Technology

Some bots are good, but most bots are not – and Distil Networks, which announced $21 million in Series B on Tuesday, has its eye on the latter. The round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with pinch hitting from Foundry, TechStars, ff Venture Capital, Idea Fund and Correlation Ventures, brings Distil’s total funding to $38 million. […]

In a new 10-year search-and-advertising alliance, Microsoft will transfer the lion’s share of its display ad business to Verizon-owned AOL. Under the deal, approximately 1,200 Microsoft employees will get offer letters from AOL, most of them in ad sales. Additionally, AOL will end its search distribution relationship with Google in order to accept Bing search and ads on […]

Turn on ad blocking and in most cases you’ll have a better user experience, a fact readily acknowledged by Sourcepoint COO and co-founder Brian Kane. Sourcepoint focuses on circumventing ad-blocking software. But rather than the problem itself, Kane views ad blocking as the surface manifestation of a deeper issue: “The value exchange between publishers and […]

Updated with comments from CEO Bill Wise. Continuing the trend of private equity investment in ad tech, Vista Equity Partners revealed Monday it had acquired a majority stake in Mediaocean, a company most commonly known for automating trafficking and billing software for ad agencies. The deal values Mediaocean at about $720 million, the company confirmed. Mediaocean was the result of […]

iProspect is best known for its heritage in search marketing. But the Dentsu Aegis-owned digital performance agency, which first opened its doors in 1996, is changing with the times. Today, content is where it’s at. “There’s a tendency in the industry at the moment to split down two different paths,” said iProspect global President Ben […]

Like all programmatic buyers, Xaxis faces a challenge – and that’s securing the best and most inventory for its clients. In a publisher waterfall, ad servers generally prioritize programmatic below direct-sold campaigns, prompting other buyers and exchanges to start asking publishers to implement a practice known as header bidding. But Xaxis, WPP’s trading desk (or, […]

Nielsen has a new program designed to give advertisers and agencies a clearer lens into the digital audience activation process, the company announced Wednesday at its Consumer 360 conference in Washington, DC. The inaugural set of “Preferred Platform Partners” includes BrightRoll, DoubleClick, FreeWheel, Moat, RocketFuel, TubeMogul, Tremor Video, Viant and Videology. Other ad tech platforms […]

Programmatic audio advertising platform Jelli unveiled a $21 million Series B funding round Tuesday, led by Relay Ventures, Intel Capital, First Round Capital, iHeartMedia and Universal Music Group. The round brings Jelli’s total funding to $37.6 million. Jelli will use proceeds from the round to support two major partnerships forged this year, one of which […]

In the wake of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s fighting words about data collection and a major study finding consumer sentiment toward online tracking is at an exasperated tipping point, it seems clear that privacy is having another “moment.” What’s an industry to do? Sources approached by AdExchanger sound a familiar chorus: Advertisers should increase operational […]

Microsoft wanted to drum up interest for its digital note-taking app, OneNote, and needed to reach a generation of students who’d grown up on Apple devices. A big part of its consumer push is bringing heritage products like PowerPoint and Word into the mobile age by supplementing these tools with new cloud apps. Last winter, […]

Undertone is consolidating around creative. The programmatic ad network acquired Buenos Aires-based rich media startup Sparkflow on Thursday as part of a move to integrate data-driven creative capabilities into Undertone’s overall tech stack, which it calls Virtuoso. The deal was on the smaller side, clocking in at “less than $20 million,” said Corey Ferengul, CEO […]

Krux is looking to overcome its industry perception as a publisher-focused data-management platform (DMP). This is one of the reasons why it hired Jon Suarez-Davis – previously Kellogg Co.’s VP of global media and digital strategy – as its chief marketing and strategy officer. Suarez-Davis officially starts Thursday and will report to Krux CEO Tom Chavez. “My […]

  The traditional publisher waterfall, where impressions are exposed to sales channels in descending order of the perceived value of each channel, has always stuck in the craw of yield-obsessed media sellers. At its worst, the model ignores pockets of high-value inventory and reduces competition, and thus artificially caps a publisher’s revenue. Publishers have by […]

Are You a Human is looking to up its human headcount. The digital security and human traffic verification company plans to spend the majority of its $4.2 million in Series A cash, announced Thursday, to roughly double its current headcount from 25 to around 50 by the end of the year. The fresh injection, led […]

Ben Barokas – whose company AdMeld was purchased by Google in 2011 – unveiled his latest venture Thursday: Sourcepoint. The company, through which publishers can ask their audience to support the content either through general advertising, interest-based advertising or subscription, also raised a $10 Million Series A round Thursday, led by Spark Capital and Foundry […]

AdRoll wants to be known as more than purely a retargeter with its rollout Wednesday of “Prospecting,” a pool of potential customers a brand can reach into to improve incremental reach. This pool is fed by a stream of anonymized advertiser data called IntentMap, culled from the vendor’s 20,000 advertiser clients who opt in. About […]

Everyone knows Google needs to counter Facebook’s people-based marketing approach, unveiled with much fanfare last year as an answer to the twin measurement problems of device fragmentation and the crumbling cookie. On Wednesday it did so to an extent, making cross-device measurement of media exposures and conversions available in all DoubleClick ad products. The announcement, […]

Email advertising and marketing platform LiveIntent unveiled a $32.5 million growth equity investment on Wednesday, led by FTV Capital. Other investors include Battery Ventures, First Round Capital and Shasta Ventures. It will use the funds primarily to build out its platform and APIs for wider integration with other marketing tech companies like Salesforce, an effort […]

Salesforce.com wants marketers to know its paid media pitch extends well beyond the confines of social media now. On Wednesday, it revealed buyers can now activate CRM data for ad buys across mobile web, video, display and apps through a wave of new Active Audiences API partners: LiveRamp, LiveIntent, Neustar, Krux and Viant. Although Salesforce.com […]

Google’s longtime display ad honcho Neal Mohan made headlines last week when Re/code’s Kara Swisher reported, and AdExchanger repeated, that he might soon leave the company to take a plum job running product at Dropbox. Not so, it turns out. On Monday, a Google rep confirmed to AdExchanger that Mohan will stay on at Google’s DoubleClick division […]

In the latest chapter to a rather convoluted M&A tale, AppNexus will snap up ad tech firm Real Media Latin America (RMLA) from Peter Gervai, the Brazilian entrepreneur who paid $1 some 13 years ago to take it off 24/7 Real Media’s hands. The companies didn’t disclose the deal price or Sao Paulo-based RMLA’s revenues, but its […]

“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 Evan Krauss, vice president of emerging solutions at PubMatic. With 160 million people in the US listening to digital audio every day, advertisers’ ears are perking up at the possibilities. […]

As audiences increasingly find and engage with content on Facebook, publishers face two choices: Keep trying to monetize that audience off of Facebook, or find a way to sell their Facebook audiences to advertisers. Deseret Digital Media is going the latter route, using posts in its FamilyShare Facebook feed as part of the native advertising […]

TripleLift closed $10.5 million in Series B funding Thursday, led by Edison Partners. The in-feed native advertising company will use the funds to double its workforce from 50 to 100 employees and expand internationally, starting in Europe with the UK. The company will also devote a portion to research and development. “My hope is that […]

ABC, A+E Networks, Comcast and Canoe have initiated a pilot with broadcaster ad server FreeWheel to manage dynamic ad insertion in VOD and set-top box inventory alongside digital ads. Video-on-demand advertising has been relatively slow to take off, namely because of greater need for back-end integration in the underlying TV tech infrastructure. “The benefit for […]

Two months into a quality control effort designed to curb fraud, domain masking and other sketchy practices in its marketplace, AppNexus has offered some details on those cleanup efforts – and even given them a name. The company’s supply hygiene initiative, dubbed IQ, consists of three measures aimed at boosting transparency and accountability of media sold […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Jourdain-Alexander Casale, senior director of solutions at Index Exchange. For more than 15 years, ad servers have been the go-to standard for publishers booking, trafficking and serving direct advertising campaigns. The ad server is […]

Apple’s stance on data collection: “We honestly just don’t want to know,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s SVP of software engineering, to roughly 5,000 app developers at the tech giant’s Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday. “We don’t mine your email, your photos or your contacts in the cloud to learn things,” Federighi said. “All of this is done […]

Update 6/15: Google says Mohan will stay put.  Original story: Re/code’s Kara Swisher just reported that Neal Mohan, for many years the architect of the DoubleClick family of products and top product guy in Google’s sprawling display ad business, is leaving the company to take a similar role with Dropbox. Read it. AdExchanger has reached […]

As more brands introduce attribution technology – or push their agencies to do the same – basic models and applications on the vendor side are expanding. Initial players in the space, such as Adometry and Visual IQ, still focus on enterprise clients. Meanwhile, a newer breed of attribution tech is aiming more for a white-label […]