Technology

Nielsen’s hire of IBM Watson honcho David Kenny as CEO, first reported on Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal, is a major bet for the measurement company as it rises to meet new competitive challenges and prepares for a possible sale of the business. Kenny oversaw IBM’s artificial intelligence initiatives, using machine learning to support enterprise […]

Global programmatic advertising will grow by more than $13 billion next year and the year after, but its growth rate has stalled and it’s making slower-than-expected headway in taking share from non-programmatic media, according to Zenith’s 2018 Programmatic Marketing Forecast published Monday. Programmatic display advertising will clear $70.2 billion this year, according to the report, […]

Digitally-native direct-to-consumer brands are super-smart performance marketers, but they also appreciate the importance of branding – and they’ve been spending big on out-of-home advertising, particularly in the New York subway system. “The MTA is very excited,” said Erica Amatori, director of marketing at Burrow, a less than two-year-old DTC customizable sofa brand headquartered in Manhattan. “They’ve […]

Tremor Video DSP is working out some growing pains. At the beginning of this year, Tremor regained profitability for the first time since it was spun off in August 2017 from the SSP that would become known as Telaria. Tremor operates as a business division within Taptica, the mobile ad tech company that acquired the […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Alessandro De Zanche, an audience and data strategy consultant. Today’s modeled data at scale is evolving rapidly, due to legal and technical limitations. It is frequently misrepresented and mis-sold, but there would be no […]

The publisher tech startup Blockthrough, which specializes in retrieving revenue lost to ad blocking, acquired its rival and category pioneer PageFair on Thursday. Terms were not disclosed. PageFair was one of the first startups offering technology for publishers to counteract ad blocking, either by circumventing the ad blocker or by creating new direct audience agreements, […]

Google Ad Manager is the dominant SSP, according to Advertiser Perceptions’ 2018 Programmatic Intelligence Report. But, the 154 publishers surveyed also valued platforms in areas like proactively shared insights and reporting – categories where Google didn’t perform as well as its competitors. “Google is the clear leader,” said Kevin Mannion, chief strategy officer at Advertiser […]

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Ramsey McGrory, chief revenue officer at Mediaocean. With The Trade Desk’s market above $5 billion (Stock: TTD) and MediaMath’s valuation topping $1 billion following its last funding round, leading traditional demand-side platforms (DSPs) are […]

Sojern is hopping a flight to funding town. The 10-year-old travel-focused ad tech company announced a monster $120 million financing round, technically a Series D, on Tuesday led by TCV partners, a growth equity firm that has also invested in Airbnb, Expedia, ExactTarget, AppNexus and Netflix. This is Sojern’s first raise since its $10 million […]

Direct-to-consumer brands like Mack Weldon, Manscaped and Peloton have expanded beyond their Facebook and Instagram roots – but don’t expect them to start advertising with or selling most of their products on Amazon. Though Amazon seems like a natural expansion for ecommerce startups, reducing the impact of the world’s biggest ecom platform is a strategic […]

The Trade Desk reported Q3 revenue of $118.8 million, a 50% year-over-year increase. The company has maintained growth of 50% or more in the past two quarters, matching its growth rates from the same periods last year. With an upward revision to the company’s revenue forecast next quarter, CEO Jeff Green said he expects the […]

Dynamic creative advertising technology is becoming more personalized. Forrester ranked Jivox, RevJet, Thunder, Clinch and Celtra as “leaders” in its first-ever Creative Advertising Technology wave, released Monday. Adform, Flashtalking, Sizmek and Google were ranked “strong performers,” while Adacado was listed as a “contender.” Vendors have tried to marry creative messaging to audience targeting for a […]

AdExchanger Talks is a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. Jounce Media founder Chris Kane gave a popular presentation at Programmatic IO New York on the buzzy discipline of supply-path optimization (SPO). In this episode, Kane comes into the AdExchanger studio for a deep dive on SPO and the ways advertisers can use it to optimize […]

The data management platform (DMP) category is now a three-horse race, with Salesforce gaining on Oracle, and Adobe nipping at their collective heels. “Salesforce is definitely on an accelerated path,” said Kevin Mannion, chief strategy officer at Advertiser Perceptions, which released its Q3 2018 DMP wave on Tuesday. “Its upward movement is the most obvious […]

Verizon has gone back on its oath to advertisers and publishers. The telecom giant said Monday it will rebrand its media and advertising division, Oath, as part of a company-wide restructuring. Oath will be renamed Verizon Media Group, and the rest of the corporation will be consolidated into two other buckets: consumer and business. Verizon […]

The Big Story is a breezy podcast featuring a roundtable of AdExchanger editors talking about the biggest stories from the past week. It is available wherever you subscribe to podcasts. When giants move, everyone takes notice. This week on “The Big Story,” the AdExchanger team looks at some small but significant shifts in Amazon’s and […]

The TV ad buying ecosystem is getting even messier, according to GroupM’s second-annual “State of Video” report, released Thursday. Some of the report’s revelations are familiar: Linear TV ratings are still dropping and, as eMarketer predicted in September, Amazon is a “likely third force” in the struggle for ad spend between Facebook and Google. GroupM […]

Criteo brought in $529 million in the past quarter, a 6% drop from the same period last year, the company disclosed in its Q3 earnings report Wednesday. The revenue drop is in line with Criteo’s previous forecast as it transitions from its traditional retargeting business to becoming a self-serve mobile platform. “We’ve been upfront about […]

Google and Amazon still dominate the demand-side platform category, but next-tier players have opportunities to win market share and for the first time there are signs that Google’s iron grip may be softening, according to the half-yearly Advertiser Perceptions DSP Wave released Wednesday. The report is based on surveys of almost 500 brand and agency […]

LiveRamp began trading as $RAMP on the New York Stock Exchange on Monday and hosted investors and analysts when the company reintroduced itself to the market following the sale of Acxiom Marketing Solutions to IPG for $2.3 billion in July. LiveRamp is embracing its position as a subscription-based middleware technology, a category that comes with […]

Amazon is testing a program that lets advertisers use search queries to retarget across the web, according to agency executives briefed about the pilot program. This capability is only available through Amazon’s DSP and it is the first time that Amazon search data is being used off of Amazon’s owned and operated platform. While Amazon […]

Although Alphabet’s revenue grew 21% to $33.7 billion in Q3, that fell short of its target, sending its stock sliding 4.5% in after-hours trading Thursday. “We feel good about the underlying strength in the ads business,” said Google CFO Ruth Porat, noting that Google is investing in machine learning to further improve its ads business […]

Online spending records have shattered across the country during this year’s midterm election cycle, but no campaign has brought more attention to digital media than that of Democrat Beto O’Rourke, a Texas congressman running for Republican Ted Cruz’s Senate seat. No candidate this year has raised more money online or spent more on Google, Facebook […]

Despite AT&T missing its projected Q3 earnings, the telecom giant’s new data-driven ad unit Xandr had “strong growth,” executives told investors Wednesday. Xandr’s ad revenue grew 34% YOY, fueled by AT&T’s acquisition of AppNexus. Excluding AppNexus, revenue was still up 22%. Xandr’s Q3 revenues were $445 million, and its operating margin was 74.8%. In Q3 2017, […]

Verizon’s Oath content and advertising subsidiary brought in $1.8 billion in the past quarter, down 6.9% from the same period last year, Verizon said in its earnings report Tuesday. Verizon attributed the downturn to declining desktop and search advertising. CEO Hans Vestberg said the Oath business should remain flat for the short term and that […]

If Amazon-owned Twitch reaches its goal this year of – according to Bloomberg – doubling its ad sales revenue to $1 billion, it has quite a lot to offer but a lot it must still do. On the plus side, Twitch, the popular video streaming platform that boasts more than 15 million daily active users, […]

Audio ads should be personalized, too. That’s the thought behind Adobe’s partnership with A Million Ads, which powers dynamic creative optimization in digital and programmatic audio, announced Monday. Adobe launched programmatic audio capabilities in July 2017, after receiving an uptick in demand from its customer base, said Justin Merickel, VP of media optimizer at Adobe […]

The in-housing trend prompted Gartner’s first-ever Magic Quadrant report for ad tech, which was released late last week. Even if not all marketers are ready or interested in taking their media buying in-house, there’s a desire across the board for more control over their tech stack – or at least to know what the heck’s […]

Brad Stamulis, director of digital marketing at Dish Network, has long called out viewability measurement’s shortcomings – but at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O in New York City on Tuesday, he specified the steps the industry needs to take to fix it. Eliminating waste in programmatic marketing is always a challenge when it comes to viewability and […]

AdExchanger Talks is a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. This episode of AdExchanger Talks is supported by StackAdapt. Among the “Big Three” marketing clouds – Oracle, Adobe and Salesforce – Oracle has been the most active on mergers. The list of its acquisitions is long: Eloqua, Responsys, Maxymiser, BlueKai, Datalogix, Moat, Grapeshot, Crosswise, AddThis. These are […]