Story updated at 1:40 p.m. Rubicon Project has acquired nToggle, a startup that builds infrastructure to streamline bid requests, for $38.5 million, the companies revealed Monday. NToggle’s technology uses machine learning to weed out impressions a DSP is better off not bidding on through a process known as “traffic shaping.” This capability is increasingly important […]
Two years ago Hearts & Science didn’t exist. Today, it employs more than 500 to serve an expanding roster that includes two of the world’s largest marketers: AT&T and Procter & Gamble. In a recent interview, CEO Scott Hagedorn described some tenets of the Hearts & Science services model. Technology Sprints “We’re gearing up for […]
While mobile app advertising is in dire need of standards, that prospect is easier said than done. Confusion and wrongheadedness in the industry is rife, even among user acquisition specialists. “Ask a room full of UA managers to explain how mobile tracking works and I think most won’t be able to explain the whole process,” […]
If you’re an organization in dire need of digital transformation, who ya gonna call? While an enterprise software company might not initially come to mind, that’s exactly who brands like Coca-Cola and Philips turned to. For Hollywood studio 20th Century Fox Film, it’s moved from primarily a B2B company focused on partners like broadcasters, retailers, […]
By Sarah Sluis, Kelly Liyakasa and Alison Weissbrot Some publishers excel in programmatic in ways that make buyers take notice. The best way to stand out in programmatic is by integrating sales teams so it’s easy to buy programmatically and direct with a single conversation. Smart publishers don’t create incentives that make salespeople push direct […]
Blockchain, an unmodifiable and unbreachable digital ledger, was conceived 10 years ago to support the cryptocurrency bitcoin. But it has since seeped into new categories, jumping from finance to health care and, more recently, digital advertising. It’s doing so with the backing of big companies like IBM and Comcast, as well as smaller startups like […]
In the past, large linear audiences weren’t always addressable, and TV tune-in marketing was more “spray-and-pray” than precise. But TV tune-in, that mainstay of traditional linear promotion, is getting a data-driven boost. As linear ratings decline and consumers trend toward time-shifted content and new distribution points like mobile and over-the-top, marketers have more data at […]
Accenture Interactive, a subsidiary of the management consultancy Accenture, is the world’s largest digital agency by revenue. The digital network has 18,000 employees in 40 offices around the globe. It brought in $4.4 billion last year, roughly 13% of its parent company’s total revenue. With projected revenue at $6 billion for 2017, Accenture Interactive ranks […]
Addressable TV has earned a rep for being expensive and not all that scalable. But for early adopters like Conagra Brands, the channel does have its perks. Advertisers that invest in addressable TV alongside their larger broadcast buys view the format as a vessel for reducing waste by being able to more effectively zero in […]
MoPub, Twitter’s mobile ad exchange, is looking to get stickier with the buy side. On Thursday, after five months of beta testing, it launched a solution that aims to help marketers aggregate inventory types based on performance and to target them programmatically. Advertisers that want a lot of installs, for example, can take advantage of […]
RTB whiz Neal Richter is the new CTO at Rakuten Marketing, the marketing solutions subsidiary of Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten. Richter, who serves as a technical adviser to a number of ad tech startups, including Metamarkets and nToggle, joins the company after more than seven years with Rubicon Project, most recently as CTO. At Rakuten, […]
Singular and Apsalar are consolidating, and they’ve got their collective head in the marketing cloud. On Tuesday, the duo announced that they will become one and marry their respective technologies – Singular’s mobile marketing analytics tech and Apsalar’s mobile attribution and DMP offering – to take on the likes of Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce on the mobile […]
As automation takes hold of the advertising industry, media planning and buying agencies are being forced to take a cold, hard look in the mirror. “We’re dealing with a lot of forces of commoditization,” MEC CEO Tim Castree told AdExchanger. Castree is in a delicate spot. Following MEC’s merger with sister GroupM agency, Maxus, he’ll […]
Jet.com has been quietly pitching publishers on changes to its payment structure related to affiliate commissions. The message is clear: Work with Jet and it’s prepared to pay you for the privilege. Affiliate bucks often go to the more established players like Amazon or eBay. But in order to incentivize publishers to send traffic its […]
“There are three big issues: technological disruption, zero-based budgeting (ZBB) and activist investors,” WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell told AdExchanger at the Cannes Lions festival. “The first involves continuous experimentation,” he said, and WPP has certainly walked the talk on that front. Under Sorrell’s leadership, the company has invested in tech far more aggressively than […]
Despite the tech company takeover of Cannes, the ad industry’s current infatuation – artificial intelligence – confined its appearances to panels and presentations. But a few AI aspirations (“deployments” is too strong a word in many cases) are worth calling out. Tencent The Chinese maker of the popular WeChat application has a machine learning agenda […]
Leo Burnett, one of the most iconic advertising agencies in the game, is evolving the way it thinks about creative. “I’ve been focused on infusing technology, data and analytics to make creative more relevant, personalized and effective,” said Andrew Swinand, CEO at Leo Burnett. For Swinand, who spent time on the media side as president […]
Oath is having its coming-out party in Cannes. On Monday, AOL executives officially launched Oath at the advertising festival in Cannes, following the close of Verizon’s $4.8 billion acquisition of Yahoo last week. The execs also clarified lingering questions about how it will integrate assets from AOL and Yahoo into Oath’s pending ad tech […]
There’s no more US presidential election or splashy Summer Olympics to prop up ad spend, but there is still growth to be found – especially on the mobile front. Although the growth rate in total ad spend has slowed, global mobile advertising is on pace to reach $110 billion this year, surpassing the $100 billion mark […]
The duopoly isn’t a duo when it comes to brand safety. The nuances of how their respective platforms operate mean that Facebook and Google face their own particular challenges to ensure brand safety. While the primary risk on YouTube is adjacency – ads appearing within or beside unsavory or questionable content – the personal nature of […]
Programmatic and data-driven creative will likely be a buzzworthy topic at the 2017 Cannes Lions festival. Programmatic creative has progressed since last year, thanks to the maturation of machine learning and standards released by the IAB for dynamic content ads that makes it easier to customize ads for audiences and publisher sites. But media and […]
Three years after dissolving its VivaKi trading desk, Publicis Groupe has launched a data-driven center of excellence for its media agencies. The group, called Precision, formed about two years after VivaKi melted down its Audience on Demand trading desk and redistributed its staff to operating agencies. The new centralized group will offer support to programmatic […]
The slang phrase “I’ve got the receipts” has become a way to declare oneself the indisputable winner of an argument. Mobile shopping and analytics companies are learning to love the term as well. As image scanning and recognition software improves and the value of shopper data shoots up, a growing industry is devoted to accessing […]
Amazon on Monday quietly launched a self-serve platform called Advertiser Audiences, which lets advertisers upload their audience lists and CRM information, enabling tactics like audience matching and lookalike modeling. Advertiser Audiences is similar to solutions Facebook and Google released earlier, though Amazon’s tool has some key differences. The biggest strength, said Wunderman North America Chief […]
Broadcast radio is getting a data-driven boost with the help of Nielsen Marketing Cloud. Nielsen announced on Wednesday that broadcast radio network Westwood One will use Nielsen’s data-management platform (DMP) to segment audiences across its broadcast and digital inventory. That makes Nielsen Marketing Cloud the first exclusively audio DMP on the market, said Damian Garbaccio, […]
Like the packaged products he helps market, Omnicom Media Group Chief Research Officer Jonathan Steuer wishes data segments disclosed their ingredients on the side of the label. “You really have to dig to figure out what’s in [a segment] right now,” Steuer said Monday at the Advertising Research Foundation’s Audience Measurement Summit in Jersey City. […]
Kelly Liyakasa contributed The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will become law in May 2018. Think it won’t affect you? Think again. “This kind of legislation impacts every company in the world,” said Acxiom CEO Scott Howe. “Very few companies aren’t collecting or utilizing information to improve their decision making.” But how the […]
Procter & Gamble has a reputation for putting its partners through the wringer – and sometimes out of business. Some ad tech CEOs are hopping mad about it. “The death of AudienceScience is on P&G’s doorstep,” said one ad tech chief exec. AudienceScience, P&G’s longtime buying platform, was forced to close its doors last week, less […]
Snap’s acquisition of location data company Placed, announced Monday, shows the platform is getting serious about attribution. While Snap has robust location data on its 166 million daily active users, Placed’s ID graph, which collects geodata on a panel of 150 million opted-in mobile devices, broadens those insights to people who don’t use Snap and […]
Tremor Video has hired Mark Zagorski, the former CEO of data management platform and exchange eXelate and current EVP of the Nielsen Marketing Cloud, as CEO. He will begin July 10. Tremor, a video ad platform that more recently began focusing on the sell side, has had a vacancy at the top since February, when […]
