Technology

Private equity firm Vista Equity Partners has acquired a majority stake in ad verification vendor Integral Ad Science. Terms were not disclosed. IAS detects ad fraud by scanning billions of insertions from both buy and sell sides, searching for anomalies. It also assesses whether individual impressions are fraudulent or not. Industry insiders had wondered about […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Second Bite Apple has discussed a potential in-app ad network to target audiences based on keywords – similar to its current App Store search business – and drive app downloads. Snap, Pinterest and others have been approached about the idea over the past year, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Fountain Of Youth The online media habits of US teenagers have changed dramatically since Pew Research last conducted a major survey of 13-17-year-olds. From 2014 to 2015, Facebook was used by 71% of US teens, then the only social platform with a clear majority, […]

The European Union’s GDPR regulations have been in force for less than a week, but ad tech exchange players are already feeling whiplash. The crux of the problem is advertising technology vendors must have user consent for data-driven advertising – yet there are only two scaled ways to get it. Either use Google’s GDPR pipeline […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Follow The Trends Mary Meeker delivered her famous “Internet Trends” deck (this one clocking at 294 slides) at Recode’s Code conference Wednesday. Smartphone adoption and internet user growth are slowing, but time spent online continues to rise. US adults spend on average 5.9 hours […]

Location marketing platform Verve is angling for a piece of the growing programmatic mobile video pie with the acquisition of in-app video ad vendor Receptiv (formerly MediaBrix). The deal, announced Wednesday, opens up a rich new seam of inventory for Verve, said CEO Tom Kenney, who declined to share terms other than to say the […]

The potential of programmatic audio has caught the interest of advertising’s behemoth. Google said Wednesday it had launched the ability to buy programmatic audio ads through its demand-side platform (DSP) DoubleClick Bid Manager. Programmatic audio is still a new market, but it’s growing quickly. Spotify launched the capability in 2016, and on its Q1 2018 […]

Dentsu Aegis Network said Tuesday it has added Index Exchange as a tech partner for its people-based marketing initiative, M1. M1 typically targets precise audiences. The Index Exchange wrapper will find more of those needles in the haystack. Publishers already using the Index Exchange wrapper must sign a contract with Dentsu Aegis Network before tapping […]

The odds are stacked against ad tech companies that go public. But Integral Ad Science CEO Scott Knoll wants to buck that trend. Among a trio of leading verification companies, it’s the only one left that hasn’t taken an exit. Oracle bought Moat in April 2017 and bolted on brand-safety tool Grapeshot a year later […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Many Appy Returns It’s a truism that iOS users and Apple App Store downloads generate more value for brands than downloads that happen through Google’s Play store. But over the past couple of years Apple has been running away with the market, according to […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Jay Friedman, COO at Goodway Group. In the past two weeks, I’ve been to two supply-side platform (SSP) summits and spoken in depth to more than a dozen publishers. I’ve learned a lot. In short, […]

Data matching and cookie syncing aren’t verboten under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) but getting the consent to do it is another story altogether, since consumers need to know exactly what they’re signing up for when they provide unambiguous and specific consent. Like most vendors in the ad tech ecosystem, companies that onboard data […]

Header bidding-enabled ad spend is on the upswing thanks to mobile. And though it’s still early days for in-app header bidding adoption, that train’s just about ready to leave the station. The number of mobile impressions transacted through unified auction technology increased more than 110% year over year in the first quarter of 2018, according […]

Google soon expects to join the IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework, which transmits consent across the ad tech ecosystem to serve data-driven ads under GDPR. Google said it will join once it has resolved technical and policy details so parts of its ad tech can operate with the framework. “We absolutely want to be […]

More brands are bringing the strategic functions of programmatic buying in-house, relegating their agencies to specialized roles. Sixty-five percent of brands are either completely or partially buying programmatic media in-house, according to a white paper released Tuesday by the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Data Center of Excellence. The white paper surveyed marketers at 119 US […]

Shopper marketing, a longtime favorite of CPGs typically used for in-store signage or to get products on eye-level shelves, is undergoing a massive transformation thanks to the spread of ecommerce and online shops. Of the $178 billion marketers spend annually on in-store marketing, $55 billion could shift from traditional retail trade marketing to online ads, […]

Adobe said Monday it will buy the ecommerce platform Magento for $1.68 billion. Magento’s 2017 revenue was $150 million, and the deal is expected to close by the end of August. Ecommerce has long been a big hole in Adobe’s tech, even as competitors spent heavily to acquire Magento’s competitors. SAP has owned hybris since […]

Verizon’s Oath wants advertisers to know that although it shuttered its programmatic TV offering OneTV, its addressable TV business based on Fios households – which launched in late 2016 – is here to stay. Verizon knows that for addressable inventory, it’s later to the game than Dish network as well as AT&T and its DirecTV […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Story Time Advertising is coming to Facebook Stories, a sleeper hit on the Facebook platform that draws 150 million daily active users. Ads will be 15- to 20-second videos that users can skip and are for now limited to branding initiatives, TechCrunch reports. Click-throughs […]

Acxiom intends to sell its marketing solutions division before moving to a potential sale of LiveRamp, because it believes selling them separately will drive more shareholder value, said sources close to the company. Interest in Acxiom and LiveRamp in particular heated up in March, after Salesforce bought the middleware tech company MuleSoft for $6.5 billion, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Onboarder Offloaded? Acxiom is shopping LiveRamp, a linchpin of data-driven advertising, Mike Shields reports for Business Insider. LiveRamp, the strongest player in the data-onboarder category, would have many suitors, with marketing tech giants like Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce and IBM likely to make a bid. […]

This isn’t a test: Data-driven TV planning is finally having its moment. About 15-17% of advertisers in the US already regularly include addressable or advanced TV buys in their media plans, according to a joint Forrester/Association of National Advertisers survey of 126 ANA members released Wednesday. An additional 20-30% of advertisers plan to start dipping […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Turmoil At The Top More drama at the top of WPP, as shareholders rally against Chairman Roberto Quarta’s reelection after his handling of CEO Martin Sorrell’s exit last month. The concern was sparked by a report from advisory firm Glass Lewis, which said it […]

Apple just made a move under the radar that could cause third-party attribution providers to become obsolete. In late March, Apple quietly released SKAdNetwork, an API for iOS 11.3 that allows ad networks or advertisers to directly attribute installs from the App Store without relying on an attribution vendor. Apple’s well-documented stance on consumer privacy […]

Google’s decision to stop providing DoubleClick (DCM) advertising IDs in its ad server log files beginning May 25 will throw a wrench into multitouch attribution, because it will block marketers’ ability to compare Google campaigns with other ad platforms. Whether this policy change is an existential threat to independent attribution or not, the loss of […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. TV Killed The Video Star? Videology, a video ad network that tried to reinvent itself as an advanced TV company, plans to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, The Wall Street Journal reports. Amobee has offered $45 million for the company’s assets, which likely will […]

The Trade Desk generated $85.7 million in revenue during the first quarter of 2018, a 61% jump from the same period last year, the company disclosed in its earnings report Thursday. Profitability was also up, with net quarterly income reaching $9.1 million, compared to $4.9 million in Q1 2017. The Trade Desk raised its 2018 […]

AdExchanger Talks is a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. Google’s top digital marketer, Bob Arnold, is our guest in the podcast studio this week. Many listeners will remember Bob’s early advocacy of programmatic drawn from his time at P&G and Kellogg. “I’m still a dyed-in-the-wool CPG marketer,” he says in this episode. “Marketing is marketing, […]

In the National Football League, the whole team has to know the same playbook for the plays to work. And the same is true for the NFL’s marketing group, which in 2017 began centralizing its audience data to improve team-level marketing and the value of league sponsorships. “We’re building a data co-op, in a sense,” […]

Drawbridge, one of the last major cross-device indies, is selling its US media business to location data platform Gimbal, shutting down its self-serve ad platform and getting out of the advertising biz, AdExchanger has learned. Drawbridge’s media team and the company’s entire book of managed business is transferring to Gimbal. Both companies declined to share […]