ARCHIVE FOR:

featured

  • Google Adds Programmatic Support For Native Ads

    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 Debuts Its Data Exchange

    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 […]

  • Adobe, Krux And Neustar Crest Forrester’s DMP Wave

    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 […]

  • Publishers And Marketers Are Anteing Up – And Networks Are Folding

    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 […]

  • As Ad Blocking Grows, What Legal Recourse Do Publishers And Marketers Have?

    “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 […]

  • How Frito-Lay Levels The Playing Field Between TV, Digital And Offline For NFL Promos

    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 To Acquire MarketShare For $450 Million

    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 […]

  • Expedia Rewires Its Media Mix Using TubeMogul’s New Cross-Screen Planning System

    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 […]

  • Rocket Fuel Promotes Sales Chief Randy Wootton To CEO

    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 Pools Data From Over 6,000 Brands To Power Its Device Graph

    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 Has High Hopes For Digital Publishing, Without Programmatic

    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 Buys Essence – And A Lot Of Google Expertise

    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 […]

  • As Ad Tech And Mar Tech Converge, MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki Prefers Partnerships Over Acquisitions

    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 […]

  • Merkle's New Programmatic Chief On Why Agencies Need To Be Systems Integrators

    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 Its Answer To Header Bidding, Called 'DFP First Look'

    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 […]

  • Programmatic Drives 10-15% Of NBCUniversal’s Total Digital Upfront Business

    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's LiveRail Cans Some Ad Network Customers As It Goes Direct-To-Publisher

    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 […]

  • With Weather Co. Acquisition, IBM Bolsters Data Services, But It’s Not Diving Into Media Just Yet

    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 […]

  • A Peek Into Yahoo’s Ad Stack As Investors Search For Evidence Of A Turnaround

    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 […]

  • Oracle Marketing Cloud Levels Up With New Data Targeting Abilities

    Oracle Marketing Cloud kicked off its OpenWorld conference this week with three platform features meant to reach customers across channels, improve email targeting using Datalogix and manage content marketing workflow and scheduling. “We’re making easier for clients to operate in a cross-channel way, and we’re doing it practically, as opposed to theoretically,” said Alexander Hooshmand, […]

  • DISH Opens A Programmatic Exchange, Enables RTB

    DISH Network is subscribing to the programmatic playbook, enabling greater automation and data application for buyers bidding on addressable TV spots. The satellite pay-TV provider, representing 8 million addressable households nationwide, on Monday debuted a programmatic marketplace and supply-side platform running on IPONWEB. Its initial demand partners are Rocket Fuel, TubeMogul and DataXu. After an […]

  • It’s Getting Harder And Harder For Mobile Ad Companies To Woo Developers

      App developer Guy Tal isn’t interested in cold calls from mobile service providers he isn’t familiar with who want him to test their software development kit (SDK). “I get approached by companies through email and at conferences all the time and, to be honest, I really can’t be bothered,” said Tal, CEO and founder […]

  • A New AppNexus? CEO O'Kelley Talks About Ch-Ch-Changes On Eve Of Expected IPO

    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 […]

  • IBM Rolls Out A ‘Behavior Exchange,’ Brings On Ad Tech Partners

    IBM is pushing deeper into the cloud and paid media. Big Blue on Thursday launched the IBM Universal Behavior Exchange (UBX), a platform that unifies marketing tech acquisitions including Unica campaign management, Silverpop marketing automation, Coremetrics analytics and Xtify mobile personalization. It also named 25 UBX partners, including a handful of ad tech players like […]

  • Yahoo Signs Search And Ads Deal With Google, But Microsoft Is Still In The Picture

    Yahoo is entering into a search pact with Google that will allow it to power its Internet search and ad services with some non-Microsoft juice. According to Yahoo, the agreement with Google provides Yahoo with “additional flexibility to choose among suppliers of search results and ads.” Google’s offering will complement the services already provided by […]

  • Omnicom's Accuen Trading Desk Revenue Grew $25M In Q3

    Programmatic continues to help more than hurt the agency conglomerates, or at least it has for the largest US holding company Omnicom Group. Omnicom continues to see notable growth from its trading desk, although the growth rate has slowed. The company’s Accuen exchange-buying unit delivered an incremental $25 million in spending growth during the third […]

  • Dunkin', McDonald’s And ADT Debate: Can We Trust Tech Platforms With Our Data?

    It’s a question every CMO must answer: How much of my first-party data can safely be shared with tech platform partners? For advertisers in categories where Google has a product offering of its own, the question has even more urgency. Consider ADT, whose home security business faces an emerging competitor in Google’s Nest smart thermostat […]

  • ANA Masters Show: Disrupt Yourself Or Someone Else Will Do It For You

    From global leaders to energetic startups, “internal disruption” has become the driving force behind marketing resources. “The scary thing for me is to see how fast the disruptors are themselves being disrupted,” said Pepsi’s beverage group president Bradley Jakeman at the ANA’s Masters of Marketing conference. He pointed to the speed with which a company […]

  • Oracle Partners With Tapad – Because Probabilistic Vs. Deterministic Data Isn’t An And/Or Sort Of Thing

    Which is better – deterministic data or probabilistic data? It’s a trick question because the answer is “both.” Even Google – whose first-party cross-device logged in user base likely trumps anything anyone other than Facebook could muster deterministically – uses a combination of logged-in user data and statistical matching. With privacy in mind, Google’s recently […]

  • Coke Opens Data-Driven Happiness, Builds Out Marketing Decision Engine

    For 128 years, Coca-Cola has distinguished its brand through mass media, but consumer tech titans like Apple, Microsoft and Google have usurped its top spot among the world’s most valuable brands, as rated by Forbes. “That’s indicative of the world we’re living in,” said Michael Weaver, director of data strategy for The Coca-Cola Company, speaking […]