More marketers are moving programmatic strategy in-house, pushing agencies into an executional role, according to a study released by the Association of National Advertisers on Monday. Most marketers approach in-housing in a hybrid fashion, splitting responsibilities between their internal team and an external agency partner. Marketers increasingly are taking responsibility for strategy while agencies serve […]
Podcast publishers, rejoice: At long last, Apple has released the beta version of its podcast analytics tool. In June, Apple said it would share with podcast publishers aggregate online and offline listening behavior for episodes downloaded through iTunes and its Podcast player app. Previously Apple, which captures over half of all podcast listening, didn’t share […]
Criteo’s stock plummeted nearly 27% midday Thursday, as the ad tech company revised its Q4 business outlook in the wake of Apple’s latest iOS browser update. Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) feature, designed to limit ad tracking on Safari browsers by crippling third-party cookies, will create more kinks for ad tech giant Criteo than it […]
Champagne used to be reserved for special occasions, but Moet Hennessy USA wants consumers to see its luxury products as more of an everyday utility. The company teamed up with its creative agency, Rehab, and Amazon’s voice-activated service, Alexa, to create Bottles and Bubbles, a customized “skill” or application. Once users command Alexa to “open […]
Since 2011, ecommerce startup BarkBox has been delivering boxes of toys and treats to dogs and their owners. The six-year-old subscription service has half a million subscribers, became profitable in Q1 and is projected to reach $150 million in revenue for 2017. In August, BarkBox brought on Bank of America marketing vet Jay Livingston as […]
Publishers are getting ensnared in the filters used by many advertisers to combat the YouTube brand safety crisis. Earlier this year, many brands found their ads running next to offensive content on the video platform, prompting marketers and their agencies to enlist third-party monitoring. Now publishers as a whole are feeling the effects. The filters […]
That teens have no attention span is a fallacy. Just ask Wattpad, a platform where people can write and share stories that they’ve written and solicit feedback from their community. The storytelling platform boasts a community of 60 million monthly active users, mainly teens, young adults and millennials under 30, who spend more than 15 […]
Both the adoption of Ads.txt and commercialization of blockchain solutions have the IAB optimistic about the prospects for Ads.cert, a follow-up to Ads.txt that uses cryptographic security measures to authenticate inventory. While Ads.txt helps authorize inventory sources, it doesn’t solve the authentication problem, said Neal Richter, CTO of Rakuten Marketing and co-chair of the IAB’s […]
Want to tap News Corp.’s first-party data to target ads across all of its properties? As of Tuesday, you can, thanks to the release of News IQ, which is a managed service (for now) ad platform owned and operated by News Corp. News IQ unifies inventory from publications as varied as The Wall Street Journal, […]
Big consumer product brands like L’Oreal have soaked up as much data as possible in recent years as they try to assemble consumer profiles without the direct data enjoyed by ecommerce merchants and retailers. Doing so requires a multifaceted strategy. L’Oreal’s head of data acquisitions and partnerships, Aruna Paramasivam, described her company’s efforts along these […]
Digital advertising is growing, and big platforms like Google and Facebook continue to reap the profits. That’s the insight from global ad spend forecasts released Sunday by GroupM, Zenith and Magna, which predict the industry will grow between 3.1% and 5.2% this year to as high as $535 billion, as reported by Magna. Advertising growth […]
Online display advertising spend in the US will grow 70% from $42 billion this year to $72 billion by 2021, propelled mostly by social media ad spend, according to Forrester’s annual Online Display Advertising forecast, released Wednesday. As mobile adoption continues to surge, Forrester predicted, social ad spend will reach $40 billion by 2021, and […]
BuzzFeed laid off 8% of its domestic workforce, or 100 people, Wednesday as the company diversifies beyond native advertising. Recode first reported the cuts. With 25% of revenue in 2017 coming from programmatic, affiliate links, commerce and non-native ads, many staffers working on the branded content side are being let go. Despite building a nine-figure revenue […]
During a speech Tuesday at think tank R Street Institute, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai justified his plan to scrap net neutrality (“We’re shifting from one-size-fits-all preemptive regulation to targeted enforcement.”) and took a shot at edge providers like Twitter, Google and Facebook. “Let’s not kid ourselves: When it comes to a free and […]
Oracle DMP has always had a comfortably high perch in terms of advertiser recognition and adoption. And make no mistake – it still does. But Salesforce DMP has reached some pretty high branches in the year since the Krux acquisition, according to Advertiser Perceptions’ Q3 Programmatic Intelligence Report, released Wednesday. The findings come from a […]
The ad industry needs to check itself before it wrecks itself. That was the rallying cry Tuesday at NBCUniversal’s swanky State of the Industry Forum, where 150 digital and broadcast advertising luminaries gathered in midtown Manhattan for fancy eggs and frank discussion. “I’ll cut right to the chase: We have a problem,” said Linda Yaccarino, […]
When TrustX launched in September, David Kohl was nervous. “One of the fears is that we would find ourselves in a situation where buyers were making demands that were ultimately not panning out to be so good for the sellers or that sellers would put something into the marketplace that wasn’t interesting to buyers,” said […]
Amazon wants to own a greater chunk of the video supply chain. Its cloud division, Amazon Web Services, released a suite of video tools called AWS Elemental Media Services on Monday, designed to help live and on-demand video content providers manage workflow. It is available only as a managed service for now. “We’re trying to […]
MGM Resorts International’s media, ecommerce and analytics teams used to work in silos. “You’d have one team in analytics sending out reports … and separate product owners doing A/B testing and data management,” said Sylvester Obafunwa, the company’s director of digital analytics. “In the past, a lot of our [tech] integration was also primarily focused […]
It looks like China is not the ultimate exit for ad tech. Late Tuesday evening, app marketing platform AppLovin said that company will no longer be acquired by a Chinese private equity firm for $1.42 billion as planned. The deal, now scrapped, was first announced in September 2016. The duo will still do a deal, […]
For video service Crunchyroll, finding the right mix of ads and subscriptions is critical for ensuring long-term success in the OTT space. That strategy also includes a range of alternative revenue streams, such as offline events and ecommerce. But before it could effectively monetize, Crunchyroll built a scaled audience by catering exclusively to Japanese anime […]
The US Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against AT&T has thrown a wrench into the $108 billion planned merger between the telco and Time Warner. The complaint, filed late Monday, alleged the merger could “hinder [AT&T’s] rivals by forcing them to pay hundreds of millions of dollars more per year for Time Warner’s networks.” The filing […]
As holding companies distribute programmatic knowledge to their operating agencies, trading desks are repositioning to stay relevant to clients. Xaxis, GroupM’s trading desk that pioneered the model of selling media to clients at a mark-up on a guaranteed CPM, will now buy for clients on guaranteed metrics that impact business performance, such as viewability and […]
If an agency spends $100 programmatically for its client, how much money actually ends up with the publisher? Agencies and marketers want to know – especially GroupM. As awareness of hidden fees continues to rise, GroupM is doing more than just tracking where media spend ends up. It’s pulling and rerouting spend to take advantage […]
While tapping into purchases helps advertisers close the loop around the actual conversion, the use cases for purchase data have evolved far beyond measurement. The use of transactional data is maturing in media activation, as is the ability to commingle it with other data sources like behavioral, location and even panels in channels like addressable […]
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Ramsey McGrory, chief revenue officer at Mediaocean. “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” is one of the greatest movies of all time. I love the movie because Willy Wonka, like […]
The Trade Desk reported net revenue of $79.4 million in the third quarter, a 50% jump over the same period last year. The Trade Desk increased its forecasted revenue for 2017 from $303 million to $306 million, and has beaten and increased its revenue guidance in all five quarters since its IPO. The company’s first […]
When Snap reported disappointing earnings on Tuesday, it said revenue was constrained by its shift from a direct sales model to a programmatic, auction-based model. Snap’s excuse mimics one that publishers used in the early days of programmatic to explain their revenue shortfalls, and it doesn’t fully take into account immaturities and nuances in Snap’s […]
The video player ad-serving interface definition (VPAID) standard, which was supposed to improve the delivery of digital video ads but struggled to hit its stride, will be sunsetted. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Tech Lab revealed Thursday (read the blog post) that the unpopular nine-year-old video ad spec will be retired and replaced with two […]
AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley has been waiting 10 years for ad tech to become transparent. Less than a week after Rubicon Project slashed its take rate in half, to 10% to 12%, by doing away with buy-side fees, AppNexus said its fees are even lower. The company revealed it charges an 8.5% average to the […]
Congress is taking another swing at a federal privacy framework. Wonder what the odds are on Kalshi.
Good news for advertisers, many of whom have found it difficult to meet minimum spend budgets on ChatGPT: Logged-out users can now see ads.
The Amazon advertising boycott last week wasn’t really about Amazon’s ad platform as much as it was a dispute over evolving seller economics, which raises a fundamental question: Can you even build a brand on Amazon anymore?
For the first time, Unity’s gaming audiences will be available for ad targeting outside the Unity platform, with Index Exchange using Unity’s data to curate web and CTV inventory.
Agentic commerce company Envive builds on-site agents for brands like footwear company Clove, painting a clearer picture of what their customers are looking for.
Paramount might have outlasted and outbid Netflix in the competition to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, but Netflix is not overly fussed about the loss.
