Technology

Advertiser agency reviews took center stage during Omnicom’s Q2 call. Chief John Wren claimed the holding company is well positioned to weather the storm of media reviews, which have spurred the reevaluation of nearly $30 billion in media billings, according to estimates from Pivotal Research, because of Omnicom’s investments in its data-management platform, Annalect, and its programmatic […]

Kinetic Social is choosing growth over profitability. The social ads company, which announced $17.5 million in venture cash from Multiplier Capital and Bridge Bank on Tuesday, will use the bulk of its funding to ramp up its content management and creative services through an internal outfit the company is calling Creative Studio. The infusion brings […]

The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), which is uniting industry players to root out criminal activity in digital advertising, has unveiled a pilot program to block fraudulent traffic coming from data centers. Google proposed the data center project and is leading the pilot program, which will see member companies sharing intelligence about fraudulent data centers. The companies […]

Open auctions generated 70% of total programmatic revenue in the US last year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) first-ever Programmatic Revenue Report. Programmatic display advertising totaled $10.1 billion last year, the study found, and made up 20% of 2014’s $49.5 billion total Internet ad revenues. The report, prepared in partnership with PricewaterhouseCoopers US […]

YouTube has sparked a brand fire, but can it ignite the same flame with content owners? “YouTube invented short-form video and took the category from zero to 4 billion views over a period of five years, but then it flat-lined and nothing happened,” said Hilary Perchard, head of US investments for European broadcaster and pay-TV operator […]

Technorati on Monday released SmartWrapper, a SaaS-based product that helps publishers run multiple header bidding partners by bringing all demand partners into one place. For publishers juggling multiple partners, SmartWrapper helps manage implementation page latency and gives publishers more unified analytics. With the product release, Technorati enters a different market. “We see this continuing down […]

Retailers and brands with physical locations are witnessing “an explosion of touchpoints in the ad and marketing tech landscape,” according to Travis May, president and GM of LiveRamp within Acxiom. The result is positive overall, he said, with marketers discovering new ways to demonstrate ROI and reach consumers across channels, but as that adoption takes […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Matt Maroon, a targeting and programmatic sales specialist at Microsoft. After my freshman year of college, I took a short leave from school and moved to Central America. I had taken Spanish courses for […]

Google cited strong growth in revenue from its DoubleClick unit, YouTube and mobile search in second-quarter earnings reported Thursday. Total revenue for the quarter was up 11% year over year (YoY), somewhat less than the 22% reported for the same period in 2014. Read the earnings release. “Our strong Q2 results reflect continued growth across the breadth of […]

David Karnstedt, who headed performance-marketing engine Efficient Frontier during its $400 million sale to Adobe in 2011, is taking the reins yet again as CEO of a data startup called Quantifind. He will lead a 60-person team seeking to scale quickly. Quantifind, which has raised $12 million, is among a handful of startups that act […]

Google wants to prove it’s on retailers’ sides – big time. During a Google Shopping presentation for press at the company’s New York headquarters Wednesday, the search behemoth rolled out a slate of new mobile shopping features. They include: Shopping Ads for Best Queries, which lists results for products based on online reviews; Google Now Price Drop […]

When it comes to native, Zalora cares about context. The Singapore-based online fashion retailer, whose app has been downloaded more than 5 million times since 2014, has been working with German mobile marketing company glispa to integrate native placements into its app experience. Glispa, which started life as a user-acquisition and engagement network, has been plugging […]

Zeta Interactive closed a $125 million round of debt and equity funding on Wednesday from GSO Capital Partners, the credit division of Blackstone. Zeta Interactive, which changed its name from XL Marketing in 2014, is a marketing technology company whose clients include ADT, National Geographic, Time Inc., T-Mobile, US Airways, ConEdison and Century 21. According […]

Google’s recent push to prioritize mobile-friendly sites in organic search results is straining the advertising ecosystem, according to Adobe Digital Index’s Q2 2015 Digital Advertising and Social Intelligence report, released Wednesday. The Adobe Digital Index for Q2 2015 noted a 10% decrease in organic traffic on Google among sites that weren’t optimized for mobile. The […]

Ari Paparo is a longtime builder, explainer and sometimes lampooner of ad tech. And now he’s a CEO. The former product executive with Google, Nielsen and AppNexus has taken the wraps off his new company, Beeswax, which provides a licensed “Bidder-as-a-Service” technology geared to two primary constituents: (1) ad tech firms, such as ad networks […]

When Ellen Pao stepped down from her post as CEO of Reddit on Friday – ceding the spot to Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman – it left Reddit’s monetization situation murkier than ever. In a question and answer session on Reddit’s popular AMA (Ask Me Anything) section, Huffman wrote, “Reddit has a lot of cash. Monetization […]

“Marketer’s Note” is a regular column informing marketers about the rapidly evolving, digital marketing technology ecosystem. This week it is written by Catherine Oddenino, Analyst, AdExchanger Research. I’m currently finalizing a report focused on the state of programmatic media from the publisher perspective. As part of the research I’ve been asking publishers what they see […]

AOL is giving its multitouch attribution system, Convertro, a little extra juice by adding contextual data that measures the impact of ZIP code-level weather data within marketing mix models. Other forthcoming additions to Convertro will include conditions around the local and national economy and gas prices. Convertro claimed, even before it was acquired, that it […]

Chango recorded 2014 revenues of $43 million prior to its acquisition by Rubicon Project, according to a new US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing. But the company was not profitable, despite being an early player in the lucrative retargeting niche. It reported a loss of just under $1 million for the year. Read the 8-K. […]

If mobile and video are the twin engines driving ad tech, then AOL’s rumored $300 million to $350 million acquisition of Millennial Media would put the pedal to the metal. The potential deal, first reported by AOL-owned TechCrunch on Thursday, comes just a few weeks after the official close of Verizon’s $4.4 billion purchase of […]

After signing up 150 publishers for its self-service DSP, Centro officially launched the platform Thursday. The publishers managing reach extension internally come from opposite ends of the spectrum: McClatchy, a local media company with roots in more than two dozen markets, and PureWow, a small, national lifestyle publisher. They’ve come to the same decision. “It’s increasingly […]

A year after embracing programmatic technology, Live Nation is planning another major expansion of its ad tech capabilities, this time by connecting its many online and offline properties into a holistic marketing platform. With its “Fan Connect programmatic platform,” the entertainment company is continuing its evolution into a “digital publisher” – not in the sense […]

The volume and scope of ad tech/marketing tech M&A activity in 2015 shows investors want in on marketing stacks with scalable infrastructure that can support programmatic growth and increased automation of marketing functions, says a duo of investment firms. Such were the findings in reports from The Jordan, Edmiston Group (JEGI) and Petsky Prunier. The […]

Microsoft isn’t the advertising behemoth it once aspired to be when it purchased aQuantive for $6 billion in 2007. Since then, Microsoft has mostly been a publisher, selling inventory both directly and programmatically across its Microsoft Network (MSN) family of sites, its Outlook email portal, Skype and Xbox. Following the Microsoft-AOL search and display deal, […]

Microsoft and AOL observers have a lot of questions in the wake of the companies’ landmark search and display ad deal, announced Monday. Here’s a big one: How will AOL, a company of some 4,500 employees, possibly absorb 1,200 new sales, marketing, biz dev and engineering people? Once the partnership is consummated, AOL will have […]

“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 Thaer Namruti, European strategy director at Acxiom. Before you can score points in any game, you need to know the rules. How is “winning” or “success” defined? In data-driven marketing, some […]

Time Warner subsidiary Turner Broadcasting revealed during its May upfront a centralized data-management platform to power its ad products. That system is the Turner Data Cloud, which the network souped up on Tuesday with data integrations to Epsilon, Krux and Oracle. Using Turner’s Data Cloud, a marketer can apply first-party audience data as well as […]

The IAB’s native advertising working group is building out recommendations that specifically address the promulgation of feeds. The group, which developed the OpenRTB 2.3 native formats, is narrowing recommendations into three categories: social feeds, news feeds and product feeds. Its focus on feeds indicates an ongoing trend in which traditional website layout, which has tended […]

While AOL’s absorption of Microsoft’s display, search and video ads business is indicative of Verizon’s digital media interests, industry insiders aren’t quite convinced the flagship publications it inherited through the AOL acquisition will stick around for the long haul. An early Huffington Post exec said Verizon will need to treat the media group like “a […]

Some bots are good, but most bots are not – and Distil Networks, which announced $21 million in Series B on Tuesday, has its eye on the latter. The round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with pinch hitting from Foundry, TechStars, ff Venture Capital, Idea Fund and Correlation Ventures, brings Distil’s total funding to $38 million. […]