Once again, a private equity firm has bought a majority stake in a marketing tech company. Email marketing solutions provider StrongView will get a strategic growth investment from private equity firm HGGC. The deal is expected to close in 30 days, and financial terms weren’t announced. Read the release. HGGC has a solid background in […]
Global media powerhouse Carat has lowered its 2015 global ad spending forecast from 4.6% to 4.0%, reaching $529 billion, in the wake of a similar ad sector demotion from rival agency group Zenith Optimedia. “That’s the new normal [for growth],” said Jonathan Barnard, Zenith’s UK-based head of forecasting. Barnard cited volatility in the eurozone, slowdowns […]
Citing a guilty conscience, the developer behind the ad blocking app that shot to the top of the iOS 9 charts has pulled his creation off the App Store shelves. Marco Arment, who cofounded Tumblr and created Instapaper before dabbling in ad blocking, said he ultimately couldn’t endorse an app that blocked ads en masse. Arment’s […]
The marketing clouds were heavy with ad tech this week. On Wednesday, Adobe uncorked its self-serve programmatic platform. On Thursday, MediaMath and Oracle hooked up. And of course, Salesforce is concluding its annual Dreamforce blowout, where Scott McCorkle, CEO of its Marketing Cloud, laid out to AdExchanger how the CRM giant thinks about ad tech. […]
Twitter’s comms chief, Gabriel Stricker, departed suddenly in July, and now more execs will likely follow. A key marketing figure is already job prospecting, sources say. Bottom line: If Twitter doesn’t find a permanent chief executive quickly it risks a flight of talent within its marketing organization. And it’s not at all clear how much longer […]
Remember when Facebook said it wouldn’t allow independent viewability verification on its properties? And remember when WPP’s GroupM agencies Unilever, Kellogg and others were extremely displeased with that proposition and said they would curtail spending on platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, where third-party viewability tags weren’t welcome? Well, Facebook announced Thursday that it’s planning to […]
At Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce celebration, Rick Ruskin, who heads marketing and product management for General Motors’ OnStar service, sits in a parked Buick that’s serving as a makeshift conference room. He points to his phone, where there are offers from Best Buy and Audiobooks.com. “These two spots here are like Google AdWords, where people are […]
“Marketer’s Note” is a regular column informing marketers about the rapidly evolving, digital marketing technology ecosystem. This week it is written by Melissa Parrish, Executive Director, AdExchanger Research. Earlier this week there was an article in Ad Age about the “hidden” costs of programmatic. I don’t intend for the quotes to indicate that the fees don’t exist, just […]
Jack Dorsey will apparently not be the next full-time CEO at Twitter, bringing Adam Bain, the company’s top sales exec and a presumptive candidate for the job, a step closer to the throne. Dorsey has been whispering to Square investors that he will stay on as CEO of the payments company, Re/code reported Thursday. But […]
Publishers distributing their content on Facebook have discovered a way to buy traffic on Facebook – but it isn’t through amplifying their posts. Instead, publishers place their content on Facebook pages that already have millions of engaged followers, such as “I Love Halloween,” George Takei, Lil Wayne or (perplexingly) “Music for Deep Meditation,” giving it […]
AOL has packaged a number of its creative point solutions into a single platform called ONE by AOL: Creative, which the company revealed Tuesday. The self-serve banner, video and mobile ad creator was built on the back of Pictela, a rich media tool AOL acquired in 2010, which provided templates for marketers to create custom, […]
More than 32,000 will congregate in Cologne, Germany, this week to spark a dialogue about the connected consumer and the state of the digital media economy. Among those gathered here will be MasterCard’s chief marketing officer, Raja Rajamannar, who will join a bevy of global agency and platform execs at the yearly Digital Marketing Exposition […]
Programmatic advertising makes it difficult for publishers like Hearst Newspapers to ensure that users enjoy fast-loading pages and quality ad experiences. Hearst closely monitors its site templates, optimizing for fast load times and ad viewability. But once it starts letting third parties run scripts on its website – aka programmatic advertisers – that can slow […]
It was an orgy of new products. At its “Hey Siri” event on Wednesday, Apple unveiled enhancements to the Apple Watch and launched the iPad Pro and something called the Apple Pencil, which is basically a super fancy stylus for the new, bigger iPad. The company also rolled out the next generation of iPhone 6 […]
In the two years since Facebook’s huge image-sharing platform sold its first ad, Instagram has focused on fixed-price advertising from big national brands. In keeping with the platform’s emphasis on aesthetics and high design, many early advertisers were lifestyle companies like Starbucks and Disney. With Instagram’s 300 million global users now accustomed to seeing ads, […]
There’s no need to freak out, but content blocking in iOS 9 goes beyond the mobile web and in some cases will also apply to in-app advertising. And that’s because of an in-app browsing mechanism in iOS 9 called Safari View Controller. It’s basically a more streamlined version of Apple’s current webview framework that developers […]
Media General will acquire Meredith Corp. for $2.4 billion, combining the two companies’ TV and digital assets to create greater reach and efficiency. The new company, Meredith Media General, will own 88 TV stations in 54 markets, making it the third-largest owner of network affiliates. On the digital side, it will reach 200 million monthly unique […]
The digital media industry is mourning Curt Hecht. Hecht passed away this week at the age of 47, ending a brilliant 26-year career at Publicis Groupe and The Weather Company. His death has come as a shock to many, not only because of Hecht’s intellectual and physical vigor but also because he chose to keep […]
By Kelly Liyakasa and Zach Rodgers Verizon-owned AOL will snap up mobile ad platform Millennial Media, the companies said Thursday morning. AOL will pay $1.75 per share of Millennial stock, valuing the company at $238 million, as was previously rumored. This price is a considerable premium over the company’s Wednesday close-of-trading market cap of $187 million. As AdExchanger […]
On any given day or month, the programmatic marketplace is filled with spiky peaks and valleys as CPMs rise and fall and as audiences ebb and flow. The best trading desks, advertisers, publishers, DSPs and exchanges don’t just understand these variations in price, volume and user behavior. They act on them. That action might mean […]
Atlanta-based News Distribution Network (NDN) is the quiet video engine that hums behind a host of traditional and new media publisher sites like the New York Daily News, Los Angeles Times and Hearst. Last March, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer contemplated a $300 million bid to buy NDN following its interest in French web video platform Dailymotion, but […]
“Closed.” The word is often bandied about to describe Facebook’s ad tech business. It has become a rallying cry for smaller competitors as well as independent observers concerned about what they see as a return to AOL-style walled gardens. It would seem the naysayers have struck a nerve. Brian Boland, Facebook’s VP of advertising technology, […]
There’s no larger driver of brand awareness than a 30×60-foot cinema screen. At least, that’s the logic for Swedish auto manufacturer Volvo, which is test driving 90-second interactive cinema ads targeting 18- to 34-year-olds across 100 Screenvision theaters in the US. The effort involves partnerships with cinema advertising company Screenvision and interactive, motion-detection company Audience […]
Publishers are concerned about content blocking in iOS 9 – but how concerned should they be? At first glance, the single brief reference to content blocking in Apple’s iOS 9 release notes seems innocuous enough. “Use the Content Blocking extension point to give Safari a block list describing the content that you want to block while […]
While Imgur has 150 million monthly active users, many of them use ad-blocking software and access the site on mobile, where banners go for lower CPMs. The image-sharing community is strongly tied to Reddit, hosting much of its image content. And like Reddit, Imgur’s audience is filled with tech-savvy male millennials suspicious of advertising. Native, done […]
The wonderful thing about ordering food online is that you can get what you want quickly and accurately, without ever once talking to the indifferent high school stoner taking your order through a choppy phone connection. It’s like consumer nirvana, and it certainly explains why restaurants delight in talking about their upgraded ordering systems. Case […]
WhoSay is one of the more undefinable companies in the advertising and marketing landscape. It’s a celebrity news site, a HootSuite-like social media platform for celebrities, and it also functions as an influencer marketing agency in that it accepts RFPs from brands, builds campaigns with celebrity spokespeople and distributes those campaigns using the power of […]
When it comes to customer data, Alimama claims to have the mother lode. “Our data is bigger than Facebook plus Google plus eBay plus Amazon,” said Joanna Wang, CMO of Alimama, the marketing services and data arm of Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba. Beyond the bravado, Wang is referring to Alimama’s potent combination of identity data […]
BlackArrow, a 13-year-old provider of live and video-on-demand ad products to TV operators, was acquired Monday by Cross MediaWorks, the owner of a national media network called Cadent and the full-service Cross Agency. Although BlackArrow, which has 100 employees, will remain as an independent entity, it will partner with Cross MediaWorks’ other business divisions to […]
The director of ad technology for Netflix, Tony Ralph, and director of marketing for Abe’s Market, Michelle Goldstein, will appear at AdExchanger’s Omni.Digital conference on Sept. 10, an event designed to educate marketers on advanced solutions for building seamless cross-channel brand experiences. Cross-channel attribution will be one topic discussed at the conference. As Netflix’s director of […]
