Last week in Cannes, global leaders from the five biggest holding company trading desks convened for a panel discussion hosted by the Rubicon Project. The event took place on a rooftop against the backdrop of the Mediterranean Sea, while on the sidewalk below creatives scurried between beach parties and celeb-packed sessions at the Palais des […]
Disagreements continue between the advertising industry and privacy advocates as advertisers point to potential weaknesses in the “Cookie Clearinghouse” project that Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser, and the Stanford Center for Internet and Society’s have unveiled. The Cookie Clearinghouse promises to create two lists of domains: one for those that browsers would permit to […]
Facebook has made so many embellishments to its ad monetization machine in the past year that communicating it all to clients has become a big chore. This week in Cannes, the company participated in a “Creativity at Scale” panel and convened its 18-member Client Council to discuss its embrace of hashtags, its recent decision to […]
The moment for “convergence” between TV and online video is starting to seem more real, but video ad tech firm YuMe believes that programmatic sales methods won’t be a substantial part of the conversation around television-style branding campaigns for many years to come. “We do have a small amount of ad sales coming to us […]
Talking about data feels a bit transgressive in Cannes, where creativity is literally center stage. But with data driving so much change at agencies – including at creative shops – it seems an unavoidable topic. It came up frequently in a conversation on Tuesday with Americo Campos Silva, Shell’s Global Media Manager, and Sasha Savic, CEO […]
It’s been a little more than a year since Kepler Group was spun off (see AdExchanger’s Q&A) from MediaMath, where it had previously been the direct-to-client professional services group. So how’s it going for the world’s first independent agency to be incubated within a demand-side platform? Not bad at all. Kepler is hiring up and […]
One of the reasons that digital publishers like to talk about native is obvious: it resembles the age-old practice of high-priced “advertorials” and the natural customization of the placement dictates that marketers must deal directly with the site’s sales team. At the same time, those reasons have left agencies feeling frozen out by native ads, […]
AdExchanger is in the French Riviera, where some 12,000 people have gathered for the 60th annual Cannes Lions festival of creativity. We’ll have updates throughout the week, and a definitive (!) answer to the question, Can Big Data can play nice with the Big Idea? This morning Adobe hosted a discussion around advertising and trust, […]
While it was not mentioned at Apple’s WWDC keynote address earlier this week, the newest version of iOS includes a new privacy feature that pushes more advertisers into adopting its latest user tracking system. After Apple announced nearly two years ago that it was shutting down access to the unique device identifier (UDID), which many […]
Recounting an anecdote in his opening keynote yesterday at Merkle’s customer summit, Merkle CEO David Williams illustrated what a “game-changer” Facebook’s Custom Audience product has been for Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM) companies like his. Williams said that Facebook executives initially told him it would not only never let email addresses match to Facebook login data […]
Facebook ad platform Blinq Media has made some big changes since Gannett bought it last year for an estimated $92 million. Among those changes is a potentially powerful tie-in with ShopLocal, the dominant player in digital ad circulars and Blinq’s corporate sibling at Gannett. The idea is to convince ShopLocal’s existing customers (national retail giants […]
The online ecosystem is different in Russia. Yandex is the search leader over Google; VK.com (originally VKontakte) and Odnoklassniki.ru are more popular social networks than Facebook. But when it comes to programmatic buying, the country looks similar to the US RTB circa 2011, thanks in part to the participation of Russia’s major internet players. The […]
“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 Sacha Xavier, Partner, Media & Innovation Director for Neo@Ogilvy. One day I came to work and realized that everything had changed. My branch of the industry had upgraded from the […]
“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 Rob Leathern, CEO of Optimal, Inc.. Having had the fortune (or misfortune) of being involved in online advertising product development over the past nine years, I’ve been able to […]
WPP Group’s trading desk Xaxis is known for its proprietary approach to technology. The GroupM unit has incubated numerous ad platforms, a legacy of WPP’s 2007 acquisition of 24/7 Media. It offers these products to clients as an alternative to licensing from vendors. By contrast, trading desk rivals VivaKi AOD (Publicis), Cadreon (IPG), and Accuen (Omnicom) are […]
Google remains on a warpath to drive industry-wide adoption of its ad tech “stack” strategy, positioning integration of past acquisitions as proof it is serving key constituencies. In March, Google called out the integration of Admeld and publisher direct sales. Today at its thinkDoubleClick client advisory board, it will highlight the inclusion of Wildfire (acquired […]
Salesforce.com has said it will acquire the digital marketing platform ExactTarget for $2.5 billion, making this the cloud software company’s largest acquisition to date. One driver of the deal was Oracle’s acquisition of marketing automation provider Eloqua last year. At the time, AdExchanger and others speculated that Salesforce.com would snap up ExactTarget or Eloqua competitor […]
When Publicis Groupe launched it five years ago, VivaKi Audience On Demand was among the first holding company trading desks. And Google was its key partner, supporting a great majority of AOD’s ad serving and auction-based display media buying. But those days are over. As of Q1, Google’s DoubleClick Bid Manager (formerly Invite Media) is […]
There are almost as many approaches to solving the attribution puzzle as there are brands. At Lancome, part of the strategy is to consolidate two key channels with a single vendor. Alessio Rossi is VP of digital marketing, ecommerce and CRM for the Loreal-owned luxury cosmetics brand. Since joining in May 2012, he has reevaluated […]
Social infrastructure company Gigya allows businesses to connect social elements to their sites, like social logins, and leverage the resulting data. It works with nearly 700 online enterprises, including 48 of the top 100 comScore properties, according to Gigya CEO Patrick Salyer. “Across our platform we touch 1.5 billion consumers,” he says. “Two-thirds of the […]
For the past year, executives at The New York Times Company speaking on its quarterly earnings calls have singled out a particular challenge for the newspaper publisher’s display ad business: programmatic media buying methods. With this month’s hire of online ad veteran Matt Prohaska as programmatic advertising director, the NYT still regards exchange and automated […]
Automotive data company Polk collects and analyzes data related to registration and title information, new vehicle transactions from all the major manufacturers, and even vehicle financing data. Working with companies like Datalogix, with whom Polk has a years-long partnership, the company is able to bring this offline data into the online world. “Polk has some […]
AcquireWeb is not a new, bootstrapped startup – but it could be labeled an evolved one with a new home in display advertising. CEO Al Gadbut describes his 27-person company, launched in 2001, as “a marketing data technology company focusing on customer identity integration within the digital space.” When the Foster City, California-based company started out, […]
Last week AdExchanger looked at the dynamic between ROI DNA, a performance-driven agency, and its preferred display-trading partner, Run DSP. (Read the story.) There are many such relationships in ad tech, where a mid-sized agency relies on a key network or platform partner to drive ROI and provide hand-holding to its planners and buyers. You […]
There were two adjectives Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer used repeatedly when discussing the advertising opportunity with Tumblr, which her company agreed to buy for $1.1 billion. Those words: “native” and “aspirational.” It’s what you would expect. In its short history of monetization, Tumblr has focused on organic ad formats, tentatively rolling out tools to promote […]
Yahoo’s planned acquisition of Tumblr brings it “coolness,” young demos and mobile eyeballs, says the blogosphere. The deal, reported at $1.1 billion, is Yahoo’s Instagram – even with aging Flickr already aboard. Okay, fine. From here, this acquisition may also be a new, strategic move into “identity.” Yahoo Mail used to be the portal’s identity magnet, but product development neglect and […]
The balance between protecting consumers’ privacy and reaching them with relevant targeted ads is a constant struggle for the online ad industry. And consumers experience a similar tension, according to several surveys published in recent months. After a December 2012 survey of 2,000 customers in the US and UK, Accenture Interactive found that 86% of respondents […]
“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 by Andrew Shebbeare, Founding Partner and Global Chief Strategist at Essence. Don’t worry; I’m not planning to reprise the old debate over whether data is good or evil here. I assume this […]
Five years into the exchange-buying trend, attention tends to focus on what’s broken in agency/network relationships. Black-box algorithms, opaque margins, impression fraud, and a tendency to overpromise and underdeliver have damaged trust in digital ads and the platforms that traffic them. So the story goes. But for many agencies, these concerns are outweighed by the […]
Facebook has raised the velvet rope to let more of its real-time bidding partners into the News Feed, and by many accounts the response rates are stunning. But some technical and ad quality issues still need to be ironed out. Beta partner TellApart says click-through rates for Facebook Exchange ads in the News Feed are […]
