Technology

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Will Doherty, vice president of business development at Index Exchange. The concept of scarcity tends to have a negative connotation, as anyone who has ever shopped for real estate in a hot market can […]

A handful of ad tech employees who started out at agencies are now returning to senior-level agency roles. And they’re bringing a particularly valuable blend of skills with them. According to Accuen CEO Megan Pagliuca, that initial agency experience is key. “There’s a big con of hiring people from ad tech [without an agency background] […]

Programmatic native is scaling, but the rate of progression hasn’t been rapid, according to agencies and ad tech vendors. While most major demand-side platforms (DSPs) can place ads on Facebook or Twitter – the most common strain of native inventory being social/in-feed ads – native programmatic platforms like Sharethrough, TripleLift and Nativo seek to corner […]

Google, Facebook and Twitter have become powerful platforms for political candidates, and each has earned a line item on every campaign’s media plan. But it may require another election cycle before smaller players can break into the big time. In 2015, Borrell Research predicted $1.1 billion would be spent by political buyers on digital media […]

Google on Tuesday launched an analytics service, Google Analytics (GA) 360 Suite, designed specifically for enterprise marketers. The suite consists of six products: the former GA Premium as the centerpiece; Adometry, rebranded as Attribution 360; the data management platform (DMP) Audience Center 360; Optimize 360, a website optimization and personalization product; Data Studio 360, an […]

Consumer tech and lifestyle publisher Digital Trends always tries to provide what its brands request – rich media, video, custom units, home-page takeovers – but that can-do attitude is tested when it comes to native advertising and sponsored content. Since it was founded in 2006 out of Portland, Ore., product reviews have formed the core […]

Integral Ad Science on Thursday rolled out pre-bid viewable segments for video that will let advertisers target against different viewability thresholds. MediaMath is the first demand-side platform (DSP) to adopt Integral’s new pre-bid segments. Rather than bidding based on historical data, Integral’s pre-bid viewability segments help marketers fine-tune their bids before the fact. So instead of […]

To reach the diverse purchasers of Hunt’s Tomatoes with the message that would best resonate with them, ConAgra looked to its customer data. ConAgra – which owns the brand –created dozens of messages targeting dozens of consumer segments for a campaign that ran from September through early March. The goal was to move away from […]

When Heineken moved more of its advertising budget to digital video, it didn’t see results. “Digital never rose to the top [in marketing mix models], in an almost mind-boggling way,” said Ron Amram, VP of media for Heineken USA. But Heineken knew its audience was moving to digital environments, so it didn’t want to leave […]

Following a previous Snapchat campaign aimed at campus students from last year, Goldman Sachs is doubling down with a broad investment across the messaging service’s Discover and Live Story channels. Major financial players like American Express, Visa, MasterCard, Bank of America and JP Morgan have also been early adopters to Snapchat advertising. Goldman’s ad buy, which […]

AppNexus has completed beta tests of a new supply-side platform and ad server designed solely for video and will release it widely in Q2. The company has already signed up 15 publisher clients in the US and Europe in the wake of a beta test that began in late 2015. The SSP is one piece […]

Among the findings of this week’s programmatic survey from Forrester and the Association of National Advertisers is this alarming nugget: Programmatic adoption could be hindered unless marketers continue to push for transparency – and make progress getting it. “We need to move from awareness and education to policy and action,” said Jim Nail, principal analyst at Forrester, […]

AT&T has officially entered the programmatic TV fray. The carrier on Thursday revealed the launch of a private marketplace called the Video Inventory Platform (“VIP” for short), which Jason Brown, AT&T AdWorks’ VP of national advertising sales, told AdExchanger was a “data-optimized TV and video planning tool.” The product will be generally available in Q3 […]

Xaxis, WPP’s programmatic media company, is a bit of lightning rod in the advertising industry for a few well-documented reasons. However, it’s undeniable that the ad net/trading desk/tech shop combo invests a lot into its own data, partnerships and technologies. Consider, for instance, the $25 million it put into its proprietary data management platform Turbine […]

Call it the holistic grail: the ability to connect advertising, ecommerce activity and in-store buying with a single measurement. No one’s filled that gap yet, but a bunch of companies are taking incremental steps. Earlier this month the location analytics shop Placed added a product for attributing in-store lift to its suite. Then last week […]

Video platform TubeMogul sees itself as a bastion for brand advertisers and, beginning in April, it’s putting its money where its mouth is. The company will roll out a Non-Human Traffic Credit Program, an automatic make good on all video impressions it buys on the open exchange that have been identified as fake or fraudulent. In […]

MWC drinking game: Take a drink every time someone says “value exchange” in reference to the ad-blocking issue. You won’t stand a chance. “We believe in the fair value exchange. If someone wants content from CBS Interactive, we will deliver it to them happily for free in exchange for them watching an ad,” said CBS […]

The Trade Desk has grown faster than probably any other DSP in recent years, as founder and CEO Jeff Green sought to capitalize on what he saw as strategic errors by rivals. “We saw that most of the DSPs had created channel conflicts for themselves,” said Green, a reference to some other DSPs’ media company […]

In a bid to enhance its header bidding wrapper and improve yield for publishers, Index Exchange has tapped Drew Bradstock as its new SVP of product. Bradstock spent the past five years as group product manager of Google’s Ad Exchange. The move brings Bradstock back to focusing on a fast-growing exchange, he said, that looks more […]

A couple of partnerships have popped out of RampUp, a Tuesday conference centered around Acxiom’s data onboarding service, which has since been integrated into a unit called Connectivity. The common theme – probably not surprisingly – is the ability to do one-to-one matching. Adobe Audience Manager: From Device Matching To Individual/Household Matching First, Adobe and […]

There have been some significant organizational shifts within Acxiom in recent years. While the company was mostly known as a seller of third-party data sets – at least, by lawmakers in Washington – or as a builder of large, complex databases, Acxiom now wants to be considered a data infrastructure provider. That is, it wants […]

Last September, BrightRoll COO Bruce Falck became CEO of the troubled ad tech company Turn. It’s an interesting time for Turn. The company is not a spring chicken in the ad tech world – an industry often rocked by the mercurial whims of investors, agencies and brands. So how can Turn be a stabilizing force […]

Microsoft’s ad offering is getting a facelift with the addition of premium ad formats from AOL, beginning first with its MSN.com property. MSN will get access to five new ad types, including adaptive mobile units such as AOL’s Devil Full Page Flex. It’s the first major ad update for the company since Microsoft transferred its […]

Average CPMs on the AppNexus platform rose sharply during the second half of 2015, from below 20 cents last summer to $1.60 by early fall, as invalid traffic was rejected under the company’s anti-fraud efforts. Meanwhile, volume fell off a cliff, with impression transactions plummeting more than 90% from December to September. The company released the data Wednesday […]

The telco industry’s obsession with ad tech shows no sign of slowing down and Verizon’s corporate venture arm is the latest accelerant. Verizon Ventures has invested $5.5 million in Qualia, a company focused on mining intent data, and which recently merged with cross-device tool BlueCava. The Series B round included support from S3 Ventures. It’s […]

Google is realigning its advertiser product management team by consolidating its buy-side products under a single product leader, AdExchanger has learned. Eight-year Google product management exec Brad Bender, who oversees the Google Display Network (GDN), will now also oversee Google’s programmatic buying platform DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM) and the ad server DoubleClick Campaign Manager (DCM). […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Eric Berry, CEO at TripleLift. Header bidding has added significant value to the publisher ecosystem, maximizing revenue and creating opportunities to democratize access to the ad server. A series of fascinating trends in the […]

Best practices and policies to deal with fraud and botnets are emerging, but ad tech companies aren’t sharing them with each other – partially because they don’t want their secrets to slip out to fraudsters, and partially because ad fraud detection is a competitive differentiator. As a result, companies are developing their own policies and […]

Google is upping its defenses against ad fraud to take on three malware families. The offenders include Bedep, plus two previously unknown entities internally code-named Beetal and Changthangi, which are named for goat species. Read the blog post. Google has developed a filter – now available for advertisers using DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM) and Google Display […]

If you take the headlines at face value, Google and Facebook are killing it – dwarfing all others in terms of revenue and scale – and there’s not much reason for other publishers to get out of bed in the morning. But there’s a more nuanced story going on. Certainly, Facebook and Google have become the […]