Technology

Digital marketing attribution is in vogue. AOL will acquire attribution vendor Convertro for approximately $101 million, the company announced Tuesday afternoon. This comes on the heels of Google’s move earlier in the day to snap up competing attribution pure play vendor Adometry for an undisclosed sum. Customers will have access to Convertro in a couple […]

Salesforce.com released Tuesday the Radian6 + Buddy Media Social Studio, indicating new life for a string of social acquisitions the company has made in recent years. “For the first time, you can listen, publish content, and track it through to results all as part of a stack that also includes email, Web, and mobile,” said […]

Google will scoop up Adometry, a marketing attribution firm whose product is designed to assign value to incremental media impressions. Some industry watchers, like research firm Forrester, consider Adometry’s solution superior to Google’s home-grown technology. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Austin, Texas-based Adometry and its approximately 130 employees will eventually be incorporated into the Google Analytics […]

Big box retailer Walmart’s software and technology accelerator @WalmartLabs has acquired Adchemy, the developer of a SaaS platform that essentially makes retail product search smarter. Silicon Valley-based @WalmartLabs, which employs 2,100 people, was founded three years ago as a way to develop and scale technology to tap into online buying patterns of the store’s 245 […]

Since going public in Q4 2013, Criteo has had an easier time signing new advertisers – especially in Europe, where the business environment is more cautious overall and advertisers carefully examine credentials when making vendor selections. In the first quarter of this year, the French ad tech company’s business wins in the EMEA region included […]

Video search engine Blinkx has acquired Lyfe Mobile, a 3-year-old startup that delivers targeted ads based on geographic data and other location-based analytics, in an all-cash transaction, the companies said Tuesday. Based in Santa Monica, Calif., Lyfe Mobile offers audience-targeting features using GPS data combined with other data points such as weather, traffic and population […]

TubeMogul, whose IPO is expected soon, saw revenue from direct users of its demand-side platform (DSP) ramp up dramatically in the first quarter of the year. According to an updated S-1 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, total revenue for Q1 2014 grew to $22 million, 130% more than it made the first three months […]

Google is walking the walk when it comes to promoting YouTube personalities. After hearing from agencies that it was not acting swiftly enough to tout its own programming, the video platform embarked this month on a “massive” TV, print and out-of-home campaign starring several of its high-profile personalities (YouTube calls them creators) that target Millennial […]

Oracle hosted a “launch event” Wednesday to introduce its Marketing Cloud, though the fact that Oracle has a suite is about as newsworthy as the world’s roundness. The enterprise software giant has been using that particular nomenclature since it acquired marketing automation solution Eloqua in December 2012. Oracle’s Marketing Cloud has several components. In addition to Eloqua, there’s social […]

Note: Story updated to point out Forrester analyst Susan Bidel, who authored the report, is a former PubMatic employee. Bidel tells AdExchanger she does not hold equity in the company. Forrester Research‘s Wave reports are harrowing events for tech startups, which find themselves labeled Leaders, Strong Performers, Contenders or – heaven forbid – Risky Bets. And those labels often stick. […]

Paid media has become essential to content marketing, as social media “war rooms” become commonplace and Facebook throttles the organic reach available through Page Posts. In a new report, Forrester Research detailed a range of content marketing offerings, dividing the world into service- and software-based solutions. The report highlighted 15 agencies and 30 technology vendors, rating […]

Rubicon Project went public earlier this month, becoming the fifth ad tech company – give or take – to do so since the IPO door was flung open around this time last year. Since then its stock has had a bumpy ride, but no more so than some others in its class. CEO Frank Addante […]

Content discovery company Outbrain has allegedly flirted with an IPO for well over a year now, with the most recent report claiming a target of around $100 million. CEO Yaron Galai did not comment on a potential IPO, which is expected to materialize in the first half of the year. Instead, he focused his attention […]

Rocket Fuel’s stock closed at $31.04 Friday, near its lowest point since the ad tech company went public six months ago. The sell-off comes after a group of more than seven investors and senior executives cashed out to the tune of more than $150 million, as reported by InsiderTradingWire. Those transactions, which earned more than $14 […]

RockYou is clawing its way back. The 8-year-old company, which once produced social games, was one of the first MySpace and Facebook third-party app developers until it suffered a major data breach five years ago that exposed unencrypted user account data of more than 32 million users. That wasn’t RockYou’s only struggle. The company couldn’t […]

There are two general methods for targeting consumers as they flit across desktops and devices: match various online log-ins and/or make educated guesses about an identity based on aggregated device characteristics. Many data-focused ad tech companies can do the former; fewer can do the latter as well. MediaMath, through its acquisition Thursday of French cross-device […]

Google’s search engine may eventually reward Web sites that use encryption and if it does, advertisers may find themselves cut off from useful data. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, hinted at the recent SMX West conference hosted by Search Engine Watch editor Danny Sullivan that Google is indeed considering revising its search […]

Facebook’s unveiling last week of a mobile feature called Nearby Friends, through which it might enable location-targeted ads, places the company in a highly competitive segment of tech vendors offering similar products. The company that will develop the best location-targeted ad product, however, is the one that will couple it with the most relevant consumer […]

First Facebook, then Twitter and now Google. The search giant unveiled plans Tuesday to offer app install ads on mobile search and YouTube (where they’ll be presented like TrueView ads), similar to the units that have been a cash cow for Facebook. The company said it plans to launch this new product over the next […]

Marketing M&A deal activity increased 22% year over year, marking one of the highest volume quarters on record, according to new data from mid-market investment bank Berkery Noyes. On a quarterly basis, media and marketing transaction volume increased by 3% from 423 to 434 deals; average deal size also climbed, increasing from $25.1 billion to […]

Four months after first introducing support for native advertising, Twitter’s mobile exchange MoPub is pitching the solution to all publishers. Consisting of an native ads SDK, a publisher-side ad server,  and an RTB extension, the MoPub native product is a “a complete solution for direct sold and exchange traded native ads, delivering the same control […]

Premium publishers have needed some convincing to open up their more valuable inventory to programmatic buying technologies. But interest in tools that streamline the often unwieldy direct sales process has heated up. It’s one of the reasons Yieldex, a company best known for producing forecasting and analytics tools for premium inventory, introduced a new line […]

Despite some volatility in ad pricing and performance last quarter, Adobe Index’s Q1 2014 Social Media Intelligence Report indicates Facebook remains the leader in driving revenue per visit (RPV). Meanwhile other platforms – namely Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest – are in some instances noticing quarterly double-digit declines in RPV. In paid social, Facebook saw a […]

Retargeting platform AdRoll announced a $70 million funding round, led by Foundation Capital. The San Francisco-based company, which had previously raised $19 million, has expanded rapidly since launching in 2007 and become a leader in the retargeting space. AdRoll plans to use the investment to beef up its existing platform for mobile, and expand hiring at […]

Most know Adobe for the company’s Creative and Marketing Cloud offerings, but it’s the company’s end-to-end, “TV Everywhere” platform Adobe Primetime that steals the show with broadcasters and cable operators like NBC Sports and Time Warner Cable. The year-old platform encompasses technology Adobe acquired when it bought video ads platform Auditude in 2011, as well […]

Krux’s co-founders, CEO Tom Chavez and CTO Vivek Vaidya, discuss what the company offers in terms of linking consumers across devices. This is the eighth in AdExchanger’s series on the cross-device question, in which we examine what each DMP can provide in terms of connecting the identities or profiles of consumers across the digital, mobile […]

As programmatic buying continues to grow internationally, one region is catching companies’ eyes: Asia Pacific. But online advertising technology in countries like China is a completely different beast than what many Western ad tech companies are used to. Many players in the ad tech space in China, including the major publishers, are international companies looking […]

Correction 4/17: The product name is Harvest RTG, not Heritage RTG as originally stated. Public service advertising (PSA) agency PlowShare is introducing a programmatic trading desk, Harvest RTG, built by advertising technology provider RUN. The platform is designed to enable non-profits to run PSA’s programmatically, targeting diverse audiences across different screens. Josh Millman, director of digital […]

Google posted a solid quarter, as total revenues for Q1 2014 jumped to $15.42 billion, a 19% increase compared to this time last year. During its earnings call, Google emphasized its ambitions to extend its value as a brand builder and to close the price gap between mobile and desktop display advertising. Google also stated […]

Despite a surge in programmatic buying for mobile ads, a recent Forrester report cautions that challenges unique to mobile advertising make direct sales away from open marketplaces the preferred buying method for the foreseeable future. Based on interviews with 21 industry executives, mobile marketing analyst Jennifer Wise wrote in her report – “Mobile Advertising: It’s Time to […]