Change isn’t easy. Just ask Farmers Insurance Group CMO Michael Linton and CIO Ron Guerrier. About three or four years ago, the company had a dismal digital presence. Its Net Promoter Score, which ranks customer loyalty from -100 to 100, was in the gutter at -30 and its website bounce rate was about 40%. “Our […]
By Kelly Liyakasa and James Hercher Criteo’s $250 million, all-cash purchase of retail exchange HookLogic on Tuesday was premeditated. Meaning, the two companies already knew of the other’s capabilities – and a marriage felt right for the future of both ecommerce ad tech companies, said Criteo CEO Eric Eichmann. “We’d been talking to HookLogic for almost […]
French performance marketing company Criteo will acquire HookLogic, a retail exchange, ad server and attribution company focused squarely on retailers. The deal, a $250 million all-cash transaction, gives Criteo a brand new set of customers – including CPG advertisers like Clorox and Kraft. HookLogic’s performance marketing exchange enables these consumer brand manufacturers to bid on sponsored product […]
Salesforce has shifted back into gear on ad tech M&A after a three-year quiet period. The company will snap up data management platform Krux in a move that could bring its marketing stack into closer parity with its archrival Oracle. The acquisition’s price tag is $700 million, a number that will put smiles on the faces […]
Carat has a leg up on holding companies scrambling to integrate siloed teams. As part of Dentsu Aegis Network, the media agency operates on a shared profit-and-loss (P&L) statement by country across the network. That allows it to pull in specialist media capabilities to better serve its clients, without those teams competing financially. “This idea […]
With Omar Tawakol departing as head of Oracle Data Cloud, Eric Roza, who served as the unit’s co-SVP after Oracle acquired his company Datalogix, will become GM. Roza had previously focused on Data Cloud’s go-to-market strategy and will now oversee product, engineering, operations and data science. But he’s also shepherding Data Cloud through a philosophical […]
By Kelly Liyakasa and Alison Weissbrot Agencies are becoming more consultative. Consultants are buying creative agencies. And systems integrators are dabbling in client strategy. “Everyone talks about online vs. offline media or creative vs. media, but when a marketer wants to change the consumer journey, we’re talking new operating models and governance,” said Glen Hartman, […]
Google will expand its free marketing measurement software by adding an A/B testing product (Google Optimize), a data reporting and dashboard-creation tool (Google Data Studio) and new machine learning capabilities for Google Analytics. These products will be available in an open beta starting next month. “The ultimate goal is to provide a kind of analyst […]
There’s no splashy programmatic AOL upfront at this year’s Advertising Week. Instead, the company is addressing more serious matters – like the state of integration with Yahoo amid a data breach. AOL’s senior execs are also talking up consumer-driven content and innovative ad formats. “We had this giant emphasis on algorithmically driven media over the […]
Sourcepoint, a company founded last year to provide publishers with an antidote to ad blocking, has made its first major product release since raising a $10 million Series A round in June. The product, Dialogue, allows publishers to deliver a message to users with ad blockers installed and then test the efficacy of those messages. […]
Demandware has officially ascended into the clouds. The ecommerce platform that Salesforce bought for $2.8 billion in June became Commerce Cloud Tuesday, and will gradually retire the Demandware brand. Next step: integration. While that process won’t be entirely onerous – Demandware and Salesforce Marketing Cloud clients have “significant overlap,” said Commerce Cloud marketing SVP Elana Anderson – there […]
Another unicorn rides off into the eastern sunset. App marketing company AppLovin has agreed to be acquired by a Chinese private equity firm for $1.42 billion. “AppLovin” could also be used to describe the scene in China right now, where consortia of institutional investors have mobile fever. This acquisition, which was confirmed on Monday after […]
No more unwanted sound. Less autoplay. And say goodbye to expanding ads, Rising Stars, 300x250s and 728x90s. The IAB is tackling cross-screen advertising and intrusive formats in its first set of standard ad units released since 2012. The public can comment on the proposed new portfolio over the next two months. “Technology and the user […]
When Celestial Seasonings first redesigned its iconic packaging last summer to attract more millennial tea drinkers, it didn’t go over well. Although the Boulder, Colo.-based tea brand had invested in promotional and brand marketing to reinforce its new brand look, loyal customers weren’t having it. After engaging in consumer studies – and gathering consumer feedback […]
Cross-device targeting and foot traffic attribution and TV, oh my! Google revealed three products Monday in a blog post. Here’s the low-down. Precise Cross-Device When Google earnestly made its cross-device play last year, it was for measurement and optimization only. No longer. Cross-device remarketing for Google Display Network and DoubleClick Bid Manager lets marketers actually […]
Microsoft underwent big shifts in its platforms and ads business in the last year, first when it shook up its sales structure by outsourcing its direct order business to AOL and again, when it dropped $26.2 billion on LinkedIn. And now, Microsoft is eyeing artificial intelligence. It recently bought messaging app developer Wand Labs to beta test intelligent chat […]
Xaxis is placing three bets on how it can evolve programmatic buying, according to global COO Nicolle Pangis. One, it wants to understand the entire consumer life cycle. That means using historical data and a team of data scientists to figure out when someone enters the market for an item and the best time to […]
Business intel and anomaly detection tool Anodot is looking for what doesn’t make sense. “Traditional BI and visualization only gives you answers to the questions you think to ask, but when you’ve got a lot of data, doing that manually becomes almost mission impossible,” said Anodot CEO and co-founder David Drai. The company raised an […]
If time is money, agencies and publishers are still working out how to bill for it. At a Wednesday event hosted by IAS in Manhattan, Mitch Weinstein, SVP of ad ops at IPG Mediabrands, shared research that found time in view was more important in driving ad effectiveness than the number of in-view pixels. In […]
Now trading on NASDAQ: The Trade Desk. The demand-side platform officially IPO’d on Wednesday morning, with shares trading between $28 and $30, smashing the company’s $16-to-$18-per-share projection (which it amended upward from $14 to $16 the day before its IPO). The stock price as of approximately 3 p.m. Eastern placed the company’s market cap close […]
Banks, brokerages, insurance companies, mortgage providers and the like want to direct their advertising spend toward users they know will convert, which requires granular audience targeting. “The KPIs are just much more performance-oriented,” said Jordan Bick, VP of financial services at Pandora, which recently began working with financial services advertisers. “They want to know how […]
Salesforce wants to “democratize” the development of artificial intelligence (AI) applications. That is, making AI available to as many business users as possible. Consequently, it’s baked an AI system called Einstein into the Salesforce platform – such that its capabilities are available across its various clouds, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud. “AI […]
Six weeks ago, Laura Ipsen – a former Microsoft and Cisco exec – succeeded Kevin Akeroyd as SVP and GM of Oracle Marketing Cloud (OMC). Akeroyd, one of the original architects of the OMC business, had moved on to the CEO role at Cision. Ipsen – formerly an SVP of Oracle’s global industry solutions group […]
Google has severed its relationship with ComboTag, the Israeli startup that sourced buyers for Adblock Plus’ recently launched Acceptable Ads Platform. “We were just as surprised as you were and certainly don’t want to be in a business relationship that [supports this],” Google’s SVP of ads and commerce, Sridhar Ramaswamy, told reporters at DMEXCO in […]
Glispa keeps scooping up companies. On Tuesday, the Berlin-based mobile ad platform plunked down an undisclosed sum to buy native mobile ad exchange Avocarrot, its third acquisition in less than two years. Glispa bought MoneyTap, a Russian mobile mediation platform, in March, followed by the acquisition of Brazilian mobile performance agency Mobils a couple of […]
Germany-based Adblock Plus (ABP) on Tuesday debuted its beta supply-side platform (SSP) offering, called the Acceptable Ads Platform. It marks the company’s first move into an ad tech space it typically criticizes. “We’ve always called the Acceptable Ads initiative an ongoing experiment,” ABP ops manager Ben Williams told AdExchanger. “We’ve improved it over time, surveying […]
There are walled gardens, and then there’s Arbor. The startup, which raised a $6.5 million round on Tuesday, bills itself as a marketplace for people-based data. Think of it as a supply-side platform mated with a co-op for deterministic data. The bulk of the round, led by Canaan Partners with participation from First Round Capital, […]
Eight trade associations, including the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Tech Lab, the 4As and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), have teamed up to develop cross-platform standards for video ad delivery. Their goal, according to Alanna Gombert, SVP of technology and ad operations for the IAB and GM of the IAB Tech Lab, is to […]
Every retailer that isn’t Amazon is thinking about how not to get crushed by Amazon. “Amazon is taking over retail,” said Oliver Chen, managing director and senior equity research analyst at Cowen and Co., speaking at AdExchanger’s Omni.Digital conference in Chicago on Thursday. Based on its recent research, Cowen is betting that by 2017 Amazon […]
Breather, a startup that lets people book work spaces on demand, spends all of its digital ad budget on Google and Facebook – 65% and 35%, respectively – because Google and Facebook work. But figuring out why they work – and what effect they have on revenue per user, lifetime value and the overall customer journey – is another […]
Amazon has packaged a handful of upgrades to its ads measurement solutions, obviously catered to TV and streaming media advertisers.
AdExchanger Senior Editors Alyssa Boyle and Anthony Vargas share their takeaways from three days chatting about agentic AI at POSSIBLE.
Generative AI search has pushed traffic off a cliff across most of the internet, but not on social platforms. Reddit included.
Domenic Venuto, indie agency Horizon Media’s chief product and data officer, sat down with AdExchanger during POSSIBLE at the Fontainebleau in Miami to unpack the role of AI in today’s media and advertising landscape.
Google announced new features and ad types for AI Max, its AI-based bidding product for search and shopping or sponsored product ads. The company also touted “hundreds of thousands” of advertisers using AI Max.
Meta’s Q1 call sounded like an AI and hardware pitch, but under the hood it was still about one thing: investing in AI to squeeze more money out of its ads business.
