When Atlas served ads, the industry shrugged. On Friday, Facebook made the inevitable official by retiring the ad-serving component of Atlas, thereby making it primarily a people-based measurement pixel. The ad-serving capability will be phased out over the next couple of months so as not to be disruptive to users. Facebook’s ad stack looks quite […]
Publicis Groupe has merged digital agencies SapientNitro and Razorfish, it announced Thursday. The combined agency, SapientRazorfish, will sit under the Publicis.Sapient umbrella, which houses the holding company’s digital and technology assets. SapientNitro CEO Alan Wexler will become CEO of SapientRazorfish and co-CEO of Publicis.Sapient as current CEO Alan Herrick moves to a chairman role. Chip […]
LiveRamp will drop $140 million to finance its people-based marketing dreams. On Thursday, the Acxiom-owned onboarding company announced its intention to acquire two companies: Arbor, a marketplace for people-based data, and Circulate, which helps app developers monetize their first-party data in a privacy-friendly way. LiveRamp declined to say how much it paid for each company. […]
Facebook admitted additional measurement errors Wednesday, along with policy and organizational changes meant to narrow the trust gap between marketers and the mobile world’s leading ad platform. The news comes less than two months after Facebook disclosed that it had been overstating video engagement results, prompting backlash from agencies and concern from other digital media […]
Google is sticking with the script of “openness” in its publisher roadmap, citing a flurry of product updates designed to maximize publisher revenue, access to inventory and the user experience on mobile. There is an uptick in publishers, including USA Today Network, The New York Times and Time Inc., that are structuring direct deals programmatically, Google […]
GroupM is refocusing investments around addressable and data-driven media. WPP’s media investment management arm will be split into two pillars, Media Investment and Platform Solutions, the company said Monday. The Media Investment arm will refocus GroupM’s investment strategies around data and platforms, while the new Platform Solutions division will centralize and scale GroupM technology used […]
Some publishers are raking in the traffic courtesy of Apple News, but not everyone on the buy side is impressed. “I want to be able to upload my own audience, match it to theirs and know what’s running where so I can customize the ad,” said Angelina Eng, VP of media platforms and operations at […]
Adobe’s $540 million acquisition of TubeMogul this week was a bet on more automation and addressability in TV. In addition, the deal gives Adobe Marketing Cloud – which is known for its strength in site analytics and creative – the ability to do more cross-screen media execution. TubeMogul has shown consistent growth quarter after quarter, following […]
Adobe will acquire the video demand-side platform TubeMogul for $540 million in debt and cash, the companies said Thursday. [Here’s the deal release.] The deal gives Adobe a sophisticated DSP capability for the first time. Though Adobe had display and search-buying capabilities via the Efficient Frontier acquisition (now Media Optimizer), Adobe has never been lauded […]
Pandora launched the Harmonic Audio Network on Thursday, in partnership with streaming platforms TuneIn and AccuRadio, to offer advertisers mass reach on premium inventory across digital audio platforms. The network will sell exclusive in-stream audio inventory from its own as well as partner platforms. Both TuneIn and AccuRadio will commit roughly 95% to 98% of […]
The programmatic salesperson only came into existence about five years ago. What started out as an outsider position in the sales organization has become more mainstream as programmatic adoption increases. But the very people holding programmatic sales roles are already predicting its extinction, as the role gets absorbed into the entire sales process. “In three […]
It’s illegal to display political ads or messages, solicit supporters, hand out campaign paraphernalia or try to affect voters’ preferences in almost any way once they’re within a roughly 100-foot radius of a polling location. But sophisticated location-based mobile advertising has exposed a loophole in those laws, wherein campaigns target mobile ads to people while […]
Statisticians know that correlation does not imply causation – so, applying that same logic to advertising, a consumer who saw an ad and converted could have already been predisposed to purchase. One big issue with attribution, as it exists today, is that many marketers still rely on last-touch. Video also poses unique challenges, since brands […]
Rubicon will lay off 19% of its workforce, totaling 125 jobs, completing the reorganization it began in Q2. The company is also lowering its guidance for Q4. It will be the third ad tech company with an SSP to make large cuts this year. PubMatic laid off 100 last December, and AppNexus laid off 150 […]
All the notice in the world doesn’t mean anything if the consumer doesn’t see it. It’s not yet apparent what the Federal Communications Commission’s recently passed privacy regulations will look like in practice. Internet service providers (ISPs) could potentially phone in their compliance to the newly imposed strictures with an updated user agreement or cleverly […]
WideOrbit considers itself the DoubleClick of local broadcast TV. “It’s the closest description to what we do,” said Eric Mathewson, WideOrbit’s CEO. “We’re the publisher ad server for TV stations.” WideOrbit supplies tools to local TV stations and broadcasters like Telemundo, Scripps, Sinclair, Meredith and Cox Media Group to help monetize and manage their yield. […]
Google is seeing strong growth in its dynamic allocation exchange bidding, countering the advantages gained by other exchanges via header bidding. Six months ago, Google reversed its DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) policy when it opened the server up to third-party exchanges. Since then, it’s more than doubled the number of outside exchange partners, adding Smaato, […]
Artificial intelligence (AI) is surging in ad/mar tech land. Or resurging, depending on how good your memory is. IBM continues to push Watson, and, in the run-up to their respective conferences, Salesforce and Oracle talked up their own AI initiatives. Also, Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon banded together to create best practices around […]
Dunkin’ Donuts’ marketing might be known for big awareness campaigns like “America Runs On Dunkin” and “Keep On,” but the brand also breaks down media into smaller, product-specific activations. For instance, when Dunkin’ began serving cold-brew coffee this past summer, it let consumers unlock custom geofilters through a special code on Snapchat. “Coffee is such […]
The cable model may be going online, if last week’s reports around a possible Snapchat licensing model are true. (Snapchat declined to comment.) Publishers would receive a licensing fee for their content on Snapchat Discover, instead of selling ads themselves and taking a share of revenue. By moving to this model, Snapchat would consolidate all its […]
The ability to buy directly from a publisher, both programmatically and through direct integrations, is transforming agency media-buying practices. Premium inventory is going programmatic thanks to private marketplaces (PMPs) and programmatic guaranteed deals. Meanwhile, header technology has reinvented the way buyers connect with some media sellers. These converging trends have empowered more agencies to go […]
By Kelly Liyakasa, Sarah Sluis and Allison Schiff Update: AT&T has reached a deal to acquire Time Warner for $85.4 billion. The move gives the telco some seriously premium media assets, including HBO, Warner Bros., CNN, Turner Broadcasting and DC Comics. Yes, AT&T will own Batman. While the telco got a distribution outlet when it merged with DirecTV […]
This year, Facebook appeared to abandon its plan to develop an ad tech stack to rival Google’s DoubleClick. It shut down its SSP (LiveRail), closed the Facebook Exchange and threw away its DSP before it got off the ground. All that remains is Atlas, a former ad server repurposed as a measurement tool, and the […]
“We need CMOs to turn up the leadership dial,” Association of National Advertisers CEO Bob Liodice told attendees during his opening keynote at the Masters of Marketing conference Thursday. Liodice rattled off a litany of problems familiar to the contemporary marketer, including fraud, viewability, privacy, talent shortages and poor creative, that have withered the effectiveness […]
Adidas-owned Reebok is in a unique position, both as a challenger to Nike and as a target of other challenger sports and apparel brands like Under Armour. As such, it invests heavily and consistently in content – despite its fluctuating ad spend over the years. Because content must generate larger, measurable performance results, Reebok bets the […]
Turner will speak at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC I/O Conference in New York on Oct. 27. Turner took a bold position when it promised that by 2020 more than 50% of its inventory would be transacted against audience guarantees. Since then, CNN, TNT and TruTV’s parent broadcaster has grown its data management and marketing services business, to […]
Julie Clark will speak at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC I/O Conference in New York on Oct. 26. Hearst had deployed header bidding for years before it became one of the industry’s hot topics. As a veteran user of header bidding, Hearst focuses on adapting it to make programmatic buying more efficient for marketers and publishers. “The old way would […]
When SAP first dove into ad tech, it was under the guise of a standalone incubator – an “intrapreneurship,” as the company calls it – called SAP Exchange Media (XM). The launch raised questions about where ad tech fit within SAP’s broader stack. SAP’s commerce and marketing prowess has historically fallen under the SAP Hybris portfolio […]
Like the measurement industry it tracks, Forrester’s Cross-Channel Attribution Wave has evolved. Now dubbed the Marketing Measurement and Optimization Solutions Wave, Forrester noted a migration toward more unified measurement in its latest edition, released Tuesday. “Several tried-and-true approaches to measuring marketing effectiveness served their purpose for a long period of time,” said Tina Moffett, a […]
Democrat Karen Jacobs isn’t running any TV ads while campaigning for a state House seat in Texas. Even cheaper regional and local broadcast inventory is expensive because her squiggly district northeast of Dallas – known as one of the nation’s most gerrymandered – must hit multiple markets. The district skews heavily Republican so any TV spending would […]
