Kargo

For all of Ad Tech Land’s excitement about new and emerging CTV-specific ad formats, many commercial brands are still hesitant to try some of these new formats for themselves.

An Adalytics report released Friday details numerous instances of brands serving ads to known bots that appear on the IAB Tech Lab’s International Spiders and Bots list and TAG’s Data Center IP List.

Sierra Nevada is tapping Kargo’s latest ad offering for its recent CTV campaign aimed to raise awareness for a brand refresh. But there’s a catch: The new ad units aren’t traditional video assets.

Pivoting to a “premium internet” is like avoiding the parts of town that have been blighted by illicit activity. The only real solution to MFA is for the dollars to dry up.

More than two decades after they ran, Cerveza Cristal’s Star Wars ads are a perfect and unintentional cautionary tale for ad tech vendors pushing CTV ad products like virtual product placements and shoppable content overlays.

Despite the backlash against MFA websites, there is still no industry standard to define MFA. So the 4A’s is hosting monthly meetings between buyers and sellers to nail down more explicit criteria for what constitutes MFA.

DoubleVerify added a feature to its platform on Tuesday that classifies MFA sites based on a tiered system.

There’s a new TLA (“three-letter acronym”) that’s crept into the media-buying conversation. MFA: Made-for-advertising content. MFA is a combination of paid traffic, clickbait and other incentivized traffic, engineered to create ad impressions and generate revenue. New sites pop up virtually overnight with millions of impressions, sucking up ad dollars and hurting campaign performance, writes Tal Almany, VP of publisher development at Kargo.

Rather than looking at one particular data signal, attention metrics include a variety of data points, which are fed into a machine-learning model to predict the likelihood that a given media environment and ad creative will draw attention from a hypothetical audience member.

Brands and tech vendors can do a lot more to make good on their public promises to support diverse and Black-owned media, says Rhonesha Byng, the CEO and founder of Her Agenda, a digital media platform for millennial women, and co-creator of the Black Owned Media Equity and Sustainability Institute.

Netflix is joining the AVOD squad at an industry-wide inflection point. Despite exploding consumer and ad revenue growth, CTV also still has growing pains (you know, like the ad overload plaguing the viewing experience). But with a strong market presence – and “extremely attractive first-party data” – Netflix could help CTV turn the corner, writes Chris Keune, VP of data science and product at Kargo.

Mobile ad exchange Kargo has acquired attention sales platform Parsec Media. The deal reflects Kargo’s investment in attention as a viable metric for post-cookie mobile advertising, said Kargo CEO Harry Kargman.

A Stitcher In Time Kargo Global has acquired the online retail advertising company StitcherAds for $64 million. StitcherAds, an Irish startup, specializes in selling on social platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, whereas Kargo’s main business is placing ads on the mobile web or within a network of app publishers. “We realized we were […]

“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 Mike Shaughnessy, COO of Kargo. Publishers and ad tech companies have lately been treated to some interesting new information about how Google has managed its programmatic advertising business through the years. […]

“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 Mike Shaughnessy, COO at Kargo. As we come out of the fog of 2020, we must remember the five incredibly important investigations happening right now that affect the way content is […]

An embedded tweet or Instagram post is often the first place a reader’s eye lands on the screen when reading an article. Mobile ad exchange Kargo said Wednesday it will acquire Rhombus, an ad tech company focused specifically on targeting social embeds within articles, for that very reason. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Michael Shaughnessy, senior vice president of operations and partnerships at Kargo. The economic downturn caused by COVID-19 has accelerated supply-path optimization (SPO) conversations and will force suppliers that don’t exceed buyer demands and expectations […]

In this episode of Social Distancing With Friends, Kargo CEO and founder Harry Kargman talks wine tasting over Zoom, keeping morale high and how to get the timing right so your company can accelerate when the pandemic is over. Also, he predicts what advertiser activity might look like as the world comes out of its […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. All In Context  Integral Ad Science acquired European contextual targeting company ADmantX for an undisclosed amount. Using natural language processing and machine learning, ADmantX identifies the context of an article and whether a piece of content is positive or negative, The Wall Street Journal […]

“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 Harry Kargman, founder and CEO at Kargo. The advertising industry is facing sweeping and unprecedented changes, where user targeting is being challenged with extinction. We need to accept the fact that the […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Harry Kargman, founder and CEO at Kargo. Google announced last month that it would switch to a first-price auction in Google Ad Manager by the end of 2019. The move brings Google into parity […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Sorrell Speaks Martin Sorrell had plenty on his mind as he took the stage at Luma Partners’ DMS conference on Tuesday, so much so that moderator Terry Kawaja could hardly get a word in. Sorrell’s most surprising comments were on Amazon’s ad business. He […]

“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 Adam Chandler, chief business officer at Kargo. What a week. More than 250 brands pulled back their ad spending due to unsafe supply in the very walled gardens that claim […]

Adam Chandler joined Kargo as its chief business officer this week. He will handle sales, account management and business development for the fast-growing mobile rich media company. Kargo added 92 employees in 2016, for a total of 250. From 2011 to 2015, it’s grown at a rate of 100% a year. Chandler joins from Rubicon […]

Engagement metrics are all well and good, but before someone can be engaged by an ad, that person has to be able to see it. And with more time and money shifting over to mobile, the viewability debate is heating up there. “Viewability is the first step towards engagement, and we’re starting at the front […]

“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 Ryan McConville, senior vice president of business development and partnerships at Kargo. Programmatic advertising has slowly but steadily taken hold of nearly the entire digital marketing universe. And while by […]

Kargo, a mobile ad platform, has undergone several transformations and is about to make another one. Following the 2001 dot-com crash, Kargo pivoted from providing wireless operators with software and services to helping media brands launch mobile ad campaigns. The New York City company now has a client roster that includes CBS, Univision, Meredith and […]