The dynamic duo of Bryan Wiener and Sarah Hofstetter is back in business. This time at the helm of the ecommerce analytics company Profitero. Wiener and Hofstetter were the CEO and president, respectively, of the agency 360i, which was acquired by Dentsu. Later, they both took up similar positions at the measurement firm Comscore, before […]
Pinterest made $272 million in Q1 this year, a 35% jump from the same period in 2019, but its net loss increased by $100 million because ad spend crumbled in March. The company “began 2020 on strong footing,” said Pinterest CFO Todd Morgenfeld during the company earnings call Tuesday, but April ad spend declined by […]
When Xandr launched in 2018, it had a grand vision to be the data-driven platform and ad marketplace for the TV industry. But from the start, industry insiders were skeptical that plan would ever come to fruition, and few were surprised when Xandr announced last week it would fold into WarnerMedia. “We kind of thought […]
Roku said Tuesday it rebranded dataxu, the DSP it acquired last October, and is introducing it as a programmatic ad-buying platform called OneView, with capabilities powered by Roku’s first-party data. OneView was the name of a dataxu’s cross-device identity graph, which is joining with Roku’s data from 39 million US households to combine programmatic performance […]
A year ago, if you overheard someone say “BOPIS is all the rage,” you could be forgiven for mistaking the reference for obscure ’90s-era slang. But nowadays, “buy online pick up in store” is as normal as, well, doing groceries. And it’s going to change retail advertising forever. Publicis Groupe forecast in 2019 that it would […]
IPG CEO Michael Roth believes that post-pandemic, aspects of work-from-home life will definitely stick at agencies, and business travel policies will be dramatically changed. “Working from home has turned out to be fairly attractive,” he said. “It’s amazing how the world and commerce go on.” Overall, the tone from IPG clients is pretty erratic. Travel, […]
No company in the world is better positioned than Amazon to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic stronger. Most advertising companies suffered a painful contraction in March. But Amazon’s advertising revenue was up by about 40% in Q1 compared to the year before, accounting for most of the $3.9 billion Amazon earned in its “Other” business […]
AT&T said Thursday it will combine TV ad tech division Xandr with WarnerMedia. Xandr Chief Business Officer Kirk McDonald will continue to lead the group and report into WarnerMedia Chief Revenue Officer Gerhard Zeiler. Zeiler reports to John Stankey, AT&T’s new CEO. “Xandr and WarnerMedia have always worked hand-in-hand to benefit our incredible advertising partners,” McDonald said in a statement. […]
Retail foot traffic and recessions be damned, people need to snack. That fact has boosted Mondelēz, despite the coronavirus crisis and economic downturns. And, unlike in previous recessions, Mondelēz is investing to win market share, instead of cutting spend to protect the bottom line, CEO Dirk Van de Put told investors on a quarterly earnings […]
WPP is slogging along with the rest of the agency market. Q1 like-for-like revenues were down 3.8% to $3.5 billion, the company said Wednesday. In North America, WPP’s largest market, like-for-like revenue was down 1.9% to roughly $1.2 billion. Grey, GroupM and VMLY&R all grew in the region, but revenues began to sag across the […]
Alphabet had a surprisingly strong performance in Q1 2020, with revenues up 13% from last year to a total of $41.2 billion, according to the company’s earnings report on Tuesday. YouTube revenue passed $4 billion in Q1, up from $3 billion a year ago. But Google is preparing for a much tougher Q2. “Q1 was […]
Like its competitors, Omnicom expects steep declines in the second quarter as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on. “In the preliminary forecasts we looked at, the second quarter was the most traumatic,” said CEO John Wren on the company’s Q1 2020 earnings call Tuesday. Omnicom also declined to give guidance for the rest of the year […]
Is COVID-19 the beginning of the end for upfronts? Buyers and sellers have long questioned the necessity of flashy presentations, especially as the broadcast TV business declines. Disney chairman Bob Iger recently predicted an end to the antiquated upfront process altogether as a result of the economic crisis. Ad buyers have been pushing to […]
The podcast industry has been on a crazy ride for the past month and a half. As people spend more time at home, listeners are still gravitating toward their favorite programs, but they’re engaging at different times of day and through home devices such as smart speakers. In the initial days of the pandemic, podcast […]
So much chips and salsa is slowly growing stale, beer and soda going flat. If you think the average American TV viewer misses live sports, consider the desperation for brands that target sports advertising. The NFL Draft is seeing clearly enough, with a surge of demand from advertisers that are itching for the return of […]
Google will require advertisers to submit personal identification or business documents that prove who they are and what country they operate in, the company announced on Thursday. The process will start in the United States and then expand globally, but it will take a few years before the new business verification program is complete, according […]
Holding companies are being hit hard by the pandemic, and IPG is no exception. The company reported Wednesday that Q1 2020 net organic growth was 0.3% YoY to $1.97 billion, compared to 6.4% growth during the same period a year ago. Revenue was negatively impacted by account losses and the coronavirus pandemic in certain regions, […]
Welcome to ad tech. Everything’s a disaster. But Troels Jensen, former CEO of the Danish fin tech company Itiviti AB, who was brought on as Adform’s chief in April, is sticking to the plan. “The long game hasn’t changed,” Jensen said. “But we do have time now to think about how we’re hitting the ground […]
This article is sponsored by Verizon Media. Up until recently, brands looking to break through the heavily saturated digital advertising ecosystem adopted third-party cookies as the anchor for behavioral and interest-based targeting. Even two years ago, spend on third-party data was still rapidly increasing – by 17.5% to $19.2 billion, according to a 2018 study […]
The coronavirus pandemic brought everyone online, leading to a surge in traffic. But it’s expensive to process all the programmatic ad requests that come with that traffic. Plus, CPMs are falling industrywide. So two weeks ago, The Trade Desk asked exchanges to stop sending duplicate bid requests for the same ad impression. The request initially […]
The mobile gaming category – a more than $60 billion-a-year market – is thriving amid the brewing economic crisis. But unlike other publishers and platforms experiencing engagement spikes without the corresponding uptick in ad revenue, mobile game publishers are seeing massive boosts across the board. Nearly every metric (other than CPMs and cost per install or […]
Brands launching campaigns in response to the COVID-19 crisis must tread carefully. Consumers largely don’t want to hear about irrelevant products or buy nonessential items during a recession. They can also see right through brands with COVID-19 responses that don’t offer something relevant. That leaves brands balancing the need to distribute important information without coming […]
While the increased digital media supply caused by the pandemic has prompted CPMs to plummet – dropping 20% in March, according to ad analytics company Adomik – programmatic auctions are still healthy. Certainly bidding in March declined overall, said Francois de Laigue, Adomik’s VP of sales and strategic partnerships. The average dropped from 2.5 to […]
The Ad Council said Thursday it has launched a programmatic private marketplace (PMP) for public service announcements related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This initiative is its first major foray into donated programmatic media, though it has experimented with targeting audiences on social and specific publishers. The Ad Council coordinates public service advertising campaigns for a […]
Travel is the backbone for many business categories, including entertainment, events, hospitality and food and dining. But that backbone is broken right now, and may never fully recover. Rafat Ali, founder and CEO of the travel industry publishing company Skift, has his finger on the pulse of the travel industry. It was three years after the 9/11 attacks […]
This article is sponsored by Xandr. Given the events of the past month, few questions should remain about the importance of Connected TV (CTV) as an integral part of advertisers’ media plans. According to Nielsen, the AT&T TV Now streaming service saw an approximately 20% increase in total viewing time in the third week of […]
Brands that haven’t gone dark still need a steady flow of creative, but production shoots are on hold. So with everyone practicing social distancing, brands are repurposing stock assets and using influencers as content creators. “People are looking for any cost-effective solution that gets them high quality ads,” said Alex Collmer, CEO of creative automation […]
NBCUniversal opened more of its inventory to programmatic platforms on Monday, with a new product integration through FreeWheel and The Trade Desk. FreeWheel, a sister-company of Comcast’s NBCU, is coming out of beta with its “unified decisioning” platform, which operates an auction where programmatic demand is considered alongside direct-sold campaigns for OTT inventory and video […]
“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 Allison Schiff, senior editor at AdExchanger. It’s part of a series of perspectives from AdExchanger’s editorial team. The COVID-19 outbreak highlights a singular dilemma of a pandemic in the digital […]
This story has been updated to reflect Tuesday’s earnings call. Publicis Groupe said Monday it will cut the salaries of chairman and CEO Arthur Sadoun and executive chairman of the supervisory board Maurice Lévy by 30% in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The company will also reduce compensation by 20% for management board members. For […]
