Technology

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. TikTok Snubs Campaign Ads Candidates: The world’s fastest-growing social app doesn’t want your money. “We have chosen not to allow political ads on TikTok,” VP of Global Business Solutions Blake Chandlee, writes in a post innocuously titled “Understanding our policies around paid ads.” He […]

Companies large and small have griped for years that tech giants – Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple – habitually engage in anticompetitive behavior. Regulators around the world are now paying attention. In some cases, companies proactively proffer their grievances, while in others, regulators solicit their feedback as evidence gathering in newly launched antitrust investigations. Here’s […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Vice And Virtue The consolidation of media proceeds apace. One week after Vox nabbed New York Media, Vice said it will acquire Refinery29. The price was not disclosed, but CNN business sources put the deal below $500 million. Vice CEO Nancy Dubuc called the […]

MediaMath launched on Wednesday a digital media-buying framework called SOURCE to give advertisers, publishers and every vendor in between visibility across the supply chain. MediaMath has assembled a roster of partners for the initiative that span the ecosystem. They include Havas Media and its own advertising customers, SSPs Rubicon Project and Telaria, news publishers such […]

“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 Ramsey McGrory, chief revenue officer at Mediaocean. Major internet service providers (ISPs) will be intently watching Amazon’s corporate facilities in Sunnyvale, Calif., for the next four-plus months as it tests […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Big Guns Vs. Google Comcast’s FreeWheel unit told a congressional task force last month that Google used privacy concerns to limit FreeWheel and other video advertising companies from selling ads for its clients on YouTube. Other ad tech and cable companies have spoken out […]

Direct-to-consumer brands have just as much to learn about retail as traditional retail brands can learn from DTCs. “DTC founders make the mistake of thinking we know everything, just because we were able to scale and build our businesses faster,” said Nate Checketts, CEO and co-founder of Rhone, a men’s sports apparel startup founded in […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Rerouting Traffic Google plans to use a new internet protocol (DNS over TLS) to improve security in its Chrome browser, and internet service providers are worried. Specifically, they fear Google’s shift to a new standard could change the competitive landscape in Google’s favor. “They […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Help Us, IAB Next up for the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA): Gov. Gavin Newsom needs to sign the bill into law, and the attorney general needs to release practical guidelines. (Read AdExchanger’s coverage.) It’s all happening fast, and if you’re an ad tech […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. ViacomCBS Vs. The World ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish believes the key to winning the streaming wars is to unite ad supported products like Pluto with subscription video products. “The cool thing about streaming in the context of ViacomCBS is it unites two strategies that […]

Agency holding companies have spent $12 billion on data assets over the past five years but have yet to successfully deploy those assets at their creative agencies, according to a Forrester report released Monday. “It’s still very much a media proposition,” said Jay Pattisall, Forrester analyst and author of the report. “[Creative] seems to be […]

One more cookie workaround bites the dust, in Safari at least. The latest iteration of Intelligent Tracking Prevention, ITP 2.3, is cracking down on localStorage and other tracking mechanisms that try and outfox ITP. The change was already in the code base, but hadn’t yet been publicized. LocalStorage is a form of web storage that […]

Despite Xandr’s positioning as the TV platform of the future during its Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara last week, agency buyers want to see more progress toward that goal. Certainly, Xandr has the right assets and strategy to create a programmatic marketplace for TV. Over the past year, Xandr launched a publisher network called Community, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Move Over Rick Welday is stepping out of his shoes as Xandr president and likely right into a position at either AT&T or WarnerMedia. The change comes as AT&T begins to bring the three pillars of its new media empire – communications, advertising and […]

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 […]

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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, […]