“The Sell Sider” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Scott Messer, SVP of media, Leaf Group. Last month we looked at how publishers may be losing their grasp on the contextual opportunity ahead. This month, we’ll explore the […]
The multistate antitrust lawsuit against Google that dropped on Wednesday evening is so squarely focused on ad tech that the term “header bidding” shows up more than 110 times. The suit details alleged anticompetitive sins related to the way in which Google runs its multibillion-dollar online advertising business, including the claim that Google colluded with […]
The DSP Beeswax, founded in 2014 by ad tech gadfly Ari Paparo, is off the market. Comcast’s video ad tech company FreeWheel said Thursday it will acquire the “bidder-as-a-service” for undisclosed terms. Over the last couple of years, FreeWheel has increased its buy-side capabilities, building out a more advanced exchange, hosting upfronts and integrating with […]
Facebook’s got its claws out, calling Apple’s move to require an opt-in for the IDFA “an attack on personalized advertising” that will harm small businesses, creators and kittens. Well, not kittens, necessarily. It’s just that it’s a little hard not to be facetious when a multibillion-dollar company that just got hit with twin antitrust lawsuits […]
Samsung Ads released Tuesday its new TV measurement solution designed to help advertisers to measure the combined impact of linear and streaming TV ad campaigns, as opposed to viewing the data in different silos. General Motors is the first advertiser to use the tool as part of a pilot program, which includes an integration with […]
Well, the other shoe dropped. Actually two shoes. On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission and, separately, 48 attorneys general, led by New York’s Letitia James and including AGs from the District of Columbia and Guam, sued Facebook for the same thing: alleged illegal monopolization of the social networking market. (Read the FTC’s full suit here […]
So WPP’s media buying unit GroupM released its US ad spend figures on Tuesday and, all in all, the pandemic fallout was not as bad as many had initially anticipated. Especially if you happened to be named Google, Facebook or Amazon. Back in June, GroupM projected a 13% decline in 2020 but now, it’s anticipating […]
The first half of 2020 was pretty lean. This year is on track to be the slowest since 2015 in terms of deal activity, according to LUMA Partners. But set the table and get out the gravy boat, because strategic M&A started to pick back up in Q3 and the momentum has continued into the […]
Wyclef Jean has seen up close the devastation that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on Black-owned businesses. The three-time Grammy Award–winning musician and founding member of acclaimed hip-hop group the Fugees said that his friends, Medjine and John “Jube” Altino, struggled to keep their business, Vibez Juice & Vegan Cafe in Jersey City, NJ afloat. […]
The more the merrier. App attribution company AppsFlyer has a late breaking addition to its $210 million investment round, which closed in January: Salesforce Ventures. Although Salesforce is only taking a small percentage of AppsFlyer as part of the round extension – less than 1% of the company, according to AppsFlyer CEO and co-founder Oren […]
Guess telcos really aren’t that into ad tech after all. On Thursday, Norwegian telco Telenor sold cross-device company Tapad to Experian in a transaction advised by LUMA Partners. Experian is acquiring 100% of Tapad for a cash consideration of roughly $280 million. Not too shabby for an ad tech company getting sold in 2020. Tapad’s […]
“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 Richard Eisert, partner at Davis & Gilbert. For the ad tech community, election day felt like deja vu. Less than a year after the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) came into […]
After Donald Trump’s then-digital honcho Brad Parscale described the outgoing president’s operation as a Death Star, the Biden campaign’s digital director, Rob Flaherty, posted a gif showing the moon’s space station’s ultimate fate. On Monday, Biden’s ad agency, Bully Pulpit Interactive, hosted a seminar detailing the president-elect’s digital strategy to educate voters, expand its organic […]
For nearly a year, advertisers using Facebook’s conversion lift studies tool were unknowingly being fed faulty data. A code error caused the reached conversions metric to be undercounted for conversion lift tests conducted on Facebook by several thousand advertisers between Aug. 15, 2019, and Aug. 31 of this year. Advertisers use conversion lift studies, a […]
Mobile ad networks have been busily stress testing SKAdNetwork in preparation for Apple’s IDFA changes – but they’ve been doing so with one arm tied behind their back. For months, two of the most crucial pieces of information necessary for attribution were absent in the postbacks coming from SKAdNetwork, which is Apple’s API for enabling ad […]
“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Ari Turner, senior vice president of sales operations at Ampersand. Scale in TV is traditionally associated with the amount of inventory. But relying on the blunt force of media tonnage is not sustainable in 2020 […]
GroupM recently promoted veterans Kieley Taylor and Amanda Grant to global head of partnerships and global head of social, respectively, as part a strategic move aimed at strengthening the company’s relationships with Google as well as Amazon, Spotify, Twitter and others. Taylor, previously global head of social, will focus heavily on Google as she designs […]
Addressable TV advertising promises to deliver unique ads on a household-by-household or even individualized basis. The problem, however, is that the Nielsen ratings currency off which linear TV is transacted, isn’t designed to accommodate all that variability. And not being able to use the Nielsen rating on addressable ads keeps a lot of advertisers from […]
LiveRamp posted its first profitable quarter back in August, and the data company’s upward trajectory continued through its fiscal Q2 2021, the company reported Monday. For a second quarter in a row, LiveRamp was profitable with revenue increasing 16% YoY to $105 million. That’s more than the 11% growth LiveRamp predicted during its Q1. Read […]
Over the past two years, NBCU has made inroads in the commerce arena, building capabilities that drive transactions directly and measuring those conversion events. The strategy makes sense: If you know your ad inventory drives purchases, you might as well go full Amazon and own the whole funnel. And NBCU has executed on that vision […]
Video streaming giant Roku’s revenue soared 73% YOY to $452 million in Q3. Roku’s Platform business – which includes advertising and content distribution revenue – saw its strongest quarter in the segment’s history, with revenue leaping 78% YOY to $319 million. Roku attributed the record Platform numbers to strong growth in advertising as brands embraced […]
Holy stock market obliteration, Batman! The Trade Desk continued its meteoric trajectory, when it reported Q3 revenue of $216 million on Thursday, a 32% YoY increase, and a 45% leap from the previous quarter. Its stock price Friday morning was more than 25% and still on an upward trajectory, and it has a market cap […]
The Trade Desk is on a tear, striking three partnerships in quick succession over the course of a week to support the Unified ID 2.0 initiative. First was LiveRamp, then Criteo, followed by Nielsen. Each partnership tackles a different piece of the development process for UID 2.0, which aims to use encrypted and hashed email […]
🚨🚨 Privacy news 🚨🚨 The Consumer Privacy Rights Act, on the ballot as Proposition 24, has been approved by voters in California, passing with 56.1% of the vote. We are thrilled to announce the passage of #Prop24, the California Privacy Rights Act, with a decisive majority of Californians supporting the measure to strengthen consumer privacy […]
As Americans head to the polls, advertisers and publishers need to remain agile with their paid media strategies. There’s a lot we can’t know about what comes next. “As we’ve seen throughout several points this year, it’s all about staying flexible, making sure messaging is relevant and appropriate – but not going dark,” said Ken Blom, […]
Amazon reported a record Q3 that was driven in part by a 51% increase in advertising revenue and buoyed by a surge in ecommerce due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The online retail giant’s accelerated push into advertising netted $5.4 billion in revenue – up from $3.6 million a year ago – with the company telling […]
Ad verification company DoubleVerify clinched a $350 million investment deal Wednesday that will be used to buy out existing shareholders and help fuel its growth ahead of a reported initial public offering next year. The backing from a new investor group led by Tiger Global Management – which includes the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, […]
TikTok marked its first foray into ecommerce by announcing a global partnership deal with Shopify on Tuesday, a deal that it said will help more than a million merchants reach new audiences and drive sales on the popular video-sharing app. The integration deal with Shopify – the Canada-based ecommerce giant – is intended to help […]
This article is sponsored by Criteo Retail Media. Ecommerce was on the rise long before COVID-19 upended the traditional brick-and-mortar retail experience. Even as shopping restrictions loosen in some parts of the country, many retailers and brands have watched online shopping behaviors continue to accelerate. According to an August report from McKinsey, most consumers […]
Do a word search of the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Google, filed on Tuesday, and you won’t find … a single reference to DoubleClick, YouTube or DV360. As expected, the focus of the DOJ’s long-awaited filing, the result of an investigation that began well over a year ago, is squarely on Google’s alleged (gotta […]
