Technology

FreeWheel released the next generation of its ad exchange on Tuesday. The Comcast-owned ad server built off its legacy ad exchange, enhanced by technology from its acquisition of StickyAds in 2016, for its updated ad product suite, DRIVE. The new exchange is designed to let marketers more easily buy over-the-top (OTT), set-top box video on […]

The switch to first-price auctions last year is causing programmatic buyers to pay more, according to research from media agency Hearts & Science. In one test, a first-price auction drove CPMs up by more than 50%. The Omnicom agency wants programmatic to create “clean” second-price auctions to remove the premium that buyers pay. It doesn’t […]

Contrary to popular belief, video did not kill the radio star. It made them a YouTube influencer. Advertisers use influencer marketing to reach consumers at a time of increased ad aversion. But the sheer volume of influencers and content on YouTube alone can be overwhelming for advertisers searching for the best fit for their brand. […]

When Adobe acquired the B2B marketing company Marketo for $4.8 billion last week, investors pressed CEO Shantanu Narayen to explain the gulf between Adobe’s price tag and Wall Street’s valuation of Marketo two years ago, when Vista Equity Partners snapped it off the stock market for $1.8 billion. Private equity investors have shown they have […]

One year after first launching programmatic ads, BuzzFeed is doubling down with BuzzFeed Exchange, a formal expansion of its programmatic product offerings. BuzzFeed’s inventory has grown to 3 billion impressions a month, up from the  1 billion impressions a month it offered when it debuted programmatic ads a year ago. The BuzzFeed Exchange aims to […]

With $2.3 billion in cash on the books thanks to IPG’s acquisition of Acxiom Marketing Solutions in July, the newly constituted LiveRamp is ready to start bankrolling its road map in a serious way. “We didn’t have the technology muscle before and we weren’t investing in R&D,” said Scott Howe, who went from CEO and […]

The first rule of ad fraud: If it can be spoofed, it will be spoofed. Bad actors are pretending to be legit, demand-side platforms to try and fool partners and blend in with real ad calls as a way to purvey malware and litter the web with forced redirects. “They weasel their way onto the […]

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Mike Bevans, global vice president of product solutions, marketing and partnerships, at Xaxis. In the age of media fragmentation, securing the appropriate level of reach and frequency in video can feel overwhelming. Just picture […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Setting Up A Private Practice Amazon’s private-label brand business is on pace to generate $25 billion by 2022, up from $7.5 billion this year, according to investment firm SunTrust Robinson Humphrey. And Amazon has quietly taken measures to rapidly grow its exclusive brand roster, […]

The third-party cookie isn’t crumbling so much as imploding. In a Friday email to advertisers and publishers, Facebook said that on Oct. 24 it will start offering a first-party cookie option for the Facebook tracking pixel so that businesses can keep targeting their ads and measuring their campaigns without relying on third-party cookies. Facebook confirmed […]

Brian O’Kelley’s departure as CEO of AppNexus surprised few in the industry who know him. His sharp opinions and independent mindset made him an ad tech provocateur and a fearless leader. But that same personality seemed incompatible with taking a subservient role to Xandr CEO Brian Lesser within the AT&T mega-corporation. After all, this is […]

When The Trade Desk IPO’d in September 2016, it nearly doubled its own value projection and quickly became a $1 billion company. Fast-forward two years and the company’s market cap sits at around $6 billion. The question for many analysts and ad tech observers is: How long can this ride last? Investors have pumped a […]

This is the latest installment in “PII,” a series featuring the talent that makes the wheels turn in our data-driven advertising world.  When Anneka Gupta joined LiveRamp as her first job out of college, she didn’t foresee that she’d be co-CEO seven years later. In fact, she didn’t even know if she wanted to be a […]

The Big Story is a breezy new podcast featuring a roundtable of AdExchanger editors talking about the biggest stories from the past week. It is available wherever you subscribe to podcasts. So you’ve made it to the final day of Advertising Week in New York City. Congratulations. This year, the annual shindig crammed its attendees […]

Why is the industry still talking about linear vs. digital when to consumers, it’s all just content? That’s the question Donna Speciale, president of ad sales at Turner, is asking to galvanize long-awaited changes to how network TV transacts media. “At some point, we’re not going to say linear or digital,” she told AdExchanger. “We’ll […]

MediaMath will stop buying from supply partners that play auction games, preferring to create an economic incentive for fair, transparent programmatic auctions and put an end to auction manipulation. The DSP sent an open letter Wednesday morning to its 50 directly integrated suppliers. The full letter is reproduced at the end of this article. “Auction […]

See you later, siloed views. Data science and technology company 4C is hoping its integrations with Freewheel, Telaria and SpotX, unveiled Tuesday, will streamline the buying of over-the-top (OTT) and linear inventory. These partnerships make more OTT and linear inventory accessible within 4C’s platform, Scope, a dashboard that lets ad buyers plan, purchase and measure […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Sridhar Out One of Google’s key ad executives is riding his horse off into the VC sunset, Forbes reports. SVP Ads and Commerce Sridhar Ramaswamy will depart the Googleplex for a role with Greylock Ventures. Sridhar helped Google’s ad platform business grow from $1.5 […]

Ryan Joe contributed One of Google’s key ad executives is riding off into the VC sunset. Sridhar Ramaswamy, SVP for ads and commerce,  will depart the Googleplex for a role with Greylock Ventures, Forbes reports. Prabhakar Raghavan, VP of Google cloud apps, will become the new ads honcho. “I’ve long admired how Sridhar and his team have […]

Six exchanges and a handful of top publishers who work with Index Exchange’s wrapper say they consistently notice anomalies indicating the exchange prioritizes itself. At least two of those exchanges are composing a letter to Index Exchange CEO Andrew Casale threatening to withdraw from its wrapper unless it takes steps to ensure neutrality, AdExchanger has […]

Jay Seideman will present on programmatic best practices at AdExchanger’s upcoming Programmatic IO New York conference on Oct. 15-16. AT&T’s new advertising and analytics unit, Xandr, is capturing the headlines and Amazon is on its way to making the duopoly a trio – but don’t count out Oath. The Verizon-owned digital media company is avidly […]

Despite the massive steps the ad industry has made in figuring out addressable TV just this year, advancement comes not from stunning breakthroughs, but simply from attaching a few additional pipes and freeing a new trickle of inventory or data. On Thursday, Adobe Advertising Cloud TV soldered together a few more of those connections by […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Brick By Brick Amazon’s newest foray into offline retail is a store called Amazon 4-star in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood featuring products that have high ratings and are trending with New Yorkers. The store will be similar to Amazon’s small chain of bookstores, […]

The Big Story is a breezy new podcast featuring a roundtable of AdExchanger editors talking about the biggest stories from the past week. It is available wherever you subscribe to podcasts. Two big tech and media players held their extravaganzas this week. The Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara was a coming-out party for Xandr – […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. A Dish Best Served Amazon has discussed building its own video ad server that would put it squarely in competition with Comcast’s FreeWheel and Google, Mike Shields reports for Business Insider. The product could power advertising on Amazon’s streaming platform, where ad-supported video streaming […]

AT&T’s promise to connect data, technology, distribution and content to make advertising better for all constituents is exciting. So exciting, in fact, that industry executives from both the buy and sell sides gathered in support of the idea at the Relevance conference in Santa Barbara, Calif., this week, willing to help make it happen. But […]

ISpot some cash! TV ad measurement company iSpot.tv has raised $30 million in a Series C funding round, bringing its total to $57.8 million, the company’s CEO and founder Sean Muller told AdExchanger on Tuesday. Investors Insight Venture Partners and Madrona Venture Group led the round. No investors took money off the table. ISpot will […]

Two multibillion-dollar acquisitions and one Justice Department lawsuit later, AT&T’s advertising and analytics unit finally has a name: Xandr. AT&T revealed the brand at its Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara, Calif., Tuesday, a debutante ball for the new unit that gathered 300 top advertising and media executives at the lavish Ritz-Carlton Bacara. The name pays […]

Since Oracle Data Cloud’s creation four years ago, following the acquisitions of data sellers Datalogix and BlueKai, it has taken a central role in powering Oracle’s core products. Oracle Data Cloud further enhanced its ability to measure the digital media supply chain with its $850 million acquisition of Moat and the $400 million acquisition of […]

Salesforce on Tuesday introduced Salesforce Customer 360, a unified customer ID that connects profile data across its Sales, Services, Commerce and Marketing cloud product suites. “There are so many ways for a person to engage with a brand nowadays and a certain level of control has been lost behind these layers of technology and media,” […]