Technology

The ad tech rollup is real, and its name is Sizmek. On Tuesday, the 18-year-old company revealed its intent to buy public ad tech company Rocket Fuel for $145 million. If the purchase finalizes, Sizmek’s acquisition spree (excluding the earliest iterations of its evolving stack) will round out to about five companies acquired in less […]

Digital offers more precise measurement than most channels, which has helped move the industry from an art to a science, according to Brian Andersen of Luma Partners. “And as part of that [transition], they need to know: How do we manage our data? How do we use our data for targeting? How do you understand […]

OTT is a catch-22 for advertisers. While it reaches the cord cutters traditional TV advertisers want to target, that audience is still difficult to track in an OTT environment. Although the channel is capturing more attention (and dollars) from the traditional TV camp, digital buyers say connected TV needs to address the issue of identity […]

Seven-year-old mar tech startup Integrate has raised $8 million in a Series D growth round, bringing its total financing to $35 million. New investor Iron Gate Capital led the equity round with participation from existing investors Foundry Group and Forte Ventures. Other investors include mar tech luminaries like Scott Dorsey, founder and CEO of ExactTarget […]

Sizmek said Tuesday it intends to buy ad tech company Rocket Fuel for $2.60 per share in cash, valuing Rocket Fuel at $145 million. That’s a long way from where Rocket Fuel was valued when it IPOed in 2013 – going public at $29 per share at a roughly $1 billion value. Read the release. […]

Ask Facebook for access to its data and the official answer is going to be, “Nope.” But under certain circumstances, a limited number of advertisers and agencies are tapping into impression-level Facebook campaign delivery data, AdExchanger has learned. The data-sharing arrangements are euphemistically referred to as “clean rooms.” These clean rooms are safe spaces where […]

Story updated at 1:40 p.m.  Rubicon Project has acquired nToggle, a startup that builds infrastructure to streamline bid requests, for $38.5 million, the companies revealed Monday. NToggle’s technology uses machine learning to weed out impressions a DSP is better off not bidding on through a process known as “traffic shaping.” This capability is increasingly important […]

While broadcaster ProSieben owns about a 30% share of the German TV market, it’s looking to expand its influence in new channels – using its investment arm, SevenVentures, to scout startups. “We look to invest into promising startups on the B2C side of the business, which is different than the investment we make into our […]

Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. Google and Facebook have no problem compelling advertisers to create ads that visually conform to their huge platforms. Smaller publishers? Not so much. This week’s podcast guest, TripleLift CEO Eric Berry, built his company five years ago based on that fundamental reality. “We wanted to […]

Podcast advertising is getting a bit more measurable. The IAB Tech Lab updated its Podcast Measurement Guidelines on Wednesday to include definitions and best practices for measuring audience reach and downloads. The original guidelines, released in September, focused on defining ad delivery and how to count it consistently. “But podcast measurement is for more than […]

If you’re an organization in dire need of digital transformation, who ya gonna call? While an enterprise software company might not initially come to mind, that’s exactly who brands like Coca-Cola and Philips turned to. For Hollywood studio 20th Century Fox Film, it’s moved from primarily a B2B company focused on partners like broadcasters, retailers, […]

You’ve got to be a tough cookie and have good fortune to crack the China market. And success in other regions is not a guarantee of success in the People’s Republic. Such was the case with Criteo, which, after investing heavily in the domestic China market, discreetly pulled out in late May, nearly three years […]

Blockchain, an unmodifiable and unbreachable digital ledger, was conceived 10 years ago to support the cryptocurrency bitcoin. But it has since seeped into new categories, jumping from finance to health care and, more recently, digital advertising. It’s doing so with the backing of big companies like IBM and Comcast, as well as smaller startups like […]

DoubleVerify is looking for a home. AdExchanger has learned that the independent verification company recently hired a banker from tech-focused investment firm Pacific Crest Securities. Final bids were due Tuesday, and sources tell AdExchanger the deal price could be somewhere in the $350 million range – a lofty bid, though considerably less than the reported […]

Addressable TV has earned a rep for being expensive and not all that scalable. But for early adopters like Conagra Brands, the channel does have its perks. Advertisers that invest in addressable TV alongside their larger broadcast buys view the format as a vessel for reducing waste by being able to more effectively zero in […]

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Chris Hock, head of business strategy and development, media and entertainment, at Adobe. EMarketer pegs the US addressable TV ad spend at $1.56 billion for 2017. That’s double the rate of 2016, which was double […]

RTB whiz Neal Richter is the new CTO at Rakuten Marketing, the marketing solutions subsidiary of Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten. Richter, who serves as a technical adviser to a number of ad tech startups, including Metamarkets and nToggle, joins the company after more than seven years with Rubicon Project, most recently as CTO. At Rakuten, […]

Jet.com has been quietly pitching publishers on changes to its payment structure related to affiliate commissions. The message is clear: Work with Jet and it’s prepared to pay you for the privilege. Affiliate bucks often go to the more established players like Amazon or eBay. But in order to incentivize publishers to send traffic its […]

The drumbeat of blockchain industry news continues this week with the launch of AdLedger Consortium, a blockchain-enabled online advertising group backed by MadHive, a blockchain ad tech startup, IBM, Integral Ad Science and Tegna’s OTT ad subsidiary Premion. As with other initiatives, like Comcast’s fledgling Blockchain Insights Platform, the AdLedger Consortium is still in the […]

Adobe is looking to get schooled on AI and data science. While many technology giants foster relationships with academics by offering them lucrative part-time consultancy positions. Adobe is pursuing a different tack: dishing out $50,000 no-strings-attached grants to professors and doctoral students working on projects of joint interest. “What academia provides is more the advanced […]

Microsoft is looking to claim itself a spot beside the top dogs competing on the video and cloud front. It says data is the differentiator. “Unlike other providers who use your data to sell groceries or other services that compete [with your business], your data belongs to you,” Martin Wahl, principal program manager for Microsoft, […]

Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. Mediaocean is boring – in a good way. The 50-year-old marketing workflow and billing provider offers a relatively mundane set of marketing and advertising enablement tools. Its customer base is stable, its revenue predictable. In a few years, God willing, the rest of the […]

Twitter’s ad tech fortunes haven’t been great. Most recently, it took its 479-million-dollar acquisition TellApart for a long walk behind the barn. However, Twitter isn’t giving up on ad tech, at least not as an investor, said co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey at a Wednesday panel hosted by Omnicom’s OMD in Cannes. “We’re definitely not […]

Yahoo’s new parent, Oath, will have to make do without one of the acquired company’s key ad platform executives. BrightRoll CEO Tod Sacerdoti is exiting the video demand-side platform and exchange he founded in 2006, according to a source with knowledge of the company. Yahoo bought BrightRoll for $640 million in 2014. An unconfirmed number […]

  Oath is having its coming-out party in Cannes. On Monday, AOL executives officially launched Oath at the advertising festival in Cannes, following the close of Verizon’s $4.8 billion acquisition of Yahoo last week. The execs also clarified lingering questions about how it will integrate assets from AOL and Yahoo into Oath’s pending ad tech […]

There’s no more US presidential election or splashy Summer Olympics to prop up ad spend, but there is still growth to be found – especially on the mobile front. Although the growth rate in total ad spend has slowed, global mobile advertising is on pace to reach $110 billion this year, surpassing the $100 billion mark […]

The convergence of retail and ecommerce accelerated with a blockbuster Friday when it was announced that Amazon would buy Whole Foods for $13.7 billion and Wal-Mart is snapping up ecommerce men’s clothing company Bonobos for $310 million. The market response to the deals was clear, particularly to Amazon’s 11-digit investment in a brick-and-mortar footprint. The […]

The native advertising technology platform Sharethrough parted ways with company president Patrick Keane and CRO Mike Gaffney last week as it focuses on its programmatic exchange. Christopher Schreiber, who had been Sharethrough’s VP of marketing and communications for the past five years, also left the company. The executive departures are not part of broader layoffs, […]

Ad tech talent is packing up and moving on. Longtime ad tech insiders – many who started before the dot-com boom – see their peers moving to other industries or fleeing for safety into the arms of the duopoly. When Ari Paparo, founder and CEO of Beeswax, tweeted, “The best people are leaving the business […]

A new IAB Tech Lab standard will help publishers and platforms make their header bidding container setups as efficient as possible. The lab will accept public comment on the standard through July 28. The lab decided to create a baseline standard because header bidding has started to mature. “We don’t create standards until something has […]