Technology

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, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The House Always Wins As YouTube keeps dialing up brand safety protections, creators in marginal or disreputable categories are feeling the brunt. A relatively small but active group of creators who stream from inside casinos (because people like to watch others gambling) have found […]

Google is reversing its policy for its consent management platform (CMP) that initially capped at 12 the number of vendors a publisher can list in opt-in messages, following critical feedback from publishers and the ad tech industry. The platform now has no limit. “The change being made now is in line with our priority of […]

Vista Equity Partners’ plan to buy a majority stake in Integral Ad Science – valuing the company at $820 million, according to AdExchanger sources, or up to $850 million, according to Axios – underscores the ongoing importance of ad verification and the pressure these vendors face to grow their product offering to remain competitive. “There’s […]

Ads.txt is headed to the app ecosystem. What form will it take? That’s still shaking out. The IAB Tech Lab released guidance on Wednesday with several proposals for how to implement Ads.txt within an app environment. Ads.txt is the Tech Lab’s initiative to reduce inventory spoofing and help advertisers distinguish legit supply sources from the […]

Facebook is hopping into in-app header bidding. Starting Wednesday, publishers can include Audience Network inventory in their in-app unified auctions. All formats will be available, including display, native and video. Facebook joins a long list of other platforms that have gotten jiggy with in-app header bidding in recent months, including Google’s AdMob, Oath, MoPub and […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Justifying $22B The Wall Street Journal does a post-mortem on strife at Facebook that led to the resignation of WhatsApp’s founders. Facebook paid $22 billion to acquire WhatsApp in 2014, and as the years ticked by, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg […]

In late April, Google said it would limit the portability of the DoubleClick ID outside of its ad server DoubleClick Campaign Manager (DCM), effectively killing independent attribution (at least to the extent that it was possible). Marketers who want access to the DoubleClick ID, which ties together data across Google’s properties, will have to use it […]

Even if Google registers its entire product stack with the IAB Europe Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF), there will still be important differences between Google’s GDPR solution and the programmatic ecosystem. Google has a huge advantage because of its end-to-end status in the online supply chain, said Blake Brannon, VP of product at the privacy […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Playing Nice As he throws his energy into a new marketing investment vehicle, Martin Sorrell has no plans to undermine WPP Group, where he remains the eighth largest investor, Reuters reports. Reuters spoke with another big WPP stakeholder, Jupiter Asset Management fund manager Alastair […]

Social plugins, your cookie-dropping days are numbered – on Safari, at least. At its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, Apple announced that the third-party widgets that litter the internet will no longer be able to place cookies on visitors using Safari. “We’ve all seen these like buttons and share buttons and these comment fields,” said Craig […]

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 […]