Technology

As more people increasingly listen to podcasts, the advertiser dollars are following. As a result, podcasting is poised to become a billion-dollar advertising business in the United States within the next three years. Advertising revenue earned by podcast creators grew an estimated 53% in 2018 to $479 million, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau and […]

Amazon’s acquisition of Sizmek’s ad server and dynamic creative optimization (DCO) platform Friday puts it in a better position to compete with Google for advertiser budgets. Amazon will likely gain new clients from Sizmek who don’t want to deal with switching ad servers, as well as some advertisers who don’t like the idea of working […]

Placed has found a new home. Foursquare is buying the location-based measurement company from Snap. Separately, it raised $150 million in fresh funding courtesy of The Raine Group, some of which is going to fund the acquisition. The rest is earmarked for R&D. The deal, announced early Friday morning, comes less than two years after […]

Updated at 11:50 EDT Amazon announced on Friday that it will buy Sizmek’s ad server business and dynamic content optimization (DCO) solution, following a two-month sales review since Sizmek declared bankruptcy in March. The deal would give Amazon the second-largest ad server footprint, trailing Google, and has important implications for Amazon’s advertising ambitions and the […]

Firefly is moving fast. On Thursday, the San Francisco-based startup, which places digital ad displays on the top of private rideshare vehicles and taxis and then splits the revenue with drivers, announced its expansion into New York City, the acquisition of digital ad company Strong Outdoor and $30 million in Series A funding. The round, […]

Today in the podcast studio, Criteo COO Mollie Spilman talks about what makes companies survive and thrive in the ever-changing digital advertising business. Criteo was the emblem of the wild growth in programmatic marketing, and remains the second-largest publicly-traded ad tech companies with a valuation of $1.3B. In the five years since Spilman joined to […]

On the surface, LinkedIn’s plan to acquire cross-device data company Drawbridge may seem like a head scratcher. What does a B2B social network want with a probabilistic cross-device vendor? The deal creates potential for LinkedIn’s marketing products that go beyond Drawbridge’s existing technology assets. If LinkedIn wanted access to an identity graph, it could have […]

When Jonathan Carson became The Trade Desk’s first-ever chief revenue officer last week, the company was at an inflection point. The Trade Desk has soared since its IPO, going from just a shy of billion in value in 2016 to about $9 billion now. To date, however, The Trade Desk has succeeded primarily by consolidating […]

LiveRamp earned $78.3 million in the second quarter, a 30% increase from $60.2 million in the same period last year, according to its earnings report released Tuesday. The company’s gross profit also grew year over year, from $36.4 million to $40.6 million. LiveRamp is still shaking off the blow from Facebook’s third-party data prohibition. The […]

LinkedIn is buying Drawbridge. The acquisition was announced quietly on Tuesday via a mere mention buried in a blog post, and the deal price was undisclosed. The deal is expected to close by the end of June. Drawbridge CEO Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan and CTO Devin Guan are coming aboard, although LinkedIn declined to share which other […]

When it comes to ad tracking in Safari, Apple usually taketh away. But sometimes Apple giveth advertisers a little something. Meet privacy-preserving ad click attribution for the web. Think of it as Apple throwing a bone to advertisers who need a way to measure the effectiveness of their ads in Safari, which is where tracking […]

Datorama, the Salesforce marketing analytics platform, launched an app marketplace Thursday where companies can list new automated data products. AT&T’s Xandr ad unit has one app in the marketplace at launch, which pulls data from the AppNexus demand-side platform (DSP) into Datorama, so it can be analyzed alongside other DSP or ad platform campaign data, […]

Real-time bidding is under the gun in Europe. On Wednesday, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) opened a formal investigation into whether Google’s ad-exchange data-processing practices violate the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). GDPR celebrates its first birthday on May 25. A complaint filed in September 2018 with regulators in Ireland and the United Kingdom triggered […]

Amazon is primed to splash some color on a new product category: paint. But rather than slap on its own private label, home improvement site The Spruce lent its name and home décor expertise, selecting and naming the 32 colors of paint. Paint manufacturer KILZ produced the line. KILZ and Amazon first approached the digital […]

The programmatic advertising ecosystem is a mess – even its main architect agrees. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Brian O’Kelley, founder and former CEO of AT&T-owned AppNexus, shared a three-pronged proposal for how he’d start to fix the tangled web he helped weave. First, give consumers control and transparency over their data. […]

Interpublic Group’s $2.3 billion purchase of Acxiom Marketing Services in 2018 shook the industry. And it reverberated into 2019 with Publicis Groupe’s follow-up acquisition of Epsilon. This week on the podcast, IPG Chief Data and Technology Officer Arun Kumar comes into the studio for a frank discussion of the deal and the larger trend of […]

Consulting firms like Deloitte and Accenture are forming mutually beneficial business partnerships with Google around selling the Google Cloud platform to enterprise customers. Deloitte and Google expanded their relationship at Google’s Next conference in April. The companies have a goal of driving billions of dollars of business to each other per year, said Tom Galizia, […]

Quantcast began monetizing its consent management platform (CMP) business for the first time on Thursday with the launch of Choice Premium, a paid version of the publisher tool. Quantcast Choice was released about a year ago with the introduction of the IAB Europe’s CMP registry and the Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF), the collaborative industry […]

Beyond the money they mint with their owned-and-operated inventory, Google, Facebook and Amazon are, each in their own way, bidding into nearly every programmatic auction that takes place across the open internet. Although programmatic is growing year over year, independent ad tech players are increasingly fighting over the remaining crumbs while the walled gardens cut […]

It’s been almost eight months since Prabhakar Raghavan took the reins of Google’s advertising and commerce business, but it isn’t getting any less complicated. “I have to say, it took me several hour-long sessions before I could grasp all of our data policies,” Raghavan quipped during a candid conversation with four reporters at the Google […]

TransUnion is busily expanding its digital marketing product portfolio. On Wednesday, the credit bureau and consumer data provider acquired marketing tech platform TruSignal. The deal – TransUnion declined to share terms – arrives less than a year after the company hired seasoned ad executive and former MediaLink managing director, Matt Spiegel, as EVP of digital marketing solutions […]

Tealium has raised $55 million in new funding, its sixth round, the company said Wednesday. The round, led by Silver Lake Waterman with participation from ABN AMRO, Bain Capital and a smorgasbord of others, brings its total funding to $160 million since 2012. Most of the cash will go toward growth in order to capitalize […]

AT&T’s ad unit Xandr on Tuesday unveiled a publisher network called Community, which lets advertisers use Xandr data on video inventory across WarnerMedia’s O&O properties as well as a selection of outside publishers. The WarnerMedia properties include CNN, TNT, TBS, truTV, B/R Live, Otter Media and Warner Brothers, and the video partner publishers include VICE, […]

Google released a slate of new shopping ad products on Tuesday, upping the ante in commerce marketing as Amazon, Facebook-agram and Adobe ramp up their shopper ad businesses. Google’s new shopping ad formats, unveiled at Google Marketing Live in San Francisco, tie formerly siloed properties within Google, such as YouTube and Maps, into a more […]

What if Microsoft, and not Google, had acquired DoubleClick in 2007? What if Facebook hadn’t given up on its Atlas and LiveRail acquisitions? What if YouTube had stayed independent? In this episode, Beeswax CEO Ari Paparo comes to the studio for a game of “what if,” applying his encyclopedic knowledge of ad tech to a […]

Adobe launched a cloud product suite for retail and ecommerce technology services on Monday. The Adobe Commerce Cloud is the fourth Adobe cloud offering, joining the Experience, Advertising and Analytics clouds. The core of the new commerce package is the Magento ecommerce platform Adobe acquired a year ago for $1.68 billion, that’s now been integrated […]

Browser fingerprinting isn’t a new tactic, but it’s newly in the headlines as all of the primary web browsers – Safari, Firefox and now Chrome – crack down on the practice in the name of privacy. The main problem with fingerprinting from a privacy perspective is that there’s no way for a consumer to opt out or to […]

Google Chrome is making it easier for its users to block cookies and harder for ad tech companies to do fingerprinting. But Google’s dominant position in online advertising means even small changes will unleash a cat-and-mouse game with ad tech companies, who may choose to sidestep the new restrictions. There’s also the concern that consumers […]

The Trade Desk captured $121 million in revenue during Q1, up 41% from $85.7 million in the same period last year, the company reported on Thursday. Its profitability in the quarter rose to $10.2 million, from $9.1 million in 2018. It’s been more than two years since The Trade Desk IPO’d, and strong revenue gains […]

Publishers want to control their header bidding – especially in light of Google Ad Manager’s changing rules and proprietary header bidding wrappers giving preference to their own demand. To serve this need, Rubicon Project built Demand Manager, tech that sits on top of the open-source wrapper Prebid. In addition to analytics and a rich UI […]