Technology

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 […]

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 […]