Another day, another acquisition of a mobile company by a Chinese conglomerate. Publisher-focused mobile ad exchange Smaato will be snapped up by (this is a mouthful) Spearhead Integrated Marketing Communications Group, a Beijing-based offline marketing service provider. Spearhead will shell out $148 million on the deal, pending the usual approvals. Getting acquired by a Chinese […]
Cross-channel marketing company Signal announced $30 million in fresh funding on Tuesday – seeming evidence that ad tech funding isn’t drying up for everyone. That brings Signal’s total funding to around $70 million since it was founded in 2009, including a $13.3 million round of venture capital in March. Raising funds hasn’t been a problem, […]
Bell Media, the broadcasting and radio subsidiary of Canadian communications company Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE), is bulking up on programmatic for its linear, streaming video and mobile platforms. Using Videology, Bell Media is building an audience indexing and delivery tool for advertisers to plan and execute cross-platform campaigns. The first phase of the integration will go […]
With additional reporting by Sarah Sluis. Mobile app marketing platform Fiksu was quietly acquired last Wednesday by an obscure holding company for an undisclosed sum. But it’s a fate that could have been avoided. Fiksu’s cautionary tale has multiple chapters. It’s the story of what happens when a company pegs its future to the dynamics […]
Despite its tax and auditing acumen, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has 3,000 creatives, engineers, strategists and technologists dedicated to experience design and digital services that span ecom to cybersecurity. Like competing consultancies Deloitte Digital and Accenture Interactive, PwC Digital has grown both organically and through acquisition via its 2013 purchase of digital and creative consultancy, BGT, and […]
After a late start, AppNexus is continuing to double down on video. The company launched a closed beta for video viewability measurement and reporting across its platform on Tuesday. The plan is to move into open beta by the end of Q2. The announcement comes a little less than three months after AppNexus took the […]
Salesforce dropped $2.8 billion on ecommerce platform Demandware on Wednesday, which will underpin the creation of Salesforce’s latest business line: Commerce Cloud. The deal catapults Salesforce into the ecommerce space – a tech category largely dominated by enterprise competitors like SAP/hybris and IBM/WebSphere, though Salesforce first dabbled in ecommerce in 2012, when it acquired site […]
There would be far less of an ad-blocking brouhaha if publishers took a page out of the print playbook, said Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard, one of the earliest entrants on the mobile newsreader app scene. “There’s a big opportunity rooted in the timeless principles of print, where people, generally speaking, actually enjoy the advertising,” […]
Marketing automation giant Marketo has been snapped up by a private equity buyer in a deal that values it among the top ad and marketing tech investments ever. Vista Equity Partners, which took a majority investment in agency billing and workflow software Mediaocean last June, agreed to acquire Marketo in a $1.79 billion all-cash deal. Upon […]
Advertisers don’t have a strong enough grip on the technological ecosystem to make informed buying decisions, agreed leaders of several leading ad organizations at AdExchanger’s Clean Ads IO conference. Panelists from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) got on stage in New […]
Google is cracking open the gates on its AdWords demand. Its giant pool of search buyers will be able to dip into other exchanges when they need to find a user for retargeting campaigns. The move was buried in a blog post about mobile innovation Tuesday. The change makes Google far more open, benefiting buyers, […]
The dander was up at AdExchanger’s Clean Ads IO in New York on Tuesday as the CEOs of two ad blockers engaged in a contentious debate with two prominent adversaries about the rock-and-hard-place situation publishers presently find themselves in. “It might be ironic that an ad blocker can really play a very important role in […]
In a nod to mobile’s growing importance for advertisers and its own bottom line, Google on Tuesday unveiled AdWords updates and local ad formats to help marketers execute mobile-focused ad campaigns. Advertisers can now connect more widely with Google Maps users and give consumers more information in their text ads. Google also gave manufacturers access to […]
After decades of specializing in hardware and on-premise servers, IBM is emphasizing its new-wave agency IBM Interactive Experience (IBM iX), a mashup of design, systems integration, analytics and the Internet of Things, with billings in the billions. IBM iX made three digital, design and brand agency acquisitions in a single week this winter when it snapped […]
“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 John Dempsey, senior director of mobile, Oracle Data Cloud, at Oracle. “Deterministic” isn’t the same as “true.” The industry has reduced cross-device accuracy to a single question: “How many of […]
As some industry insiders speculated, IBM is starting to merge its Weather Co. asset with its cognitive supercomputer Watson, a move that will benefit its marketing cloud and commerce businesses. “Everyone wondered why an IT company like IBM would make such an acquisition, a company that produces forecasts for 2.2 billion locations every 15 minutes,” […]
Location data newbie Unacast is looking to help mature the still nascent beacon market. The Norwegian startup, which aggregates beacon and sensor data across proximity solution providers, announced its $5 million Series A on Tuesday led by Open Ocean Capital and Investinor, bringing the company’s total funding to $6.6 million. Unacast will double its headcount […]
Since Google opened up its ad server and brought exchange bidding to dynamic allocation a month ago, publisher ad tech and media companies have been asking many questions but receiving few answers. People in the industry want to know: How much will Google charge? Nobody seems to know. What kind of data will publishers be […]
Exploding smartphone growth makes Brazil more than just a mobile market to watch – which is why German mobile performance marketing firm glispa is putting down local roots. On Tuesday, glispa announced the acquisition of Mobils, a 10-person mobile-focused digital agency based in Sao Paulo. Glispa declined to share how much it spent on the […]
Since its split from PayPal – and the $925 million divesture of its enterprise technology business last summer – eBay has been relatively silent. But judging by its latest quarterly earnings in late April, eBay is busy rethinking its business strategy. The ecommerce marketplace surpassed some analysts’ expectations when it posted a 6% revenue increase […]
To know your enemy, you must become your enemy. That could be one way to view Google’s rumored entrance into the world of ad blocking. Recent buzz has centered on Google spearheading an industrywide initiative that sounds a heck of a lot like an acceptable ads program, taking an unexpected page from the Adblock Plus […]
Since B2B publishers are still waking up to the possibilities of programmatic, media buyers must find B2B audiences on consumer sites. Sixty-three percent of media planners and buyers execute B2B campaigns programmatically, as opposed to 73% who do so for B2C campaigns, according to the inaugural “B2B Programmatic Media Planning and Buying” study released Friday by […]
Because Seeking Alpha attracts a financially savvy audience, financial services advertisers want to be there. But often, those advertisers want to reach even finer slices of Seeking Alpha’s audience. One of the most coveted demos on the site is financial advisers, who make decisions about vast amounts of other people’s money. Seeking Alpha needed a […]
When Amazon debuted its Video Direct service on Tuesday, the media hailed it as a rival to YouTube. Video Direct lets content creators post and monetize video directly on Amazon’s Video and Prime platforms. Amazon isn’t commenting beyond the release, but there’s no standalone platform and the only launch partners are media publishers, film studios […]
Whether or not Ghostery is an ad blocker depends on how you define “ad blocker.” Also depends on who you ask. It’s an awkward question for a company that wears two seemingly different hats in the online ad industry. The first is as one of two primary privacy compliance technology providers powering the Digital Advertising […]
More marketers are adopting data-driven tactics by blending their own first-party data with third-party sources. Financial services, for example, is undergoing major digital disruption, and banks are looking to translate direct-to-consumer marketing tactics to business constituents. Capital One seeks to reach small and medium-sized merchants nationwide through its small-business division and does so using Salesforce […]
“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 Kiki Burton, senior manager of product strategy at Adobe. Individual departmental buy-in and adoption often pose the greatest challenges to the process of integrating a data-management platform (DMP). These central […]
Blood in the water brings sharks, and high CPMs bring bots. And political spenders, who often outbid brands on targeted inventory, are uniquely vulnerable to digital fraud and bots. “All the ingredients that typically happen for fraud are a part of the political marketplace,” said Mark Schlosser, senior sales director at the ad fraud security […]
When Google rolled out its CRM matching program Customer Match last fall, it seemed to follow in the footsteps of Facebook’s Custom Audiences, which launched in 2012. But Google’s strategic partnership with Salesforce, revealed Tuesday at the latter’s annual Connections conference in Atlanta, Georgia, boosts both companies’ ability to make identity-based matches based on CRM and […]
Advertisers are spending less on desktop pre-roll and shifting more dollars into cross-screen formats, if video ad platform TubeMogul’s first-quarter results are an indicator. Nondesktop pre-roll spend (including mobile, social, TV and traditional display ads) grew from 37% last year to 43% – or close to $50 million – of total spend running through TubeMogul’s […]
Agencies are differentiating their tech stacks by building custom agentic AI tools for their clients. And they’re rethinking owning those AI tools – particularly since licensing them creates new revenue streams.
Agencies and marketers discussed the future of AI governance at AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO NYC this week. The main takeaway? Expect insurers to play an increasingly important role in managing AI compliance.
The Trade Desk is unable to serve ads to the Safari browser for Apple device owners that have downloaded iOS 27. Apple has been investigating the issue since last week.
The open web is done, stick a fork in it. Banner blindness is near universal, search traffic has run dry and publishers are struggling for oxygen. But what if that’s … not true?
Attention, publishers: Although you might not think of yourself as a data broker, in the great state of New Jersey, that’s not really your call anymore.
MMM can tell marketers what worked, but Lifesight’s open-sourced forecasting tool aims to tell them what to do next.
