The No. 1 criticism leveled at mobile data-management platforms (mDMPs): Who needs another silo? But that’s not stopping a growing number of ad tech companies from unveiling mDMPs as they move to meet the demands of marketers looking to activate their mobile data. Although several players have been on the scene for a while now – both […]
This week at the Cannes Lions festival, Rubicon Project hosted its annual discussion of some of the world’s most powerful digital media buyers. This panel has historically comprised the leaders of the four largest holding company trading desks, but this year was different – with senior buyers from IPG, Publicis, Dentsu and Bank of America. […]
The TV ad makeover is gaining steam, judging by comments on the ground this week in Cannes. Cablevision and NBCUniversal/Comcast are talking up the data granularity and addressability of their millions of set-top boxes, and agency buyers are crowing about results they’re seeing from programmatic TV activities. For example, Modi Media, GroupM’s addressable TV agency, […]
Nielsen has a new program designed to give advertisers and agencies a clearer lens into the digital audience activation process, the company announced Wednesday at its Consumer 360 conference in Washington, DC. The inaugural set of “Preferred Platform Partners” includes BrightRoll, DoubleClick, FreeWheel, Moat, RocketFuel, TubeMogul, Tremor Video, Viant and Videology. Other ad tech platforms […]
Much has changed for Interpublic Group since 2005, when Michael Roth stepped in to lead the then-troubled holding company. His background, as the CEO of a life insurance company, was unconventional, but it made sense given his role was to push IPG back to financial solvency. “The original profile for this job was financial,” he told […]
Alibaba’s sale of its US shopping site 11 Main on Tuesday may have looked like it was waving the white flag in surrender to Amazon and eBay, but CEO Daniel Zhang reaffirmed the Chinese commerce giant’s pursuit of cross-border commerce in his first onstage appearance in the United States. “Yes, we are strong in ecommerce, […]
A host of content-focused marketing agencies has sprung up inside agencies and media companies in recent years, so why not launch one jointly backed by those entities? That’s the logic behind Truffle Pig, a new agency joint venture from WPP Group, Snapchat and DailyMail. DailyMail and Snapchat media will be the starting points for branded […]
While affiliate marketing is hardly new – perhaps you’ve heard of Google and Amazon – for some publishers its real value comes from the data and optimization it enables, as opposed to the incremental revenue it generates. At least, this is what Alicia Navarro, CEO and co-founder of content monetization company Skimlinks, was led to […]
Krux is looking to overcome its industry perception as a publisher-focused data-management platform (DMP). This is one of the reasons why it hired Jon Suarez-Davis – previously Kellogg Co.’s VP of global media and digital strategy – as its chief marketing and strategy officer. Suarez-Davis officially starts Thursday and will report to Krux CEO Tom Chavez. “My […]
The traditional publisher waterfall, where impressions are exposed to sales channels in descending order of the perceived value of each channel, has always stuck in the craw of yield-obsessed media sellers. At its worst, the model ignores pockets of high-value inventory and reduces competition, and thus artificially caps a publisher’s revenue. Publishers have by […]
AdRoll wants to be known as more than purely a retargeter with its rollout Wednesday of “Prospecting,” a pool of potential customers a brand can reach into to improve incremental reach. This pool is fed by a stream of anonymized advertiser data called IntentMap, culled from the vendor’s 20,000 advertiser clients who opt in. About […]
Everyone knows Google needs to counter Facebook’s people-based marketing approach, unveiled with much fanfare last year as an answer to the twin measurement problems of device fragmentation and the crumbling cookie. On Wednesday it did so to an extent, making cross-device measurement of media exposures and conversions available in all DoubleClick ad products. The announcement, […]
Email advertising and marketing platform LiveIntent unveiled a $32.5 million growth equity investment on Wednesday, led by FTV Capital. Other investors include Battery Ventures, First Round Capital and Shasta Ventures. It will use the funds primarily to build out its platform and APIs for wider integration with other marketing tech companies like Salesforce, an effort […]
In the latest chapter to a rather convoluted M&A tale, AppNexus will snap up ad tech firm Real Media Latin America (RMLA) from Peter Gervai, the Brazilian entrepreneur who paid $1 some 13 years ago to take it off 24/7 Real Media’s hands. The companies didn’t disclose the deal price or Sao Paulo-based RMLA’s revenues, but its […]
As Daymond John approached the hotel valet, a kid – who recognized John as one of the sharks on the ABC series “Shark Tank” – asked for help becoming a rap star. John demurred. “I can’t do that,” he said. “I make T-shirts for a living.” And then the valet pulled up with the kid’s […]
ABC, A+E Networks, Comcast and Canoe have initiated a pilot with broadcaster ad server FreeWheel to manage dynamic ad insertion in VOD and set-top box inventory alongside digital ads. Video-on-demand advertising has been relatively slow to take off, namely because of greater need for back-end integration in the underlying TV tech infrastructure. “The benefit for […]
Two months into a quality control effort designed to curb fraud, domain masking and other sketchy practices in its marketplace, AppNexus has offered some details on those cleanup efforts – and even given them a name. The company’s supply hygiene initiative, dubbed IQ, consists of three measures aimed at boosting transparency and accountability of media sold […]
Visa wants merchants and consumers to know it’s everywhere they want to be. And, increasingly, everywhere means mobile. The brand is committing more than 50% of its US media budget to digital, including social and mobile, said the company’s SVP and head of North America marketing, Lara Balazs. Last year, it invested 30-40% or more […]
In 2012, Target had to swallow a few hard truths. Its digital platform relied solely on third-party code and it had little to no engineering talent in-house. And it was playing catch-up with mobile. “My focus has been on moving toward an agile product model where we rewrote our code [over three years] for about […]
There’s something fishy going on in China. According to mobile attribution company Apsalar, for every valid in-app purchase (IAP) made in China, there are 273 fraudulent ones. But China isn’t the only place with IAP problems. Taiwan sees 54 fake in-app purchases for every valid one, while Saudi Arabia clocks in at 24.6 and Israel […]
The public market has not been too kind to ad tech companies, but French performance marketing company Criteo has seemingly fared far better (it had five straight quarters of revenue growth and a market cap of $2.6 billion). Numerous industry insiders laud Criteo for its recurring revenue stream, typically associated with a software model. Yet Criteo […]
If MediaMath co-President Mike Lamb has his druthers, the convergence of ad tech and marketing tech – the industry’s current inescapable narrative – will manifest in two ways. The first is beginning to happen: a set of integrations that advertisers or their agencies can use to clip together their paid media platform to their marketing […]
When French holding company Publicis Groupe decentralized the programmatic capabilities of its agency trading desk VivaKi in February, it did so to capitalize on the increasing performance of programmatic, said VivaKi CEO Stephan Beringer. While Beringer didn’t pinpoint the exact drivers for the restructuring, “It was the culmination of insights that led to the need […]
The digital marketing technologist isn’t exactly a new kid on the block in the enterprise, given Gartner’s prediction – in 2012 – that 70% of companies employed one. But the job title has definitely evolved as many of the technologies that fuel brands’ consumer interactions – from data-management platforms to CRM to commerce systems – […]
What’s the future of content distribution and monetization, particularly as major players like Facebook, Google and Verizon make strategic moves to capture more share in mobile video? This was the dominant theme at JW Player’s JW INSIGHTS conference Tuesday in New York, where a group of execs from Google and AOL’s likely owner, Verizon, gathered for the […]
It’s time for the next can of worms: mobile viewability. And the mobile ad vendors are already on the scene. Less than two weeks after the Media Rating Council (MRC) issued its long-awaited interim guidance on mobile viewability measurement, three separate mobile media sellers – Millennial Media, 33Across and JUICE Mobile – have announced their intention to offer a 100% […]
Wayne Gattinella, CEO of DoubleVerify, will appear at AdExchanger’s CleanAds I/O conference on June 3, an event addressing inventory quality and supply chain issues in the digital advertising ecosystem. Because of the high demand for mobile location-based data, it’s a big opportunity for fraudsters looking to game geo-coordinates. “With more money flowing to place-based advertising, […]
If Verizon closes its $4.4 billion AOL acquisition, it will mark one more marriage between a telco and an ad tech company. It’s also a harbinger of more to come. Last summer, Australian telco Telstra grabbed a majority stake into streaming video distribution platform Ooyala and then bought video supply-side platform Videoplaza. In 2012, Singapore […]
Kelly Liyakasa contributed. Verizon will acquire digital media and ad tech platform company AOL in a cash transaction valued at $4.4 billion. The deal vaults the telecommunications company into the media and ad tech sectors and gives it a “three screen” relationship with consumers across desktop, mobile, and television. “It’s really one of the moments in time where […]
Viewability and fraud will be addressed at AdExchanger’s upcoming CleanAds I/O conference on June 3, along with a host of other inventory quality and supply chain issues in the digital advertising ecosystem. Screening out fraudulent and non-viewable ads has never been easier or more popular. Last summer AdExchanger reported that the number of marketers running viewability […]
