Technology

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 […]

This is the second in a series of interviews with vendors combating the problem of ad fraud. Other companies participating in this series include White Ops, DoubleVerify, Forensiq, Moat, PubChecker and Telemetry. Read last week’s interview with Videology. When it comes to detecting and preventing ad fraud, Integral Ad Science is the middleman. That is, […]

Comparison shopping site Shopzilla has a lot of data. About 20 years’ worth, to be exact. Shopzilla’s been around since 1996 and unbeknownst to some, still drives 50 million monthly unique visitors across its owned-and-operated network that includes consumer insights and merchant ratings site Bizrate. But the company will soon become primarily a marketing services […]

“Programmatic ads grew at over 100% year-over-year, and we’re growing faster than the programmatic field overall,” AOL CEO Tim Armstrong told investors looking over the company’s second-quarter results. “Programmatic [ad revenue] has grown from 5% to 34% of our business in a year, which is part of a large industry shift and the biggest shift […]

Supply-side platforms (SSPs) such as OpenX, Rubicon Project and PubMatic are under heavy pressure to increase value for publishers who pay a premium to use their technologies. “The fact that SSPs are positioned on the sell side after much of the transaction value has been extracted by other intermediaries puts more pressure on their margins […]

France-based ad tech company Criteo crossed into the black in the second quarter, recording net income of $3.2 million. During the same time period last year, the company lost $7.5 million. The retargeting-focused display advertising company charges on a CPC model for performance-focused clients. (Earnings release) The solid momentum comes as President Greg Coleman exits to join BuzzFeed as […]

Programmatic ad network Rocket Fuel will acquire [x+1], an older ad tech company with a dual demand-side platform (DSP) and data-management platform (DMP) offering. The estimated value of the deal is $230 million. The acquisition brings Rocket Fuel a strong direct-to-advertiser capability – an area where it is seen as lacking and where [x+1] has strength through client relationships with […]

Media and audience measurement company comScore reported on Tuesday a 14.5% YoY revenue increase for Q2 2014 to $80 million, up from $69.9 million last year. Although comScore renewed its preferred strategic partner deals with agency GroupM and consumer packaged goods company P&G for audience delivery measurement, the company recognizes there is room for improvement […]

After a $25 million Series E injection, mobile ad exchange Smaato — a play on the word “smart” in Japanese — plans to focus on mobile acquisition and building out the self-service side of its automation platform. Smaato began rolling out its self-serve functionality about a year and a half ago. “Too many players are […]

Popular audio-recognition app Shazam, which has amassed 475 million users to date, set its sights on TV Tuesday with the release of a network sales platform called Resonate. Initial launch partners include: A&E, AMC, FUSE and dick clark productions. Kevin McGurn, the company’s chief revenue officer and former SVP of sales for Hulu, said television […]

“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 Terri Walter, chief marketing officer at PubMatic. If you hang out with publishers and others in the media business long enough, you’re going to hear one question come up for discussion […]

You can’t blame Acxiom for trying, but the data management firm still has a ways to go before it achieves its goal of becoming the data management company to end all data management companies. Revenue for the first quarter of 2015 (Acxiom’s fiscal year ends in March) was $242.2 million, down roughly 6% year-over-year from $257.2 […]

Digital media measurement company comScore revealed a deal Monday to acquire MdotLabs, a cyber-security startup that uses statistics and machine-learning to fight online fraud. Non-human traffic, click-farms and other “invalid activity” represent a $14 billion assault on the advertising industry and have spurred deals in online fraud detection, most notably Google’s acqui-hire of Spider.io earlier this […]

Content recommendation engine Taboola has acquired Perfect Market, which develops a publisher-side solution designed to improve engagement, driving traffic, and monetization. Taboola CEO Adam Singolda wouldn’t disclose the deal’s terms, though he said it was a mix of cash and stock. With the acquisition, Taboola will change from being a content discovery engine to being […]

It’s hard to bucket Ooyala. The seven-year-old company, which already dabbles in both video monetization and digital content management, wants to be for TV “what Cisco is to network computing.” While Ooyala’s a full-service consultancy that helps traditional networks migrate to the cloud, it also has a software business. The Ooyala Platform hooks up to […]

This is the first in a series of interviews with vendors combating the problem of ad fraud. Other companies participating in this series include White Ops, DoubleVerify, Forensiq, Moat, PubChecker, Telemetry and Integral Ad Science. Videology might not be specialists in ad fraud like White Ops or Integral Ad Science, but preventing and detecting it […]

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner confirmed the social network wants to enable customers to prospect and nurture leads well beyond its own walled garden during the company’s Q2 call Thursday, though he stopped short of calling it an ad network. “As big a network as LinkedIn is – and they’re adding exponential numbers of people everyday […]

Inventory is where it’s at for RockYou. The company, which recently pivoted away from game publishing to focus on becoming a programmatic in-game video ad network, has raised $10 million in funding from FastPay, a sort of anti-VC that extends credit lines to digital media companies. It plans to use the money to buy up […]

Earlier this month, Upworthy – a curator of socially-conscious content – revealed native content was outperforming editorial content. The data was striking: Branded content received 3.5 times as many views, 2.9 times more “Attention Minutes” (an Upworthy-developed metric) and three times as many social shares compared to its in-house editorial content. All this for a […]

Updated with additional comment from SpotXchange CEO Mike Shehan and RTL. European entertainment network RTL Group announced Thursday it will acquire a 65% stake worth $144 million in video supply-side platform and programmatic marketplace SpotXchange. Depending on the performance of the company, RTL could acquire additional stake in the company through the terms of an earn-out […]

Memo to marketing industry observers waiting for ad tech to merge with marketing tech: It’s probably safe to go make popcorn, as this could take a while. It’s been a year since Salesforce.com acquired ExactTarget. On Thursday, the company hosted a press event in San Francisco to commemorate the deal’s anniversary, using the occasion to […]

Like many publishers, The Washington Post’s Kelly Andresen grapples with success metrics for native advertising campaigns. As director of ad innovations and product strategy, she has a front-row seat on her publication’s digital evolution and oversees teams that are dedicated to creating new digital advertising revenue, including native. “When you move into content marketing, it’s […]

Rubicon Project posted a Q2 revenue YoY increase of 49%, for a total of $28.3 million. Managed revenue was $153.5 million, an increase of 36% from the same period last year. RTB managed revenue grew 75% YoY. Rubicon lost more money than last year, however, with a net loss of $9.4 million, compared to $2.1 […]

Amazon’s enterprise self-serve ads platform, designed for agencies and brands, is intended as a programmatic complement rather than a replacement for direct-sold inventory. Publicis agency VivaKi is the first and only agency Amazon Media Group is working with at present for the self-serve platform rollout. Over the last three years, Amazon has spoken with agency […]

This is part of a series on companies advancing programmatic buying in Russia. Read our recent Q&As with Yandex, ADFOX, AiData, HubRus and Between Digital. Even with a growing Russian programmatic market, RuTarget’s founder and CEO Eugene Legkiy claims its greatest competition comes from without – from global players like IPONWEB, OpenX and AppNexus. Global companies trying to make […]

ChoiceStream, which began as a product recommendation engine before three years ago shifting to programmatic ad tech, has raised $7.5 million in Series B financing from Fred Alger Management. The financing will help ChoiceStream grow out its sales capabilities, with the remainder going toward the build-out of its demand-side platform (DSP)  technology. CEO Eric Bosco […]

You don’t have to be good at math to know that if you only get $3 back on a $4 investment, then there’s something painfully wrong with whatever you’re doing. No one’s more aware of that than game app developers, some of whom spend thousands of dollars on user acquisition daily — though the truly […]

Ecommerce giant Amazon on Thursday reported Q2 revenue of $19.3 billion, up 24% from $15.7 billion last year. Amazon buckets ad revenues in an “other” category ($1.2 billion for Q2, a YoY 38% increase from $844 million), which includes Amazon Web Services (AWS) and branded credit cards. One of the biggest focuses for Amazon in […]

Multiscreen tracking company Crosswise, which on Thursday launched its cross-device identification solution, doesn’t care about buying media. It doesn’t care about creating segments. Basically, Crosswise CEO and co-founder Steve Glanz doesn’t care if you’re a man or a woman, how old you are or where you live — at least not as isolated data points. […]