Technology

An attention economy solves for viewability. That’s the thinking at real-time analytics firm Chartbeat, which announced $15.5 million in Series C cash on Wednesday, bringing the company’s total funding to $31 million. The bulk of the round, led by Harmony Partners, with participation from DFJ, Index Ventures and Digital Garage, will go toward building products […]

Criteo, the French online display retargeter turned performance marketing company, saw its Q1 revenue increase 68% YoY to €105 million ex-TAC, driven by the growth of its cross-screen tools and client retention “consistently north of 90%.” It added 640 new clients in Q1, giving it a total of 7,800. Additionally, market conditions have been favorable for Criteo. CEO Jean-Baptiste “JB” […]

A programmatic API for cable television? Cablevision, a telecom and cable systems company reaching 2.5 million households in the New York tristate region, claims it has developed one. It launched Total Audience Application (TAPP) last Thursday, an audience-planning tool that allows marketers to apply first- and third-party data to optimize addressable or linear TV campaigns. […]

LinkedIn’s display business deteriorated during Q1 2015 and will continue to tumble, the company said during its quarterly earnings call on Thursday. While LinkedIn reported Q1 revenues of $638 million, up 35% YoY, its disappointing Q2 and full-year guidance ($670-$675 million and $2.9 billion respectively) sent shares plummeting more than 25%. During the call, CFO […]

Compared to other digital audio content, podcast advertising has unique measurement challenges. But the medium is growing quickly. Edison Research claims nearly 46 million Americans, or 15-17% of the US population, listen to a podcast every month. It’s roughly double the size of podcast listeners in 2008. AdsWizz, which provides radio listening metrics for broadcasters and […]

Advertisers only want to pay for viewable impressions. But publishers feel they should have the right to charge more for that type of inventory, said Jeff Bander, president and CRO of biometric online eye-tracking firm Sticky. Sticky announced a $5 million Series A round on Wednesday led by London-based VC firm Dawn Capital, with participation […]

Adobe is shoring up its support for display ads with the acquisition of dynamic creative optimization (DCO) tech from Collective, called Ensemble. The small technology pick-up, announced at the firm’s European summit in London on Wednesday, will give Adobe’s advertiser clients self-serve tools to build, customize and deploy ads through Adobe Media Optimizer in real […]

DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM) clients can soon use the buying platform to purchase Twitter Promoted Tweets across the mobile web, in-app and desktop. Read Google’s blog post. The capability isn’t available yet, but Twitter CEO Dick Costolo anticipated a May release during the company’s earnings call. Google first needs to do some technical jiggering to […]

Twitter is taking cross-device retargeting under its wing with the acquisition of digital ad platform TellApart. “Direct response advertising has been a major growth engine for our ads business over the last several quarters. … TellApart will accelerate that trajectory further,” said Kevin Weill, Twitter’s SVP of product, in a blog post Tuesday. According to […]

When the IAB set out to craft a set of standards for digital audio advertising seven months ago, it wanted to address the challenge of consumers shifting to mobile and to organize the fragmented digital audio landscape. The effort resulted in the Digital Audio Ad Serving Template (DAAST), and many in the industry welcomed the […]

On Wednesday, Adweek’s Garrett Sloane reported that Google is finally, officially (no, really) closing the last big gap in its ad tech stack. That is to say, it’s coming to market with a data-management platform (DMP). Called DoubleClick Audience Center (DAC), the product will allow advertisers to create audience segments using their first-party data along […]

The $45 billion Comcast-Time Warner Cable (TWC) deal is officially kaput. If the merger had materialized, it would have created an unsurpassable media and cable conglomerate with massive audience reach. From day one, regulators were wary about one company controlling too much broadband access, resulting in Comcast terminating the deal Friday. “Today, we move on,” […]

“Marketer’s Note” is a regular column informing marketers about the rapidly evolving, digital marketing technology ecosystem. This week it is written by Lizzie Komar, Associate Analyst, AdExchanger Research.   Last week, during an on-stage conversation at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O event in San Francisco, Omnicom Digital (OMD) chief Jonathan Nelson described the agency’s evolving approach to technology, data, partnerships, […]

For the first time, Amazon extracted its lucrative Amazon Web Services (AWS) business from its “Other” category, which traditionally included co-branded credit cards and advertising services. When coupled with AWS, the category came in at about $1 billion each quarter. As it turns out, Amazon’s North American ads business brought in $187 million in Q1, a 22% […]

Though less known than some of the other big marketing cloud companies, NetSuite took one more step to ramp up its commerce marketing platform by dropping $200 million on marketing automation platform Bronto, the company revealed Thursday. The Bronto acquisition is the latest instance of marketing automation consolidation. It follows IBM’s roughly $300 million purchase of Silverpop last […]

Advertisers are no longer interested in hitting demo targets alone and, leading into upfronts, media companies are baking behavioral and audience-based guarantees into their sales pitches. Buy- and sell-side parties want to link TV programs with purchase propensity to determine whether a media exposure helped loosen purse strings. “We’re seeing more demand to bring together business […]

Boston-based in-store beacon company Swirl revealed its $18 million Series C round on Thursday. Led by Twitter Ventures, Hearst Ventures and SoftBank Capital, with participation from Longworth Venture Partners, this latest capital injection brings Swirl’s total funding to $32 million. It’s evidence that beacon technology is reaching maturity, said Hilmi Ozguc, CEO and founder of […]

Pangia Games doesn’t have money to waste. What app developer does? Monetization and user acquisition are tricky for anyone – although it certainly helps to have extra cash to throw at the problem. But the smaller devs out there, like Pangia, need to get creative. “We’re a team of two,” said Nick Barbato, managing partner at […]

When it comes to shopping ads, it’s not all about Google anymore. While Q1 US spend for Google Shopping Ads (formerly Product Listing Ads) was up 37% year over year, Bing/Yahoo is starting to encroach on Google, at least in the United States, where spend increased 72% last quarter, according to the Adobe Digital Index […]

When holding companies Publicis Groupe and Omnicom reported their respective 2015 first quarter earnings on Tuesday, each had to field investor inquiries about agency rebates and kickbacks. Omnicom outwardly denied participating in the controversial activity, at least in the US. “Our media agencies in the US don’t seek rebates,” Daryl Simm, CEO of Omnicom Media […]

Acxiom vet Nada Stirratt is looking to spread the good word about location-based advertising in her new role as CEO of Verve Mobile, announced Monday. “The last few years have been about Angry Birds and app downloads, but now the market is finally talking about reaching consumers in particular locations,” said Stirratt, who comes to […]

The viewability standard may be better served by saying what it isn’t, rather than what it is. “Viewability does not guarantee that an ad will be looked at, or that an ad will be appealing, or have an impact or generate awareness or change brand perception,” said Sherrill Mane, SVP of research, analytics and measurement at […]

Last week, WPP launched the “marketing foresight” consultancy Gain Theory, housed within GroupM. Gain Theory, which has 200 people and a new office in New York City, rolls together two existing WPP agencies: the London-based marketing effectiveness agency Ohal and the Bangalore-based data analytics firm Meritus. Jason Harrison, previously CIO at Maxus, has been appointed […]

On April 21, Google will begin instituting a change to its mobile search algorithm that will take a site’s mobile-friendliness into account when ranking results. Indexed apps will also start showing up among organic search results. The update applies to mobile search only. In somewhat un-Google-like fashion, Google, which normally makes its search algorithm changes […]

Programmatic ad tech companies aren’t properly estimating their total addressable market, said BMO Capital Markets equity research analyst Dan Salmon. Salmon presented a report Thursday at Programmatic I/O in San Francisco that pointed to two areas where these estimates tend to get thrown off. First, most ad tech vendors don’t factor in take rates – the […]

The rumors were true. Google’s skippable and click-to-play YouTube ad format TrueView will be available programmatically, the company announced Thursday at the Programmatic I/O conference in San Francisco. The 5-year-old format, priced on a cost-per-view basis, represents more than 85% of in-stream ads on YouTube, according to Rany Ng, product management director for Google. TrueView […]

The ad tech funding scene is getting a little unfriendly – but that doesn’t seem to be a problem for the video guys. On Thursday, Altitude Digital announced a $30 million cash injection from financial tech firm FastPay, bringing the video SSP’s total funding to $45 million. The Denver-based company has direct relationships with 500 […]

The European Commission hit Google with a Statement of Objections on Wednesday, claiming the tech giant prioritizes its shopping comparison service in search results, featuring Google Shopping results more prominently on screens, thereby abusing its dominance. The Commission claims this policy artificially diverts traffic, hinders market competition and violates EU antitrust rules, which ultimately harms […]

Partner, build or buy? WPP Group has decided on the last in the case of Medialets. The global holding company said Wednesday it will acquire the mobile ad platform as a wholly owned subsidiary. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Clients across the breadth of WPP’s holdings will have the option to use Medialets’ tech. Medialets CEO […]

Banners weren’t cutting it for Vaibhav Gupta, CEO and founder of Bidstalk, a Singapore-based company that provides a white-label mobile and video DSP platform for advertisers and publishers. But the alternative – native – presented its own attendant complications. “Marketers are ready to experiment with newer mobile-focused ad formats, but such traffic is still limited,” Gupta said. […]