Technology

Updated with comment from FreeWheel’s CEO. Comcast has acquired StickyAds.tv, a French video ad tech startup focused on publishers. Re/code first reported the news Sunday night, and Comcast confirmed it Monday morning. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Business Insider claimed the deal was an all-cash transaction and worth “at least $100 million.” […]

YouTube reaches more 18- to 49-year-olds on mobile alone than any cable network or broadcaster, said Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, during Google’s glitzy Brandcast event Thursday night in New York City. She cited MAGNA Global’s $250 million upfront commitment to Google Preferred as evidence of the shift of brand TV dollars to digital. YouTube […]

The money keeps flowing to cross-device, and Drawbridge is the latest beneficiary, picking up $25 million in Series C on Thursday, led by Sequoia Capital. The new round brings Drawbridge’s total funding to $45.5 million since it was founded in 2010. The company will use a portion of its Series C to pursue more licensing […]

Essence co-founder and chief product officer Andrew Shebbeare will discuss fraud, lack of transparency and misaligned incentives in the ad ecosystem at the May 24 CLEAN ADS I/O conference in New York. Andrew Shebbeare says the ad industry is at a tipping point. The acceleration of consumer ad blocking and uncertainty around viewability and fraud […]

MAGNA Global, the strategic investment arm of Interpublic Group, revealed Wednesday it would shift $250 million from its TV budget into Google Preferred over a three-year period, making it the latest agency to commit big upfront dollars to YouTube. Other agencies, such as WPP, Publicis and Omnicom, have collectively committed “billions” through the Preferred program to […]

After completing his first full quarter as CEO of performance marketing company Criteo, Eric Eichmann seems confident. Criteo had “very strong top-line growth,” Eichmann told AdExchanger ahead of the company’s Q1 earnings call on Wednesday. Revenue was up 41% year-over-year to $162 million at constant currency minus traffic acquisition costs and that performance was consistent across […]

Here’s a scenario that has played out millions of times in recent months: A user clicks a Taboola or Outbrain link to arrive at a content page of marginal quality, such as the ViralWalrus.com slideshow “These 16 Celebs Served Real Jail Time.” When the reader clicks the right arrow button to see the second page […]

Pinterest’s rumored acqui-hire of deep-linking startup URX is a go. On Tuesday, Pinterest announced that it’s bringing the San Francisco-based URX team into the fold, but not its technology. URX, which started as a deep linking provider before becoming a mobile retargeting platform, will work with its customers to sunset its advertising product. As of […]

Xaxis is getting its ad tech house in order with the creation of a new role: chief technology officer. Filling those shoes at the WPP programmatic trading desk is Bob Hammond, whose career spans some of the most recent greatest hits in ad tech M&A. Hammond, whose appointment was announced on Tuesday, served as CTO […]

Like every marketing cloud, Oracle’s was built through acquisition. The tech giant has devoted more than $3 billion to construct a suite that includes campaign management or marketing automation from Responsys and Eloqua, data management solutions from BlueKai and Datalogix, omnichannel commerce through Maxymiser and online ad targeting tools like AddThis – among many others. […]

With additional reporting by Kelly Liyakasa. Rovi Corp., a maker of cloud-based analytics technology for TV and media companies, revealed Friday it would acquire TiVo for $1.1 billion in cash and stock. The combined company will be called TiVo once the deal, which is subject to regulatory and shareholder approvals, closes. “The combined capabilities of […]

The steady growth of AppNexus’ advertiser-facing business in recent years has led to a jump in employees. Out of AppNexus’s roughly 1,050 total headcount, about 318 now serve the buy side, developing and supporting the company’s demand-side platform product. Of those employees, about 97 are engineers, 19 are product managers, 74 are in sales and a […]

Ecommerce and marketing are converging and, as a result, e-tailers are uniting their supply chain, CRM and marketing stacks. Qubit, a startup founded by a bunch of former Google employees, is tackling that technology intersection. Following a $40 million Series C round in February from Goldman Sachs and the venture arms of SAP and Salesforce, […]

Transparency could be a way for brands to differentiate. Because building trust with consumers is about more than telling them why your brand is great and expecting them to just believe it. “Trust is earned in drops, but lost by the bucketful,” said Forrester principal analyst Fatemeh Khatibloo at Forrester’s Marketing Forum on Wednesday in […]

New York City has more than 8,000 public pay phones, most of which are in various stages of decline and decay – but Sidewalk Labs, a company under Google’s Alphabet umbrella, is helping put a plan in motion to revive those aging kiosks. Through a project called LinkNYC, the city’s neglected phone boxes are in […]

About one year ago, GroupM quietly introduced a new structure designed to consolidate its real-time ad buying capabilities across programmatic, social, search and mobile. Called Connect, the new group appeared to be the WPP-owned media agency network’s answer to the growing need for programmatic decentralization of programmatic buying. We have seen that decentralization play out across […]

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in programmatic TV and video. Today’s column is written by James Shears, general manager of advanced TV at The Trade Desk. At this year’s Golden Globe Awards, actor Gael Garcia Bernal was at a loss for words. He’d just won best actor in a […]

Will Google’s grand plans for TV, evidenced by its launch of DoubleClick Dynamic Ad Insertion on Wednesday, be successful? Google’s move into dynamic ad serving across live, linear and on-demand programming marks a critical shift in the search giant’s strategy, which some industry insiders say was necessary to meet future business objectives. “Google will not […]

In the first quarter of 2016, Alphabet reported total advertising revenues of $18 billion, representing a 16% increase from the same period last year, though slightly below analyst expectations. Google CFO Ruth Porat, speaking on the company’s quarterly conference call after trading on Thursday, attributed the growth to the company’s mobile search business. Today’s earnings […]

US online ad revenue hit $59.6 billion in 2015 – $10 billion more than in 2014 (a 20.4% YoY increase), according to the IAB 2015 Internet Advertising Revenue report conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Innovation in areas like mobile drove the industry’s consistent high growth, according to David Silverman, a partner at PwC. Nonmobile digital advertising […]

In an unusual partnership between agency and onboarder, DigitasLBi has teamed up with LiveRamp to sharpen and speed up the segmentation capabilities of its advanced analytics platform to drive more targeted campaigns. DigitasLBi said Thursday that it will leverage LiveRamp’s data connectivity services on IDIOM, its advanced analytics platform – still in the process of […]

The wave of acquisitions in digital media is almost always driven by the need for scale. Access to millennial audiences often plays a role as well. Both of these challenges played a role in the marriage of humor sites Cheezburger and eBaum’s World, which are uniting under the umbrella of Literally Media. A private group […]

Matt McGowan, head of strategy for Google’s America’s ad agency business, has jumped to UK-based email automation platform Adestra, where he will serve as president, effective immediately. McGowan spent two and a half years at Google, where he supported sales to big brand and agency buyers. During his tenure, Google made major inroads into brand […]

With additional reporting by Allison Schiff. Scrap cat videos. Google wants a piece of the $70 billion linear TV ad pie – of which $300 million-plus and growing is addressable. As such, the tech giant unveiled a bunch of TV-related products and updates Wednesday at the National Association of Broadcasters meeting in Las Vegas. Announcements […]

Programmatic revenues from Omnicom’s trading desk, Accuen, grew $25 million YoY, the holding company noted Tuesday during its Q1 2016 earnings call. Notably, Accuen’s performance since 2014 has reliably shown YoY revenue growth of between $20 million and $40 million. Q1 2016 – $25M Q4 2015 – $45M Q3 2015 – $25M Q2 2015 – […]

YouTube is starting to measure the offline sales lift for consumers exposed to its viewable video ad format TrueView. Through a tool called DLX ROI Sales Lift for YouTube, developed in partnership with the Oracle Data Cloud, Google is telling CPG advertisers that its video ads not only have brand impact, but that they drive […]

Apester, a self-described digital storytelling platform, rounded out its Series A on Tuesday with $12 million, bringing its total funding to $17 million. The fresh infusion, which came after an initial $5 million round in July, was led by Blumberg Capital, with participation from Mangrove Capital, Wellborn Ventures and several others. The cash is earmarked for […]

Updated with statement from Amazon. Amazon’s forthcoming $8.99-a-month subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service offers strong new competition to Netflix and Hulu. Will it include advertising as well? Not at first, but there is an internal debate at Amazon around the proper role of ads in its video offering. According to one source with knowledge of Amazon’s […]

Indie data management platform Lotame has remained relatively quiet since the acquisition of cross-device tool AdMobius in 2014. Because Lotame rode out the wave of DMP consolidation between 2013 to 2014 (Oracle acquired BlueKai, Neustar snapped up Aggregate Knowledge and Rocket Fuel bought [x+1]), Lotame CEO Andy Monfried claims his company has one key advantage […]

“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 Eric Berry, CEO at TripleLift. The chasm between effective media buying strategies for TV and digital are often so large that one might be excused for forgetting both are simply […]