Technology

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 […]

The value of a marketing cloud, as Forrester Research pointed out Tuesday, is in the level of its integration. But Portland, Oregon-based startup Lytics takes the position that whatever level of integration the big-name marketing suites offer simply isn’t enough. The company, which started in 2012, made its “marketing activation platform” generally available on Wednesday […]

“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. The jig is up. And it’s been up for a long while. It’s time to move past dynamic […]

Forrester Research crowned Adobe Marketing Cloud in its first-ever ranking of enterprise marketing software suites – informally called “marketing clouds.” The report, compiled by analysts Cory Munchbach and Rusty Warner and released Tuesday, encompassed eight vendors (Adobe, Salesforce.com, SAS, Teradata, IBM, Oracle, SAP and Marketo). Munchbach and Warner interviewed three clients from each vendor and tallied […]

Omnicom Group’s programmatic buying discipline is still in its early days, the agency holding company emphasized during its Q3 2014 earnings call Tuesday. Programmatic buying constitutes just south of 2% of the company’s overall revenue, which reached $3.75 billion during the quarter, up 7.4% YoY. Most of the growth came from the North America region, […]

Digital ad revenues in the US hit an historic high in the first half of 2014, reaching $23.1 billion, according to the IAB’s Internet Advertising Revenue Report released Monday. Notably, the IAB reported that mobile jumped 76% YoY and overtook banner ads. In another Monday release, the VivaKi AOD Benchmark Report saw CPMs increase across display, social, […]

Nielsen and Adobe revealed a partnership Tuesday designed to combine Nielsen’s digital audience measurement products with Adobe Analytics and Adobe Primetime, the company’s platform for online TV delivery and monetization, making both available to joint Nielsen/Adobe clients through Adobe Marketing Cloud. The result is Digital Content Ratings (DCR), a cross-platform census-based metric that aims to do for digital […]

Roughly a year ago, CPXi began building out two consumer-facing sites: PressRoomVIP for celebrity culture, and the music-oriented portal Hip Hop My Way. These two sites formed the foundation of CPXi’s Consumed Media publishing division, which launched in late September. What’s unusual is that CPXi, which used to be the ad network CPX Interactive, doesn’t […]

A change is on the horizon for Annalect, Omnicom’s analytics and marketing technology arm. Omnicom agencies – both its media traders and its creative firms – use Annalect when they need data-driven expertise for their clients’ campaigns. As such, Annalect has a wealth of data scientists and technologists, 250 relationships with third-party data sources and a […]

Walmart, one of the last bastions of big box retail, is investing for a digital future – one with considerably less square footage. Walmart recently revealed plans to invest between $1.2 to $1.5 billion in its ecommerce and digital operations for fiscal year 2016. Subsequently, its in-store investments are taking a temporary hit. In its […]

Because AARP serves a specific demographic – people over 50 – the magazine has long understood just how valuable it was to provide advertisers with a segmented audience. But within that age bracket, there is incredible diversity of segments that the AARP knew would provide value to advertisers. So the team decided to use Krux to […]

Google’s Q3 revenue rose 20% year over year to $16.52 billion, though it continued to see click volume rise (17% YoY) and cost per clicks fall (2% YoY). Google sites comprised about two-thirds of revenue, for a total of $11.25 billion. Partner sites contributed $3.43 billion, or about 20%. Google’s O&O paid clicks (which include […]

Alliance Data Systems (ADS) reported Q3 2014 revenue of $1.3 billion, a 20% YoY change, mostly driven by the company’s private-label credit card services division, which saw 17% YoY revenue growth to $622 million. ADS has steadily increased its outlook with each earnings call, and it did so again in its Q3, raising its core […]

The digital ad sector has made some tangible progress in the war on fraudulent ad impressions, thanks to new detection methods and improved hygiene from many sell-side platforms. But one of the biggest exchanges has added rather than subtracted invalid impressions, and buyers are complaining. AppNexus, the industry’s uber-exchange and one of the most promising […]

An AdExchanger story published Wednesday describes the persistent problem of fraudulent ad impressions in the AppNexus inventory supply, and the company’s plans to fix it. Its plan of attack includes a new certified supply program that will clearly label inventory AppNexus has deemed “valid.” Buyers can choose to purchase only the good stuff, while ignoring the uncertified […]

Cross-device is hot (hey there, Atlas), and now data-management platform Lotame has tossed its hat into the ring with a feature built from AdMobius’ technology, a company Lotame acquired earlier this year. The feature, announced Wednesday, uses a combination of deterministic and probabilistic algorithms to create device matches and cross-screen audience segments within Lotame’s DMP. […]

Distributing the same sponsored posts across a network of sites isn’t a widespread practice – yet. While planning the media spend for Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, ad agency Mediasmith turned to Distroscale, which allowed the team to leverage existing content to connect with readers about the hospital at scale. “Native advertising had a key role to […]

FreeWheel, a video ad server owned by Comcast and used by broadcasters like ABC and Discovery Communications, has teamed up with digital demand-side platform (DSP) TubeMogul to make premium digital video inventory accessible on a programmatic reserved basis. FreeWheel is arranging several data escrows with TubeMogul and providing access to agencies and marketers like Allstate, […]

When Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage in Cupertino last month and unveiled Apple Pay, it was game on for many in the mobile payments industry. While Apple’s embrace of mobile payments doesn’t mean retailers immediately need to outfit every point-of-sale system with an NFC reader, megacompanies like Disney, Macy’s, Panera, Sephora, Starbucks, Walgreens […]

Germany is leading the attack in the EU’s deepening privacy war against Google. Late last Tuesday, a legal ruling levied by Hamburg data protection commissioner Johannes Caspar required that Google obtain Germans’ expressed permission in order to access their data, or face $1.27 million in fines. “Our requirements aim at a fair balance between the […]

Visible Measures has forged a number of supply-side integrations with AdsNative, TripleLift and DistroScale, adding “thousands” of publisher supply sources as a result of the deal, revealed Friday. These partnerships build on the recent rollout of Fabric, a demand-side platform (DSP) designed to place native ads, used first by Publicis Groupe’s media buying unit VivaKi. The DSP is primarily […]

This is the 11th in a series of interviews with vendors combating the problem of ad fraud. Other companies participating in this series include  Sizmek. Read previous interviews with comScore, DoubleVerify, Dstillery, Forensiq, Integral Ad Science, PubChecker, Telemetry,Videology, White Ops and RTB Asia. The meta-problem with ad fraud, according to Moat CEO Jonah Goodhart, is that it’s a tremendous […]