Technology

Amazon’s rumored development of an ad-supported video-streaming service was resurrected Friday when the New York Post reported the ecommerce company’s launch of a “Netflix killer” is, indeed, nigh. Although Amazon says it often experiments with new offers and experiences for customers, it has not announced plans for an ad-supported video-streaming service. According to The Post’s […]

Apple CEO Tim Cook might have called iAd a “very small part” of the company’s business in the past, but Apple is starting to take programmatic seriously and the partners are piling up. Following Wednesday’s announcement of Rubicon partnering with iAd on the demand side, seven more names are officially on the list: Tapsense, The Trade Desk, […]

App developers are test-obsessed. They don’t spend a dime without knowing how it’ll turn out. That could be part of the reason why they haven’t done much spending on in-app mobile YouTube pre-roll. Until recently, Google Analytics provided developers with feedback on things like rate of install, AdWords performance, how often an app is opened, […]

When Undertone released its programmatic platform Virtuoso in September, the goal, according to co-founder Eric Franchi, was for it to eventually become the primary console of brands and agencies that want to purchase high-impact ad units, or ads that use unique formats designed to snag the audience’s attention. The onetime ad network has hired George […]

This is how to make a beer commercial. Combine gorgeous women, average-looking men, laughter, extreme close-ups of flowing beer, long shots of snow-capped mountains (optional). Shake it up and toss it onto an NFL game, preferably sometime during the first quarter when people are still watching. This is also the antithesis of how Heineken-owned Newcastle […]

Adobe’s having a good couple of months. Following Forrester’s high ranking of Adobe’s enterprise marketing suite last month, the software company unveiled a series of mobile enhancements to the Adobe Marketing Cloud on Tuesday. Adobe customers can now tap into in-app messaging capabilities and send personalized follow-up emails and other messages based on a consumer’s […]

What do telcos and YouTube talent have in common? Not a lot right now, but that will change once video and TV ad budgets converge. Consider the YouTube multichannel network (MCN), Google content partners that are responsible for both production and audience monetization and which get 55% of banner and pre-roll ad revenue. The digital […]

Mozilla, which makes the Firefox web browser, officially released on Thursday its in-browser ad product, which the company first announced in February. Early adopters include media agency Mindshare North America, online booking site Booking.com, and The Weinstein Company’s video-on-demand portal Radius-TWC. How it works: Individuals opening Firefox for the first time will see tiles filled […]

Media buyers and suppliers are now authorized to transact on viewable impressions, but how many are even using this form of tracking? To measure the adoption of viewability tracking and other forms of verification among national and global advertisers, AdExchanger recently worked with ad analytics firm Moat. We supplied Moat with a list of 100 […]

As fraudsters swarm like so many bees at the display advertising picnic, the industry is trying to blunt their stings with a combination of automated and manual solutions. Google has been among the most proactive ad platform players, hiring legions of real humans to review websites submitted to DoubleClick Ad Exchange. It recently acquired Spider.io, a […]

Independent full-service agency MARC USA is beefing up its digital planning and buying prowess following its acquisition of Boston-based media agency Results:Digital in September. The Pittsburgh agency has 270 employees and $370 million in annual billings, according to Jason Russo, who founded Results:Digital in 2011 and now serves as president of MARC’s Boston office. MARC’s […]

The mobile value proposition of a company like Facebook or Google is fairly straightforward: Download the free app and it’ll let you converse with your friends or give you directions to help you get where you’re going. In return, you allow yourself to be tracked for advertising purposes. “For carriers, the story is not as […]

“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 Dan Hill, senior data scientist at Integral Ad Science. How effective was the last ad campaign you worked on? What was the return on investment? Chances are you don’t know. […]

MediaMath has snapped up Rare Crowds, a small, 2-year-old startup founded by ad tech trailblazer Eric Picard, AdExchanger has learned. Under the all-stock transaction, Picard will join MediaMath as VP of strategic partnerships as the media-buying platform builds out products around private marketplaces and “automated guaranteed” inventory (i.e., direct site buys). The deal has the […]

Considering two of the usual pure-play suspects in Forrester’s Cross-Channel Attribution Wave (Convertro and Adometry) were snapped up by AOL and Google on the very same day in May, its latest release Friday had all kinds of new implications – media neutrality and a platform mentality among them. The report, authored by Forrester analyst Tina […]

Matt Mobley has spent more than 14 years tinkering with databases. He served as Acxiom’s VP of European consulting, followed by a stint as SVP of solutions consulting at Epsilon, and is now chief marketing technology officer (CMTO) for CRM and database marketing agency Merkle. Under CEO David Williams, Merkle has moved in on search, mobile and […]

Last month AdExchanger reported on plans by AppNexus to roll out a “Certified Supply” stamp of approval for demonstrably valid impressions, and thereby cut off the flow of spend to impressions that are fraudulent, nonviewable or otherwise undesirable. The certified program came amid growing industry concerns about the persistence of fraud in the AppNexus supply. […]

What’s better than first-party shopper data? First-party shopper data paired with predictive analytics. That’s the thinking behind Adroit Digital’s acquisition of Arcametrics, a small North Carolina-based company whose technology uses predictive modeling to create lookalike audiences based on high-quality customers. Adroit declined to share details of the deal, including price, although company president Jacob Ross […]

KBM Group might be the data services unit of WPP agency Wunderman, but don’t think of it as just a database manager. “Our job is to provide strategic leadership, not simply be a database vendor when clients need one,” said William Burkart, who became KBM Group’s president and COO in late September. So if you […]

It’s been one year since Criteo went public and the overall growth experienced by the company last quarter is holding steady. The French retargeting firm announced a 71.9% year-over-year uptick in revenue in Q3 2014 to roughly $243 million. (Full earnings release.) Part of that sustained growth is thanks to Criteo’s expanding client base, which […]

E-commerce giant Alibaba – often referred to as the Amazon of China – had a rosy third quarter, its first as a public company after a whopping $25 billion IPO (the one that put about $6 billion in stakeholder Yahoo’s pocket). (Earnings release.) Alibaba’s Q3 revenue growth was “mainly driven by the growth in online […]

Sometimes, a standalone app might be more trouble than it’s worth – especially if we’re talking about a branded game as part of a single activation. For WWE Studios, a subsidiary of World Wrestling Entertainment that focuses on film development and production, that proved to be the case for “Road to Wrestlemania,” its first-ever mobile […]

In recent quarters, Acxiom’s financial narrative has focused on its struggle to redefine itself. Whereas Acxiom was once – and still is – known as a provider of data for marketers, it’s seeking to become a neutral provider of data infrastructure via its Audience Operating System (AOS) platform and LiveRamp, the data onboarder it acquired in July. This […]

Linda Woolley wants TAG to have teeth in the fight against online ad fraud. The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) is part of a cross-industry coalition composed of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the Association of National Advertisers (which launched its own anti-fraud initiative with White Ops in July), and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). […]

Interpublic Group’s (IPG) integrated agency Hill Holliday has launched its own programmatic unit, headed up by EVP and Chief Media Officer Cindy Stockwell. Faithful followers of the agency will recall this isn’t the first time Hill Holliday has offered programmatic-type services. But changing client demands spurred the agency’s decision two months ago to move away […]

Amazon remained tight-lipped about its developing ad network during the company’s Q3 earnings call, about which CFO Thomas Szkutak only said: “There’s not a lot I can say there.” Amazon’s “Supplemental Revenue” category, which includes advertising, Web services and co-branded credit cards, raked in $1.3 billion in Q3, up 40% YoY from $960 million. Amazon’s supplemental revenue […]

Rubicon Project’s stock rose over 20% in after hours trading following the announcement that the company posted a record quarter. That’s good news for a supply side platform that has struggled to educate Wall Street of its value. Rubicon Project hoped its IPO would give it a market cap of $671 million. The current market cap is […]

Publicis Groupe reported a meager 1% organic growth rate for 2014’s Q3 on Thursday, with the displeased CEO Maurice Lévy blaming key account losses at Razorfish and lingering “distraction” on the failed Omnicom fusion. Publicis’ revenue in Q3 grew 4% YoY to reach $2.21 billion. “We have been too much focused on [the merger] and […]

Hearst Magazines plans to remove its marketing data from silos and bring it to the cloud using Acxiom. Hearst hopes this move helps it bring together siloed customer information. Finding the overlap between Hearst newspaper and magazine subscribers, for example, is a manual process under the current system. “If a customer engages with us in one […]

Interpublic Group (IPG) reported Q3 revenue of $1.84 billion, an 8.3% increase YoY and an organic increase of 6.3%. IPG Chairman and CEO Michael Roth attributed the solid quarter to strategic digital developments and to the competitiveness of its agencies. IPG’s media agencies are housed in its Mediabrands entity and include Initiative, BPN, ID Media […]