Technology

When Forrester released its Wave assessment for video ad platforms Monday, the ability for each demand-side platform (DSP) to buy cross-screen – including linear TV – was a key factor. “The biggest thing large advertisers are struggling with is how to use digital video and TV in combination, not just digital video by itself,” said […]

With turkeys almost in the oven, retailers and ecommerce companies are hoping the investments they’ve made all year long in audience segmentation, mobile tech and cross-channel measurement will pay off in the make-or-break holiday season. Ecommerce in particular is looking to benefit from the maturation of ongoing retail and ecommerce trends – such as offline […]

Rocket Fuel is speeding up the rollout of its device graph. Starting in Q1, the programmatic platform company will make cross-device targeting the default mode for marketer and agency clients of its self-serve DSP. Those customers include Microsoft, which does its own US digital ad buying in-house. Microsoft’s top B2B marketing exec in the US, […]

Six out of 10 marketers would reallocate their media spend if digital media owners failed to supply sufficient third-party measurement, according to new findings from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). In an ANA survey of 154 members conducted this summer, 90% of marketer respondents also said they are “not fully confident” that their working […]

“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 Nicolle Pangis, global chief revenue officer at Xaxis. With $6.3 billion destined for illicit hands this year, according to the Association of National Advertisers, ad fraud is clearly a major […]

“AdExchanger Politics“ is a new weekly column tracking developments in the 2016 political campaign cycle. Today’s column is written by Eric Berry, CEO at TripleLift. The political season is upon us, for better or worse. Cue the typical debates, false controversies, real controversies and, of course, ads. But the 2016 presidential campaign is unique because […]

With the exception of back-to-school needs, office supply retailer Staples focuses on small-business owners. Like most brick-and-mortar retailers, Staples knew mobile played a vital role in its customers’ daily lives, but it was less clear from a media standpoint how mobile impacted the ultimate sales conversion. Staples wanted to use mobile to drive upper-funnel awareness […]

Marketers are known for demanding ROI and previous results before they embrace new strategies, but they’re going all-in on the assumption that mobile will be a far more prosperous channel this year than in previous holiday seasons. Industry analysts like eMarketer project a strong holiday for retailers, with mobile commerce expected to grow 32.2% over […]

After an initial wave of integration, Millennial Media, the mobile ad platform AOL acquired in September for $240 million, rolled out its first ad product under new ownership – TV Commercial Retargeting. The new ad product is backed by a partnership with Rentrak, which aggregates set-top box data across 25 million households, tapping into data […]

Neal Mohan, the long-term architect of Google’s display ad ambitions, has left the building. But he’s staying on the campus. Mohan has taken a post under his old boss Susan Wojcicki, who led DoubleClick for many years before becoming CEO of YouTube a little less than two years ago. In the role he’ll lead all […]

Some of Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s new products, rolled out Wednesday, seem to mimic the capabilities of a data management platform (DMP) – software historically absent from the stack. Salesforce’s Predictive Scores and Predictive Audiences are designed to help marketers segment and target prospects and known consumers with more speed and granularity. Those two tools fall […]

“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 Jay Friedman, COO at Goodway Group. All too often in today’s digital advertising industry, new agency hires are quickly handed the keys to technologies that can unleash millions of dollars in […]

Oracle 1.0 was more about databases than device graphs. But as Oracle methodically built out a Marketing and Data Cloud, that changed. For the latter, marrying data management platform BlueKai with offline data tool Datalogix unlocked new capabilities. For instance, it can validate metrics that purport to measure links between TV, digital and sales. Oracle […]

LiveRail and AppNexus removing resellers from their respective platforms last week were two more nails in the ad network coffin. If any publishers were upset, AdExchanger couldn’t find them. Just the opposite, in fact. While some publishers still use ad networks, most have significantly pared back in recent years, and those that still work with […]

If someone asked you to rattle off the big buzzwords in media, it’s a pretty good bet mobile, native ads and programmatic would be somewhere near the top of your list. Google has just knocked down all three in a single gesture, allowing its publisher customers to expose native ad inventory in their mobile apps to buyers […]

Acxiom’s data onboarder LiveRamp hopes to solve the thorny problem of identity – thorny because consumers have thousands of different identifiers. LiveRamp – which Acxiom now refers to as its Connectivity unit, but we’ll refer to as LiveRamp for the purpose of simplicity – has a solution to accomplish that using deterministic identifiers. On Thursday, it announced a partnership […]

Adobe rolled out the Audience Marketplace data exchange on Tuesday, featuring a data cooperative (which Adobe first revealed to prospective partners last summer) and a data partner network. Both are powered by Adobe’s data management platform, Audience Manager. The co-op aspect is designed to let companies pool their first-party data sets. The data partner network […]

Some corners of the ad and marketing tech industries wonder if the data management platform (DMP) is on the verge of becoming a commodity. But a Forrester Wave report on the technologies noted points of differentiation among DMPs’ abilities to handle social information, ingest data from channels usually associated with marketing tech, such as email […]

Judging from last week’s news, it’s tempting to say GroupM has got the programmatic religion. But that might be selling the holding company short. WPP Group’s media-buying arm, which controls $106 billion in global ad spending, last week promoted Xaxis CEO Brian Lesser to a big new job running its North America business. His elevation […]

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 […]