Technology

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 […]

IBM is pushing deeper into the cloud and paid media. Big Blue on Thursday launched the IBM Universal Behavior Exchange (UBX), a platform that unifies marketing tech acquisitions including Unica campaign management, Silverpop marketing automation, Coremetrics analytics and Xtify mobile personalization. It also named 25 UBX partners, including a handful of ad tech players like […]

Independent trading desk Accordant Media is holding strong to its bundled offering of services plus technology, even as others like Dstillery, ChoiceStream and Adadyn, roll out self-service options. But technology is still a big deal, particularly when it comes to buying across channels, which is why the company hired former Crisp Media exec Nathan Carver […]

If ad tech is a dinner party, someone forgot to invite the creative – or, at least, that’s what it can often feels like to the marketers and agencies tasked with creative production and testing. “I’ve been on the agency side and now I’m on the marketing side, and through both of those lenses I’ve […]

Univision hasn’t been plagued with the problem of retaining live linear viewers, one of the byproducts of the cord-cutting craze. Although the Hispanic broadcaster claims 91% of viewers prefer to consume its content live, it still estimates visitors to its properties spend 36% more time on mobile than the average consumer. Thus, it determined its […]

We hear about TV budgets being reallocated to digital, but how much budget exactly? According to an AOL survey of 300 brands, agencies, and publishers, nine out of 10 of those buyers push 10% of their TV budgets to digital. While that’s good news for online publishers, it creates additional burdens around how data can […]

Creative and tech have an uneasy coexistence. But the advertising world is in the early stages of a new hybrid model, where creative relies on tech for personalization and storytelling. “With programmatic buying and targeting, the contextual opportunities are increased to quantum levels, and we’ll need machines in order to address them,” said Chick Foxgrover, […]

“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 Jonathan Hsu, chief operation officer and chief financial officer at AppNexus. Does it seem that every week we learn about the latest “unicorn” private company raising hundreds of millions of […]

Yahoo is entering into a search pact with Google that will allow it to power its Internet search and ad services with some non-Microsoft juice. According to Yahoo, the agreement with Google provides Yahoo with “additional flexibility to choose among suppliers of search results and ads.” Google’s offering will complement the services already provided by […]

The Been Choice saga seems to be coming to an unexpected conclusion – Apple is going to allow the in-app ad blocker to block in-app ads after all, including in Apple News. Just not in Facebook, Pinterest, Yahoo, Yahoo Finance, Google or any other apps that requires end to encryption, a process that prevents third parties […]

From global leaders to energetic startups, “internal disruption” has become the driving force behind marketing resources. “The scary thing for me is to see how fast the disruptors are themselves being disrupted,” said Pepsi’s beverage group president Bradley Jakeman at the ANA’s Masters of Marketing conference. He pointed to the speed with which a company […]

Dstillery released Thursday a self-serve version of its digital audience platform, combining a data management and demand-side platform. While the bulk of Dstillery’s business comes from agencies, it does some brand-direct deployments. The new self-serve offerings won’t replace Dstillery’s managed services, but will offer more flexibility to clients who wish to take an active role […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Andrew Casale, president and CEO at Index Exchange. The ad-blocking discussion has shifted to the now-standard story that ad tech is responsible for creating bad user experiences on publisher sites, thus causing a huge […]

David Yoon is having an interesting week. It started out on Oct. 6 when Apple’s App Store gave its blessing to Been Choice, the ad-blocking app he developed along with his co-founder and CTO Sang Shin. The mini–media frenzy that ensued was immediate because Been Choice said it could do something that other content blockers […]

GameSpot readers know what they like – and they know what they don’t like. Owned and operated by CBS Interactive, the video game news and reviews site caters to the mainstream console gamer aged 18 to 40. And they’re an opinionated, assorted bunch. “On the surface level, that might seem like a homogenous audience – simply […]

Nitin Bhutani gets pitched by eager ad tech vendors daily in his role as VP of marketing at LendingTree.com. “We’re inundated with proposals from companies soliciting business,” said Bhutani, who came to LendingTree in 2011 after nearly a decade in various exec roles at HSBC, including VP of Internet marketing. But as a brand that […]

A lot has changed, yet little has changed for Acxiom. On the one hand, it reorganized earlier this year, rolling its LiveRamp acquisition into a unit called Connectivity (overseen by Travis May) and hiring Experian Marketing Services vet Rick Erwin as head of audience solutions to work on its data products. Acxiom is also building […]

In the oft-cited litany of “right message, right person, right time,” the creative is often given short shrift. “Programmatic gives advertisers the ability to target infinite segments, but if they’re delivering generic messages to a targeted audience, they’re simply wasting their ad spend,” said Victor Wong, CEO of creative management platform PaperG, which announced $5 […]

After hinting it would bring more video inventory to market, Conversant acted on that promise Tuesday with the launch of a Personalized Video suite. With Personalized Video, the company aims to link desktop and mobile video messages with both online behavioral attributes and offline sales data. Because of its roots with display retargeter Dotomi, a […]

Forrester senior analyst Susan Bidel will appear Oct. 29 at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference, an event dedicated to the advancement of programmatic media and marketing. The ad industry’s collective hand wringing over ad blocking reached a fever pitch in September during Advertising Week in New York City. In reality, however, it’s far from a block […]

Publisher-facing ad platform PubMatic has let go about 50 employees, or 8% of its global headcount of 600. Many of the cuts were in India, where the company has significant development and support operations. The changes were motivated by a desire to improve the overall level of service, including by bringing service teams in-market to […]

When AOL agreed in June to bring Microsoft’s sales organization into AOL, nearly doubling the amount of front-line salespeople to a total of 1,000, head of sales Jim Norton saw an opportunity. AOL knew there were a number of ways it could improve its sales force to better align with the organization’s structure: custom solutions […]

“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 Picard, vice president of product planning at MediaMath. If you ask anyone, anywhere, if they like advertising, the answer will likely be a laugh and quick “no.” From a […]

Of all the threats posed by the ad-blocking trend, perhaps the scariest scenario for publishers is that paid media placements could be filtered at the network level. Now that nightmare seems to be coming true, as Israeli ad-blocking tech company Shine has said it will integrate with wireless carrier Digicel to screen ads aimed at […]

If ad blocking is war, long-tail publishers will likely be its earliest casualties. “Ad blocking is a threat to the whole industry, but it has an especially high impact for the small publishers who make up so much of the rich fabric that is the digital experience,” said Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the Interactive Advertising […]

Origami Logic revealed Tuesday it had received $25 million in Series C funds, which it will use to more than double its teams across sales, engineering and marketing, said co-founder and CEO Opher Kahane. Origami Logic has an employee count in the lower double digits, though Kahane wouldn’t give an exact number. But clients like […]

At AOL’s annual programmatic upfront (now called the “Future Front”) Monday, its parent, Verizon, staged a showy coming-out party for a video content network called Go90. Besides Go90’s official launch, Verizon revealed it had secured its first upfront commitment from agency holding company Publicis Groupe. The deal has a couple of implications. On the content […]