Technology

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 […]

Say you’re an advertiser plunking down $5 million for 30 seconds of prime Super Bowl ad time. You’re going to want to make sure that campaign drives some sort of action online. But between Facebook, Google and Twitter, how do you choose what to use? According to a report released Monday, Google’s attribution engine, Adometry, […]

Just because an ad is “in-view,” that doesn’t mean it’s effective. On the contrary, time spent is often a better indicator of ad effectiveness than percentage of pixels in-view on a page. That’s according to a new viewability study from Interpublic Group (IPG) and measurement firm Integral Ad Science. The report, “Putting Science Behind The […]

Server-side ad insertion (SSAI), also known as ad stitching, is emerging as a key method for video publishers to mitigate ad blocking and boost video playback across devices. Though the technique is not new, industry insiders say there is massive growth potential as consumers stream more video content and new over-the-top devices enter the fray. […]

Location analytics company Placed announced Wednesday its attribution service would connect billboards to in-store traffic. It will do this via a mix of partnerships with holding company agencies and out-of-home (OOH) inventory suppliers like Clear Channel Media and cinema ad network NCM. “OOH is shifting,” said Michael Lieberman, COO of tenthavenue, an OOH agency within […]

IBM’s purchase of three agencies in six days on behalf of its in-house agency Interactive Experience (iX) is uncharacteristic since iX hasn’t been acquisitive in its almost two-decade history. The first purchase, last Thursday, was Resource/Ammirati, known for brand building. IBM then acquired digital agency Aperto on Tuesday and design agency Ecx.io on Wednesday; both […]

  Header bidding has been such a runaway hit for publishers that it’s required the development of a new technology to manage all the partners they want to add. What seems a small change – the addition of a wrapper that organizes buyers as they enter the ad server – further solidifies header bidding’s place […]

Google had a strong showing in Q4, its first quarter airing results under an entirely new segment-based reporting structure. Google’s holding company Alphabet reported $21.3 billion in Q4 2015 revenue, an 18% increase YoY. Google itself saw $21.2 billion in quarterly revenue (an 18% YoY increase) and $74.5 billion for FY 2015. Read the release. Breaking down the […]

When IBM revealed Friday it had closed its deal (financial terms weren’t disclosed) for The Weather Co.’s product and tech business, it began setting expectations on how those assets will be used. There are two things to consider. First, The Weather Co. has digital publications that sell advertising. Second, it sits on a massive front […]

[pullquote][/pullquote]Telcos continue to be big ad tech acquirers. Norwegian mobile carrier Telenor on Monday snapped up cross-device company Tapad for $360 million. Tapad is one of the two largest cross-device vendors in the space; Drawbridge is the other. It’s a move somewhat reminiscent of the AOL/Verizon deal, but with more global scale, said Tapad CEO […]

“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. When yield optimization strategies for publishers come up, real-time bidding and advertising automation technologies are the first things that come to mind. And rightfully so, because […]

To date, IBM’s internal digital agency Interactive Experience (iX) has flown under the radar, through quiet, organic growth – reaching a global headcount of 10,000 employees. That changed Thursday when IBM iX – not to be confused with IBM’s consulting unit Global Services – revealed its first-ever acquisition: the digital/creative agency Resource/Ammirati, which has 300 […]

“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 Mark Davenport, senior director of analytics at The Trade Desk. Ad tech can be an echo chamber. Only a small number of media outlets cover our industry, largely because it’s […]

Cardlytics, which, in its first iteration, fueled card-linked offers for banks and financial services firms, is opening up new ways to monetize around the private bank channel. The company, which sits on transactional data spanning 109 million accounts in the US alone, is eyeing longer-term deals with agency holding groups. It’s also beefing up demand […]

A singular issue is electrifying the publishers and tech companies attending the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Desert, Calif. IAB CEO Randy Rothenberg came out swinging at ad-blocking firms during his opening speech to members Monday, describing them as an “unethical, immoral, mendacious coven of techie wannabes.” Afterward he continued that discussion with AdExchanger. His […]

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) wants to help advertisers manage their quality assurance testing for mobile rich media ads. On Monday, the IAB Tech Lab released the MRAID Ads SDK Tester app at its at Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Desert, Calif. The app is a free open-source tool designed to validate the functionality of […]

AppNexus is hitting the market with its own version of mobile header bidding. Announced Monday, the tool – dubbed PriceCheck – aims to help app developers and publishers maximize their yield by accessing as many sources of demand as possible and revealing what each impression is worth. Then the impressions are routed to the advertisers willing […]

Ad blocking might be marketers’ current headache, but FTC Commissioner Julie Brill believes it’s up to the advertising industry to alleviate that pain. At AdExchanger’s Industry Preview event in New York on Thursday, she called on the audience of vendors, agencies and marketers to create “usable tools” so consumers can deal with their privacy concerns. […]

There’s a world of difference between achieving mass reach and engagement in multiplatform video. Just ask Stephanie Horbaczewski, CEO of the fashion and beauty multichannel video network (MCN) StyleHaul. StyleHaul was among the first YouTube MCNs to join larger companies (Maker/Disney, Fullscreen/AT&T and Chernin Group, Collective/ProSieben) when German broadcast giant RTL Group purchased a majority […]

Google sounds more and more like Twitter, heralding ways marketers can tap into live events for engagement. As such, the company on Wednesday rolled out a new ad product called Real-Time Ads at a press event in New York. With Real-Time Ads, Google aims to capitalize on the ripple effect of live events, such as […]

Publishers thinking about how to deal with the growing rates of ad-blocking users can start by doing something simple: Just ask them to unblock. Requests to turn off ad blocking resulted in 30-40% of users whitelisting the publisher, according to data shared by GQ (30%), IDG Communications (37% for B2B and 38% for B2C) and […]