Technology

Salesforce has agreed to acquire the data reporting and analytics company Tableau for $15.7 billion, the enterprise cloud giant said Monday. The deal comes less than a week after Google bought Looker, one of Tableau’s main cloud analytics competitors, for $2.6 billion. So Salesforce and Google have consolidated large shares of the independent analytics market. […]

Google is selling linear television inventory with Display & Video 360, its demand-side platform (DSP), via a beta partnership with the TV industry ad tech company WideOrbit. “The feedback we’ve most consistently heard from clients is how challenging it’s become to reach their audiences,” said Eve Goldman, Google’s director of global YouTube and video solutions. […]

Xandr is making AT&T data available to buyers across all media types through AppNexus’s demand-side platform (DSP), which it has rebranded as Xandr Invest. Xandr Invest launched Monday and allows advertisers to layer AT&T’s first-party data when buying inventory available through the AppNexus exchange as well as inventory from Xandr’s premium video network, Community. Advertisers […]

The US Department of Justice is reportedly preparing an antitrust investigation into Google. But that doesn’t mean Google is headed for a breakup and, at least for now, there are way more questions than answers. Which parts of Google’s sprawling business will the DOJ look into? Will it delve beyond Google’s search practices, which have […]

One week after Amazon reached a “definitive agreement” to buy the Sizmek ad server and DCO tech, the French ad tech company Weborama is trying Friday to re-open the process with a press release and what it claims is a larger offer. FTI Consulting, the financial advisory overseeing Sizmek’s bankruptcy review, emphasized its agreement with […]

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

Apple dropped a mini bombshell Monday at its Worldwide Developer Conference: a privacy-safe logon button for apps. Positioned as “the fast and easy way to sign in without all the tracking” according to SVP of software engineering Craig Federighi, “Sign in with Apple” is a developer-initiated alternative to the single sign-ons offered by the likes […]

When Amazon acquired Sizmek’s ad server and dynamic content optimization (DCO) businesses last week, most of the attention fell on the server. And rightly so, since the server is the meat and potatoes of the deal. But don’t sleep on the DCO solution as a potentially valuable asset for the Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP). After […]

Neal Richter, who spent two years as Rakuten Marketing CTO, is headed to SpotX as the company’s first ever chief scientist. Richter is one of the early tech leaders in programmatic, helping to develop all three openRTB specs released by the IAB, as well as online ad authorization industry initiatives like Ads.txt and Sellers.json. As […]

Apple’s high-profile assault on third-party tracking continues. Starting with iOS 13 in the fall, users will be able to log in to apps and services using Apple Face ID without sharing other personal information. The new “Sign in with Apple” button, an unconcealed jab at Google and Facebook, is a way to sign in “without […]

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 […]