Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital acquired the programmatic agency MightyHive last December to marry hands-on-keyboard expertise with dynamic creative expertise from MediaMonks. The acquisition kicked off a formal working relationship between S4 CEO Sorrell and MightyHive CEO Pete Kim – who are bonding over their similar Type A personalities. Sorrell’s reputation for all-hours emails and constant […]
Remember when WPP CEO Mark Read said he wanted the holding company to be known for creative transformation? That need to evolve has finally hit Triad, a company WPP acquired in 2016 that sells paid media on ecommerce sites. On Tuesday, Triad rebranded from Triad Retail Media and launched a consultancy to help brands increase […]
LiveRamp has added connected TV IDs to IdentityLink, its cross-device identity graph, the company said during its Monday Q4 2018 earnings report. Connected TV IDs are tied to a home IP address, and are used to distinguish households by companies that serve ads over smart TVs or OTT services, including some smart TV manufacturers, multichannel […]
Facebook CFO David Wehner recently told investors that even if the economy falters, Facebook’s ability to measure advertising returns is its saving grace. Will the same hold true for small- to mid-sized marketers? AdExchanger called on several analysts and senior marketers to get their take. On the whole, they agreed SMBs will continue to buy […]
As marketers spend more with Amazon, they’re spawning a cottage industry of Amazon-focused ad tech vendors and service partners. Brands need specialists to guide them across Amazon’s sprawling marketing empire – a brand may deal separately with Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP), Amazon’s Alexa voice group, Amazon Fresh groceries, Twitch and the company’s packaging and shipment […]
by Sarah Sluis, Alison Weissbrot, James Hercher and Ryan Joe The economy is a roller coaster. It’s up, it’s down, it does a loop-de-loop. A downturn isn’t guaranteed, but there’ve been enough rumblings that people are waiting for the other shoe to drop. The last recession in 2008 catalyzed some change in the industry – […]
NBCU did something it had never done before: transacted on a TV advertising campaign based on business outcomes. The campaign for the STXfilms movie “The Upside” was guaranteed based on ticket sales and, secondarily, show time searches, the broadcast giant said Friday. Comscore will measure viewership data and tie it to ticket sales from Fandango, […]
Consumer goods clients are struggling, and dragging Publicis down with them. The holding company reported weak earnings with just 0.3% organic growth for the quarter and 0.1% organic growth for the year to $2.85 billion, well below analyst expectations of 2.5%. “Let’s be clear,” CEO Arthur Sadoun said on the earnings call Thursday. “Q4 organic […]
Brian Wieser is heading back to the agency world, joining WPP’s media buying unit GroupM as global president of business intelligence, the company said Wednesday. He will report to GroupM CEO Kelly Clark. It might seem like an odd time to jump to an agency, given the volatility of the industry and the epic amount […]
Spotify said Wednesday in a blog post it would acquire podcast production network Gimlet Media and podcast creation, distribution and sponsorship platform Anchor. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but sources pegged the price at roughly $230 million. If that estimate is correct, it’s the most high-value acquisition of a podcast network or platform […]
While Facebook’s earnings last Tuesday prove that marketers still spend, some wonder if consumer backlash against the platform could one day damage brands advertising on it. “The slow stream of press has caused more angst and questions,” said James Douglas, executive director and head of media at performance agency Reprise. “Every day it seems like […]
This article is sponsored by GSTV. It turns out fueling up can predict more about consumer behavior than marketers might expect. A recent study produced by Mastercard and GSTV revealed fueling up leads to significant patterns in consumer spending. After analyzing nearly a year’s worth of aggregated, anonymized transaction data on Mastercard’s network, the […]
Since GDPR came into effect last year, Google has been at the center of two connected issues around resolving identity in digital marketing. First, it planned to remove the DoubleClick ID (now the Google ID) from its log files, preventing ad tech and analytics companies from using the ID to track campaigns across the web. […]
Google still brings in the big bucks, but its costs are skyrocketing as well as the digital media giant pushes its way into TV advertising. First, the basics. Alphabet brought in $39.3 billion in Q4 2018, up 23% from the same period the year before, the company disclosed in its quarterly earnings report on Monday. […]
When the LA Rams beat the New Orleans Saints en route to Super Bowl LIII, the citizens of Atlanta could finally start breathing again. At least, when their city hosts the big game on Sunday, they won’t be forced to decide whether to root for the Saints – their hated division rival – or the New […]
Amazon’s “Other” category, its miscellaneous revenue segment that consists primarily of advertising, made $3.4 billion in Q4 2018, almost doubling from Q4 2017. The “Other” category also grew by about $900 million from the prior quarter, for the first time outpacing the growth of Amazon Web Services, the cloud infrastructure business, which added $700 million, […]
Google has maintained its dominant share of the ad server market because switching ad servers is a hellacious process that requires a hard reset on media plans, analytics, creative and billing. But Google’s announcement last May that it would remove the Google ID from its ad-server log files, thus prohibiting marketers from tracking or measuring […]
AT&T is juggling a lot of business units at the crossroads of media, advertising and communications. Here are three takeaways from the company’s Q4 2018 earnings call on Wednesday that you can bring to the water cooler. DirecTV Now lost subscribers … but it’s all part of the plan? When AT&T scaled back on promotions […]
Traditional broadcasters might soon bridge linear and digital ad buying. But first, baby steps. Before anyone reaches that holy grail, it helps if the ad inventory is trafficked through the same system. So in the spirit of unification, the video ad server FreeWheel said Wednesday that it will handle decisioning for NBCUniversal’s digital and linear […]
The New York Times once worked with thousands of advertisers, but it’s now narrowed its focus to the top 100 global brands. “The business is shrinking in terms of the overall number of advertisers, as there are more places to do longtail advertising,” said Sebastian Tomich, global head of advertising and marketing solutions at The […]
The ad tech industry might soon be facing a more punitive FTC. While the consumer privacy and protections agency traditionally came down on blatantly fraudulent advertising, like rebilling scams, or improperly targeting children, the influx of data-driven technology has required the FTC to reevaluate its agenda. With consumer privacy protections becoming a more pressing issue, […]
Adobe Marketing Cloud’s top executive, Brad Rencher, is leaving the company after nearly a decade. Rencher, who as EVP and GM Digital Experience set the vision and strategy for the software giant’s digital marketing platform initiatives, first joined Adobe in 2009 through the acquisition of Omniture, which later became Adobe Analytics, a key component of […]
“We’re privacy-centric,” said every marketer ever. But what was once a reflexive statement must now be backed by substance. Despite excitement about harnessing data to send the right message to the right person at the right etc., marketers must now wrestle with whether they should simply because they can. One of the major themes at […]
When AT&T bought Time Warner in June to create a programmatic exchange for the TV industry, many looked to Verizon’s purchases of AOL and Yahoo as a comparison. But the two telco’s strategies “could not be any more different,” said Xandr CEO Brian Lesser on stage at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview last Thursday. “Oath, I think, […]
Marketers have a lot to contend with in 2019. Heads are spinning with thoughts of consumer-driven privacy concerns, different regulations in different regions, Apple blocking third-party tracking on Safari and how to buy TV in a world of digital delivery. At AdExchanger’s Industry Preview conference Thursday, Google’s vice president of ad platforms Sean Downey considered […]
A slew of consortiums, collaborations and integrations have emerged to fill the need for a universal advertising ID, which would help publishers and ad tech companies level the playing field with Google, Facebook, Amazon and other platforms with vast logged-in user data. But those vendor-focused initiatives struggled to gain broad adoption and overcome competitive issues […]
BuzzFeed, Verizon Media and Gannett all had layoffs this week, as the media business struggles to find its way in a digital climate. Over 1,000 jobs went away. BuzzFeed laid off 200 people (15% of its staff), Verizon Media laid off 800 people (7% of its staff) and Gannett laid off more than two dozen […]
This article is sponsored by MoPub. As time spent in mobile apps continues to soar, in-app ad spend has followed. In fact, in-app’s share of mobile video advertising alone is projected to grow to 84% by 2023, according to a report by Forrester. Yet despite steady growth in this category over the last few years, the […]
Mel Edwards, the newly minted global CEO of Wunderman Thompson, has a huge job ahead of her. When the agency officially launches this year, it will have 20,000 employees in 90 markets across 200 global offices, and eventually, Edwards wants everyone in each market working together. “We need a little more time because of the […]
Salesforce expanded integrations between its marketing cloud platform and Datorama, the customer data platform it acquired for $800 million last year, the company announced Wednesday at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview in New York City. The new features allow Datorama customers to centralize marketing data from email and social media campaigns for analytics or ad campaign management. […]
