Technology

AT&T reported Q2 earnings Tuesday for the first time since its $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner, which it has renamed WarnerMedia, closed in June. Revenue for AT&T’s Advertising and Analytics unit, which includes the AdWorks addressable TV group, grew 16% sequentially to $1.8 billion, CFO John Stephens said during Tuesday’s earnings call. Advertising and […]

Verizon revealed Tuesday that it is taking a $658 million writedown for “product realignment” that is “mainly related” to Go90, which it shut down in late July. Verizon also had $339 million in severance charges and $120 million in charges related to its Oath integration, the company said during an earnings call. Taken together, the […]

The revised OpenRTB 3.0 spec released Tuesday makes major changes to the programmatic standard to stamp out bad ads and fraud. The IAB Tech Lab’s new spec is now open for public comment for 60 days. The eight-year-old OpenRTB standard governs how demand-side platforms (DSPs) and supply-side platforms (SSPs) communicate with each other to buy […]

Alphabet’s second quarter revenue hit $32.7 billion, a 26% jump from the same period last year, according to its earnings report on Monday. The advertising platform is “firing all cylinders,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai told investors, with ad revenue reaching $28.1 billion in Q2 2018, compared to $22.7 billion in Q2 2017. This is the […]

What’s the point of integrating data sources if you can’t activate on them? That’s the rationale behind the Salesforce Ventures-led $23.8 million Series E investment in SessionM, announced Monday. SessionM helps companies consolidate first- and third-party data sources and activate them around the customer journey. While it has elements of a customer data platform, its […]

Disney is about to get its own happily ever after with Hulu. Comcast has dropped out of its bidding war for most of Fox’s assets, conceding it to Disney. Disney and Fox shareholders are expected to approve the deal on July 27, USA Today reported. Disney will also gain access to Fox’s Star India network […]

Amazon Prime Day is the ecommerce leader’s biggest shopping day ever as well as an opportunity to see how the company strategically deploys its advertising and promotional products. Many retailers responded to Prime Day this year with their own deluge of special discount deals, but Amazon uniquely uses its arsenal of products, from Alexa-based voice […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Ian Davidson, vice president of platform demand at OpenX. Why would exchanges add to their enormous server-farm costs by sending multiple bid requests to a single demand-side platform (DSP) for the same impression opportunity? […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Claws Down The bidding war between Comcast and Disney for 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets has finally come to an end, with Comcast backing down after Disney’s $71.3 billion counterbid. Comcast will focus instead on beating Fox to acquire Sky, the British satellite TV […]

AppNexus launched the first video advertising product for its demand-side platform (DSP) in late 2015. Over the next two years it built out its video offering to include a supply-side platform (SSP) solution, a video ad server, a video header bidding product and a connected-TV marketplace. With its acquisition by AT&T expected to close later […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Direct Control Direct-to-consumer upstarts are giving established brands a run for their money, and are also wreaking some havoc in the agency world. That’s because DTC brands are for the most part digitally native and do their advertising in-house. Despite its $1 billion acquisition […]

Google was hit with a $5.1 billion fine by the European Union on Wednesday for antitrust practices around the Android mobile operating system – a move that underscores Europe’s willingness to issue steep financial penalties for bad behavior. And there’s another bludgeon in the EU’s cache that Google – and the advertising world in general […]

Less than two years after Vector Capital sealed its $122 million deal to acquire Sizmek, the private equity firm is already looking to divest. Multiple sources with direct knowledge told AdExchanger that Vector has been shopping Sizmek, possibly as early as April, and just a year and a half after the deal closed. Vector denied […]

It seems everyone wants a piece of AppLovin. Private equity firm KKR bought a $400 million minority stake in the app marketing and discovery platform on Tuesday, lifting AppLovin’s valuation to around $2 billion from $1.4 billion just eight months ago. Bank of America Merrill Lynch advised AppLovin on the investment, adding a new wrinkle […]

Ad tech is a buyer’s market right now, and MediaMath just got $180 million in cash to fund acquisitions. Could one of those targets be Rubicon Project? “That’s an interesting idea,” MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki told AdExchanger Thursday. “No, we are not buying them at this time.” The idea of a top-tier DSP and SSP […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. A+ Marketing Universities are taking a play out of the data-driven marketing playbook to recruit students for graduate programs. Houston Baptist University worked with higher education consulting firm EAB to create a demographic and psychographic profile of its students and target lookalikes on Facebook […]

Salesforce has signed an agreement to acquire Datorama, a marketing tech company whose platform connects and consolidates data from different sources, the companies said Monday. The deal is anticipated to close Q3. Terms were not disclosed, though the publication CTech said the offer is for $800 million. “With one unified view of data and insights, […]

July is historically a slow month for the US retail industry. It splits Memorial Day and Labor Day shopping spikes, and foot traffic dwindles as consumers travel or hit the beach. But this year, ecommerce and brick-and-mortar retailers are pouncing with mid-July promotional events, hoping to seize the shopping energy stirred up by Amazon Prime […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Blockchain Fever While still buzzy, advertisers are starting to test blockchain as a tool that can shine a light on the digital supply chain. Marketers such as AB InBev, AT&T, Kellogg’s, Bayer and Nestle are using the technology to measure the flow of their […]

Hold the phone, it ain’t over yet. One month after losing its case to block AT&T’s $85 billion merger with Time Warner, the Justice Department filed an appeal Thursday. In a statement, AT&T’s general counsel, David McAtee, sounded a bit baffled. “The Court’s decision could hardly have been more thorough, fact-based and well-reasoned,” he stated. […]

This is a new podcast from AdExchanger. It will be available wherever you subscribe to podcasts.  The Big Story is a breezy new podcast featuring a roundtable of AdExchanger editors talking about, well, the biggest stories that broke over the past week. In our inaugural episode, Managing Editor Ryan Joe and staff writers Alison Weissbrot […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Snap’s OK Instagram may have run away with Snap’s stories format, but – consolation prize! – Snap is benefiting from all the exposure. According to Digiday, Snap story ads are now seen as a great value, selling at CPMs of just $1.88 versus as […]

MediaMath is flush with cash and ready to ignite consolidation in ad tech. Thanks to a $225 million investment by private equity firm Searchlight on Tuesday, MediaMath will end up with a $180 million cash infusion to spend on acquisitions and building new products. MediaMath, whose flagship product is a DSP/DMP, used $45 million of […]

Machine Zone’s (MZ) experiment with homegrown ad tech is over. The gaming company shuttered Cognant, an internal demand-side platform created in 2016 to help MZ’s media buying team plan, create, buy, optimize and measure marketing campaigns. MZ laid off the entire Cognant team in June, as well as around half of its in-house media buyers, […]

Arun Kumar, chief data and marketing technology officer at IPG Mediabrands, will play a central role in integrating Acxiom Marketing Solutions (AMS) into the holding company. The $2.3 billion acquisition, announced last week, gives IPG 1,600 data scientists, 200 product and technology specialists and first-party data on 2.2 billion global consumers. With AMS, IPG also […]

Forrester Research took its first steps into technology ownership on Tuesday with the acquisitions of customer data collection company FeedbackNow and GlimpzIt, a machine-learning and content recognition company. Forrester’s SEC filing said the deals will have insignificant effects on overall revenue and that through 2019 the stock-based compensation and acquisition and integration costs will range […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Grow Big Or Go Home HBO is at a crossroads and its new corporate manager plans to make a change, a recording from a recent company-wide town hall meeting suggests. John Stankey, the AT&T executive who now oversees the Time Warner media properties, says […]

On Monday, Pivotal analyst Brian Wieser informed investors he will begin covering Criteo and The Trade Desk as his first ad tech stocks. Wieser covers large entities across the media and marketing sectors. His smallest previously was Interpublic Group, which has a $10 billion market cap. But when investors began asking him more about ad […]

FreeWheel and Operative said Monday that they have partnered on an initiative called “Premium at Scale,” which lets advertisers buy digital and addressable TV inventory in one place. NBCU is the first media brand to sign on. Traditionally, ad sales on linear TV and digital have been very separate processes with very different measurements. Since […]

When IPG acquired Acxiom’s managed services group, Marketing Solutions (AMS), for $2.3 billion last week, it marked the end of a five- months-long strategic review of the business – and the start of the next big sales review process with LiveRamp. Acxiom already had opened a strategic review of LiveRamp but was intent on selling […]