It’s a problem that’s familiar to many agency buyers: start geotargeting, and soon, a campaign’s scale whittles to nothing. The same problem exists for publishers. If a local newspaper starts selling moms reading the auto section, the audience might be too small to be worthwhile to advertisers. The Local Media Consortium (LMC), a partnership of […]
Varick Media Management, agency holding group MDC Partners’ audience and media-buying arm, has released Alveo – a planning, buying and reporting platform. Operating originally as more of an internal trading desk, Alveo can now be used by Varick’s clients to manage and visualize data as well as access reports across multiple campaigns. Alveo is available […]
Bloomberg Media is at an inflection point. The business and financial media company has had numerous high-profile exits (including Businessweek editor Josh Tyrangiel and Bloomberg’s chief digital content officer, Verge co-founder Josh Topolsky) following former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s return. A number of layoffs resulted as Bloomberg Media pulled back on nonbusiness content in […]
Twitter and Square have more in common than Jack Dorsey as CEO – both platforms have a marked interest in small and medium-sized businesses. While Twitter maintains a suite of Promoted Products aimed at small business owners, including Quick Promote, a tool that allows brands to amplify tweets directly from the Twitter analytics dashboard, Square’s entire […]
The mobile web is way too slow for publishers and users alike. Google, along with platform and publisher partners including Twitter, Vox, BuzzFeed, the Guardian and The Washington Post, unveiled its answer to this problem on Wednesday: the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project. “Anything less than instant shows a decline in engagement,” said Richard Gingras, head of […]
A lot has changed, yet little has changed for Acxiom. On the one hand, it reorganized earlier this year, rolling its LiveRamp acquisition into a unit called Connectivity (overseen by Travis May) and hiring Experian Marketing Services vet Rick Erwin as head of audience solutions to work on its data products. Acxiom is also building […]
Facebook is taking the next logical step in its evolution toward a full-stack ad tech offering, rolling out a demand-side platform (DSP) capable of executing programmatic buys using the company’s “people-based” advertising methodology. In recent weeks Facebook’s Atlas team has pitched the DSP product to agency partners, including Omnicom Group, Havas, Merkle and others, according […]
Sony Pictures TV thinks there’s power in remaining subscription-free. In the case of its free streaming premium video network Crackle, which clocks 22 million monthly uniques, it promises brand partners a 93% ad completion rate and an engaged audience. Sony Crackle in April staged its first upfront presentation. “Because we see ourselves as a TV […]
Let’s be honest: For all of its success as a business, it’s hard to be impressed with the NFL’s digital presence. Good luck using its overdesigned, slow-loading website to find video highlights of your favorite team’s last game. But little by little, the NFL has opened up its assets to digital experimentation. In January, it […]
Jack’s wearing a lot of hats. After several months of will they/won’t they, Twitter announced Monday morning that Jack Dorsey will go from interim chief exec – shoes he’d been filling since Dick Costolo stepped down in June – to permanent CEO of the company. He’ll also continue on as CEO of Square, the mobile payments startup […]
Publisher-facing ad platform PubMatic has let go about 50 employees, or 8% of its global headcount of 600. Many of the cuts were in India, where the company has significant development and support operations. The changes were motivated by a desire to improve the overall level of service, including by bringing service teams in-market to […]
The New York Times has a solution to the bot fraud problem: “Buy quality.” So declared Michael Zimbalist, SVP of advertising products and R&D at the Times, speaking at OpenX’s session about trust in the supply chain at Advertising Week in New York City. “You get what you pay for,” Zimbalist said bluntly. “We need to collapse […]
The merger of comScore and Rentrak, announced Tuesday, creates a powerful new player providing unified digital and offline measurement. The deal poses a real challenge to Nielsen, which nevertheless is not about to be overthrown as the reining champ of marketing and media measurement. Pending regulatory approval, comScore will begin to combine its digital audience measurement […]
There’s apparently power in numbers in the fight against ratings fixture Nielsen. Measurement companies comScore and Rentrak have reached a definitive agreement to merge, the two companies announced Tuesday. (press release) In the stock-for-stock merger, Rentrak is to merge into a wholly owned subsidiary of comScore. ComScore CEO Serge Matta will take the reins as CEO […]
Axel Springer will acquire Business Insider in a deal that values the publisher at $390 million, the companies said Tuesday. The German media company bought 9% of BI back in January, and the new $343 million deal will bring its total stake to 97%. That earlier deal placed the value of BI at $200 million, so the sale price […]
First there was Right Media. Then there was the Yahoo Ad Exchange. Now there’s BrightRoll. Yahoo started off Advertising Week on Monday with the announcement that it had consolidated all of its programmatic ad tech under a single umbrella – the BrightRoll brand. The purple platform has been on a bit of an ad tech spree […]
Programmatic buying of display and video ads will expand rapidly for years to come, according to new findings from Magna Global. In a forecast released Monday, the Interpublic Group media investment unit predicted the amount of global ad inventory bought and sold using programmatic methods in 2015 will rise 49% compared to last year – […]
Influencer marketing startups think it’s time to become a more strategic part of content marketing initiatives. Part of the problem is that influencer marketing doesn’t get its own budget line, said Pierre-Loïc Assayag, founder and CEO at the influencer management platform Traackr. It’s as likely to come under the jurisdiction of a PR firm as […]
Oracle’s aggressive stance on acquisition is evident when you consider its Marketing Cloud shopping spree, and it’s not backing down. It recently added web personalization platform Maxymiser to a long list of purchases that included data-management platform BlueKai, campaign-management tool Responsys and Datalogix. The intent is to round out a complete stack that covers all […]
Just because people block ads doesn’t mean they hate advertising – it means they hate bad advertising. Slow-loading, third-party tracking, battery-draining, bandwidth-bleeding, pop-upping, visually questionable and sometimes creepily relevant (but, more often than not, utterly irrelevant) advertising. But a straw poll conducted by Dean Murphy, the developer behind the iOS ad-blocker app Crystal, found that 71% of […]
Pirated content and ad fraud are like a nefarious version of peanut butter and jelly – but there’s not lot of awareness in the industry about their connection. “The people who create pirate sites are the same ones who perpetrate clickbot fraud – they’re the ones who spread malware and create the armies of bots that generate […]
Former Google and BrightRoll exec Bruce Falck has joined Turn as CEO, the company revealed Tuesday. Most recently, Falck was COO of video marketplace BrightRoll, which Yahoo acquired last fall. Prior to that, he spent eight years at Google, where he was instrumental in expanding the Google Display Network and DoubleClick businesses. His transition to […]
Flashtalking is on a quest to become what company CEO John Nardone calls a “single point of truth.” It’s why the NYC-based ad server decided to buy Device[9], a small cross-device recognition company located in Hamburg, Germany. The acquisition, announced Tuesday, was a mostly stock deal. Nardone declined to share the sale price. At its […]
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 […]
