Technology

China is a market on the programmatic verge – Magna predicts that China and Japan will surpass the UK programmatic ad market by 2017 – and Alibaba seems more than ready to embrace it. The Chinese ecommerce giant revealed Wednesday that it’s become a majority shareholder in AdChina, a Shanghai-based digital ad platform that combines supply- and demand-side […]

The singles ad would read like this: Mobile native inventory seeks demand. In an effort to act as matchmaker, global mobile ad platform Opera Mediaworks launched Tuesday a private marketplace native extension of its mobile ad exchange, Opera Mediaworks Ad Exchange (OMAX), which until now had just focused on programmatic display and video. Because the […]

When Oracle bigwigs gathered Tuesday in New York to discuss the company’s platform strategy, they focused on data’s central role – which makes sense given Oracle’s acquisitions of Datalogix and technology and services platform BlueKai. Oracle’s data investments, as they pertain to the Oracle Marketing Cloud, manifest through the Oracle Data Cloud initiative spearheaded by […]

There’s a world outside of app stores and it’s App Annie’s goal to help developers capitalize on it. On Tuesday, the app analytics company announced $55 million in Series D funding and launched a tool that analyzes the usage data around popular apps, including active users (daily, weekly and monthly), the number of sessions, time […]

Data is a bit like a little black dress – it goes with everything. That’s especially true for women’s apparel brand Cache, which maintains an active ecommerce site and more than 230 brick-and-mortar stores in malls across the US. The data collection potential is huge. “In-store transactional data, online behavior, CRM data, offline purchases down […]

Adobe isn’t exactly synonymous with ecommerce. At least, synonymous in the sense of competitors SAP and Oracle, which have invested aggressively and acquired commerce-centric companies like hybris, ATG Commerce and Datalogix, respectively. The extent of Adobe’s commerce capabilities, to date, have spanned standard site analytics, A/B testing and tag management, but the Adobe Marketing Cloud […]

Programmatic has been gaining steam in the Asia-Pacific region, but the industry still lacks awareness and understanding, according to a new study from Singapore-based MediaQuark. Of the 108 respondents to the company’s survey, 62% said that a lack of industry understanding was one of the biggest challenges for programmatic in the APAC market. Looking at […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Will Doherty, senior director of business development at Index Exchange, a division of Casale Media Inc. There is just one path forward for the sell side of digital advertising: total accountability. As fraud persists […]

Google’s big video reveal this week included a significant update to its premium video exchange, Google Partner Select. At the time of its launch last June, it was unclear how many participants initially were involved in Google’s effort to “bring together the best of brand advertising with the best of programmatic,” Neal Mohan, Google’s VP […]

Hear that? It’s the sound of Google quietly mentioning that it plans to report on audibility for video ads at some point later this year. The audibility reference was buried as a footnote toward the end of a larger update on Google’s intention to roll out viewability reporting across all of its ad platforms, including […]

“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 Matt Scharf, manager of display media operations and analytics at Adobe. Contrary to popular belief, out-of-view impressions aren’t worthless. As controversial as that sounds, impressions that are never seen can […]

Just a few months after it hired Digilant COO Nathan Woodman to take charge of its demand-side business, IPONWEB has nabbed another well-known ad tech guy. The 13-year-old ad platform company has hired Bob Walczak, VP product at PubMatic, to oversee BidSwitch, its ad exchange-like product. At IPONWEB, Walczak will run sales and business operations for BidSwitch, a […]

Video platform M&A exploded in 2014, particularly in the second half of the year, according to data from Coady Diemar Partners. A report from the boutique investment banking firm highlights substantial growth in the ad tech sector, led by demand for technology assisting in the convergence of TV and digital video. Four of the top 11 […]

As it turns out, Acxiom’s LiveRamp and Datalogix were friends all along. The duo – sometimes portrayed as rivals in the data onboarding space – on Monday revealed they’ve expanded their existing partnership through 2017. At the time of Acxiom’s $310 million acquisition of LiveRamp last spring, CEO Scott Howe compared Acxiom to Switzerland. That is, […]

2014 was the year advertisers collectively asked the question, “How much?” As in, viewability aside, how much ad fraud is actually out there? Some of the numbers bandied about, often by the fraud vendors themselves, were alarming to say the least. A report released by cyber-security startup MdotLabs in October 2013 before it was acquired […]

The ad tech industry isn’t going anywhere, but 2014 exhibited some of the financial shakiness that dogged public ad tech stocks through much of 2013, especially for companies that went public in the last 12 to 15 months. “The only slight surprise for me and many others [in 2014] was the sudden switch in sentiment […]

If you’re an Oracle competitor, the Datalogix acquisition looks formidable indeed. It adds considerable power to its data-as-a-service offering, which to this point had mostly online data. But if you’re a marketer using Oracle’s technologies – or using Datalogix data to link online advertising to offline sales – what additional benefits can you expect? While, […]

The mad dash for offline-to-online data connections has been one of the top trends of 2014. Enterprise giant Oracle was the latest to close the loop between the online and offline worlds when it revealed Monday its intent to acquire data solutions company Datalogix. “This deal is about championing commerce,” said Ray Wang, principal analyst at […]

Oracle has agreed to acquire Datalogix, a data solutions company that shopped itself around in recent weeks, as AdExchanger has reported. As we previously reported, Facebook, Nielsen and Adobe have also shown interest in the business. Although the deal price was undisclosed, Oracle paid about 6.25x for BlueKai. If Datalogix had revenue of $125 million, that means […]

Google spent the year branding YouTube as the de facto video partner for brand advertisers. 2014 was certainly active for Google’s video properties. Its ads and commerce chief, Susan Wojcicki, took the reins at YouTube as senior vice president, Google packaged the top 5% performing YouTube videos for brand buys in a program called Google […]

The attribution space heated up this year. First Google snapped up Adometry, then AOL grabbed Convertro. Not to be left out, Rakuten bought DC Storm. Everybody wants a solution to the attribution problem – but attribution is more than just another shiny object. “The marketer’s world has never been more fragmented – from channels to possibilities […]

If banner advertising has peaked, native advertising is still on its way up. Proponents of native cite better consumer engagement and higher rates for publishers. London-based market research firm Mintel pegged the current native advertising market at $1.8 billion, predicting it will rise to $9.4 billion by 2018. Of course, “native” is a broad term […]

The Trade Desk made headlines this week when it raked in $45 million in debt financing and brought on Microsoft, RGM Group and Delivery Agent alum Gabe Greenberg to manage its Advanced TV division. The company positions itself as both a DSP and a DMP, and its leaders have longstanding roots in automation, according to […]

Gartner Research’s first-ever Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Hubs, released Wednesday, assumes that ad tech, marketing tech and CRM will naturally converge. As such, it pits enterprise platforms like Salesforce.com against ad tech regulars like Rocket Fuel [x+1] and Turn. No doubt many in the industry will debate whether or not this is fair, or […]

One week after completing its $2.3 billion acquisition of ad tech company Conversant on behalf of its Epsilon subsidiary, Alliance Data Systems has made some C-level org changes. Epsilon President Andy Frawley has become Epsilon’s CEO, reporting to Bryan Kennedy, the former Epsilon CEO who has been placed in charge of a joint Conversant-Epsilon unit. His title? That’s right. […]

Adelphic has mobile programmatic on the brain – which makes sense for a mobile DSP. The company said Wednesday that it had closed its Series B to the tune of $11 million in a round led by Blue Chip Venture Co., Google Ventures and Matrix Partners, bringing its total funding to $23 million. Adelphic – which […]

Native is a bit like awkward teenager – it’s still trying to figure itself out and it just wants to fit in. Sharethrough is looking to help native advertising blend in a little better with a new unit that takes a cue from the way players like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest display third-party content on […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Andrew Casale, vice president of strategy at Index Exchange, by Casale Media. Commonly and with little difficulty, bad actors are defrauding the digital marketplace. They’re playing tricks to make exchanges think they’re selling inventory […]

“I don’t care if only a portion of my ads are actually seen,” said no advertiser ever. But 100% viewability is still a work in progress. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) issued a report Tuesday in which it emphatically stated that 100% viewability simply “isn’t possible,” setting 70% as a more realistic threshold, at least for […]

“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 Eric Berry, co-founder and CEO at TripleLift. Risk–reward analysis is studied heavily in modern portfolio theory. There are two important questions that pervade this discipline: How can an individual’s portfolio […]