Technology

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 […]

Google said Monday it will let marketers use their first-party CRM data to target specific users based on hashed email addresses. The product is called Customer Match. While Facebook and Twitter both enable CRM matching, that Google now allows it constitutes “a seminal shift for first-party, addressable targeting,” said Merkle’s EVP of digital strategy, Matt […]

PulsePoint is planning to get acquisitive. On Monday, the programmatic platform announced $30 million in debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank, the majority of which will be used to buy companies to complement PulsePoint’s existing tech stack. PulsePoint – which was formed through the merger of Datran Media and ContextWeb in 2011 – had previously raised a […]

Oracle’s aggressive stance on acquisition is evident when you consider its Marketing Cloud shopping spree, and it’s not backing down. It recently added web personalization platform Maxymiser to a long list of purchases that included data-management platform BlueKai, campaign-management tool Responsys and Datalogix. The intent is to round out a complete stack that covers all […]

“On TV and Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in programmatic TV and video. Today’s column is written by Kevin Lenane, general manager of video at Integral Ad Science. If you regularly read digital advertising news, you may be forgiven for believing that marketers have embraced video advertising in a monumental way. In […]

With ad blockers increasingly available on mobile devices and adoption increasing, especially among millennials, publishers can’t ignore the issue anymore. But what, exactly, are their options? First, publishers must figure out the extent ad blocking happens on their site – which varies dramatically based on audience composition and the type of site. Gaming sites, for […]

Adobe has combined more components of its Creative and Marketing clouds. Its launch Thursday of Analysis Workspace for Adobe Analytics, a Marketing Cloud visualization tool, uses creative elements inspired by products like Photoshop. The self-serve tool is designed to be a slicker way to query reports than relying on a spreadsheet. It presents a customizable […]

Beyond knowing whether an ad was viewed and for how long, marketers want to verify viewability percentages against key audience segments, which is the basis of a new alliance between Nielsen and Integral Ad Science (IAS). Although the two companies have partnered since 2012, they have now expanded the scope of their relationship to offer […]

Former Google and BrightRoll exec Bruce Falck has joined Turn as CEO, the company revealed Tuesday. Most recently, Falck was COO of video marketplace BrightRoll, which Yahoo acquired last fall. Prior to that, he spent eight years at Google, where he was instrumental in expanding the Google Display Network and DoubleClick businesses. His transition to […]

Pandora knows sound. Now the music streaming service is experimenting with sight and motion in its quest for new users – and mobile is the central battleground. More than three-quarters of Pandora’s roughly 80 million monthly active users listen on mobile. “We want to acquire and engage high-quality listeners – aka users who actively use the app […]

“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 Matt Scharf, senior manager of display media operations and analytics at Adobe. What’s the secret to more effective retargeting? You might say brilliant creative, predictive modeling or segmented data. True, […]

Citing a guilty conscience, the developer behind the ad blocking app that shot to the top of the iOS 9 charts has pulled his creation off the App Store shelves. Marco Arment, who cofounded Tumblr and created Instapaper before dabbling in ad blocking, said he ultimately couldn’t endorse an app that blocked ads en masse. Arment’s […]

As agencies face increasing pressure to produce more content with shrinking budgets, some are streamlining production with in-house capabilities. At least, that’s what WPP had in mind when in 2009 it partnered with Hogarth Worldwide, a global marketing implementation firm. As a sister organization to WPP, Hogarth acts as a production and global distribution resource […]

The marketing clouds were heavy with ad tech this week. On Wednesday, Adobe uncorked its self-serve programmatic platform. On Thursday, MediaMath and Oracle hooked up. And of course, Salesforce is concluding its annual Dreamforce blowout, where Scott McCorkle, CEO of its Marketing Cloud, laid out to AdExchanger how the CRM giant thinks about ad tech. […]

Mobile ad blocking is a disaster for the ad industry. Content blocking is not the harbinger of advertising doom that some speculate it is. So, which is it? If the adoption numbers for mobile content blocking apps the day after Apple’s iOS 9 release on Wednesday are any indication, skeptics might have to change their […]

Ad tech company MediaMath has integrated with Oracle Marketing Cloud’s email marketing systems, specifically Oracle’s B2B solution Eloqua and the B2C solution Responsys, the companies revealed Thursday. The ad tech integration is the first of its kind for Oracle, said Alex Hooshmand, Oracle’s VP of product. Typically, clients log into the Oracle data-management platform (formerly […]

At Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce celebration, Rick Ruskin, who heads marketing and product management for General Motors’ OnStar service, sits in a parked Buick that’s serving as a makeshift conference room. He points to his phone, where there are offers from Best Buy and Audiobooks.com. “These two spots here are like Google AdWords, where people are […]

“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. Earlier this week there was an article in Ad Age about the “hidden” costs of programmatic. I don’t intend for the quotes to indicate that the fees don’t exist, just […]

In a move that illustrates the fast-growing importance of programmatic video, News Corp. will acquire UK-based Unruly for $90 million, the companies revealed Wednesday. News Corp. will pay as much as $86 million more for Unruly’s social video advertising platform, contingent on meeting certain performance goals. The deal gives News Corp. access to Unruly’s data […]

The realm of brick-and-mortar retail data has been steadily absorbed by digital technology in recent years, and that trend took another step forward on Wednesday with the launch of the Cross Device Marketplace by Placed, an in-store attribution firm. While Facebook and Google have put considerable effort into developing retail-specific solutions, Placed founder and CEO […]

Adobe’s initial move to upgrade its demand-side platform (DSP), Adobe Media Optimizer, culminated Wednesday in the launch of its new programmatic self-serve platform. The first wave of integrations to Adobe Marketing Cloud applications include data-management platform Adobe AudienceManager, Adobe Analytics and personalization tool Adobe Target. Buyers who use Adobe’s DSP can source search, social and […]

Publicis Groupe’s VivaKi will officially release a tool called Quality Index (QI) at the end of this month, designed to streamline inventory sources, manage multiple KPIs and cross-check viewability. QI has been in Beta since late 2014, and will be part of an internal UI called the VivaKi Operating System (VOS) Platform that VivaKi is building […]

AOL has packaged a number of its creative point solutions into a single platform called ONE by AOL: Creative, which the company revealed Tuesday. The self-serve banner, video and mobile ad creator was built on the back of Pictela, a rich media tool AOL acquired in 2010, which provided templates for marketers to create custom, […]

The technological problem with the Internet of Things (IoT) is that various connected devices, household appliances and vehicles all have different operating systems with different communication or data collection methods. This means they can’t talk to each other because they don’t speak the same language. “Information isn’t valuable without an infrastructure to make it actionable […]

More than 32,000 will congregate in Cologne, Germany, this week to spark a dialogue about the connected consumer and the state of the digital media economy. Among those gathered here will be MasterCard’s chief marketing officer, Raja Rajamannar, who will join a bevy of global agency and platform execs at the yearly Digital Marketing Exposition […]

“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 Adam Foroughi, co-founder and CEO at AppLovin. Virtual reality technology is far from mainstream, but carries incredible implications for advertising. There are already 175,000 development kits for Oculus Rift in […]

HookLogic raised $15.5 million in Series C funding and will sell AutoHook, a suite of lead-gen and marketing tools designed for automotive companies, the company announced Thursday. Terms of the AutoHook sale to auto consultancy firm Urban Science were not disclosed. In addition to previous investors Bain Capital and Intel Capital, this funding round included […]

Developers are up to their ears in mobile SDKs – and they’re not going to take it anymore. The trend toward consolidated mobile solutions is real, said Omer Kaplan, deputy CEO and co-founder of app discovery platform ironSource, which has acquired mobile monetization platform Supersonic. The deal was officially announced Thursday following a leak in mid-July when […]

It was an orgy of new products. At its “Hey Siri” event on Wednesday, Apple unveiled enhancements to the Apple Watch and launched the iPad Pro and something called the Apple Pencil, which is basically a super fancy stylus for the new, bigger iPad. The company also rolled out the next generation of iPhone 6 […]

The ongoing media reviews have created inroads for agencies to use creative, informed by data, as a strategy to win new business. In a bid to take advantage of this growing opportunity, Initiative, the IPG Mediabrands-owned agency, hired Nick Childs as its first-ever global chief creative officer on Sept. 1. “As a lot of media […]