AT&T’s ad tech unit Xandr has big hopes for TV advertising, but the company said Thursday during an analyst call that it’s also going to be heavily involved in powering online ads. “You will continue to see Xandr media business outpace the television market in 2019,” Xandr CEO Brian Lesser told investors. “And now what […]
LiveRamp, dataxu and Index Exchange launched the first commercial proof of concept for the Advertising ID Consortium on Thursday. The product places LiveRamp’s IdentityLink directly in the bidstream, skipping the cookie syncs typically required for a DSP and SSP to match against LiveRamp in a campaign. Additionally, Bill Simmons, dataxu’s co-founder and CTO, is joining […]
“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 Simon Harris, head of programmatic activation at Dentsu Aegis Network. Header bidding has made it common for a buyer to see the same impression several times, as most publishers now offer […]
The Big Story is a breezy podcast featuring a roundtable of AdExchanger editors talking about the biggest stories from the past week. It is available wherever you subscribe to podcasts. The Wild West days of ad tech are over. Any new startup that wants to stick around must show it can be a business first, […]
When people learned in 2014 that ad fraud was a $6.3 billion problem, many asked why no one had been arrested for stealing all that money from brands. Four years later, that day has arrived. “Finally, somebody gets arrested for this,” said Neal Richter, chief architect of Rakuten Marketing Platform. The FBI charged eight people […]
Until now, if an ad fraud scam was uncovered, the criminals behind it would usually fade back into the shadows with impunity, and shortly thereafter, they’d be back at it again – the seemingly eternal game of Whac-A-Mole. This time, there’s accountability. Two global botnets, Methbot and 3ve, are no more, and there are real people […]
When Gap Inc. launched the men’s activewear label Hill City in September, it marked its first new brand in a decade, and its first-ever foray into digital-first territory. Hill City has some notable differences compared to other DTC companies – like corporate ownership and a running start with distribution in 50 Athleta stores (Gap’s activewear […]
AdExchanger Talks is a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. In the podcast studio this week, GCA Advisors managing director Josh Wepman talks about the changes afoot in television. Wepman has sold companies to Google, Snap, Yahoo, Pitney Bowes and Telstra, among others, and TV is his key strategic focus right now. “When you think about […]
Thanksgiving holiday shopping trends have shifted from surprising to predictable. At this point, the big news will be in some hypothetical, future November when ecommerce sales stop growing hand over fist. Ecommerce sales reached $18 billion combined for Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, according to Adobe. Cyber Monday alone cleared about $8 billion, the […]
One year ago, Rubicon Project removed buyer fees from its platform, halving its take rate to 12.8%. The gutsy move occurred during a battle over take rates: Competitor AppNexus said its take rate stood at 8.5%, and its CEO called for a price war. Drastically cutting take rates forced Rubicon to use cash reserves to […]
WPP said Monday it will merge digital agency network Wunderman with storied creative agency J. Walter Thompson (JWT), forming a new entity called Wunderman Thompson. Wunderman Thompson will employ 20,000 people in 200 locations across 90 markets, according to Adweek. Wunderman’s newly minted global CEO Mel Edwards will lead the agency, while JWT global CEO […]
How Questionable Data-Sharing Practices And A Healthy Dose Of Hubris Helped Bring Down One Of The Most Well-Known Players In Ad Tech The Rocket Fuel brand is dead and buried, the founders long gone, its tech sold off to Sizmek for a song and the code completely rewritten. An ad tech unicorn that courted top […]
Thanksgiving and watching football on Thanksgiving are American traditions. But this year will be the first celebration of what you might call Ticketmaster’s football Thanks-for-giving-us-your-business day. The ticket-sales company has secured the exclusive ticketing rights for the NFL and transitioned the league to digital-only tickets this year. Now Ticketmaster is spiking the football – which, […]
Radio giant iHeartMedia said Monday it will acquire programmatic radio platform Jelli. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. iHeartMedia has been working with Jelli since 2015 to power its private marketplace, SoundPoint, which represents programmatic inventory on its 850 broadcast radio stations. Jelli also powers Katz Expressway, the independent programmatic marketplace run by radio […]
The IAB Europe’s GDPR Transparency and Consent Framework – which many ad tech companies now depend on to pass user consent strings – could be on shaky legal ground. On Nov. 9, France’s data protection authority, the Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (the CNIL), issued a warning against a small French ad tech company called […]
Everyone wants to talk about over-the-top (OTT) and connected TV (CTV) right now, but they’re often confused for one another. They’re also used interchangeably by many marketers, brands, and sometimes, by the most erudite reporters. With all the TLAs (three letter acronyms) we love to employ in this industry, we thought it’d be a good […]
The publisher tech startup Blockthrough, which specializes in retrieving revenue lost to ad blocking, acquired its rival and category pioneer PageFair on Thursday. Terms were not disclosed. PageFair was one of the first startups offering technology for publishers to counteract ad blocking, either by circumventing the ad blocker or by creating new direct audience agreements, […]
Martin Sorrell’s self-proclaimed “peanut” of a holding company has officially graduated to a coconut. S4 Capital reported its first-ever earnings as a public company Wednesday, following its reverse takeover of Derriston Capital in April. Q3 revenue grew 45% to $33 million and rose 48% to $94 million for the first nine months of the year. […]
Dentsu Aegis CEO Jerry Buhlmann will step down at the end of the year, after eight years on the job. He will be succeeded by Dentsu Aegis chairman Tim Andree, a former professional basketball player, who has been with the company since 2006 and will combine the chairman and CEO roles. Buhlmann – who will […]
AdExchanger Talks is a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. Dotdash is among the oldest continuously operating digital publishers. In its previous incarnation as About.com, the company employed legions of “experts” on topics as varied as saving for retirement, diabetes and the Middle East. Later, under the ownership of IAC, it rebranded as Dotdash and structured […]
It’s been a tough year for Snap, as its stock tanks and its executive team flees the ship. Despite growing revenue 43% in Q3 to a record $298 million, Snap’s stock hit an all-time low in September of $10 per share. Snapchat is also bleeding daily active users after rolling out an unpopular redesign and facing increasing competition from Instagram. “Snap is struggling to […]
Pandora is making the podcast listening experience better for people and more monetizable for advertisers. The streaming platform revealed the beta version of its Podcast Genome Project, a discovery algorithm that recommends podcast episodes to listeners, based on their habits and searches. The beta will roll out to 1% of Pandora’s user base Tuesday and […]
The news feed is still a money-printing machine for core Facebook. But people aren’t sharing like they used to – Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser used Nielsen data to detect that consumption on core Facebook, including Messenger, was down 13% in September – and now Facebook is putting its faith into what it hopes will […]
Direct-to-consumer brands like Mack Weldon, Manscaped and Peloton have expanded beyond their Facebook and Instagram roots – but don’t expect them to start advertising with or selling most of their products on Amazon. Though Amazon seems like a natural expansion for ecommerce startups, reducing the impact of the world’s biggest ecom platform is a strategic […]
Between “fake news” and lawsuits, few tech companies have been busier than Facebook. As a result, the platform’s technological ethos is changing. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has hinted that the company might phase out its classic news feed to focus on its Stories and Messenger features. Among these new avenues for monetization is Facebook Watch, […]
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is by Mark Cullinane, senior vice president and general manager of digital at Publishers Clearing House. Advertisers know that engagement metrics matter most when establishing ROI on digital ad spend. But engagement metrics themselves are still relatively nascent. Publishers have started to […]
The Trade Desk reported Q3 revenue of $118.8 million, a 50% year-over-year increase. The company has maintained growth of 50% or more in the past two quarters, matching its growth rates from the same periods last year. With an upward revision to the company’s revenue forecast next quarter, CEO Jeff Green said he expects the […]
Privacy advocates in the UK filed a series of complaints Thursday against Criteo, Tapad, Quantcast, Acxiom, Oracle, Equifax and Experian, questioning whether consumer profiling is legal under GDPR. Watchdog group Privacy International is claiming that the way many ad tech and data companies use data is in direct contravention to Europe’s new privacy law. The […]
The 2016 election was a disaster for the reputations of political pollsters, many of whom missed badly. With the midterm elections now in the bag, how well did the pre-election surveys match Tuesday’s results? Pretty well, actually. Public polls and data aggregators like FiveThirtyEight were, broadly speaking, closer to the mark in 2018 than they […]
AdExchanger Talks is a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. Jounce Media founder Chris Kane gave a popular presentation at Programmatic IO New York on the buzzy discipline of supply-path optimization (SPO). In this episode, Kane comes into the AdExchanger studio for a deep dive on SPO and the ways advertisers can use it to optimize […]
