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 […]
Ariana Grande might have belted out a few songs at YouTube’s Brandcast on Thursday, but not even she could drown out the lingering chatter about YouTube’s massive brand safety crisis last year. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki sought to assuage advertisers who might still be wary of the video platform by addressing the issue early and […]
Google disclosed how it will help publishers obtain tracking consent from users during a call last week with the IAB Europe GDPR Transparency and Consent steering committee, and its approach could spell trouble for media and ad tech companies. The consent gathering tool, called “Funding Choices,” is in beta with some DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) […]
“Everyone Wants To Be A CDP. Here’s Who’s Actually Doing It.” is presented by mParticle. Customer data platform (CDP) capabilities borrow attributes from CRM, tag management and even more traditional data onboarding. Consequently, they are often conflated with ad tech systems like data management platforms (DMPs), despite having use cases that go beyond paid media and into […]
Google’s decision last Friday to limit portability of the DoubleClick ID outside of Google’s ecosystem was done in the name of consumer privacy. But the change will also stunt advertisers’ ability to do cross-platform reach and frequency measurement – unless they’re using Google’s Ads Data Hub. While agency execs support changes to protect consumer privacy, […]
Snap’s hotly contested app redesign had a material negative impact on revenue, the company said in its Q1 earnings report Tuesday. Revenues for the quarter were up 54% year over year to roughly $231 million, but sequentially, they were down 19%, “primarily due to seasonality and our redesign,” the company said in its earnings release. […]
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) can finally take down its vacancy sign. More than a year into Trump’s presidency, five new commissioners were approved by the Senate late last week. The brand-new commission, comprising three Republicans and two Democrats, are tasked with tackling consumer protection and privacy at a time when consumers are more aware – and […]
Google is making it more difficult for advertisers to have an independent view of the data generated from ad buys in its ecosystem. In a note to partners sent Friday and obtained by AdExchanger, Google said it will no longer let buyers use the DoubleClick ID when leveraging its data transfer service. The service allows […]
Although Tasty, BuzzFeed’s popular food property, commands a ton of reach, it wants advertisers to know that it’s also a performance play. BuzzFeed is making a concerted effort to prove the efficacy of its media, particularly on high-traffic properties like Tasty. “We didn’t set out to build a shopper marketing offering, but because of our […]
IAB Europe and the IAB Tech Lab released on Wednesday a commercial version of the Transparency and Consent Framework, a new publishing standard meant to reconcile ad tech with GDPR regulations. From a consumer point of view, the experience would be similar to the current standard for web browsing in Europe, where there’s already omnipresent […]
