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 […]
The French video platform Dailymotion is a fraction of Google’s size – YouTube’s 1.5 billion-plus monthly viewers dwarf Dailymotion’s 300 million. But scale isn’t stopping the company from repositioning its platform to woo US advertisers and publishers from the dominant video-sharing site. Breaking into a video market ruled by streaming video services such as Netflix […]
Leanplum is leaning into machine learning and mobile marketing automation with $47 million in Series D funding, announced Wednesday. The round was led by Norwest Venture Partners with pinch-hitting from existing investors, including Canaan Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Shasta Ventures, and brings the company’s total funding to just over $93 million since […]
Messenger hopes to insinuate itself deeper within the customer journey. On Tuesday, Facebook released a closed beta test of a customer chat plugin as part of Messenger 2.2 that allows businesses to continue a single conversation thread across multiple channels, including Messenger and an advertiser’s own mobile and desktop sites. Businesses that integrate the customer […]
Nestle Canada is exercising more control over its programmatic and first-party data practices, said Melissa Savage, the food and drink company’s programmatic activation manager in the country. But unlike within an ad agency holding company, which tries to centralize programmatic knowledge, brand transformation must occur regionally. Take the company’s plan to ramp up native video […]
A number of ad tech-backed coalitions consolidating cookie pools have bubbled up this year to stave off Google, Facebook and Amazon running away with the market with their own scaled identity assets. And trends like Safari’s ITP cookie restrictions shift the advantage further toward the walled gardens with daily active users. AdExchanger looked at a […]
The tech titans have testified about Russian election meddling. And after two days and multiple hours of questioning by members of Congress aimed at top lawyers from Facebook, Twitter and Google on Tuesday and Wednesday, it’s clear that Russian operatives continue to spread propaganda and sow social discontent using social media platforms and that said […]
There’s a storm cloud darkening Criteo’s sunny Q3 earnings (33% YoY growth ex-TAC to $234 million), in the form of Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) feature, which went into effect Sept. 19. [More AdExchanger coverage.] ITP cost Criteo a little less than $1 million in Q3, but that number is expected to grow as iOS 11 […]
Safari may represent a relatively low share of browser traffic, but Apple browser’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) could have an outsized effect if it redefines which technology companies can access cookie data. ITP, a cross-site tracking restriction feature with the new iOS 11, builds on Apple’s pre-existing rejection of third-party cookies with a machine-learning-based algorithm […]
Facebook and Twitter both took steps last week to provide more transparent paid political advertising on their platforms. But although political ads will be clearly labeled and users will be able to access more information on who purchased the ads and how much the buyer is spending on electioneering, it’s primarily up to the advertisers […]
Brands, agencies, publishers and vendors agree that while the industry is rife with ad quality issues, programmatic isn’t the culprit. “Programmatic is not the problem,” said Shaune Kolber, programmatic creative and ad fraud manager at Dell, at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference in New York City on Thursday. “It’s a way of buying. It’s not supposed […]
Alphabet’s headlong revenue growth continues to prove durable in spite of brand safety concerns, EU regulatory pressure, Russian election meddling and other controversies. The company reported total Q3 revenue of $27.7 billion, a 24% increase from the same period last year and beating analyst expectations by around $500 million. But the raw revenue growth is […]
The Trade Desk on Wednesday made its first-ever acquisition when it bought the cross-device identity graph company Adbrain, adding a data set of cross-device IDs to its own demand-side platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. But the acquisition isn’t expected to materially impact The Trade Desk’s earning report and adds a 20-person team […]
Publishers still struggle to make enough video content and inventory. Text-to-video platform Wibbitz, which announced its $20 million Series C on Tuesday, aims to help them meet that need with technology that automates creation. The round, led by Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments with participation from The Weather Channel TV network, the Associated Press, existing investor […]
Unlike at a traditional agency, which typically services the brand marketer, IBM Interactive Experience (iX) has a direct inroad to CEOs. Clients undergoing massive transformation will often hire IBM to rethink commerce or marketing – and those conversations trickle down to IMB iX to put into practice, said Robert Schwartz, global head of agency services […]
If lawmakers have anything to do with it, political ads on Facebook, Google, Twitter and other online platforms may soon be subject to the same disclosure requirements as traditional political advertising. Senators introduced a bipartisan bill on Thursday to do just that, prompted by revelations of Russian meddling before and during the 2016 US presidential […]
“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 Matt Keiser, founder and CEO at LiveIntent. While WPP’s Martin Sorrell has sounded the alarm, the rest of the industry is just catching on: Amazon is racing ahead to own […]
Although Netflix’s audience is large (and growing), it’s notoriously hard to measure. Nielsen hopes to remove some of the difficulty gauging audience viewership in ad-free environments like Netflix with its launch Wednesday of a syndicated measurement service called Nielsen Subscription Video On Demand (SVOD) Content Ratings. Eight networks and studios, including A&E, Disney-ABC, Lionsgate, NBCUniversal […]
The Trade Desk is muscling its way into the TV operating system business with its Ventura OS – but the real story isn’t the product itself. It’s what TTD’s ambitions reveal about conflicts of interest within the industry and the inherent mismatch between consumer and advertiser needs.
The broadcast and streaming worlds are being pulled together by a wave of major M&A, from Fox’s $22 billion acquisition of Roku to Paramount’s merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. TV Land, naturally, is watching closely.
Ask Ad Manger offers instant troubleshooting help when a campaign isn’t delivering as expected, ideally by diagnosing the problem and suggesting how to fix it.
Goodway Group has reduced the number of SSPs it works with from about 20 at the end of 2024 to just single digits today.
CloudX, which makes AI infrastructure for app publishers, is expanding from monetization to agentic buying for user acquisition.
The Trade Desk expanded its relationships with a host of travel, hospitality and mobility-focused commerce media partners, including Uber Advertising, Booking.com, United Airline’s Kinective Media and MARRIOTT MEDIA.
