in stark contrast with the elevation of media and advertising at its biggest competitor AT&T. When Verizon first assembled Oath, many industry insiders wondered if it would create a new […]
The advertising technology ecosystem has been waiting for Google to implement the IAB Europe Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF), a protocol for collecting consent and conveying it to intermediaries for data-driven advertising. Google and IAB Europe have been negotiating for almost three months about how to reconcile their technology and interpretations of consent for GDPR, […]
With the rapid pace of change in the advertising technology industry, a couple of years can seem like a generation of change. Which is why it was a surprise to see JB Rudelle, Criteo’s founder and CEO until 2016, return as chief executive in April, retaking the reins a month before the implementation of GDPR. […]
When GDPR took effect in May, Google told publishers and ad tech vendors it expected to implement the IAB Europe Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) by August. But Google’s consent management solution, Funding Choices, is still not an IAB-registered consent management platform (CMP) and isn’t interoperable with many IAB members. And no new timeline has […]
