Technology

The past two years have seen a rush of consortiums, coalitions and ad tech products that all hope to standardize online IDs to improve match rates. But industry leaders, for-profit startup and nonprofit initiatives can have very different ideas on how to solve that problem. “The question is which one of these models will gain […]

Cheddar CEO Jon Steinberg will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference on Jan. 23-24. AT&T began rolling out Cheddar across its video platforms DirecTV, DirecTV Now and U-verse TV last month. Cheddar has also broadened its reach on other media over the last few months. AT&T announced the Cheddar deal just days after Axios reported that […]

“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 Orchid Richardson, vice president and managing director of the Data Center of Excellence at the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).  Lexus recently released the first ad written by AI – and […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. F Is For Fake Last year was a point of “inversion” for the Internet, which has become oversaturated with malicious nonhuman traffic, ad fraud, fake news, falsely reported metrics and other forms of digital unreality, according to a New York Magazine story. It was […]

Over-the-top TV wasn’t invented in 2018, but 2018 was certainly its year. Advertising on over-the-top (OTT) was one of the hot-button issues at Dmexco, Advertising Week and other major conferences this year – for good reason. Content providers, DSPs and others in the industry are seeing explosive growth in this sector of their businesses. The […]

Advertisers and consumers both love a good binge watch during the holidays, and Discovery Inc. and SpotX have teamed up to better manage their inventory just before winter break. Discovery will run automated programmatic guaranteed campaigns through SpotX, the SSP said Tuesday. This development complements Discovery’s direct sales efforts and private marketplace offerings, said Bill […]

The IAB Tech Lab said Tuesday it has launched a compliance program for publishers and platforms that adhere to its podcast measurement guidelines. Podcast hosting service RawVoice/Blubrry and NPR are the first companies to be certified. The program is based on the IAB’s Podcast Measurement Technical Guidelines, which were released in December 2017 to provide […]

Working with Amazon is about going in with your eyes open, said Charlie Cole, global chief ecommerce officer at luggage juggernaut Samsonite and chief digital officer at Samsonite-owned Tumi. “Amazon has a proven track record of creating brands in a data-centric way,” Cole said. “I’m always a little surprised when people on the brand side […]

Sovrn’s acquisition of VigLink last week will make 2019 Sovrn’s first year when subscription software services outearn its traditional advertising exchange. Sovrn began in 2014 as an SSP offering scale and analytics on its aggregated publishing data, growing to be one of the largest ad networks with tens of thousands of blogs and publisher clients. […]

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.  Today’s column is written by Lindsey Harju, co-founder at Blinc Digital Group. 2018 may look similar to years past, with cross-channel acquisitions a seemingly regular occurrence. But for me, 2018 will stand out in the history of advanced TV […]

Federal Trade Commission Chair Joseph Simons is in favor of a national privacy regime – but beware the potential unintended consequences, he said. “Depending on how you do privacy legislation, you could have an adverse impact on competition, potentially by entrenching the major digital platforms,” Simons told lawmakers during a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on antitrust […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Adapting Accenture Interactive will acquire Adaptly, an ad tech and programmatic services company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Adaptly has 150 employees and has raised $13 million in funding. Adaptly should help Accenture Interactive “enable workflow, improve quality assurance and really […]

On Jan. 1, 2019, Hulu will release an automated private marketplace that will allow advertisers to bid on Hulu inventory without going through the additional steps of working with Hulu’s sales team. Instead, advertisers can use their own DSPs or trading desks to plug into the marketplace. The PMP will initially house standard 30-second spots, […]

Integral Ad Science named Lisa Utzschneider as CEO Wednesday. She will start in January by performing a strategic analysis of the business and creating a growth plan for the verification company. After mulling an IPO, Integral Ad Science went the private equity route this summer when Vista Equity Partners bought a majority stake in the […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. No More Safety Net Netflix shares are down more than a third over the past six months as investors worry about its debt and high costs. Netflix built its position in OTT with few competitors (HBO and Amazon Prime were pretty much it) – but […]

After around a year of avoiding the spotlight, Google CEO Sundar Pichai spent nearly four hours fielding a grab bag of questions from members of the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, discussing everything from the scope of Google’s data collection practices to alleged political bias in search results. The problem, as is often the case […]

Verizon will take a $4.6 billion goodwill impairment charge in the fourth quarter, acknowledging that its Oath business unit has underperformed, the company said Tuesday. The hit nearly eliminates the $4.8 billion goodwill balance Verizon carried after it acquired and merged Yahoo and AOL and assorted technology holdings into its Oath business unit back in […]

AppOnboard is onboarding VC cash hand over fist. On Wednesday, the mobile app demo and analytics startup with a platform allows users to try an application before downloading it, announced its second funding round – $15 million – in less than eight months. AppOnboard’s Series A round in April totaled $15 million. That’s $30 million for the […]

You may have received a news alert from The New York Times Wednesday morning about the latest Facebook data-related misstep as you sipped on your cup of joe. What’s Facebook accused of this time? Providing special pay-for-play access to user data for whitelisted advertisers, including Airbnb, Lyft and Netflix, while penalizing others by cutting them […]

The United States and United Kingdom are dominating in programmatic innovation, but Germany could be the next big player in the space, according to a study released Thursday from the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA). The WFA analyzed 13 countries with significant ad markets. The group looked at programmatic spend per capita, amount of private […]

From 7 pm to 7:45 pm on Tuesday, publishers saw mysterious yellow 300×250 ads blanket their sites. Paying CPMs north of $20, the yellow square ad elbowed out other buyers with its big spending. Hourly revenue spiked many times over publishers’ normal averages. Then it disappeared. Turns out, the yellow ad appeared across the United […]

Forrester tried to acquire SiriusDecisions, a B2B market research and analytics firm, five years ago, so closing a $245 million deal for the company last week felt like a natural step. But SiriusDecisions was the third acquisition in the past half-year for Forrester, which historically buys a company every three years or so, said founder […]

About seven years ago, DSPs that pitched marketers directly risked losing massive agency contracts. But today, as more marketers influence technology decisions and take programmatic contracts in-house, DSPs are freer to go after brands directly. Even The Trade Desk, which built a $6 billion business by pledging its allegiance to agencies, has signed more than […]

Shorting Ads Verizon is inching away from the grand advertising ambitions it once had for Oath. The ad unit has a new chief, Guru Gowrappan, following Tim Armstrong’s departure in September, and Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg, who took over in August, is more interested in network infrastructure than media. And after failing to meet ad […]

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Ryan Christiansen, co-founder and CEO at Ntooitive Digital. The ability to track and effectively target consumer actions has never been more essential to marketers seeking to unleash the power of cross-platform digital advertising. With […]

After a protracted, year-long alpha period, the IAB Tech Lab has released the specs in beta for the app version of its Ads.txt initiative to reduce counterfeit ad inventory. The App-ads.txt hold-up was caused by app stores dragging their heels on providing support for the Tech Lab’s preferred solution of using metadata tags – essentially […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Erik Requidan, vice president of programmatic strategy at Intermarkets. In a recent podcast, Chris Kane explained three ways that buyers navigate the complex programmatic supply landscape. The hardest: direct-to-publisher integrations. Some of the biggest names in media […]

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. Sell Me A Story YouTube is expanding its Stories feature to all creators with over 10,000 followers. YouTube Stories launched last year as “Reels” and was only available to select creators. Now, in an effort to capture some of the traffic that its creators […]

AT&T’s ad tech unit Xandr has big hopes for TV advertising, but the company said Thursday during an analyst call that it’s also going to be heavily involved in powering online ads. “You will continue to see Xandr media business outpace the television market in 2019,” Xandr CEO Brian Lesser told investors. “And now what […]