It seems every time there’s a partnership between a marketing tech company and an ad tech vendor, MediaMath is involved. Its most recent hookups: Oracle and IBM. When working through the technical and logistical intricacies of these integrations, MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki takes a back seat, seeing himself as “champion and cheerleader.” “My role is […]
It might surprise those who think of Merkle as only a CRM agency to hear it has a media practice that employs 400. Although the division has taken four years to construct, Merkle has over the past several months recruited a handful of media agency heavyweights (including ex-Razorfish COO Michael Komasinski) to help support its […]
Google is beta testing a solution within DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) that will allow publishers to bring in high-value impressions before reserved inventory in their ad server. Jonathan Bellack, Google’s director of product management, made the announcement at the IAB Ad Operations Summit on Monday during a discussion about header bidding that pitted Google (anti-header […]
NBCUniversal transacted 10-15% of its digital business programmatically during the 2015-2016 season, the company has revealed to AdExchanger. Prior to the upfronts, the company expected to secure 50% of commitments on a “converged” basis, with elements of both TV and digital in a single deal. In this most recent upfront, NBCUniversal’s digital business grew 50% and, of […]
Facebook doesn’t want umpteen degrees of separation between its LiveRail exchange and the stable of publishers who use it to monetize, and the company is taking swift action to cull intermediaries. In an email obtained by AdExchanger, Facebook says it will terminate publisher services for an undisclosed number of customers (namely third-party resellers of desktop […]
IBM’s agreement to acquire The Weather Company’s B2B, mobile and cloud-based web properties – including WSI, weather.com, Weather Underground and The Weather Company brand, but not The Weather Channel – is likely more about data assets and less about a grand entrance into the media world. Read the release. IBM was mum on its long-term strategy, saying through a spokesperson that […]
If a turnaround story is going to fly, it’s got to take off at some point. But Prashant Fuloria, Yahoo’s SVP of advertising products, is preaching patience. “The reality is that this is a multiyear transformation, and our long-term trajectory will not be defined by a single quarter,” Fuloria said. Speaking of quarters, the results […]
Oracle Marketing Cloud kicked off its OpenWorld conference this week with three platform features meant to reach customers across channels, improve email targeting using Datalogix and manage content marketing workflow and scheduling. “We’re making easier for clients to operate in a cross-channel way, and we’re doing it practically, as opposed to theoretically,” said Alexander Hooshmand, […]
DISH Network is subscribing to the programmatic playbook, enabling greater automation and data application for buyers bidding on addressable TV spots. The satellite pay-TV provider, representing 8 million addressable households nationwide, on Monday debuted a programmatic marketplace and supply-side platform running on IPONWEB. Its initial demand partners are Rocket Fuel, TubeMogul and DataXu. After an […]
App developer Guy Tal isn’t interested in cold calls from mobile service providers he isn’t familiar with who want him to test their software development kit (SDK). “I get approached by companies through email and at conferences all the time and, to be honest, I really can’t be bothered,” said Tal, CEO and founder […]
AppNexus has long been the grand poobah of indie programmatic media platforms. But lately it has begun to look like a company under siege. There’s the fraud issue, which became an albatross after competitors Rubicon Project and OpenX cleaned up two years ago while AppNexus continued to allow blind impression resale. It has since fixed […]
IBM is pushing deeper into the cloud and paid media. Big Blue on Thursday launched the IBM Universal Behavior Exchange (UBX), a platform that unifies marketing tech acquisitions including Unica campaign management, Silverpop marketing automation, Coremetrics analytics and Xtify mobile personalization. It also named 25 UBX partners, including a handful of ad tech players like […]
Yahoo is entering into a search pact with Google that will allow it to power its Internet search and ad services with some non-Microsoft juice. According to Yahoo, the agreement with Google provides Yahoo with “additional flexibility to choose among suppliers of search results and ads.” Google’s offering will complement the services already provided by […]
Programmatic continues to help more than hurt the agency conglomerates, or at least it has for the largest US holding company Omnicom Group. Omnicom continues to see notable growth from its trading desk, although the growth rate has slowed. The company’s Accuen exchange-buying unit delivered an incremental $25 million in spending growth during the third […]
It’s a question every CMO must answer: How much of my first-party data can safely be shared with tech platform partners? For advertisers in categories where Google has a product offering of its own, the question has even more urgency. Consider ADT, whose home security business faces an emerging competitor in Google’s Nest smart thermostat […]
From global leaders to energetic startups, “internal disruption” has become the driving force behind marketing resources. “The scary thing for me is to see how fast the disruptors are themselves being disrupted,” said Pepsi’s beverage group president Bradley Jakeman at the ANA’s Masters of Marketing conference. He pointed to the speed with which a company […]
Which is better – deterministic data or probabilistic data? It’s a trick question because the answer is “both.” Even Google – whose first-party cross-device logged in user base likely trumps anything anyone other than Facebook could muster deterministically – uses a combination of logged-in user data and statistical matching. With privacy in mind, Google’s recently […]
For 128 years, Coca-Cola has distinguished its brand through mass media, but consumer tech titans like Apple, Microsoft and Google have usurped its top spot among the world’s most valuable brands, as rated by Forbes. “That’s indicative of the world we’re living in,” said Michael Weaver, director of data strategy for The Coca-Cola Company, speaking […]
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 […]
