Technology

Google’s advertising chief Prabhakar Raghavan is reorganizing Google’s ads business – and adding new heads of measurement and privacy, according to multiple AdExchanger sources. As part of the reorg, he’s re-visualizing the company as four “concentric circles.” The innermost circle is Google’s owned-and-operated properties, including search and YouTube. The next circle outside of that is […]

Bad actors are exploiting VPAID to serve malicious auto redirects hidden within video ads. VPAID, which stands for Video Player Ad-Serving Interface, is the old and hoary industry standard for interactive in-stream video ads. First introduced way back in 2012 by the IAB Tech Lab, VPAID created as many problems as it aimed to solve. […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Is This Innovid-ive? Video ad company Innovid bought Argentinean display company Herolens for $30 million, after raising $30 million in January. “Display is a bad business,” Innovid CEO Zvika Netter told The Wall Street Journal. Huh? Well, Innovid needs a display ad business to […]

Microsoft is enabling two types of audience targeting to improve search ad performance, which it built to bring its ad offering to parity with Google Ads. Brands can target search ads based on products the person has viewed; and they can target Microsoft audiences similar to their own customers. Both products are still in open […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Satellite Down Little over a week after activist investor Elliott Associates criticized AT&T’s operations, including its $67 billion DirecTV acquisition in 2014, the satellite unit might be on the chopping block. AT&T is considering “parting ways” with DirecTV, according to The Wall Street Journal. […]

Xandr’s Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara might be a celebration of data-driven TV’s potential, but legacy business models and competitive interests are preventing advertisers and TV networks from reaching it. Advertisers want to efficiently reach audiences on digital and OTT channels, but the scale just isn’t there without a cross-network measurement or buying platform. “Uniformity, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Programmatic Everything Tapad co-founders Are Traasdahl and Dag Liodden are the latest ad tech entrepreneurs to bring programmatic principles to adjacent industries. The two have raised $14 million for their new startup Crisp, which will use big data to reduce food waste, VentureBeat reports. […]

Big tech can’t swing a cat these days without hitting an antitrust investigation. Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple are all facing varying degrees of heat from the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general across the nation, the House Judiciary Committee and competition authorities around the world. It’s hard to keep track […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Cart, Meet Horse Seth Dallaire, Amazon’s global ad sales leader for the past five years, was named chief revenue officer of Instacart on Friday. Read the release. Instacart’s primary business is with grocers and retailers, who use it for online ordering and delivery. But […]

Usually, you’ve got to pay lawyers for legal advice. But between sessions at Fordham University’s annual conference on international antitrust law and policy in New York City on Friday, there was lots of informal chatter about Google’s growing list of antitrust inquiries. The takeaway: This isn’t Google’s first antitrust rodeo, but it might be different […]

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. CCPA Crunch Time Lobbyists, cool your jets. The California Consumer Protection Act is nearing its mostly final form. The legislative session closes on Friday the 13th (that’s not ominous), which is also the deadline for lawmakers to pass any outstanding bills. Hail Mary lobbying […]

Longtime AppNexus President Michael Rubenstein will leave the business at the end of the year. Rubenstein is the latest top executive at AppNexus to leave since the company was acquired by AT&T under its Xandr unit for $2 billion in June 2018. Founder and CEO Brian O’Kelley left the company in October 2018. Rubenstein joined […]

The data-management platform (DMP) was sold as a tool with the power to turn publisher data into dollars. Vendors wooed publishers into signing multiyear contracts to use the technology. But the expectations didn’t match reality. As those contracts have expired, especially this year, many publishers aren’t renewing them. Just as marketers are moving from the […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. GDPR Who? GDPR hasn’t stunted the growth of programmatic revenue in Europe. An IAB Europe programmatic sales report finds the category grew 33% in 2018 to $18.4 million, The Drum reports. Even excluding the impact of social media ads, programmatic revenue was up 26.6% […]

Since Lisa Utzschneider was hired as CEO of Integral Ad Science in January, almost the entire senior leadership team has turned over, a sign of swift change at the Vista Equity Partners-owned ad tech firm. The acquisition closed last July. Eighteen C-suite, SVP and VP-level executives have been hired since the acquisition and Utzschneider’s hiring, […]

Amid fears of a recession and wild swings in the stock market, advertising technology companies are enjoying a renaissance. Since the start of 2019, shares of the video ad tech company Telaria have more than doubled in value, from below $4 to $10.45 as of this week. Rubicon Project also started the year trading below […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Trust Me, This Is Bad Fifty – count ’em, 50 – attorneys general are planning to work together on a sweeping joint antitrust investigation into Google. Google’s dominance over the online ad market will be the probe’s first priority, the Republican Texas AG told […]

“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 Nico Neumann, assistant professor and fellow, Centre for Business Analytics at Melbourne Business School. Advertising agencies are often masters of creating and developing brands. To survive and keep striving, they […]

IPG revealed a series of changes to its executive suite on Monday that brings media leadership to the top of the organization. Philippe Krakowsky, IPG’s chief strategy and talent officer and CEO of IPG Mediabrands, will assume the newly-created position of chief operating officer. He will retain his duties as chief strategy and talent officer […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Hand That Feeds Big tech may be disrupting linear television and OOH, but it’s also supporting those channels with marketing dollars. As AdExchanger reported recently, tech giants are increasing their ad investments to burnish their reputations and maintain growth in an increasingly saturated […]

New York Attorney General Letitia James is leading a bipartisan investigation into whether Facebook engages in anticompetitive behavior to drive up ad prices. James, a Democrat, is being joined in her work, which will also look into whether Facebook’s actions have endangered consumer data and reduced the quality of consumer choice, by eight other state […]

While brands aren’t exactly climbing over each other to adopt blockchain, persistent pain in the marketing supply chain means the technology will eventually have its day, according to IBM iX Executive Partner Babs Rangaiah. “This was built to solve the kind of issues we’re facing,” Rangaiah says this week on the AdExchanger Talks podcast. “It’s […]

By Allison Schiff and James Hercher Are Google’s cookie syncing capabilities a violation of consumer privacy or are they common industry practice? The answer to both could be “yes.” This new data debate, which fired up the ad tech industry, was sparked Wednesday when ad browser Brave’s chief policy officer, Johnny Ryan, asserted that Google’s […]

Goodbye AppNexus SSP, hello Xandr Monetize. One year after its acquisition by AT&T, AppNexus is rebranding its exchange to Xandr Monetize. It’s also adding a slew of new features to support its vision of offering a full programmatic stack for video-heavy publishers. Xandr Monetize is the third Xandr-branded product to launch, after Xandr Community and […]

Cookies: Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em. Well, that depends on who you ask, and the experts disagree. This week on The Big Story, the team examines both sides of the heated debate on the value, or lack thereof, of third-party cookie tracking. On one side of the fence, a study from May […]

“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 Bram Woolcott, product manager at TripleLift. Supply path optimization (SPO) is about finding the most efficient path to inventory, but there is no consensus about what efficiency actually is. Demand-side platforms […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. An Endless Conquest  Google’s allowance of aggressive conquesting on search results is becoming a headache for companies relying on organic search. Jason Fried, CEO of Basecamp, sounded off about the practice on Twitter this week after his company showed up below four paid ads […]

This post is sponsored by Xandr. As the fragmentation of media viewing habits continues unabated, technology platforms must help evolve buying practices to reach interested consumers however they access content. In order to ensure buyers’ unique objectives are met across screens, customization and flexibility are paramount. This summer, AT&T’s Xandr unit introduced Xandr Invest, a […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Google’s Turn Google will pay up to $200 million to the Federal Trade Commission to settle an investigation into whether YouTube violated children’s privacy law by targeting ads to minors, Politico reports. The proposed settlement, which has been sent to the Justice Department for […]