Technology

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 […]

It’s been almost a year since Vista Equity Partners acquired a majority stake in ad verification company Integral Ad Science. In the wake of the acquisition, the company appointed a new CEO, Lisa Utzschneider, to lead the company. In this episode, Utzschneider discusses her 20 years in senior revenue roles at Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo, […]

Digital ads in the United States accounted for more than $107 billion last year, the first year digital advertising eclipsed $100 billion after totaling $88 billion in 2017, according to the IAB’s annual Internet Advertising Revenue Report. The report, which is conducted by PwC, uses Comscore media metrics to measure audience totals and time spent […]

Google surprised investors on its quarterly earnings last week when it reported roughly $1 billion less revenue than expected and a significant deceleration of its advertising growth rate. On the one hand, Google is still immensely profitable and its business is so large that a smaller growth rate is still huge. Google’s raw ad revenue […]

Google Chrome is increasing its privacy controls for users and will scramble efforts by third parties to identify users via fingerprinting, making it the last major browser to strengthen its privacy protections for users. The changes, formally unveiled during the Google I/O event Tuesday, will roll out in coming months. Chrome will make it easier […]

Regulation Nation The Federal Trade Commission is in negotiations on a settlement deal with Facebook that would install a federally-approved privacy official at the highest ranks of the company and launch an independent privacy oversight committee. CEO Mark Zuckerberg would be responsible for enforcing privacy at the company, and Facebook will still have to pay […]

Call it the circle of life, or the post-boom days of online advertising or just the end of the ad tech OG. What’s clear, though, is that many pioneers of the first wave of advertising technology companies are getting out of the game. Brian O’Kelley, co-founder and former CEO of AppNexus, holds the patent on […]

Sometimes it seems impossible to reconcile the demands of users, publishers and advertisers, the three main stakeholders of the ad-supported internet. “It’s really important that all three of these constituencies can benefit from digital advertising,” said Brad Bender, VP of product management for Google’s buy and sell-side advertising technology. On topics like privacy, web-tracking cookies […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Jean-François Bernard, co-founder and chief product officer at Adomik. Google’s move to a first-price auction will change the dynamics of the publisher stack and redistribute revenue for publishers across all the channels they use. […]

Criteo’s revenues totaled $558 million in Q1 2019, a 1% decline from last year, though net profitability increased 1% to $21 million, the company said in its quarterly earnings on Tuesday. The core retargeting business outperformed forecasts, helping to keep revenue at a relative plateau, but Criteo’s non-retargeting businesses, like in-app advertising and audience onboarding, […]

Despite Alphabet bringing in total revenues of $36.3 billion for Q1 – up 17% from last year – investors are skittish. For one, Alphabet’s revenue would have been higher if not for a $1.7 billion fine levied by the European Union last month on Google’s AdSense business. But analysts were more concerned about the slowdown […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Agent Amazon Amazon is on a charm offensive to bring in more agencies and non-endemic brands, like financial services companies or auto manufacturers that don’t sell on its platform today. Amazon is doing a roadshow pitching its data and OTT chops to help create […]

Amazon reported slower than usual revenue growth in its earnings report, with overall sales of $59.7 billion in Q1 2019, a 17% increase compared to the year before. Amazon’s annual growth rate dropped, but it is more profitable and its business has a higher profit margin than ever. The company’s operating profit reached $4.4 billion […]

The IAB Europe and the IAB Tech Lab on Thursday released a second version of the Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF), which publishers and technology companies use to pass consent data for online advertising while still complying with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The TCF update will be in a public comment period for […]

With its $4.4 billion acquisition of Epsilon/Conversant, Publicis Groupe becomes a data controller – and that ups the regulatory ante under the General Data Protection Regulation and, likely, any other privacy legislation that comes down the pike. Controllers, in GDPR parlance, determine how and why personal data is processed. Controllers are also required to establish a […]

On Tuesday, the IAB Tech Lab explained how it would start phasing out the decade-old Video Player Ad-Serving Interface (VPAID) spec in favor of a new specification – snappily dubbed Secure Interactive Media Interface Definition (SIMID) – that specifically supports interactive video ads. The IAB Tech Lab, which has been working on a VPAID replacement since 2017, […]

The two minutes of television inventory sold by multichannel video players (MVPDs) – which can be made addressable by targeting through the set-top box – has historically been fragmented across providers, making it complex for a national advertiser to run addressable campaigns at scale. Today, MVPDs are jockeying to sell each other’s addressable TV supply, […]

Publicis acquired Epsilon on Sunday primarily for the latter’s expertise in working with first-party client data. But Publicis got a lot more with Epsilon’s hefty $4.4 billion price tag. Epsilon is best known for its services related to data management, email marketing and loyalty platforms. But Epsilon also gives Publicis an affiliate marketing network (Commission […]

Google held a meeting Thursday with its top publisher partners to discuss numerous new product changes, collectively called “unified pricing,” that could upend publisher strategy and leave them with less control over their ad inventory. It soon got heated. Multiple publishers in the group, whose attendees included The New York Times, News Corp, Dotdash, Watson […]