Technology

Does Verizon have access to rich user data? Undeniably. Will Verizon successfully capitalize on that opportunity? Questionable. After all, Verizon’s user data is only as valuable as its data practices. Verizon could certainly benefit in the wake of an acquisition spree that somewhat resembled a line of falling dominos – AOL into Verizon, Millennial Media […]

“Marketer’s Note” is a weekly column informing marketers about the rapidly evolving digital marketing technology ecosystem. This week it is written by Joanna O’Connell, Lead Analyst forAdExchanger Research. As a research analyst, I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the big challenges and opportunities we in the digital advertising industry face. But […]

Attribution companies Adometry and Convertro are frequently linked because they were acquired in quick succession (by Google and AOL, respectively). And the functionality they provide is increasingly important, as marketers want to justify their digital ad spend across channels and devices. Buyers are wary when attribution technologies – which should be agnostic – are integrated […]

Prague-based Socialbakers added Robert Lang as its new CEO on Wednesday. The social media metrics firm described Lang as a key Criteo executive who helped the French ad tech company expand internationally. Lang replaces Jan Rezab, a founder of the company. Rezab will stay on as executive chairman. Coming from Criteo, Lang said he saw […]

NewsCred, a maker of content marketing software for enterprise brands like Barclays, Toyota and Conair, has raised $42 million in growth equity led by FTV Capital – bringing its total to $88.8 million. NewsCred’s co-founder and CEO, Shafqat Islam, has voiced concerns in the past regarding oversaturation in the content marketing technology category, citing $100 million […]

Cross-device data company Crosswise wants to broaden its horizons. The Tel Aviv-based startup, which announced $3 million in Series A funding on Tuesday, will use most of it on sales, marketing and breaking into new markets beyond the US and UK, with China and Western Europe at the top of its list. The round, which […]

There’s no larger driver of brand awareness than a 30×60-foot cinema screen. At least, that’s the logic for Swedish auto manufacturer Volvo, which is test driving 90-second interactive cinema ads targeting 18- to 34-year-olds across 100 Screenvision theaters in the US. The effort involves partnerships with cinema advertising company Screenvision and interactive, motion-detection company Audience […]

The debate around privacy – and where Google stands – is kicking up on the eve of Apple’s upcoming September launch of iOS 9. Why? Because though advertising revenue hardly tickles the bottom line at Apple, its decision to enable content blocking in iOS 9 affects how Google’s developers monetize. Apple’s content-blocking feature allows developers to create […]

Last week’s stock market dip and subsequent recovery could have particularly troublesome consequence for ad tech firms looking to play on public markets. Though market volatility is a constant, last week’s flux put a spotlight on a handful of ad tech firms often mentioned as IPO candidates, among them AppNexus, Quantcast, Collective, Dstillery, PubMatic, Integral Ad Science, […]

“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 Chris O’Hara, vice president of strategic accounts at Krux. Almost every marketer is starting to lean into data management technology. Whether they are trying to build an in-house programmatic practice, […]

Publishers are concerned about content blocking in iOS 9 – but how concerned should they be? At first glance, the single brief reference to content blocking in Apple’s iOS 9 release notes seems innocuous enough. “Use the Content Blocking extension point to give Safari a block list describing the content that you want to block while […]

Even if terrestrial radio still has the bulk of audience, the growth – and ability to target – is in streaming audio. And an international brand like Hard Rock Hotels and Casinos needs its tune to reverberate across a global stage. This is one of the reasons why it signed on to use a native […]

Equifax’s marketing services business has flown under the radar. The company manages a consumer credit database on some 600 million individuals and 80 million businesses and, unbeknownst to many, has a dedicated marketing services practice that competes with Experian Marketing Services. Called IXI Services, this division of Equifax helps financial services companies and other consumer […]

Yavli joined the emerging fray of ad-blocking technology solutions for publishers with its public launch on Wednesday, following an 18-month stealth period. Its technology gives users who have downloaded an ad blocker sponsored content suggestions. If the user clicks on the piece of sponsored material, the publisher charges the brand. “The idea behind it is […]

Beginning this fall, advertisers will be able to programmatically buy Hulu video inventory in a private marketplace across desktop, mobile and connected TV via Facebook’s LiveRail supply-side platform. In its Tuesday announcement, Hulu said it will also use Oracle’s data-management platform (née BlueKai), through which marketers can enrich their buys by combining their anonymized first-party […]

Classified ads were quick to move online, with Craigslist, online job boards and real estate sites blossoming in the Internet’s first decade. But then a certain amount of stagnation kicked in: While the format itself was quick to go digital, programmatic advertising hasn’t significantly tapped into this local market. Enter Densou Trading Desk, a Copenhagen, Denmark-based […]

The director of ad technology for Netflix, Tony Ralph, and director of marketing for Abe’s Market, Michelle Goldstein, will appear at AdExchanger’s Omni.Digital conference on Sept. 10, an event designed to educate marketers on advanced solutions for building seamless cross-channel brand experiences. Cross-channel attribution will be one topic discussed at the conference. As Netflix’s director of […]

Under Armour has muscled up since its origin as a supplier of compression tees, thanks to its work connecting channels like mobile and email to physical stores. Under Armour is now more than an apparel provider. One of its biggest data assets comes from its community Connected Fitness, which has grown 30% year over year […]

Kahuna, a mobile marketing automation startup going against Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce.com, revealed Wednesday it had raised $45 million in Series B funding. The round, led by Tenaya Capital, Sequoia and SoftTech, will be used for product development and to expand Kahuna’s team of 80. Kahuna’s clients like Dollar Shave Club, Overstock.com, The Weather Channel […]

A number of ad tech vets made Inc. Magazine’s annual 500/5000 revenue survey this month, but there were also some notable new additions and absentees following acquisitions last year. Inc.’s survey, which was released late last week, features the revenues and employee growth figures of independent companies considered to be among the fastest-growing in the […]

Although Apple’s App Store is seven years old and has a worthy competitor in Google’s Play Store, the app store search and discovery ecosystem is stagnant, say many app store optimization (ASO) platforms. “When we look at the landscape, we see it like the early days of Internet, when search and discovery were a mess,” […]

In his four years as Havas NA’s SVP of marketing analytics and data consulting, Leon Barsoumian has worked to marry programmatic and analytics. From a programmatic standpoint, the French holding company has two key offerings, Affiperf and Artemis. In 2010, Havas debuted Affiperf, a global trading desk that Havas calls a “Meta DSP” and is […]

“Premium video” is Google’s code for “brand budgets.” Its decision to remove YouTube inventory from the DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) by the end of the year is one more way it hopes to clinch a piece of TV’s $70 billion portion of the overall brand budget. Platform providers were understandably upset when Google revealed the […]

There are myriad reasons why location data can be defective – and fraud is just one small piece of that growing problem. Growing because the lack of industry standards around the collection and use of location data leads to a fair amount of misunderstanding, unintentional discrepancies and widespread inaccuracy. “Location fraud is the easy part,” said […]

Sizmek has gone through some seismic changes to its sales staff and some of its product offerings. So despite a 9% YoY decline in Q2 revenue to $40.2 million, CEO Neil Nguyen’s word to investors during Sizmek’s earnings call Wednesday was: “Look for efforts to match our results in the second half of the year and even more […]

One of Google’s themes, when it announced it was dividing its core advertising business from its more experimental endeavors by restructuring into the holding company Alphabet, was “transparency.” Specifically, in the words of Alphabet CEO Larry Page, “improving the transparency and oversight of what we’re doing.” What that means, however, is anyone’s guess. We asked […]

Video demand-side platform TubeMogul reported that more than 20% of global spend running through its platform in the second quarter came from mobile, programmatic TV and display ad formats. Mobile ad spend drove 10-15% of spend, programmatic TV constituted between 5-10% and less than 5% came from display. “We think this is significant, given our […]

Adobe and PageFair, a Dublin-based ad-block solutions provider, on Monday unveiled new research that claimed there are almost 200 million active ad-block users, representing a projected loss of $21.8 billion globally for online publishers in 2015. The caveat is that industrywide ad-blocking numbers can be misleading given strong variances both geographically and demographically. That skew […]

When Google revealed plans Thursday to exile YouTube ad inventory from the DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) by the year’s end, many in the ad industry felt betrayed. Google’s reasoning for this change isn’t clear, even to its partners. Its stated motivation is that it wants to devote more resources to developing other video ad products. […]

The writing was on the wall. Google revealed late Thursday it will no longer sell YouTube inventory through the DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX). Neal Mohan, VP of video and display advertising at Google, said in a blog post that the tech giant is yanking YouTube inventory from AdX to focus its development efforts on “the formats […]