Technology

Some of Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s new products, rolled out Wednesday, seem to mimic the capabilities of a data management platform (DMP) – software historically absent from the stack. Salesforce’s Predictive Scores and Predictive Audiences are designed to help marketers segment and target prospects and known consumers with more speed and granularity. Those two tools fall […]

“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 Jay Friedman, COO at Goodway Group. All too often in today’s digital advertising industry, new agency hires are quickly handed the keys to technologies that can unleash millions of dollars in […]

Oracle 1.0 was more about databases than device graphs. But as Oracle methodically built out a Marketing and Data Cloud, that changed. For the latter, marrying data management platform BlueKai with offline data tool Datalogix unlocked new capabilities. For instance, it can validate metrics that purport to measure links between TV, digital and sales. Oracle […]

LiveRail and AppNexus removing resellers from their respective platforms last week were two more nails in the ad network coffin. If any publishers were upset, AdExchanger couldn’t find them. Just the opposite, in fact. While some publishers still use ad networks, most have significantly pared back in recent years, and those that still work with […]

If someone asked you to rattle off the big buzzwords in media, it’s a pretty good bet mobile, native ads and programmatic would be somewhere near the top of your list. Google has just knocked down all three in a single gesture, allowing its publisher customers to expose native ad inventory in their mobile apps to buyers […]

Acxiom’s data onboarder LiveRamp hopes to solve the thorny problem of identity – thorny because consumers have thousands of different identifiers. LiveRamp – which Acxiom now refers to as its Connectivity unit, but we’ll refer to as LiveRamp for the purpose of simplicity – has a solution to accomplish that using deterministic identifiers. On Thursday, it announced a partnership […]

Adobe rolled out the Audience Marketplace data exchange on Tuesday, featuring a data cooperative (which Adobe first revealed to prospective partners last summer) and a data partner network. Both are powered by Adobe’s data management platform, Audience Manager. The co-op aspect is designed to let companies pool their first-party data sets. The data partner network […]

Some corners of the ad and marketing tech industries wonder if the data management platform (DMP) is on the verge of becoming a commodity. But a Forrester Wave report on the technologies noted points of differentiation among DMPs’ abilities to handle social information, ingest data from channels usually associated with marketing tech, such as email […]

Judging from last week’s news, it’s tempting to say GroupM has got the programmatic religion. But that might be selling the holding company short. WPP Group’s media-buying arm, which controls $106 billion in global ad spending, last week promoted Xaxis CEO Brian Lesser to a big new job running its North America business. His elevation […]

Why did Time Inc. decide to partner with Etermax, the Buenos Aires-based game studio responsible for the hugely popular app Trivia Crack? a) as a native play b) as a form of content discovery c) to encourage mobile engagement d) all of the above The answer: d. “We’re quickly evolving from being a print company […]

Pubs and brands have complained about programmatic inventory on open exchanges for years, but a renewed focus on inventory quality is gaining traction. AppNexus has long positioned itself as the platform for ad networks, but it reversed its policy in recent weeks by removing ad networks that don’t provide direct publisher or seller relationships. Shortly […]

There was a time around 2009 when you couldn’t talk about Zynga without also talking about Facebook. Back then, FarmVille, CityVille and CafeWorld were beyond ubiquitous. But Facebook wasn’t mentioned once on Tuesday during Zynga’s third-quarter earnings call. That’s partially because Facebook’s users are increasingly mobile, with 1.39 billion monthly actives out of 1.55 billion […]

Everyone talks about TV dollars leaking into digital, but what happens behind the scenes to make those dollars move? Vic Walia, senior director of brand marketing for Expedia, said it involves change management and rewiring old assumptions. “We’ve always invested heavily in TV as a brand, but we wanted to extend our reach beyond our […]

ComScore is keeping busy. The online measurement firm announced Thursday that it’ll be entering into a strategic global partnership with Spotify, selling its enterprise digital analytics business to Adobe and launching a new “total home” opt-in panel to measure connected devices in the household, including show-level viewing across Netflix, Roku, Apple TV and Chromecast. ComScore’s […]

The $4.4 billion check that Verizon wrote to AOL is evidence enough of its commitment to ad tech. But Verizon appears to be less committed to providing its users with an intelligible loyalty program – and that could prove to be the fly in the ointment for its lofty consumer data plans. Many Verizon customers […]

Criteo is prepping a Universal Match product as a serious contender in the cross-device arms race. The company is pooling anonymized data from two-thirds of its 9,300 brand customers in its consumer database. Every brand that participates provides CRM data (not unlike Google’s Customer Match) that would enable them to target specific users cross-platform through […]

GroupM hopes its purchase of digital/media agency Essence on Wednesday (for undisclosed terms) will add a whole lot of Google expertise into WPP’s cluster of media agencies. After all, the formerly independent Essence is Google’s digital agency of record. “Google, as you might imagine, is keen on its global digital agency using the full set […]

AppNexus unveiled a publisher suite Wednesday designed to offer an alternative to DoubleClick for Publishers [DFP], the dominant solution in the market. The AppNexus Publisher Suite includes an ad server, completely rebuilt after its acquisition of OAS [Open AdStream] in September 2014, and supercharged with forecasting from its acquisition of Yieldex in March. Publishers can […]

It seems every time there’s a partnership between a marketing tech company and an ad tech vendor, MediaMath is involved. Its most recent hookups: Oracle and IBM. When working through the technical and logistical intricacies of these integrations, MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki takes a back seat, seeing himself as “champion and cheerleader.” “My role is […]

Google is beta testing a solution within DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) that will allow publishers to bring in high-value impressions before reserved inventory in their ad server. Jonathan Bellack, Google’s director of product management, made the announcement at the IAB Ad Operations Summit on Monday during a discussion about header bidding that pitted Google (anti-header […]

In the four months since Verizon’s acquisition of AOL closed, AOL absorbed Microsoft’s advertising business, dropped $238 million on Millennial Media and Verizon revised its privacy policy in anticipation of its data flowing into the AOL stack. Since AOL launched a unified platform called ONE, it has preached the gospel of “openness.” But will that standard hold once Verizon’s […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Will Doherty, vice president of business development at Index Exchange. There is a reason that B2B and enterprise companies, such as IBM, Oracle, Salesforce and HP, are so successful. Just as their customers must […]

“Marketer’s Note” is a regular column informing marketers about the rapidly evolving, digital marketing technology ecosystem. This week it is written by Melissa Parrish, Executive Director, AdExchanger Research. Over the last couple of weeks, most of the conversations I’ve been having with marketers and tech companies have in some way revolved around the lead up to our Programmatic […]

IBM’s agreement to acquire The Weather Company’s B2B, mobile and cloud-based web properties – including WSI, weather.com, Weather Underground and The Weather Company brand, but not The Weather Channel – is likely more about data assets and less about a grand entrance into the media world. Read the release. IBM was mum on its long-term strategy, saying through a spokesperson that […]

Millennials are experts at ignoring what they don’t care about – regardless of ad blockers. “Millennials don’t necessarily follow the rules of marketing,” said Kathryn Minshew, CEO and founder of millennial-centric career and job site The Muse, speaking at eMarketer’s Attention event in New York City on Tuesday. “They don’t look where you want them to […]

Oracle Marketing Cloud kicked off its OpenWorld conference this week with three platform features meant to reach customers across channels, improve email targeting using Datalogix and manage content marketing workflow and scheduling. “We’re making easier for clients to operate in a cross-channel way, and we’re doing it practically, as opposed to theoretically,” said Alexander Hooshmand, […]

Want to track across devices? Then you’re going to have to enter the walled gardens of Google and Facebook. But the open ecosystem is working hard – and working together – to catch up. It’s in this spirit that MarketShare launched Monday a “Consortium for Cross-Device Measurement,” which for now includes Drawbridge, Crosswise, Tapad and […]

It was a day of firsts and lasts for Alphabet’s Q3 earnings call Thursday afternoon – the first since CEO Sundar Pichai took over in August and the last before the company unbundles its internal properties next year. Alphabet announced quarterly revenue of $18.7 billion, a 13% YoY increase. Google’s advertising revenue was $16.8 billion, […]

It’s been a transitional year for Conversant, the ad technology solution that’s now a part of data marketing services company Epsilon. Integrating Conversant “caused a fair amount of angst for the first half of the year,” acknowledged Ed Heffernan, CEO and president of parent company Alliance Data Systems, during its Q3 earnings call Thursday. The […]

AppNexus has long been the grand poobah of indie programmatic media platforms. But lately it has begun to look like a company under siege. There’s the fraud issue, which became an albatross after competitors Rubicon Project and OpenX cleaned up two years ago while AppNexus continued to allow blind impression resale. It has since fixed […]