At 1.55 billion monthly active users and growing, Facebook’s audience reach is massive. And Facebook is hammering out constant improvements to the video discovery mechanism in the news feed. But the social platform remains largely in experimental mode with video, and agencies and publishers are chomping at the bit for a clearer monetization path and […]
Rob Norman will speak at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview conference, taking place in New York on January 20-21. If you were forced to name one media buying entity that sets the agenda for the rest of the industry, it would have to be WPP-owned GroupM. It was GroupM – umbrella to Mindshare, MEC, Xaxis and Essence […]
Yahoo doesn’t have a fraudulent traffic problem, a company leader said Friday. Tod Sacerdoti, VP of display and video ad products and the founder of Yahoo’s video ad exchange BrightRoll, was responding to a CNBC report late last week, which claimed widespread fraud in Yahoo’s ads business and sales “ineptitude” as responsible for the downfall of […]
Sandwiched somewhere between the smart cars and $599 headsets at CES, Facebook dropped a mini-bomb by way of its developer blog when it revealed Thursday that LiveRail – the video ad server, SSP and publisher monetization platform it acquired in 2014 – would exit the ad-serving business. Facebook purports the move will allow it to […]
Snapchat is said to be rolling up its sleeves on an ads API, and agencies, advertisers and tech vendors alike are happy to hear it. “There’s a great deal of interest in Snapchat as a platform,” said Noah Mallin, head of social at MEC North America. “The intersection of video, mobile and messaging, combined with […]
Warner Brothers is moving deeper into programmatic video, using Tremor Video’s supply-side platform exclusively to set brand controls around certain properties and to help monetize more mobile video inventory. The move to adopt an SSP, which it first began testing in Q2 of last year, is in lockstep with Warner Brothers CEO Kevin Tsujihara’s prediction […]
Updated Oracle has signed an agreement to acquire AddThis, a social bookmarking startup that has since transitioned into a publisher audience platform, for an undisclosed sum. Oracle’s Data Cloud, which combines Oracle’s earlier acquisitions of BlueKai and Datalogix, will benefit the most. Making an acquisition has become a holiday-time tradition for the enterprise giant. “Oracle Data Cloud is the […]
Eighteen months after rethinking its business, Paper Magazine’s traffic has increased 900%. Digital revenue is up 400% over the year before, and for the past six months, inventory has been sold out. The publisher unleashed these changes by prioritizing a platform-agnostic approach over print. It began publishing more frequently, paying closer attention to what readers […]
With a tight marketing budget and a brand on the turnaround, Volvo is open to experimentation. Which is one reason why it’s a launch partner for Time Inc.’s Real Time ad product, which places the Volvo brand next to Time Inc.’s trending content on social media. The advertising product adds Volvo’s logo to Time Inc.’s […]
Video buyers see a future where they can bundle new-wave TV ad inventory – including VOD and connected TV – with linear television buys. But the “CTV” impression pool is still too shallow for many agencies and brands to bother. “We’re not going to scrape for impressions on some new 5 million-subscriber video startup,” said […]
If 2014 was a year of big buys in ad tech, 2015 seemed more muted. While 2014 saw a run on attribution companies from big players like Google and AOL, massive consolidation among data management platforms and some big splashes from Oracle and Alliance Data Services, 2015 was about the quiet private equity exit. Sure, […]
“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 Ephraim (Jeff) Bander, president and chief revenue officer at Sticky. Digital media has a persistent language problem. In particular, a huge gap exists between brand advertisers’ stated RFP goals and […]
Malvertising – or malicious online ads that spread code to commit ad fraud or access a user’s data – might not induce the same industry-wide concern of viewability and fraud, but it’s still an issue. An IAB report from November estimated the cost of malvertising attacks to be more than $200 million – And that’s […]
For several months, IPG Mediabrands’ ad tech unit Cadreon has been testing Google’s cross-device measurement system, baked into DoubleClick advertiser products as of June. Krish Sailam, senior product manager of mobile for Cadreon, said the trading desk has run a few beta tests with advertisers, and noted conversion uplift has consistently reached the double digits. Cadreon […]
French performance marketing giant Criteo’s promotion of its president and COO Eric Eichmann to CEO, effective Jan. 1, recalls Rocket Fuel’s recent leadership change. Eichmann succeeds JB Rudelle, Criteo’s founder and longtime chief, who will move into an executive chairman role. So why is this happening? Generally speaking, Criteo is worth more than every ad […]
Chicago-based ad platform company Centro let go 29 of its 725 employees on Monday, or about 4% of total staff. Unlike other recent layoffs in the ad tech sector – including at Turn, Collective and PubMatic – the cuts were not motivated by a shrinking pool of cash, restless investors or slouching revenue growth. Instead, […]
Glenfiddich, a family-owned maker of single-malt Scotch whisky, is among the first advertisers to place an addressable TV buy through DISH Network’s new programmatic marketplace, which launched in October. Glenfiddich’s media planning and buying agency, Resolute Digital, is using Rocket Fuel’s demand-side platform to serve an addressable, 30-second TV spot to the brand’s target audience […]
Last week’s layoffs at demand-side platform (DSP) Turn underscored uncertainty in the way advertisers and agencies pay for their buying platform technology. Turn invested heavily in implementing a SaaS-based revenue model – one that priced the technology on a monthly subscription basis – and that investment ultimately did not pay off. By extracting the cost of […]
Sell-side platform PubMatic has dismissed more than 100 employees, AdExchanger has confirmed. The layoffs, affecting 20% of the company’s global staff, follow an 8% reduction in October. The combined cuts have reduced PubMatic’s workforce from 600 to about 450. Additionally the company lost two key leaders on the publisher and demand side: Evan Adlman, VP of publisher […]
Consumers don’t want to see repurposed 30-second TV spots in their social feeds, which is why a number of brands and their agencies are investing in content tailored for Instagram. In September, Instagram’s 400 million users began seeing more ads as the image-centric platform turned on 30-second video ads, as well as landscape ads, which […]
Square may be a unicorn – but it’s got its eye on the little guy. “We’re leveling the playing field,” said Kevin Burke, former Visa CMO and now head of acquisition at Square, which completed its long-awaited IPO in mid-November. “We’re helping small businesses close the loop.” Integrating online and offline has long been the […]
For the first time outside of a recession, linear TV ad spend has stopped growing, according to global ad revenue updates by MAGNA Global and ZenithOptimedia, both released Monday. While national TV ad sales grew .3% to $42 billion in 2015, MAGNA predicted it will decrease by .3% in 2016. ZenithOptimedia’s Advertising Expenditures Forecast also […]
“If I didn’t work for the Guardian, I would block ads,” said Guardian US CEO Eamonn Store. He’s fed up with the poor-quality ads that slip through on the Guardian and other trusted sites. As an avid reader of the Guardian, he sees ads for loan sharks and other unsavory ventures slip through frequently, leading […]
Buenos Aires-based game studio Etermax is a rare creature in the app development world. “We don’t focus on user acquisition,” said CEO and founder Maximo Cavazzani. It’s quite a statement considering that Etermax is the developer responsible for quiz app Trivia Crack, which was the most downloaded app in the App Store in late 2014. […]
For most brands, the holiday season is a discount deluge. Not so much for high-end sports and eyewear maker Oakley. “We’re not a highly promotional brand,” said Krysta Brown, the company’s director of online marketing. Oakley might participate in seasonal promotions so long as they’re “brand right” and don’t undermine its messaging around premium, high-quality […]
The emergence of data-enabled TV targeting is altering the agency buying structure. In 2014, WPP’s GroupM launched Modi Media, a unit that would become the poster child for so-called “advanced” TV ad buying. But it’s not the only agency group to build an offering geared to the fragmenting milieu of TV advertising. Others, such as […]
Turn is going through a restructuring and has laid off 57 of its roughly 400 employees, said company CEO Bruce Falck, who was appointed to the role in September. “We did a pretty big restructuring of client services and sales,” he explained. “We merged the team, so it’s true that’s a larger chunk. But we’re […]
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 […]
