When it comes to mobile ad fraud, everything old is new again. “All the bad stuff we saw happen in web 1.0 in terms of trying to trick users is coming back with mobile,” said Alex Calic, CRO of The Media Trust, a company focused on ad verification and malware detection. That’s certainly the case […]
Ad tech might not be as sexy a buy as it was just a few short years ago, but that didn’t stop Israeli performance advertising company Perion from buying American ad net Undertone on Tuesday for up to $180 million in cash. Of that sum, $91 million is payable at closing and the remaining $89 […]
Tim Armstrong is going to have to look for a new successor. The AOL CEO’s heir apparent, the highly visible Bob Lord, will soon step down from the company, which he joined two years ago to help spearhead an aggressive expansion of the company’s ad technology vision. The Wall Street Journal first reported the news […]
When Forrester released its Wave assessment for video ad platforms Monday, the ability for each demand-side platform (DSP) to buy cross-screen – including linear TV – was a key factor. “The biggest thing large advertisers are struggling with is how to use digital video and TV in combination, not just digital video by itself,” said […]
Rocket Fuel is speeding up the rollout of its device graph. Starting in Q1, the programmatic platform company will make cross-device targeting the default mode for marketer and agency clients of its self-serve DSP. Those customers include Microsoft, which does its own US digital ad buying in-house. Microsoft’s top B2B marketing exec in the US, […]
With the exception of back-to-school needs, office supply retailer Staples focuses on small-business owners. Like most brick-and-mortar retailers, Staples knew mobile played a vital role in its customers’ daily lives, but it was less clear from a media standpoint how mobile impacted the ultimate sales conversion. Staples wanted to use mobile to drive upper-funnel awareness […]
Standard notice and choice aren’t going to cut it when it comes to the IoT. “As the Internet of Things ecosystem grows and more devices are connected to the Internet, you might not even know that they are,” said Pedro Pavón, Oracle’s senior corporate counsel, speaking at a two-day International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) […]
Neal Mohan, the long-term architect of Google’s display ad ambitions, has left the building. But he’s staying on the campus. Mohan has taken a post under his old boss Susan Wojcicki, who led DoubleClick for many years before becoming CEO of YouTube a little less than two years ago. In the role he’ll lead all […]
In the movie “Cube,” a group of strangers find themselves in a labyrinth made of shifting rooms. Sometimes the rooms are safe to enter; other times, they’re rigged with lethal traps. That’s what it feels like for advertisers or publishers trying to navigate the world of ad tech. The promise is great but the […]
LiveRail and AppNexus removing resellers from their respective platforms last week were two more nails in the ad network coffin. If any publishers were upset, AdExchanger couldn’t find them. Just the opposite, in fact. While some publishers still use ad networks, most have significantly pared back in recent years, and those that still work with […]
Accuracy is a spectrum when it comes to location data. And because there’s no systematic way to discern between different types of location data, including how granular it is or when it was derived, the buy side is confused and reluctant to spend. “When we ask clients what the stumbling block is for location, they […]
If someone asked you to rattle off the big buzzwords in media, it’s a pretty good bet mobile, native ads and programmatic would be somewhere near the top of your list. Google has just knocked down all three in a single gesture, allowing its publisher customers to expose native ad inventory in their mobile apps to buyers […]
Adobe rolled out the Audience Marketplace data exchange on Tuesday, featuring a data cooperative (which Adobe first revealed to prospective partners last summer) and a data partner network. Both are powered by Adobe’s data management platform, Audience Manager. The co-op aspect is designed to let companies pool their first-party data sets. The data partner network […]
Some corners of the ad and marketing tech industries wonder if the data management platform (DMP) is on the verge of becoming a commodity. But a Forrester Wave report on the technologies noted points of differentiation among DMPs’ abilities to handle social information, ingest data from channels usually associated with marketing tech, such as email […]
Pubs and brands have complained about programmatic inventory on open exchanges for years, but a renewed focus on inventory quality is gaining traction. AppNexus has long positioned itself as the platform for ad networks, but it reversed its policy in recent weeks by removing ad networks that don’t provide direct publisher or seller relationships. Shortly […]
“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 Richard Eisert, partner at Davis & Gilbert. Ad-blocking software has long been a concern of agencies, marketers and publishers, but recent developments have pushed the issue to the forefront. Now […]
Frito-Lay, the $14 billion chip-and-dip division of PepsiCo, wants to engineer 360-degree marketing programs. Ram Krishnan, CMO of Frito-Lay North America, recently outlined a 70-20-10 plan, which will enable it to do so. The brand will allocate 70% of its resources to proven methodologies, 20% to partners who prove value (Krishnan called it “validated risk”) […]
Neustar’s $450 million deal to acquire MarketShare Partners, announced Thursday, brings together two major digital marketing measurement players that will “help CMOs justify their existence to the CFO,” said Neustar CMO Lisa Joy Rosner. The purchase price is $390 million once tax considerations are factored out of the deal, the companies said. Read the press release. The […]
Everyone talks about TV dollars leaking into digital, but what happens behind the scenes to make those dollars move? Vic Walia, senior director of brand marketing for Expedia, said it involves change management and rewiring old assumptions. “We’ve always invested heavily in TV as a brand, but we wanted to extend our reach beyond our […]
Eight months after former CEO George John stepped down and the company started a search for his replacement, Rocket Fuel has decided to give head of sales Randy Wootton the keys to the city. Wootton was first hired in March to oversee a reorganization that split the company’s sales efforts clearly into three channels: agencies, direct […]
Criteo is prepping a Universal Match product as a serious contender in the cross-device arms race. The company is pooling anonymized data from two-thirds of its 9,300 brand customers in its consumer database. Every brand that participates provides CRM data (not unlike Google’s Customer Match) that would enable them to target specific users cross-platform through […]
Mic CEO Chris Altchek looks at digital publishing and sees opportunity. His goal: to reach every college-educated millennial in the US – all 40 million of them. In the past year, Mic has grown from 9.5 million to 14.5 million uniques, according to comScore. But that growth transpired in the most modern of ways: Mobile […]
GroupM hopes its purchase of digital/media agency Essence on Wednesday (for undisclosed terms) will add a whole lot of Google expertise into WPP’s cluster of media agencies. After all, the formerly independent Essence is Google’s digital agency of record. “Google, as you might imagine, is keen on its global digital agency using the full set […]
It seems every time there’s a partnership between a marketing tech company and an ad tech vendor, MediaMath is involved. Its most recent hookups: Oracle and IBM. When working through the technical and logistical intricacies of these integrations, MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki takes a back seat, seeing himself as “champion and cheerleader.” “My role is […]
It might surprise those who think of Merkle as only a CRM agency to hear it has a media practice that employs 400. Although the division has taken four years to construct, Merkle has over the past several months recruited a handful of media agency heavyweights (including ex-Razorfish COO Michael Komasinski) to help support its […]
Google is beta testing a solution within DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) that will allow publishers to bring in high-value impressions before reserved inventory in their ad server. Jonathan Bellack, Google’s director of product management, made the announcement at the IAB Ad Operations Summit on Monday during a discussion about header bidding that pitted Google (anti-header […]
NBCUniversal transacted 10-15% of its digital business programmatically during the 2015-2016 season, the company has revealed to AdExchanger. Prior to the upfronts, the company expected to secure 50% of commitments on a “converged” basis, with elements of both TV and digital in a single deal. In this most recent upfront, NBCUniversal’s digital business grew 50% and, of […]
Facebook doesn’t want umpteen degrees of separation between its LiveRail exchange and the stable of publishers who use it to monetize, and the company is taking swift action to cull intermediaries. In an email obtained by AdExchanger, Facebook says it will terminate publisher services for an undisclosed number of customers (namely third-party resellers of desktop […]
IBM’s agreement to acquire The Weather Company’s B2B, mobile and cloud-based web properties – including WSI, weather.com, Weather Underground and The Weather Company brand, but not The Weather Channel – is likely more about data assets and less about a grand entrance into the media world. Read the release. IBM was mum on its long-term strategy, saying through a spokesperson that […]
If a turnaround story is going to fly, it’s got to take off at some point. But Prashant Fuloria, Yahoo’s SVP of advertising products, is preaching patience. “The reality is that this is a multiyear transformation, and our long-term trajectory will not be defined by a single quarter,” Fuloria said. Speaking of quarters, the results […]
