Technology

In-app header bidding is coming to MoPub. On Tuesday, the Twitter-owned mobile ad exchange started testing an advanced bidding solution to replace the app ads waterfall with a unified auction. Roughly a dozen publishers are testing the solution. The closed alpha test does not have a set end date. Until now, advertisers could buy MoPub […]

Ad targeting company Magnetic has a new CEO: ad tech vet Corey Ferengul. He replaces James Green, who served as CEO for the past six years. It’s time for the company to evolve and grow beyond its retargeting roots, said Ferengul, who previously sat on Magnetic’s board and also served as chief exec of programmatic […]

Online retailers are losing revenue right under their noses thanks to a devious form of ad injection only visible to infected site visitors. “I didn’t even know we had a problem,” said Jason LeBoeuf, director of ecommerce at athletics footwear brand Asics. The Asics website was the victim of customer-journey hijacking, a sneaky practice by […]

Mobile ad network and Indian unicorn InMobi paid $90 million for mobile video monetization platform AerServ in a bid to build a header bidding solution for apps. The deal, announced Wednesday, will bring together their respective programmatic exchanges to create “fair auction dynamics for in the in-app space,” said Abhay Singhal, InMobi’s CRO and co-founder. […]

Demand-side platforms (DSPs) make money by taking a percentage of the media buys that flow through their technology – and from lots of other hidden extras they charge for. Interviews with more than a dozen sources reveal that even as marketers make progress in understanding what they’re paying for, nontransparent fees abound in the DSP […]

Brad Bender will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference on Jan. 17-18, 2018, at the Grand Hyatt New York. Google’s rallying cry for 2018? Better and possibly fewer ads. While that theory may seem counterintuitive for a company whose revenues come almost exclusively from advertising, rethinking the ad experience may mean recutting standard formats or reducing […]

In recent years, enterprise giants like Salesforce, Oracle, IBM and Adobe monopolized M&A activity as each marketing cloud raced to buy their way into ad tech. That tide has turned. These days, strategic acquisitions are more about expanding access to content, audiences and new means of distribution. Just look to media company team-ups like Disney-21st […]

2017 was a busy year of M&A for the digital media and marketing sector, according to reports released by investment banks JEGI and Luma Partners this week. Last year included 2,000 transactions in the sector hitting $272 billion in deal value, according to JEGI. It was the fourth consecutive year of increasing transaction value in […]

While ad tech companies have been accumulating VC funds and growing their stacks – and sales orgs – for a while, many took pains to rightsize over the past year or so. For some, the intent was to recapitalize or to prep for a sale if an IPO was a no-go. For others, it was […]

Podcast network Wondery is riding high into 2018. Launched in 2016 by former Fox International Channels CEO Hernan Lopez, with backing from 20th Century Fox, Wondery produced its first breakout original hit last fall. “Dirty John,” a true crime mystery created with the LA Times, has been listened to over 15 million times since it […]

For those whose New Year’s wish was never to see the word “duopoly” again: Take cheer! Soon we may start talking about the “triopoly” instead. Amazon’s $1 billion to $2 billion per year in ad revenue in 2017, according to eMarketer estimates, may be a pittance to the tens of billions earned by Google or […]

With the explosion of cross-screen TV, publishers and advertisers are clamoring for better discovery, personalization and cataloging of video content, and metadata is answering that call. Metadata, put simply, adds more context to data. Metadata in video can range from the contents of that video (e.g., colors, products, characters) to the way it’s classified (e.g., […]

Facebook and Google are no longer the ad tech acquirers they once were, and yet, the M&A landscape of 2017 is littered with their fingerprints. Media companies swallowed one other to add scale and massive amounts of content to stave off the duopoly’s dominance. Just look at Meredith-Time, AT&T-Time Warner and Disney-Fox. AT&T’s bid for […]

MAC Cosmetics wanted to increase footfall to its three most important storefronts in Turkey. The makeup brand buys out-of-home (OOH) inventory on mall displays to drive awareness, but it wanted a less static and more measureable way to target shoppers and get them in store, said Tugba Cetegin, marketing manager at MAC Cosmetics in Turkey. […]

Lotame has hired a new CRO as the independent, 10-year-old data management platform seeks to compete in a category increasingly dominated by marketing clouds. The company’s new revenue chief, Eric Marterella, spent the past five years leading global enterprise sales for social media marketing platform Sprinklr. His responsibilities at Lotame will include managing global client […]

Google had always been eager to kill shoddy ad formats, because doing so would stall ad-blocker growth. At the same time, it didn’t want to be the judge and jury, so it needed a mechanism to do so. Enter the Coalition for Better Ads (CFBA), a nonprofit founded by the IAB, ANA and 4As to […]

Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. Jonathan Suarez-Davis will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference on Jan. 17-18. In the wake of several big acquisitions, Salesforce Marketing Cloud has surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue. In this week’s episode we talk with its chief strategy officer, Jon Suarez-Davis, who joined the […]

Digital ad revenue continues to rise at the expense of traditional media. In the first half of 2017, digital advertising revenue grew 23% to $40 billion, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCooper’s Internet Advertising Revenue report, released Wednesday. Read it. Digital’s growth represents a 22.6% increase from last year, and it’s the largest […]

“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 Trey Stephens, director of audience monetization at Acxiom. As 2017 comes to a close, it’s a great time for brands to assess ways to improve marketing strategy and better capitalize […]

Edible Arrangements is best known for its fresh fruit and chocolate arrangements, many of which are gifted at the last minute for holidays or anniversaries. Although 65% of Edible Arrangement’s business comes from ecommerce, the brand wants to drive visits – particularly from repeat customers – into its 1,200 local store franchises. “No one’s going […]

Google will launch the Chrome browser’s built-in ad-blocking service February 15 next year, the company said in a developer page update on Tuesday. The new Chrome ad blocker will be based on standards established by the Coalition for Better Ads (CFBA), and will be the default service for all Chrome browser users. Banned units include […]

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, […]