Technology

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Direct Control Direct-to-consumer upstarts are giving established brands a run for their money, and are also wreaking some havoc in the agency world. That’s because DTC brands are for the most part digitally native and do their advertising in-house. Despite its $1 billion acquisition […]

Google was hit with a $5.1 billion fine by the European Union on Wednesday for antitrust practices around the Android mobile operating system – a move that underscores Europe’s willingness to issue steep financial penalties for bad behavior. And there’s another bludgeon in the EU’s cache that Google – and the advertising world in general […]

Less than two years after Vector Capital sealed its $122 million deal to acquire Sizmek, the private equity firm is already looking to divest. Multiple sources with direct knowledge told AdExchanger that Vector has been shopping Sizmek, possibly as early as April, and just a year and a half after the deal closed. Vector denied […]

It seems everyone wants a piece of AppLovin. Private equity firm KKR bought a $400 million minority stake in the app marketing and discovery platform on Tuesday, lifting AppLovin’s valuation to around $2 billion from $1.4 billion just eight months ago. Bank of America Merrill Lynch advised AppLovin on the investment, adding a new wrinkle […]

Ad tech is a buyer’s market right now, and MediaMath just got $180 million in cash to fund acquisitions. Could one of those targets be Rubicon Project? “That’s an interesting idea,” MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki told AdExchanger Thursday. “No, we are not buying them at this time.” The idea of a top-tier DSP and SSP […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. A+ Marketing Universities are taking a play out of the data-driven marketing playbook to recruit students for graduate programs. Houston Baptist University worked with higher education consulting firm EAB to create a demographic and psychographic profile of its students and target lookalikes on Facebook […]

Salesforce has signed an agreement to acquire Datorama, a marketing tech company whose platform connects and consolidates data from different sources, the companies said Monday. The deal is anticipated to close Q3. Terms were not disclosed, though the publication CTech said the offer is for $800 million. “With one unified view of data and insights, […]

July is historically a slow month for the US retail industry. It splits Memorial Day and Labor Day shopping spikes, and foot traffic dwindles as consumers travel or hit the beach. But this year, ecommerce and brick-and-mortar retailers are pouncing with mid-July promotional events, hoping to seize the shopping energy stirred up by Amazon Prime […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Blockchain Fever While still buzzy, advertisers are starting to test blockchain as a tool that can shine a light on the digital supply chain. Marketers such as AB InBev, AT&T, Kellogg’s, Bayer and Nestle are using the technology to measure the flow of their […]

Hold the phone, it ain’t over yet. One month after losing its case to block AT&T’s $85 billion merger with Time Warner, the Justice Department filed an appeal Thursday. In a statement, AT&T’s general counsel, David McAtee, sounded a bit baffled. “The Court’s decision could hardly have been more thorough, fact-based and well-reasoned,” he stated. […]

This is a new podcast from AdExchanger. It will be available wherever you subscribe to podcasts.  The Big Story is a breezy new podcast featuring a roundtable of AdExchanger editors talking about, well, the biggest stories that broke over the past week. In our inaugural episode, Managing Editor Ryan Joe and staff writers Alison Weissbrot […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Snap’s OK Instagram may have run away with Snap’s stories format, but – consolation prize! – Snap is benefiting from all the exposure. According to Digiday, Snap story ads are now seen as a great value, selling at CPMs of just $1.88 versus as […]

MediaMath is flush with cash and ready to ignite consolidation in ad tech. Thanks to a $225 million investment by private equity firm Searchlight on Tuesday, MediaMath will end up with a $180 million cash infusion to spend on acquisitions and building new products. MediaMath, whose flagship product is a DSP/DMP, used $45 million of […]

Machine Zone’s (MZ) experiment with homegrown ad tech is over. The gaming company shuttered Cognant, an internal demand-side platform created in 2016 to help MZ’s media buying team plan, create, buy, optimize and measure marketing campaigns. MZ laid off the entire Cognant team in June, as well as around half of its in-house media buyers, […]

Arun Kumar, chief data and marketing technology officer at IPG Mediabrands, will play a central role in integrating Acxiom Marketing Solutions (AMS) into the holding company. The $2.3 billion acquisition, announced last week, gives IPG 1,600 data scientists, 200 product and technology specialists and first-party data on 2.2 billion global consumers. With AMS, IPG also […]

Forrester Research took its first steps into technology ownership on Tuesday with the acquisitions of customer data collection company FeedbackNow and GlimpzIt, a machine-learning and content recognition company. Forrester’s SEC filing said the deals will have insignificant effects on overall revenue and that through 2019 the stock-based compensation and acquisition and integration costs will range […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Grow Big Or Go Home HBO is at a crossroads and its new corporate manager plans to make a change, a recording from a recent company-wide town hall meeting suggests. John Stankey, the AT&T executive who now oversees the Time Warner media properties, says […]

On Monday, Pivotal analyst Brian Wieser informed investors he will begin covering Criteo and The Trade Desk as his first ad tech stocks. Wieser covers large entities across the media and marketing sectors. His smallest previously was Interpublic Group, which has a $10 billion market cap. But when investors began asking him more about ad […]

FreeWheel and Operative said Monday that they have partnered on an initiative called “Premium at Scale,” which lets advertisers buy digital and addressable TV inventory in one place. NBCU is the first media brand to sign on. Traditionally, ad sales on linear TV and digital have been very separate processes with very different measurements. Since […]

When IPG acquired Acxiom’s managed services group, Marketing Solutions (AMS), for $2.3 billion last week, it marked the end of a five- months-long strategic review of the business – and the start of the next big sales review process with LiveRamp. Acxiom already had opened a strategic review of LiveRamp but was intent on selling […]

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

Now Hiring The overarching trend of brands in-housing marketing technology operations isn’t great for agencies and tech vendors. But one thing working in their favor is the challenge many brands now face securing top programmatic and data-driven talent. The pharmaceutical giant Bayer would like to more than double its 10-person programmatic and analytics team, but […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Devlin Jefferson, vice president of product at Operative. Bauer Xcel recently gave publishers advice about working directly with brands that take programmatic in-house. Note that the advice was written by Bauer’s new in-house programmatic […]

Summer Of Our Missed Consent Google is causing consternation and potential GDPR violations by delaying its implementation of the IAB Europe Transparency and Consent Framework, a collaborative model for publishers to gather consent and transmit that consent up the supply chain, Reuters reports. Google promised to fully integrate with the industry framework by August, but […]

Times are changing at IPG. The holding company used to tout its neutrality around data and technology, with CEO Michael Roth using the phrase, “Why buy it when you can rent it?” But IPG’s $2.3 billion acquisition Monday of Acxiom Marketing Solutions changes all that. “What’s interesting is the world has changed,” Roth said on […]

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 […]

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