Technology

Fatemeh Khatibloo, principal analyst at Forrester, will appear at AdExchanger’s CleanAds I/O conference on June 3, an event addressing inventory quality and supply chain issues in the digital advertising ecosystem. As adland moves to clean up the supply chain and weed out fraud, the consumer perspective on data safety risks is becoming an afterthought. Fatemeh […]

Acquisitions and earnings – Sizmek likes to multitask. On Thursday, the company announced its Q1 2015 results and its intention to buy mobile DSP StrikeAd for $11.7 million. Excluding StrikeAd, revenue from mobile formats, in other words HTML5-related revenue, was up 103% YoY in Q1 2015, while in-stream video revenue increased 10% in the same timeframe. […]

Wayne Gattinella, CEO of DoubleVerify, will appear at AdExchanger’s CleanAds I/O conference on June 3, an event addressing inventory quality and supply chain issues in the digital advertising ecosystem. Because of the high demand for mobile location-based data, it’s a big opportunity for fraudsters looking to game geo-coordinates. “With more money flowing to place-based advertising, […]

Interactive audio ad firm XAPPmedia closed a $3.8 million round of Series A-1 funding on Thursday, which it will use to crank up its offerings for Internet radio publishers. With its latest funding, XAPPmedia will add staff and develop new interactive capabilities, many of which are being designed at the request of customers such as […]

Percolate, which has been compared to social publishing platforms like Buddy Media, has raised $40 million to take on enterprise marketing cloud acquirers and standalone social point solutions. The Series C round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, brings Percolate’s total funding to $74.5 million. It raised $24 million in Series B last spring, which the company’s co-founder, James Gross, said is […]

Verizon has access to deterministic data – and now it ostensibly owns the programmatic tech to put that data to work via AOL, which the telecom bought for $4.4 billion on Monday. This isn’t Verizon’s first stab at ad tech. Precision Market Insights, the company’s addressable advertising division, has been groping about, with various degrees of […]

While activist investors like Starboard Ventures LLC had advocated for an AOL-Yahoo merger, Verizon’s intent to purchase the former seems to have dampened that plan. So where does that leave Yahoo? “No different than they were before,” said Pivotal Group analyst Brian Wieser. “In a bad position.” Not everyone has such dire predictions. Cantor & […]

ZenithOptimedia Chief Investment Officer John Nitti will be a speaker at AdExchanger’s CleanAds I/O conference on June 3, an event examining issues and solutions around fraudulent inventory in the online advertising ecosystem. Clients hold their agencies accountable when they run campaigns heavy on fraudulent traffic or misrepresented inventory. While ZenithOptimedia, part of Publicis, understands that […]

Even as marketers increasingly see native programmatic as a part of the core digital arsenal – alongside video, display and mobile – industry leaders like Sharethrough have encountered a lag in adoption from major DSPs. Part of the problem is that the existence of technology solutions hasn’t had a chance to sink in with brands […]

In the first quarter, TubeMogul’s self-serve software, called Platform Direct, accounted for 78% – or $55.3 million – of total advertiser spend running through the company. The video demand-side platform (DSP) has worked to migrate managed services clients onto its platform, which could garner the recurring revenue and customer-retention rates characteristic of enterprise software deployments. Agencies accounted for 37% of Q1 spend on […]

If Verizon closes its $4.4 billion AOL acquisition, it will mark one more marriage between a telco and an ad tech company. It’s also a harbinger of more to come. Last summer, Australian telco Telstra grabbed a majority stake into streaming video distribution platform Ooyala and then bought video supply-side platform Videoplaza. In 2012, Singapore […]

Mobile is big and video is big – and putting the two together presents a gargantuan advertising opportunity that Verizon will be primed to capture if it closes on AOL. “Verizon has been trying to figure out how to grab a bigger share of the ad tech pie, so the move makes sense strategically on […]

As the media and tech worlds absorb news of Verizon’s planned acquisition of AOL, the largest unanswered question revolves around the fate of The Huffington Post Media Group, a unit that includes the eponymous publication as well as TechCrunch, Engadget and others. While Re/code’s Kara Swisher reported “advanced discussions” for AOL to sell its flagship media […]

On Tuesday, Gigya, a company that develops customer identity management solutions for Fortune 500 brands, rolled out IDX Marketplace, a platform anchored by 50-plus marketing and ad-tech partner integrations. Gigya claims users can activate audiences across a variety of partner tools, including data-management platforms like Krux, Adobe AudienceManager and Lotame; marketing clouds like Oracle and […]

Nestlé found its sweet spot through a recently executed branding campaign for its Nescafé Dolce Gusto brand. For its first-ever wholly programmatic ad campaign, the European java vendor tapped UK-based online marketing firm Jellyfish to drive sales of its coffee machines. The goal was to maximize the efficiency of its display advertising, without compromising on […]

Kelly Liyakasa contributed. Verizon will acquire digital media and ad tech platform company AOL in a cash transaction valued at $4.4 billion. The deal vaults the telecommunications company into the media and ad tech sectors and gives it a “three screen” relationship with consumers across desktop, mobile, and television. “It’s really one of the moments in time where […]

The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), a group created by the IAB, ANA and 4As late last year, have announced the creation of a Fraud Threat List through which members will share URLs they consider fraudulent to create a master blacklist. “We are developing a registration program to create a safe zone for the digital advertising […]

Plenti, the new American Express-operated loyalty coalition, seeks to streamline the rewards program. The premise is that consumers can gather loyalty points for up to two years from a variety of partner brands, including ExxonMobil, Hulu, Macy’s, Rite Aid, Direct Energy, Nationwide, AT&T and Amex, and can redeem those points across participating Plenti merchants. “The […]

Just over half (54%) of all video ads across the web are viewable compared to YouTube’s 91% average viewability rate, according to a Google report released Friday. It’s not surprising Google is releasing video viewability figures, given its investment in TrueView formats for brand advertisers, which are sold on a cost-per-view basis. Google claims it […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Will Doherty, VP of business development at Index Exchange. In order to effectively leverage viewability in a programmatic marketplace, buyers and sellers need to start thinking of it as a currency and not as […]

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

IBM has big digital marketing dreams. Last spring, those dreams warranted a $100 million commitment to future marketing investments. Wednesday saw the latest development, when IBM hooked its own marketing solutions into various Facebook ad products including the CRM matching program Custom Audiences to enable things like lookalike modeling. IBM also is expanding its Digital […]

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 […]