Technology

In its first-ever Wave evaluating media agencies with under $20 billion in billings, released Thursday, Forrester recognized agencies that leverage their buying clout and understanding of the media landscape in creative ways. Mediahub, Hearts & Science and Assembly were Leaders in the ranking. PHD, Spark Foundry, Horizon Media and Vizeum were Strong Performers, while Dentsu […]

FreeWheel, the Comcast-owned video ad tech company, hosted its first television upfront on Wednesday and is mounting a campaign to expand its buy-side business. The marketer outreach centers on new attribution features and the launch of FreeWheel Media, which formalizes its buy-side accounts and ad-serving business into a cohesive offering, CRO Brian Wallach told AdExchanger. […]

Machine learning is becoming central to user acquisition and app advertising at Google. On Wednesday, Google introduced five game developer-focused ads products, four of which are powered by some form of machine learning. The first new release, called pre-registration ads, for example, allows developers to reach Android users across the Play store, YouTube, search and […]

Big Tech can’t catch a break in DC … actually, scratch that. If Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, is elected to the White House in 2020, she’s got a plan to break up Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple. And her proposal specifically targets Google’s ad platform business. On Friday, the Democratic presidential candidate laid out how her […]

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

The phrase “bidstream data” is popping up more and more, but few understand what the bidstream is and what data is available. In the world of real-time ad auctions, bidstream data comes from a publisher or app and includes basic facts about the ad unit, like publisher and URL, device type, IP address and ad […]

Google will move to first-price auctions for Google Ad Manager, its publisher exchange and ad server, by the end of 2019. At that time, it will also run a single, unified auction and remove last look, ceding a key advantage Google held in a second-price world. Google Ad Manager will be the last major exchange […]

Xandr just can’t deal right now, according to sources. When AT&T hired Brian Lesser to run its new targeted advertising business and acquired AppNexus as its anchor asset, the company signaled it might move quickly on more acquisitions. But the appetite for mergers has faded since then, and the company now plans to hold off […]

The Trade Desk shocked many observers last May when shares jumped from around $50 to $90, and then again in August when the stock leapt to about $130. Now shares are trading at almost $200. But what’s behind The Trade Desk’s monumental growth in the past year? The company benefits from a smaller field of […]

Amazon is ratcheting up conquesting campaigns, both as an ad platform and as a private-label brand operator. Conquesting is when a brand tries to directly peel off a competitor’s customers or audience. It was a limited strategy in the old world of media and shopping, where there wasn’t much data to identify a rival’s loyal […]

If Xandr wants to live up to its promise and create a programmatic marketplace for the TV industry, it’s going to have to convince agencies to buy what it’s offering. The AT&T-owned company recently hired Jay Askinasi for the job, and he joined Xandr in early February as VP, head of digital and agency partnerships. […]

Marketers are reacting differently to YouTube’s latest brand safety flare-up compared to 2017, when scores of global brands suspended YouTube campaigns over ads monetizing violent or offensive videos. There’s certainly some déjà vu, with Disney, Nestlé’s and McDonald’s halting YouTube spending after YouTube creator Matt Watson showed them advertising on a video that had a […]

The Trade Desk’s growth streak shows no sign of diminishing, with revenue of $477 million in 2018, a 55% increase from the year before, according to the company’s earnings report on Thursday. Shares of The Trade Desk were up more than 10% in after-hours trading. The company raised eyebrows last year when its stock went […]

Oracle has uncovered an ad fraud operation it calls “DrainerBot,” which siphoned off ad dollars and monthly data packages. Oracle’s internet infrastructure business Dyn originally discovered the operation after it picked up suspicious activity among some mobile apps using an SDK from Tapcore, a Dutch mobile monetization company. The apps obscured web data with proxy […]

US digital ad spend in 2019 will surpass all traditional advertising for the first time, growing to $129.3 billion this year, according to eMarketer’s latest forecast. Digital advertising is being driven by mobile, which is now more than two-thirds of the digital category, and by TV dollars moving to streaming and online video. Oh, and […]

This article is sponsored by Prebid.org. 2018 wasn’t the year header bidding first began disrupting how exchanges and publishers thought about monetizing their inventory, but it may be remembered as the year it reached an inflection point. According to the ServerBid Header Bidding Industry Index, nearly 75% of the U.S.’s top 1,000 websites had adopted header […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Apple Goes Shopping A regulatory filing revealed that Apple has acquired DataTiger, a digital marketing company specializing in customer journey tracking. Apple has assembled an interesting portfolio of tech companies in recent years, including the audio recognition app Shazam and Texture, a digital magazine […]

Criteo brought in $670 million in Q4 2018, beating expectations but still 1% below its revenue from the year before, the French ad tech leader reported Tuesday. Criteo’s earnings for the year were flat at about $2.3 billion. But CFO Benoît Fouilland said the stability is a positive sign, considering Criteo was coming out of […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. DTC Playbook, Written A values-driven brand with the best X in its category launches on Facebook, quickly gains customers and uses data to improve its products and its marketing process. Ever feel like direct-to-consumer brands are all following the same unwritten set of rules? […]

LiveRamp has added connected TV IDs to IdentityLink, its cross-device identity graph, the company said during its Monday Q4 2018 earnings report. Connected TV IDs are tied to a home IP address, and are used to distinguish households by companies that serve ads over smart TVs or OTT services, including some smart TV manufacturers, multichannel […]

As marketers spend more with Amazon, they’re spawning a cottage industry of Amazon-focused ad tech vendors and service partners. Brands need specialists to guide them across Amazon’s sprawling marketing empire – a brand may deal separately with Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP), Amazon’s Alexa voice group, Amazon Fresh groceries, Twitch and the company’s packaging and shipment […]

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

Supply-path optimization (SPO) lets buyers find the best way to access the inventory they want. But the next stage of SPO is emerging, where buyers will negotiate with exchanges to create their own low-fee paths to supply. In that spirit, the agency Goodway Group and the exchange PubMatic inked a deal Wednesday where PubMatic will […]

Zeotap is launching a global identity graph to try and beat LiveRamp to the punch across the pond. On Tuesday, the Berlin-based mobile data platform announced the global rollout of Connect, an identity solution that deterministically links offline data to anonymized online identifiers based on exclusive relationships with telco operators in markets across Europe, India […]

Since GDPR came into effect last year, Google has been at the center of two connected issues around resolving identity in digital marketing. First, it planned to remove the DoubleClick ID (now the Google ID) from its log files, preventing ad tech and analytics companies from using the ID to track campaigns across the web. […]

Google still brings in the big bucks, but its costs are skyrocketing as well as the digital media giant pushes its way into TV advertising. First, the basics. Alphabet brought in $39.3 billion in Q4 2018, up 23% from the same period the year before, the company disclosed in its quarterly earnings report on Monday. […]

Taptica will acquire RhythmOne for $176 million in an all-stock deal, the companies said Monday. The mobile ad tech firm also gets a matryoshka doll of assets along with RhythmOne, including assets from the latter’s previous acquisitions of YuMe, Burst Media and parts of RadiumOne. Taptica characterized the deal as a bid for connected televison […]

Amazon’s “Other” category, its miscellaneous revenue segment that consists primarily of advertising, made $3.4 billion in Q4 2018, almost doubling from Q4 2017. The “Other” category also grew by about $900 million from the prior quarter, for the first time outpacing the growth of Amazon Web Services, the cloud infrastructure business, which added $700 million, […]

Attention: Attorney General, State of California Re: California Consumer Privacy Act You’re killing us here. Thanks, The advertising industry The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is set to take effect in 2020 and the advertising community is desperate for some clarification. On Tuesday, a coalition of ad trade orgs sent a joint letter to the […]

Google has maintained its dominant share of the ad server market because switching ad servers is a hellacious process that requires a hard reset on media plans, analytics, creative and billing. But Google’s announcement last May that it would remove the Google ID from its ad-server log files, thus prohibiting marketers from tracking or measuring […]