It’s been a heck of a couple of months for Mark Read. The Wunderman CEO was promoted to co-chief operating officer of WPP in April after then-CEO Martin Sorrell stepped down amid an investigation into misuse of company funds. Read shares his role with Andrew Scott, WPP’s COO for EMEA, who focuses on the commercial […]
AT&T rode into Cannes this year amid fanfare following its Time Warner acquisition, freshly rebranded as WarnerMedia. But trailing in its wake are a lot of questions around what this mega-merger means for the advertising landscape. Intentionally or not, AT&T added to the ambiguity with its Cannes branding – or complete lack thereof. The telco […]
In Bruce Falck’s office, there’s a piece of paper tacked to the wall with a list of important reminders: GDPR, MRC, transparency, measurement. But rather than focusing on “external factors,” the GM of Twitter’s revenue product and his growing team are “getting back to basics.” Twitter has spent the last two years striking content partnerships, […]
AT&T, which closed its acquisition of Time Warner on Thursday, will acquire more companies to support its Advertising and Analytics unit, CEO Randall Stephenson said Friday during a CNBC interview. Watch it here. Stephenson spoke of an upcoming ad-supported skinny bundle called AT&T Watch TV, featuring Turner content, that will be formally announced next week. […]
Kantar is facing a lot of speculation about its future at WPP. Since Martin Sorrell resigned as CEO of WPP in April, analysts and investors have buzzed about how the holding company can unlock value for shareholders in a period of slow growth. Many say selling the Kantar market research business, whose growth has lagged […]
The Washington DC, District Court on Tuesday gave the go-ahead for AT&T’s $85 billion merger with Time Warner, a decision with far-reaching implications for AT&T and the media and advertising industries. Despite the hefty price tag, industry observers initially expected AT&T’s offer to breeze through under a corporate-friendly administration. The last time the Justice Department […]
When WPP Group-owned GroupM opens its doors at the brand new 3 World Trade Center building in downtown Manhattan next month, it’ll be more than just a symbolic new beginning. The face of GroupM is changing. In addition to the shocking exit of WPP CEO Martin Sorrell in April, two longtime GroupM executives, Chairman Irwin […]
While both the California Consumer Privacy Act and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation address the collection of personal information by businesses, they are actually quite different. Here’s where they diverge and why the advertising trade orgs are lobbying like bandits to block the California act’s passage. The IAB, DMA, ANA, 4As and NAI decried the […]
Google is reversing its policy for its consent management platform (CMP) that initially capped at 12 the number of vendors a publisher can list in opt-in messages, following critical feedback from publishers and the ad tech industry. The platform now has no limit. “The change being made now is in line with our priority of […]
Vista Equity Partners’ plan to buy a majority stake in Integral Ad Science – valuing the company at $820 million, according to AdExchanger sources, or up to $850 million, according to Axios – underscores the ongoing importance of ad verification and the pressure these vendors face to grow their product offering to remain competitive. “There’s […]
In late April, Google said it would limit the portability of the DoubleClick ID outside of its ad server DoubleClick Campaign Manager (DCM), effectively killing independent attribution (at least to the extent that it was possible). Marketers who want access to the DoubleClick ID, which ties together data across Google’s properties, will have to use it […]
Private equity firm Vista Equity Partners has acquired a majority stake in ad verification vendor Integral Ad Science. Terms were not disclosed. IAS detects ad fraud by scanning billions of insertions from both buy and sell sides, searching for anomalies. It also assesses whether individual impressions are fraudulent or not. Industry insiders had wondered about […]
The European Union’s GDPR regulations have been in force for less than a week, but ad tech exchange players are already feeling whiplash. The crux of the problem is advertising technology vendors must have user consent for data-driven advertising – yet there are only two scaled ways to get it. Either use Google’s GDPR pipeline […]
Varick Media Management said Wednesday that former Xaxis executive Paul Dolan will join the company as its first-ever CEO. Varick, launched in 2008 as one of the first agency trading desks, has always had a president reporting into to senior leadership at parent company MDC Partners. Now with its first CEO, Varick is establishing a […]
The potential of programmatic audio has caught the interest of advertising’s behemoth. Google said Wednesday it had launched the ability to buy programmatic audio ads through its demand-side platform (DSP) DoubleClick Bid Manager. Programmatic audio is still a new market, but it’s growing quickly. Spotify launched the capability in 2016, and on its Q1 2018 […]
Data matching and cookie syncing aren’t verboten under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) but getting the consent to do it is another story altogether, since consumers need to know exactly what they’re signing up for when they provide unambiguous and specific consent. Like most vendors in the ad tech ecosystem, companies that onboard data […]
It wasn’t a surprise to most in the industry when Accenture Interactive said Wednesday it would formally launch a programmatic services unit as part of its offer to clients. The Accenture subsidiary has been steadily wading into agency territory for years by acquiring creative and design shops. While it hasn’t made any major acquisitions in […]
by Sarah Sluis, Alison Weissbrot and Ryan Joe Everyone in the industry claims – at least publicly – to be ready for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which starts Friday. But how can that be true? There are too many unknowns to predict what will happen when the industrywide regulation kicks in. AdExchanger turned […]
Google soon expects to join the IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework, which transmits consent across the ad tech ecosystem to serve data-driven ads under GDPR. Google said it will join once it has resolved technical and policy details so parts of its ad tech can operate with the framework. “We absolutely want to be […]
Adobe said Monday it will buy the ecommerce platform Magento for $1.68 billion. Magento’s 2017 revenue was $150 million, and the deal is expected to close by the end of August. Ecommerce has long been a big hole in Adobe’s tech, even as competitors spent heavily to acquire Magento’s competitors. SAP has owned hybris since […]
Nicolle Pangis, a former C-suite exec at WPP GroupM’s Xaxis and [m]Platform, has been appointed CEO and president of NCC Media. She will start May 29. NCC is a national cable sales group owned by Comcast, Charter and Cox Communications. In April, NCC started a division led by Comcast’s advanced ads division that will focus […]
Verizon’s Oath wants advertisers to know that although it shuttered its programmatic TV offering OneTV, its addressable TV business based on Fios households – which launched in late 2016 – is here to stay. Verizon knows that for addressable inventory, it’s later to the game than Dish network as well as AT&T and its DirecTV […]
Acxiom intends to sell its marketing solutions division before moving to a potential sale of LiveRamp, because it believes selling them separately will drive more shareholder value, said sources close to the company. Interest in Acxiom and LiveRamp in particular heated up in March, after Salesforce bought the middleware tech company MuleSoft for $6.5 billion, […]
The podcast industry is growing, and audio giants want a piece of it. Twenty-six percent of Americans listen to podcasts every month. These people are young and well-educated and have higher-than average household incomes, according to Edison Research. They’re also loyal and engaged, on average consuming seven podcasts per week. Ad dollars are following. Last […]
Apple just made a move under the radar that could cause third-party attribution providers to become obsolete. In late March, Apple quietly released SKAdNetwork, an API for iOS 11.3 that allows ad networks or advertisers to directly attribute installs from the App Store without relying on an attribution vendor. Apple’s well-documented stance on consumer privacy […]
Don’t confuse Google’s Waze with its homegrown Maps product. Waze, which Google acquired in 2013, has a much different value prop. “Waze is for drivers,” said Suzie Reider, Waze’s head of ads in North America. “Google Maps is about navigating the physical world.” Waze also has a big community that works collectively to update the […]
Drawbridge, one of the last major cross-device indies, is selling its US media business to location data platform Gimbal, shutting down its self-serve ad platform and getting out of the advertising biz, AdExchanger has learned. Drawbridge’s media team and the company’s entire book of managed business is transferring to Gimbal. Both companies declined to share […]
Martin Sorrell may be out as CEO of WPP, but he’s not done as an entrepreneur yet. “I’m going to start again,” he said at the Techonomy conference in New York City on Tuesday. “I’m not going to go into voluntary, or involuntary, retirement.” So what’s the next act? Sorrell didn’t say, but he noted […]
Why would a consumer device giant like Samsung want to get into media sales? It seems implausible and yet that’s what happened, beginning in 2016 when the company quietly bought a Canadian demand-side platform and ad server called AdGear to build its own stack. It makes perfect sense to Tom Fochetta, VP of Samsung’s media […]
Viant’s answer to the marketing data overload problem isn’t a customer data platform – it’s a data lake. “And it’s for advertisers that want to go deeper on analytics,” said Jon Schulz, CMO at the Meredith-owned ad tech platform, which launched its data lake solution out of beta on Monday. Think of the data lake as a […]
