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 […]
A troupe of traditional broadcasters has a message for media buyers: Your perception of audio streaming audiences is skewed, according to a study by Advertiser Perceptions released Tuesday. The study, commissioned by terrestrial broadcasters (including Cumulus, Westwood One, iHeartMedia, CBS Radio, Cox Media Group, Hubbard Radio, Radio Advertising Bureau and Radio One) found media buyers […]
The Twitter Publisher Network is now the Twitter Audience Platform – but the name change is more than aesthetic, said Ameet Ranadive, Twitter’s senior director of revenue products. “This is one step in the direction of reaching our total audience,” Ranadive said. Several enhancements were made to the rebranded Twitter Audience Platform (TAP), which came out […]
Under Armour has muscled up since its origin as a supplier of compression tees, thanks to its work connecting channels like mobile and email to physical stores. Under Armour is now more than an apparel provider. One of its biggest data assets comes from its community Connected Fitness, which has grown 30% year over year […]
When Jun Group was founded in 2005, its bread and butter was serving desktop video ads and ads in social and mobile games, rewarding players with virtual currency when they opted in. But the video ad platform has its sights on bigger things today: mobile brand advertising dollars. And it’s using a $28 million investment […]
A number of ad tech vets made Inc. Magazine’s annual 500/5000 revenue survey this month, but there were also some notable new additions and absentees following acquisitions last year. Inc.’s survey, which was released late last week, features the revenues and employee growth figures of independent companies considered to be among the fastest-growing in the […]
“Premium video” is Google’s code for “brand budgets.” Its decision to remove YouTube inventory from the DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) by the end of the year is one more way it hopes to clinch a piece of TV’s $70 billion portion of the overall brand budget. Platform providers were understandably upset when Google revealed the […]
There are myriad reasons why location data can be defective – and fraud is just one small piece of that growing problem. Growing because the lack of industry standards around the collection and use of location data leads to a fair amount of misunderstanding, unintentional discrepancies and widespread inaccuracy. “Location fraud is the easy part,” said […]
Sarah Sluis and Ryan Joe contributed. NBCUniversal’s $200 million investment in Vox Media and its expected (though unconfirmed) $200 million investment in BuzzFeed isn’t the big broadcaster’s first date with a digital publisher. It had a disastrous marriage with top women’s lifestyle publisher iVillage, which it acquired for $600 million in 2006 and eventually merged into […]
Cox Media Group’s sell-side platform Videa is sinking more hooks into buy- and sell-side systems. Released earlier this year, Videa has since drummed up strategic partnerships with Gannett, Raycom and Media General on the local broadcaster side. That’s in addition to agency alliances with Carat and Amplifi and demand-side deals with Mediaocean and Videology. Now […]
As the ad industry girds for the mushrooming debate around privacy, consumer choice and ad blocking, it’s clear that existing opt-out mechanisms aren’t exactly cutting it, especially when it comes to cross-device. But although mobile adds another layer of complexity to the situation, online advertising is still reliant on a little .txt file called the […]
Adobe and PageFair, a Dublin-based ad-block solutions provider, on Monday unveiled new research that claimed there are almost 200 million active ad-block users, representing a projected loss of $21.8 billion globally for online publishers in 2015. The caveat is that industrywide ad-blocking numbers can be misleading given strong variances both geographically and demographically. That skew […]
When Google revealed plans Thursday to exile YouTube ad inventory from the DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) by the year’s end, many in the ad industry felt betrayed. Google’s reasoning for this change isn’t clear, even to its partners. Its stated motivation is that it wants to devote more resources to developing other video ad products. […]
The writing was on the wall. Google revealed late Thursday it will no longer sell YouTube inventory through the DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX). Neal Mohan, VP of video and display advertising at Google, said in a blog post that the tech giant is yanking YouTube inventory from AdX to focus its development efforts on “the formats […]
