“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. For four years, I oversaw business development for a programmatic buying platform that integrated supply sources and data […]
Following a $50 million infusion of cash Thursday, mobile location vendor xAd appears to be sitting pretty. The money is a combination of equity and debt financing. XAd is not publicly disclosing the split. According to CEO Dipanshu Sharma, the company doesn’t “have any immediate plans for the funding,” which came courtesy of Institutional Venture Partners, […]
Few publishers can match the scale and reach of The Huffington Post’s 86 million monthly global uniques. The AOL-owned property also has a highly international and social audience, said Tessa Gould, senior director of native advertising at the HuffPost Partner Studio. The studio, created last June, helps brands conceptualize, execute and evaluate native campaigns. “Being […]
No rest for LiveRamp. The Acxiom-owned data onboarding company announced a new partnership Thursday with enterprise tag-management provider Ensighten – the third such alliance in just a little over a week. Prior to the Ensighten deal, LiveRamp joined up with video firm Eyeview and location-focused mobile ad company xAd, both examples, said LiveRamp CEO Auren […]
A year-long effort to redesign About.com and ramp up native ad formats forced the publisher to take a hard look at itself. On the plus side, there was no dearth of content onsite. “We make 6,000-7,000 new pieces of long form content every month and we have a corpus of over 3.5 million articles,” Neil Vogel, About.com’s […]
When the privacy app Disconnect, designed to let consumers control what information other apps can access, was kicked out of the Play store last week, Google charged it with unauthorized interference with other apps, a violation of Google’s developer agreement. From Google’s perspective, Disconnect damages the functionality and health of other apps in the Play […]
Triton Digital, which builds ad tech for digital and broadcast radio, unveiled its supply-side offering, Triton Advertising Platform (Tap), available in two flavors: one for traditional broadcasters and an on-demand offering for Internet-based radio stations. Over the next 18 months, Triton is going to onboard its roughly 6,000 stations in the US, EMEA, LATAM and […]
Coming from the agency world three years ago, Alexa Christon brought creative rather than media experience to her evolving role at GE, where she is now head of media innovation. And, with responsibility for GE’s US media today and an eye toward what her mega-corporation can produce globally, she’s helping to push the envelope of more […]
If cross-device tracking is a room, then Facebook and Google are the elephants – except Google is the only elephant that isn’t talking. Facebook hasn’t been shy about its cross-device intentions. At the time of the Atlas acquisition in 2013, its ads product director, Gokul Rajaram, noted that Facebook’s goal is to “be able to measure […]
It wouldn’t be the first summer weekend French agency holding company Publicis Groupe sent shock waves through the advertising ecosystem. Close to the anniversary of the infamous ad merger of equals that never quite materialized as Publicis Omnicom Group (POG), French pub Boursier reported on a rumor the holding company could be close to extending […]
Google and Amazon are going after each other. Google has ramped up commercial search and fulfillment, and Amazon is building a Google-like ecosystem around ads – a project involving an ad-buying platform to rival AdWords, according to The Wall Street Journal. And of course, both are investing heavily in video content and advertising. What is Amazon’s […]
“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 by Josh Herman, vice president of partner and product strategy at Acxiom. Addressable television has arrived, but where is it taking us? With a reach of more than 40 million households and […]
Just days shy of its IPO, Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba Group reported Q2 revenue of $2.54 billion, a 46.4% increase over last year, while net income skyrocketed to $1.99 billion. The company could raise close to an additional $20 billion out of the IPO based on an average valuation of $168 billion. In a revised […]
Monetate, a platform primarily known for landing page optimization, has expanded well beyond the A/B test. Appointing long-time board member and entrepreneur Lucinda Duncalfe as CEO on Tuesday, the Philadelphia-based company says it’s tackling a “multi-billion dollar” market opportunity: digital personalization. While Monetate’s early product strategy around website targeting and optimization drove early growth for […]
Refinery29 started out as a fashion blog, but it’s since expanded its vision: It plans to be the go-to source for millennials on the subjects of beauty, travel and points of view on subjects ranging from dieting to news coming from Ferguson, Mo. It’s also a high-growth company. The digital publication has 15 million monthly uniques, according […]
After committing $100 million to develop original video content this quarter, Amazon has invested a whole lot more in the medium, swooping in Monday with $970 million in cash to acquire the video gaming platform Google had been eyeing: Twitch Interactive. Read the release. Variety first reported news of Google’s interest in May, citing sources claiming it […]
Startups built on programmatic technologies are among the fastest-growing companies in the United States, as reported Monday in Inc. Magazine’s annual 500/5000 revenue survey. Among the notable entries in this year’s list: Demand-side platform MediaMath’s revenue in 2013 reached $310.8 million, representing 490% growth over three years. Its competitor DataXu also made significant revenue strides for the second […]
“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 by Megan Pagliuca, VP and GM for digital media at Merkle Inc. It was penned in response to Rob Griffin’s recent piece, “The Death of the Third-Party Ad Server.” Rob Griffin’s […]
This is the fourth in a series of interviews with vendors combating the problem of ad fraud. Other companies participating in this series include White Ops, DoubleVerify, Moat,Telemetry, Asia RTB and Integral Ad Science. Read previous interviews with Forensiq, Integral Ad Science and Videology. To combat ad fraud, many in the industry have been looking to technology that detects […]
Ever since his company, Automated Insights, announced a partnership with the Associated Press (AP), CEO and founder Robbie Allen says it’s been a bit of a whirlwind. The idea that his Durham, N.C., firm’s technology could automate what reporters do with the appropriate data inputs clearly has larger implications. As The Washington Post and Poynter, among […]
Adobe has tweaked its approach to attribution, removing out-of-view ads from its attribution model in an effort dubbed “Project Iceberg.” The project has allowed the company to analyze the viewability of sequences of ads served to individual users, as part of its larger evaluation of how well those ads drove subscriptions for its Creative Cloud product […]
The independent ad tech company that powers more than 30 billion ad impressions per day through its platform is now, officially, a $1 billion-plus business. AppNexus revealed Monday it has closed a $60 million investment round from an unidentified Boston public equity and asset management firm, valuing the company at about $1.2 billion. At the […]
“Remember, I’m on day five,” Greg Coleman said on Friday. The former president of Criteo, which went public earlier this year, recently hopped aboard BuzzFeed, where he’ll serve as president and on the board of directors. The switch reunites Coleman with many of his old co-workers at Huffington Post, including BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti. Shortly […]
AOL is both a technology company and a publisher, a fact that works in Gravity’s favor. Acquired by AOL in January, Gravity’s 45-person team is a part of AOL’s 4,800-strong workforce and its content personalization engine now powers internal links to AOL’s content repository, which sees 4,000 to 5,000 new articles every day. Gravity’s engine […]
Mobile ad revenue is on growth hormones. New estimates from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), IAB Europe and IHS Technology clocked global mobile advertising at $19.3 billion in 2013 — nearly doubling 2012’s $10.1 billion (the IAB’s previously reported 2012 figure was $8.9 billion, but IAB has since updated it to reflect actuals instead of estimates and different exchange […]
In what IgnitionOne claims to be more than just an acqui-hire, the search and display tech company has snapped up mobile demand-side and data-management platform Human Demand. The deal, which officially went down Wednesday, was completed for somewhere between high seven to low eight figures, according to an industry source close to the matter. IgnitionOne […]
AdStage, a cross-platform campaign automation tool as well as a Facebook and LinkedIn ads API partner, has raised $6.25 million in Series A financing from Verizon Ventures and myriad other investment firms. This brings the company to $8.78 million in total funding since its founding less than two years ago. AdStage will predominantly use the […]
Demand Media has named a former Ticketmaster chief Sean Moriarty as its new CEO. The move follows a rough second quarter, when it revealed last Thursday that its revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs (ex-TAC) declined 10% year-over-year to $87.1 million. The company on Monday also acquired online art community Saatchi Online in a $17 million cash-and-stock deal. Moriarty […]
While Google has gotten really good at display – more than $4 billion in display ad revenue good – how about the rest of Google’s digital marketing stack? Like enterprise platform players Oracle, IBM, Adobe and Salesforce.com, Google’s ad and marketing tech offering is a sum of many acquired parts. Google followed its $3.1 billion […]
Marketers hunger for native ads and publishers, spurred by the format’s lucrative cost, are happy to feed it to them. Yet while most publishers – 93% according to a survey conducted by the Online Publishers Association – claim to have a native offering, 47% of marketers said they were unsatisfied with their ability to distribute […]
Advertisers can target high- and medium-attention ad inventory in Amazon DSP while filtering out low-attention placements and made-for-advertising sites.
Marketers and media buyers are gradually getting more comfortable talking about ad campaigns they’re testing on large-language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
In Connected TV Ad Land, proving performance is the priority for video advertisers. To drive more demonstrable reach and results, publishers are trying to expand their reach while wringing more data and AI features into their offerings.
Nowadays, programmatic vendors, and SSPs in particular, are carving new paths of differentiation based on their type of adoption of cloud infrastructure.
As performance takes center-stage in more advertising discussions, demands to solve fragmentation and cruddy measurement are reaching a fever pitch.
A word of caution to digital advertising companies, as they go all in on AI algorithms: They need to build these solutions with ownership, governance and accountability from the start – or AI could sink them with a single mistake.
