Technology

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 […]

Consumers across the globe find advertising too frequent and irrelevant, and the younger ones are more aware of ad blocking, according to an Accenture Digital Consumer study released Monday. More than 80% of the 28,000 people surveyed in 28 countries thought they saw too many ads. Seventy-three percent of those aged 14-17 know about ad […]

More than a quarter of programmatic decisions are made by agencies for their advertisers – up from 20% since September. The revelation was presented by Mark Mahaney, managing director at RBC Capital Markets, at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC I.O conference in San Francisco on Thursday. The figures, which surprised Mahaney, show agencies make 27% of those decisions […]

With Oracle’s acquisition of Israeli cross-device vendor Crosswise on Thursday, the number of independent cross-device vendors is getting thin on the ground. Although Oracle declined to comment or disclose details around the transaction, The Times of Israel reported a deal price in the neighborhood of $50 million, citing a source with knowledge of the matter. […]

Why did Google “democratize” dynamic allocation within its ad server on Wednesday to include external demand? Google addressed its rapid response to the rise of header bidding for broader exchange and publisher partners Thursday – and other developments – at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC.IO in San Francisco. “I find it interesting that this is the fastest time-to-market […]

Retargeting, a word long associated with the cookie-based world of direct-response display advertising, is getting a refresh. With the explosion of mobile and subsequent deterioration of cookie matches, marketers are demanding upper-funnel features that go well beyond conversion and tracking pixels. “What we’re seeing across our portfolio with clients like Nike, for example, is they’re […]

In a major change to its Double Click for Publishers ad server, Google will bring in the real-time bids of a publisher’s outside exchange partners to its dynamic allocation product. The feature addresses a key problem that led to the rise of header bidding, essentially doing away with Google’s previous policy where it only allowed […]

Randy Wootton will speak about advertiser perceptions on April 14 at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC.IO conference in San Francisco. The past couple of years have been a tumultuous adolescence for ad tech, and perhaps no single company embodies the growing pains as neatly as Rocket Fuel, with its near-solo public spotlight, its dispute over margin transparency and the rough […]

MediaMath is in the midst of replacing its single product architecture with a new sales and engineering org that’s built around enterprise software and services. The company gradually began reorganizing a year ago, first by refocusing the engineering team around specific products. Last fall it implemented an enterprise account structure within the sales team, which […]

At Amazon Media Group (AMG), sometimes the objective isn’t to sell advertisers more ads. AMG has a lesser-known service – ecommerce marketing – where it might evaluate a partner’s broader retail health and the roles contextual elements (e.g., Amazon product detail pages), third-party placements or product availability play in the path to conversion. “You can’t […]

Digital audio inventory is increasingly available for programmatic purchase. But while audio publishers see value in the audience-based buying and granular targeting that programmatic offers, they are wary of dumping their inventory into an open exchange. And advertisers aren’t really sure how programmatic audio fits into their paid media mix. Here’s the landscape: iHeartRadio inventory […]

When YP Canada quietly acquired programmatic mobile ad platform JUICE Mobile for $35 million on March 17, its main concern was to assuage any potential investor concerns that the directory and listings behemoth wouldn’t be able to make its debt payments. YP Canada was $1.7 billion in debt and teetering on the brink of bankruptcy […]

1-800-Flowers.com announced on Friday that it will deploy IBM Commerce on Cloud to begin integrating its supply chain from inventory to fulfillment and delivery. “The IBM Cloud will reduce complexity, provide the proper focus and enhance the ability to provide wonderful services to the customer,” said the CIO of 1-800-Flowers, Arnie Leap. The tech-savvy retailer […]

IBM’s hire of AOL’s former president Bob Lord as its chief digital officer naturally begs the question: What will it mean for IBM’s collection of marketing applications? After all, Lord helped architect AOL’s transition into an ad tech platform – which eventually led to its acquisition by Verizon. But while Lord’s duties at IBM will […]

Susan Athey will speak at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC.IO conference in San Francisco on April 14. Academia has a unique role to play in supporting the digital economy, as its members bring a completely different perspective to studying ad auctions. The academic underpinning of ad auctions isn’t new – Hal Varian, Google chief economist and early AdWords designer, […]

It’s possible to sync radio ads and digital billboards to reach drivers with cross-channel messaging – but scale, targeting options and measurement are roadblocks to adoption. For one, there’s just not that much inventory available programmatically yet. “It’s nascent,” admitted Mark van de Crommert, CEO of Mediasynced, an Amsterdam-based TV/online syncing company that recently released […]

Getting agencies to buy enterprise software is hard, which is why AppNexus quietly killed off its two-year-old product Twixt in December – which included both workflow automation (aka RFP automation) and automated guaranteed functionalities. Ultimately, Twixt was too difficult and expensive to sell. “The level of investment that would have been required to drive penetration, […]

Ad tech veteran Ramsey McGrory has joined Mediaocean as its top sales executive, effective Monday. McGrory was most recently president of sports network Scout Media. Prior to that, he was CEO of AddThis, which Oracle acquired in January, and head of Yahoo’s Right Media Exchange. He has a long history with Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise; […]

IBM has nabbed Bob Lord, who formerly served as president of AOL and global CEO at Publicis-owned Razorfish, as its chief digital officer. Lord is one of the few executives with experience running companies in both marketing services and advertising technology, a nexus where IBM has been making large bets lately. An IBM spokesperson said […]

While content recommendation engines used to be a commodity business, that’s no longer the case, said Camilla Cho, executive director of business development and strategy at New York Media. New York Media – owner of the NYMag.com, Vulture, The Cut and Grub Street sites – is looking for partners that share its focus on using […]

“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 Mollie Spilman, chief revenue officer at Criteo. Last month, Facebook launched its new Reactions buttons, allowing its 1.6 billion users to express how they feel about status updates, check-ins and […]

Jonathan Hsia will discuss advertiser perceptions of ad tech on April 13 at PROGRAMMATIC.IO in San Francisco. While ad tech capabilities have matured, marketers still need to catch up, said Jonathan Hsia, Mindshare North America’s head of digital investment. “It really is more a question of: What do marketers need to do to leverage ad tech in a […]

A group of publishers is testing a header bidding solution from Rubicon Project that is compliant with Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages program. Tribune Publishing is among those who have implemented header bidding for AMP. It’s the first time header bidding functionality has been leveraged in support of the “platform publishing” craze that has lately seen […]

The National Football League (NFL) customer database is about as diverse as it gets. Segments span season ticket holders, a millennial parent who loves football but might lack time for games and younger fans who may have been introduced to the sport in school. But the NFL recognizes that “a fan is not a data […]