Technology

Looks like Acxiom Marketing Solutions (AMS) is an agency business after all. Interpublic Group said Monday it acquired Acxiom’s legacy data management business for $2.3 billion. AMS represents about three-quarters of Acxiom’s total revenue. Dennis Self and Rick Erwin will serve as co-presidents of AMS, which will remain a standalone unit aligned with IPG Mediabrands. […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Outlook Hazy The fate of Hulu depends on the outcome of Comcast’s and Disney’s bidding war for 21st Century Fox. Whoever wins will own a majority stake in Hulu, and both companies have very different visions for the platform’s future. Comcast wants to invest […]

by Allison Schiff, Alison Weissbrot, Sarah Sluis, James Hercher and Ryan Joe Getting a big brand to shift its marketing approach is about as easy as moving a planet out of orbit. Yet, many see the writing on the wall: If they don’t change, consumers will leave them behind. As such, big marketers have to […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Ameet Shah, senior director of global technology, publisher and data strategy at Prohaska Consulting. For the last 10 years, publishers have been using programmatic media technology to drive greater scale and revenue. Real-time bidding […]

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Consent Mismanagement Publishers have wildly divergent approaches to consent management, and some may not sufficiently comply with GDPR. Since the regulation is vague about how publishers should convey consent to their audiences, many still use practices that violate the law, such as pre-ticked opt-ins, […]

Header bidding-like tech is starting to pick up steam on mobile, but it’s still mostly SDK-based, which brings added latency along with the revenue bump. On Thursday, mobile monetization platform PubNative released a hybrid server-side/client-side header bidding tool to help publishers bring in more dough without messing up the UX. Dubbed HyBid, the solution allows […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. In-House Helpers Consultancies are cashing in on in-housing. Firms like PwC, Accenture and Deloitte are using the media transparency debate to position themselves as in-housing experts, picking up marginal revenue – and helping brands cut out agencies in the process, reports Digiday. Because consulting […]

Google is kicking many of its product names and acronyms to the curb – including the 22-year-old DoubleClick brand. Google is rebranding its products into three groups: Google Marketing Platform for enterprises, Google Ads for small and medium-sized businesses and Google Ad Manager for large publishers. The transition will begin in mid-July. This transition will […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. An Otter Acquisition Most people are still busy digesting news of AT&T’s $1.6 billion acquisition of AppNexus – but the telco already has another little deal up its sleeve. AT&T is in the process of securing full ownership of Otter Media, the streaming media company […]

AT&T has big plans to operate a programmatic exchange for the advanced TV advertising industry. Its Monday acquisition of AppNexus gives AT&T the infrastructure and relationships with content owners and buyers to operate that exchange at scale. But it remains to be seen if AppNexus clients will be spooked by its loss of independence and […]

The Trade Desk on Tuesday released a campaign planning tool called Planner. Powered by company’s first branded AI product, called Koa, which was also released Tuesday, Planner is designed to drive pre-campaign and in-flight optimization. The vendor hopes the two products will accelerate spend in emerging categories such as streaming audio and connected TV and […]

AT&T acquired AppNexus. So what’s it going to do with it? Both the buy side and the supply side will remain intact. AT&T will build out each part of AppNexus’ business, Brian Lesser, CEO of AT&T advertising and analytics, told AdExchanger. AT&T data will become a “very meaningful” carrot for buyers using AppNexus’ DSP, he […]

The rumors were true. AT&T said Monday it will acquire AppNexus for its advertising and analytics unit, which is headed up by former GroupM chief (and ex-AppNexus board member) Brian Lesser. The acquisition is expected to close in Q3. Read the release. Terms were not disclosed, though The Wall Street Journal pegged the price tag […]

As Apple cuts down on lock screen clutter, app marketers should take notice. In the wake of Apple’s latest do-not-disturb feature updates, which give users more control over their notifications, developers need to be judicious about how pushy they get with push notifications. Once users disable push or banish notifications from the lock screen, they […]

AT&T rode into Cannes this year amid fanfare following its Time Warner acquisition, freshly rebranded as WarnerMedia. But trailing in its wake are a lot of questions around what this mega-merger means for the advertising landscape. Intentionally or not, AT&T added to the ambiguity with its Cannes branding – or complete lack thereof. The telco […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. DSPayday? AT&T is in talks to acquire AppNexus and the two companies are close to finalizing the deal, reports Cheddar. AppNexus brass are reportedly unwilling to sell for less than $2 billion. That sounds like an awful lot, but there are factors working in […]

As media agencies become more skilled at programmatic buying, they’re working with fewer demand-side platforms (DSPs) than ever before. According to Pathmatics, advertisers have cut the number of DSPs they work with by 40% over the past two years, to about four per month on average. In part, that’s because the market is consolidating. Big-name […]

You know stuff is getting real when the consortiums start forming consortiums. Over the past two years, two scaled initiatives have emerged to build a common ID that would reduce data loss, tags on page and site latency issues resulting from cookie syncing across dozens of ad tech companies. One is Advertising ID Consortium, led […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Weed Whacks Influencers Influencer marketing has a fraud problem, and Unilever CMO Keith Weed has had enough of it. At the Cannes Lions festival, Weed said Unilever will no longer work with influencers who buy followers to inflate audience and engagement metrics. Unilever will […]

Advertisers are sick of paying for unviewed impressions, and some programmatic exchanges are appeasing them by eating the cost of anything that wasn’t viewed. Viewability guarantees aren’t new. For advertisers that demand it, ad tech companies can optimize toward viewability on open exchanges or run viewable deals in private marketplaces. The problem is, those options […]

The marketing cloud landscape has taken big steps into advertising technology and media buying, as with Oracle’s recent acquisitions of Moat and Grapeshot or Adobe’s deal for the video DSP TubeMogul. But Salesforce defies that trend. The company has deferred to partners to provide online advertising. And while rival clouds contend for new data sources, […]

AT&T, which closed its acquisition of Time Warner on Thursday, will acquire more companies to support its Advertising and Analytics unit, CEO Randall Stephenson said Friday during a CNBC interview. Watch it here. Stephenson spoke of an upcoming ad-supported skinny bundle called AT&T Watch TV, featuring Turner content, that will be formally announced next week. […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. How The Sausage Gets Made Facebook announced new requirements for businesses building Custom Audiences. Facebook wants to make it clearer to users how their names got on lists that are commonly used for ad targeting. Starting July 2, businesses using the tool will have […]

Teamwork makes the dream work. At least, that could be the new Salesforce mantra for a suite of cross-cloud integrations and partnerships launched this week as Salesforce tries to separate itself from other leading marketing cloud companies. With so much competition and jargon in the cloud marketing technology space, it can be hard to differentiate, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Census Incenses The ANA published a survey of advertisers who oppose a potential change to the US census that would undercut marketing spend and measurement. The Trump administration wants to include a question about citizenship in the 2020 census, which advertisers worry will […]

AT&T defended its acquisition of Time Warner in court by saying it needed to compete against digital giants like Facebook and Google. By creating a scaled addressable TV platform to secure brand advertising dollars as well as performance spend, the merged companies could help AT&T stave off Google and Facebook. The two digital giants largely […]

Mazel tov, it’s a merger. On Tuesday, Judge Richard Leon gave his blessing to AT&T’s $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner. The judgment capped five weeks of testimony, six weeks of deliberation and a fair amount of nail-biting in executive suites from Dallas to New York City. But now that the deal is finally sealed, […]

The Washington DC, District Court on Tuesday gave the go-ahead for AT&T’s $85 billion merger with Time Warner, a decision with far-reaching implications for AT&T and the media and advertising industries. Despite the hefty price tag, industry observers initially expected AT&T’s offer to breeze through under a corporate-friendly administration. The last time the Justice Department […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Cannesultants Cannes Lions kicks off next week, but without the hometown hero. Last year, the French holding company Publicis Groupe said it would forgo Cannes and other award shows in 2018 and reinvest savings in an AI platform. In a press release on Monday, […]