Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. How To Finnish The Job In Finland, social media influencers join jobs like doctors, bus drivers and grocery store workers as “critical operators” who continue working during a crisis. It seems like a strange designation (especially in the United States, where some influencers have […]
Ever fall down the YouTube rabbit hole or mindlessly scroll through the news feed and then suddenly wake up 30 minutes later with no idea where the time went? Of course you have – and so has Tim Armstrong, former CEO of Oath (now Verizon Media) and AOL. The current business model of the internet is […]
Verizon will take a $4.6 billion goodwill impairment charge in the fourth quarter, acknowledging that its Oath business unit has underperformed, the company said Tuesday. The hit nearly eliminates the $4.8 billion goodwill balance Verizon carried after it acquired and merged Yahoo and AOL and assorted technology holdings into its Oath business unit back in […]
Shorting Ads Verizon is inching away from the grand advertising ambitions it once had for Oath. The ad unit has a new chief, Guru Gowrappan, following Tim Armstrong’s departure in September, and Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg, who took over in August, is more interested in network infrastructure than media. And after failing to meet ad […]
Verizon has gone back on its oath to advertisers and publishers. The telecom giant said Monday it will rebrand its media and advertising division, Oath, as part of a company-wide restructuring. Oath will be renamed Verizon Media Group, and the rest of the corporation will be consolidated into two other buckets: consumer and business. Verizon […]
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The writing was on the wall, but now it’s written in ink: Oath honcho Tim Armstrong will leave Verizon at the end of the year. Current Oath president and COO K. Guru Gowrappan was named as the new CEO, Verizon said in a release. Armstrong will aid in the transition. When Armstrong joined the telco […]
Oath is attempting to deliver on its promise of becoming an alternative to the duopoly. But a question remains as to how compelling its proposition will be to buyers without the full complement of Verizon data at its disposal. On Monday, the Verizon-owned company unveiled the long-awaited fruits of a year’s worth of hard labor: […]
Yahoo’s new parent, Oath, will have to make do without one of the acquired company’s key ad platform executives. BrightRoll CEO Tod Sacerdoti is exiting the video demand-side platform and exchange he founded in 2006, according to a source with knowledge of the company. Yahoo bought BrightRoll for $640 million in 2014. An unconfirmed number […]
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 […]
AOL’s programmatic revenue grew 250% in the fourth quarter, and now accounts for 39% of AOL’s non-search revenue. In Q4 the company “integrated the first set of private marketplaces,” Armstrong said, for a total of 15 private marketplaces. AOL’s shift to programmatic led to a recent restructuring of its sales force, another area of heightened attention from investors. AOL recently […]
Still thinking of AOL as a media company? Tim Armstrong wants to change your mind. On the company’s Q1 earnings call Wednesday, its CEO repeatedly invoked “platforms,” “mechanization” and, of course, “programmatic” as the underpinnings of the business. AOL’s Tuesday acquisition of multitouch attribution vendor Convertro also hammered this message home. Armstrong’s platform ardor almost […]
AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said 2013 delivered the “best results we’ve had in a decade.” Although the company reported 13% overall growth in revenue year-over-year in the fourth quarter, growing from $599 million to $679 million, AOL noted net and operating profitability was affected by a “pre-tax restructuring” that cost it $13.2 million. This was […]
AOL finally answered the question “What is a programmatic upfront?” by saying it would put its money where its mouth is: starting in 2014, it will make its reserved, guaranteed inventory available through its automated platforms for the first time. The portal lined up an array of advertising partners, noting that five of the six […]
Aside from the big news that AOL was acquiring video-ad marketplace Adap.tv to further its programmatic goals, the portal reported its Q2 earnings, which showed continued strides on its display business. While the single-digit gains made during the period may not seem too exciting, they do compare favorably with the recent earnings from Yahoo and […]
Barely two months after promoting its video content among the various other digital NewFront presentations, AOL is now planning a “Programmatic Upfront” for September. As we reported earlier today, CEO Tim Armstrong wants to position AOL as the antidote to the long chain of ad technology vendors that serve as the pipes connecting marketers’ online […]
The growing demand for personalized, “real-time marketing” (think: the doings of Oreo and its digital agency 360i that resulted in “Dunk in the Dark” during the Super Bowl), is one of the forces underpinning the push toward unifying the “human” and “technological” elements of the programmatic equation. AOL’s earlier announcement of a new strategic partnership […]
Aol was able to maintain its hard-won profitability and ad sales gains Q1. But just as Aol was finally able to turn US display around with a decent growth of 6%, the usual powerhouse of third-party network revenues showed signs of slowing down. Read the earnings release. The company’s third-party network revenues growth slowed to […]
On paper, the combination of Henrique de Castro, Yahoo’s chief operating officer, Brian Silver, the former Travel Ad Network CEO who became Yahoo’s VP of ad platforms over a year ago, and AOL Networks CEO Ned Brody — who just resigned from that post — as head of ad sales for Yahoo North America, sounds perfect. […]
AOL Advertising has hired former MediaMath marketing executive Marta Martinez to the newly-created position of Head of Sales Strategy & Operations. With AOL’s mixed display results the past few quarters — third party network dollars continue to surge, while spending on “premium” owned & operated properties strive to be better than flat — the company […]
AOL’s mix of challenges and improvements to its ad business was clearly represented in its Q4 earnings last Friday. U.S. display revenues slipped 3%, dampening AOL’s triumphal announcement that companywide revenues returned to the plus side after eight long years. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong surveyed the company’s Q4 earnings in an interview on Friday, conceding […]
AOL’s Q4 results had a number of positives, not least of which was a return to overall revenue growth for the first time in eight long years. And yet, Q4 saw the company’s display ad dollars slip further, with numbers in that segment flat globally and down 3% in the U.S. Read the release. For […]
While AOL’s Q3 growth was surely a welcome sign to patient investors, the fact that it has continued to come from its third party network and search ad deal with Google could be a long term problem. During a call with analysts, CEO Tim Armstrong acknowledged several times that the “traditional” display model of ad […]
In Q2, as it has for the past year, AOL’s third party network revenue rose by double digits, while U.S. display dollars remained flat. Read the earnings release. During the earnings call with investors, who once again saw their low expectations exceeded by AOL’s performance, CEO Tim Armstrong batted back questions about the advertising challenge […]
