Technology

Taking in the sprawl of CES in Las Vegas, one thing is clear: “There’s a ton of focus on streaming – it’s front and center,” according to Jay Prasad. The same can be said of Prasad’s new employer. Prasad joined LiveRamp in January after five years as chief strategy and business officer at video tech startup […]

“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 Bill Wise, co-founder and CEO at Mediaocean. This month marks the end of a decade in which the digital advertising industry came of age. When we think about where we […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Wind In DTC’s Sails Procter & Gamble’s acquisition of Billie, a shaving and body care startup focused on women, has given a boost to the DTC entrepreneur and investor community. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, so it’s unclear if it even was […]

When it comes to data, IPG CEO Michael Roth has said in the past: “Why buy it when you can rent it?” But that thinking changed last year when Acxiom went up for sale. When IPG bought Acxiom, it was able to build new offerings around first-party data management. In October IPG launched Kinesso, a […]

S4 Capital, Martin Sorrell’s scrappy new holding company, acquired Mexico City-based multicultural digital content agency, Circus Marketing, on Wednesday – its 11th deal in just over a year. Here’s why: an expanded footprint, more capacity in existing markets and data, data, data. “It’s a smart deal that makes sense for their strategy,” said Jay Pattisall, a […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Bloomberg’s Big Play Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is set to unload a 60-second ad spot critical of President Donald Trump in the upcoming Super Bowl. The New York Times estimates that the former NYC mayor shelled out $10 million for the privilege, also noting […]

LiveRamp is distancing itself from location data. AdExchanger has learned that in Q4 2019, the onboarder offloaded the location data-related portion of the business it got along with its 2016 acquisition of Arbor. Cuebiq, a location-intelligence company, bought the assets. LiveRamp is keeping the rest of the Arbor business, which includes technology to connect first-party […]

Video ad tech company Tremor said Monday it will acquire the outstream video advertising platform Unruly from News Corp. In exchange, News Corp gets a 6.9% equity stake in Tremor, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange, giving News Corp about $20 million worth of Tremor stock, based on the video advertising company’s $275 […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Buzzing  After racking up more than $50 million in losses last year, BuzzFeed is working its way toward profitability. The digital media company laid off 250 staffers and is benefiting from new revenue streams. Sponsored content, once BuzzFeed’s crown jewel, now makes up just […]

Last decade saw a spate of data broker acquisitions by agency holding companies. But are these deals too focused on owning data, rather than using it to derive insights? “You have to look at broad groups of data to understand consumption,” said Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital. Rather than purchase a data broker, Omnicom […]

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Supply Constrained Advertisers are shifting their TV budgets to streaming platforms so quickly that demand for OTT inventory will far outstrip supply this year, Digiday reports. Currently, just a handful of streaming players sell ad inventory, though more will open up when NBC’s Peacock […]

2019 brought a tsunami of change to data-driven advertising. And those changes have overflowed into other part of businesses and the economy, as regulators scrutinize the world of digital advertising. Facebook gave the boot to third-party data suppliers. And in 2020, Google says it will make good on a long-held promise to revoke its advertising […]

The advertising industry today is largely the product of tremendous M&A activity. AdExchanger looked at the acquisitions that made the biggest impact in the past decade. Impact can mean many things. Some of these startups flourished under their new owners, showing worth far more than their deal price. Others, purchased during their downfall, reflect the […]

The programmatic ecosystem spent the last 10 years in a state of hyper growth, and programmatic spending surpassed $100 billion dollars globally for the first time in 2019. While the next 10 years will likely bring a slowdown due to market maturation and data regulations, it’s indisputable that programmatic buying and the rise of ad […]

This was a major year in ad tech deal making. Many deals were opportunistic or outright fire sales, as early programmatic players like Sizmek, Rocket Fuel and IgnitionOne reached the end of the line. Ad tech and data deals were helped by a surge among public company bellwethers The Trade Desk, Cardlytics, LiveRamp, Telaria and […]

Whenever Google moves, people pay attention. Half of the 10 most-trafficked AdExchanger stories in 2019  feature Google, showing how any change Google makes ripples across the industry. Readers were also intrigued by stories of great success and … the opposite. On the former end of the spectrum was an examination of The Trade Desk’s massive […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. This Is Fine France’s competition regulator fined Google $167 million (150 million euros) for unfairly suspending advertisers for placing allegedly deceptive ads. It’s a drop in the bucket for Google, but the regulatory drumbeat is a bigger issue than the fines. Unlike previous fines, […]

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Content Costs Apple has held preliminary talks with MGM Holdings and with the Pac-12, a college football conference, as it tries to beef up the Apple TV Plus subscription offering, reports The Wall Street Journal. Although this may be a golden era of television […]

Blockchain has passed through the wild ride of the early hype cycle, and its advocates are readying for a more mature period of implementation. The IAB Tech Lab Blockchain Working Group on Thursday published its first guidelines for implementing blockchain tech in digital advertising. Hilary Chapman-Roberts, a GroupM product marketing manager and co-chair of Tech […]

Smart, a publisher ad server and exchange, is growing out of its supply-side roots with the acquisition of the DSP Liquid M, the company said on Wednesday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Liquid M is a relatively small DSP, with a little over $10 million in revenue this year and 20-25 employees, according […]

Marketers aren’t switching off of their DMPs – yet. But they’re considering solutions that are less cost-heavy and more integrated with paid media. DMPs from Oracle, Salesforce and Adobe have always been the most-used platforms in previous Advertiser Perceptions reports, and they still are in the research firm’s latest report, released Wednesday. But their favor […]

Running a programmatic exchange requires PubMatic to process around 800 billion bids a day and 80 million bids a second – which generates 100 terabytes of compressed data per day. And this number has only risen as header bidding multiplies the number of daily bid requests. Data analysis in real time instead of a day […]

The next version of the IAB Tech Lab’s open-measurement SDK (1.3) debuted on Tuesday, with support for in-app audio, more granular brand safety controls and a fix for impression counting discrepancies between vendors. But despite progress on the supply side, “very few DSPs are making use of OpenRTB signals for open measurement,” said Joe Ranzenbach, […]

On Monday, Activision Blizzard Media, the advertising and media arm within Activision Blizzard (parent company to juggernaut game studio King), launched King’s Council, a panel comprised of around 5,000 of its most engaged and active players across the United States and the United Kingdom. The purpose is to conduct user research and to test ad […]

Data management platforms (DMPs) were once painted as a panacea for all of a marketer’s data needs – from collection, to harmonization to segmentation and syndication. But marketers have since cooled on the technology, concluding that it‘s too disjointed to perform many of the functions promised. Marketers tell AdExchanger they have struggled to achieve ROI, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Hard Sell Facebook has told advertisers it won’t need to change its web-tracking services to comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), on the grounds that its use of data to target ads doesn’t constitute “selling” data. Starting January, when the law comes […]

Amazon Publisher Services (APS) will remove dataxu from its Fire TV third-party DSP service, according to sources with knowledge of the change. APS opened its Fire TV inventory to third-party DSPs for the first time five months ago with integrations with The Trade Desk and dataxu. Less than two months after dataxu was acquired by […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Lucie Laurendon, senior product marketing manager at Smart. Google’s surprising move to a first-price unified auction was met with cautious optimism and doses of skepticism. Dropping last-look advantage in Google Ad Manager’s second-price auction […]