Technology

“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. The ad-blocking discussion has shifted to the now-standard story that ad tech is responsible for creating bad user experiences on publisher sites, thus causing a huge […]

David Yoon is having an interesting week. It started out on Oct. 6 when Apple’s App Store gave its blessing to Been Choice, the ad-blocking app he developed along with his co-founder and CTO Sang Shin. The mini–media frenzy that ensued was immediate because Been Choice said it could do something that other content blockers […]

GameSpot readers know what they like – and they know what they don’t like. Owned and operated by CBS Interactive, the video game news and reviews site caters to the mainstream console gamer aged 18 to 40. And they’re an opinionated, assorted bunch. “On the surface level, that might seem like a homogenous audience – simply […]

Nitin Bhutani gets pitched by eager ad tech vendors daily in his role as VP of marketing at LendingTree.com. “We’re inundated with proposals from companies soliciting business,” said Bhutani, who came to LendingTree in 2011 after nearly a decade in various exec roles at HSBC, including VP of Internet marketing. But as a brand that […]

A lot has changed, yet little has changed for Acxiom. On the one hand, it reorganized earlier this year, rolling its LiveRamp acquisition into a unit called Connectivity (overseen by Travis May) and hiring Experian Marketing Services vet Rick Erwin as head of audience solutions to work on its data products. Acxiom is also building […]

In the oft-cited litany of “right message, right person, right time,” the creative is often given short shrift. “Programmatic gives advertisers the ability to target infinite segments, but if they’re delivering generic messages to a targeted audience, they’re simply wasting their ad spend,” said Victor Wong, CEO of creative management platform PaperG, which announced $5 […]

After hinting it would bring more video inventory to market, Conversant acted on that promise Tuesday with the launch of a Personalized Video suite. With Personalized Video, the company aims to link desktop and mobile video messages with both online behavioral attributes and offline sales data. Because of its roots with display retargeter Dotomi, a […]

Forrester senior analyst Susan Bidel will appear Oct. 29 at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference, an event dedicated to the advancement of programmatic media and marketing. The ad industry’s collective hand wringing over ad blocking reached a fever pitch in September during Advertising Week in New York City. In reality, however, it’s far from a block […]

Publisher-facing ad platform PubMatic has let go about 50 employees, or 8% of its global headcount of 600. Many of the cuts were in India, where the company has significant development and support operations. The changes were motivated by a desire to improve the overall level of service, including by bringing service teams in-market to […]

When AOL agreed in June to bring Microsoft’s sales organization into AOL, nearly doubling the amount of front-line salespeople to a total of 1,000, head of sales Jim Norton saw an opportunity. AOL knew there were a number of ways it could improve its sales force to better align with the organization’s structure: custom solutions […]

“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 Eric Picard, vice president of product planning at MediaMath. If you ask anyone, anywhere, if they like advertising, the answer will likely be a laugh and quick “no.” From a […]

Of all the threats posed by the ad-blocking trend, perhaps the scariest scenario for publishers is that paid media placements could be filtered at the network level. Now that nightmare seems to be coming true, as Israeli ad-blocking tech company Shine has said it will integrate with wireless carrier Digicel to screen ads aimed at […]

If ad blocking is war, long-tail publishers will likely be its earliest casualties. “Ad blocking is a threat to the whole industry, but it has an especially high impact for the small publishers who make up so much of the rich fabric that is the digital experience,” said Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the Interactive Advertising […]

Origami Logic revealed Tuesday it had received $25 million in Series C funds, which it will use to more than double its teams across sales, engineering and marketing, said co-founder and CEO Opher Kahane. Origami Logic has an employee count in the lower double digits, though Kahane wouldn’t give an exact number. But clients like […]

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 […]