Technology

Updated with comments from Brett Wilson, TubeMogul’s CEO Video demand-side platform (DSP) TubeMogul ($TUBE) made its NASDAQ debut Friday. While its share price was projected at only the $7 to $8 range – below previous predictions of $10 to $11 – within only an hour of trading, TubeMogul’s share price increased to $9.84. At the top of the hour, the company […]

Nikesh Arora, Google’s SVP and chief business officer, will be leaving the company after a decade, according to the company’s earnings press release. He’ll join Japanese telecommunications and internet company SoftBank, where he’ll be vice chairman of SoftBank Corp. and CEO of SoftBank Internet and Media. Omid Kordestani, a senior adviser to the CEO and one of […]

Triggit, known to many as the “Facebook-only” retargeting firm, is taking on native ads outside the Facebook platform. The company is courting publishers with the promise to support their native advertising formats and bring the kind of in-stream ad experiences it has run in Facebook’s news feed over the past year to a wider range […]

Kevin Akeroyd, SVP and GM of the Oracle Marketing Cloud, warned a crowd of 1,500 marketers Wednesday to “beware false marketing clouds.” All jokes aside, Akeroyd did not mince words about competitors’ perceived strengths at the Oracle Marketing Cloud Interact 2014 event in San Francisco. “It’s not just web analytics and it’s not going to come […]

Video demand-side platform TubeMogul priced the shares for its public offering Thursday, and the target price is significantly lower than the $11 to $13 per share the company previously specified. The company now expects to debut shares at a rock-bottom $7.00 to $8.00, according to an updated S-1. The company had previously hoped to raise $93 million, […]

Publishers using DoubleClick platforms will no longer have to rely on agencies to learn if their ads are viewable or not. Google has made its viewability product, Active View, available for publishers in addition to advertisers and agencies. “We’ve been hearing from publishers that discussions about viewable impressions with advertisers lack transparency making it difficult […]

Are you a technology or retail company? If so, you’ve probably got a bigger problem with ad fraud than your CPG or telco counterparts, at least according to Integral Ad Science’s Q2 2014 Industry Report, which includes information from the ad tech companies, exchanges and agencies it works with. So why are verticals like technology […]

“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 Jeff Green, founder and CEO at The Trade Desk. While I joined my fellow Americans in catching World Cup fever, I couldn’t help but lose some steam after the US […]

A recent article by New York Times media columnist David Carr revealed a radical publishing technology catching on in news media companies everywhere: email newsletters. Carr wrote that email is a marketing tool many people tend to forget about. But, he argued, email is the most consistent and useful medium for advertising. Email and search drive […]

There’s a digital ad fraud outbreak – one that gobbles up roughly $14 billion in advertising spend and between 25 and 50% of ad spend per campaign. White Ops CEO and cofounder Michael Tiffany likens the landscape to a cholera outbreak. Bots cause their devastation in a certain corner of the web and move on. White […]

This is part of a series on companies advancing programmatic buying in Russia. Read our recent Q&As with Yandex, ADFOX and AiData. Many international DSPs follow and learn from companies in more mature programmatic markets. But the team behind HubRus, a Moscow-based DSP founded in 2012, admits that the decision to introduce a local DSP […]

Walmart’s widely revered as a retail maven, but media buyer? It’s a brand-new capability for the $473-billion company, which on Friday revealed more details about the digital marketing platform it’s developed, the Walmart Exchange (WMX). Like Amazon, which has turned massive amounts of shopper data into monetization opportunities for brands via Amazon Media Group’s demand-side […]

Video ad platform BrightRoll is looking long-term. In the words of Tod Sacerdoti, its founder and CEO, “we’ve been focused on building an alternative stack to Google for a long time.” And BrightRoll’s got just the man to do it. Barely a day after it brought on DoubleClick vet Bruce Falck as COO to scale […]

If you want user consumption and engagement data, look no further than the World Cup. You’ve got tweets, likes, shares, traffic, comments — take your pick. Mobile traffic spiked significantly in Q2 2014, according to a report from mobile ad platform Opera Mediaworks, with football-related sites and apps seeing particularly high levels of engagement in […]

The SundaySky has shifted. Since the video ad company launched its SmartVideo platform in 2011, it has ramped up its focus on personalized ads and video content. It’s an evolution for a company whose platform was first used by brands like AT&T to create videos for customer messaging. SundaySky has raised $40 million in funding to date from investors […]

“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 Jean-Baptiste Rudelle, CEO and co-founder at Criteo. Return on investment (ROI) is the only thing that matters for an advertiser: How much return am I really getting for my money? […]

Amazon’s not lifting its foot off the gas pedal in the drive for more developer ad dollars. After revealing the Fire Phone only weeks ago, the ecommerce company tried to incent new app creation via a two-month promotion offering $6 CPMs on the Amazon Mobile Ad Network. The company is also making a European push, […]

Remember the scene in the movie “Kill Bill, Vol. 2“ where the vengeful heroine, the Bride, is buried alive in a coffin and has to pound her way out with her bare fists? That’s your video ad. It’s essentially trapped in a box and buried in the publisher’s web page, and whether it can get out […]

Missing in the Media Rating Council’s (MRC) definition of in-browser video viewability (50% in view, playing for two consecutive seconds) is any stipulation around audibility. This isn’t an oversight – the MRC chose not to institute an audibility requirement because the technology doesn’t exist to determine muting in all instances, said David Gunzerath, SVP and […]

Facebook’s purchase of video supply-side platform (SSP) LiveRail for $500 million underpins its deeper foray into video advertising and positions the social network as a major force in premium publisher monetization. While some experts argue the purchase is a direct response to Google’s recent launch of its programmatic video marketplace Google Partner Select, the sum […]

This is the third in a series on companies advancing programmatic buying in Russia. Read our recent Q&As with Yandex and ADFOX.  As programmatic buying starts to take off in certain countries, finding and analyzing audience data can be a major challenge to getting it off the ground. In Russia, at least one company has been tackling this […]

When Adobe Systems acquired French cross-channel campaign management company Neolane last summer for $600 million, it gained the ability to manage customer data at scale. Stephan Dietrich, cofounder of Neolane and now VP Americas for Adobe Campaign, one of six products that comprise the Adobe Marketing Cloud stack, said one of the drivers for joining […]

Want to see a marketer rip out her hair? Ask her to begin identifying consumers across devices. It’s not an easy thing to do, but vendors have been building tools to help. When Experian Marketing Services acquired 41st Parameter last October, it also got the latter’s subsidiary, AdTruth. AdTruth’s core product is the AdTruth ID, […]

Updated 7/2/14, 3:22 p.m. For the second time in less than a year, CRM and database marketing agency Merkle is on the acquisition prowl. This time, it gobbled up RKG, an agency that provides paid search, social marketing and comparison shopping engine services. With the RKG acquisition, Merkle CEO David Williams said the agency is […]

PubMatic had a good spring. The company won top honors in Forrester’s sell-side platform shoot-out, acquired a mobile ad server (Mocean Mobile) and hired up to support its product initiatives around programmatic direct. The macro strategy, according to CEO Rajeev Goel, is to provide a full stack spanning all publisher ad revenue. That means guaranteed […]

Adknowledge has acquired video analytics provider TriVu Media for an undisclosed sum, a move the former hopes will extend its ad targeting capabilities to YouTube advertising. The company is betting the big three sources of video inventory going forward will be native (by which CEO Ben Legg means inventory sold through a transparent network), Facebook […]

The Russian advertising market is one of marked interest for ad tech companies. Certainly Western mainstays like Google are working their way in. But it’s the local players that dominate. Consider Google’s recent partnership with Yandex to expand its inventory offered by Russian publishers. One such local player is ADFOX, a Moscow-based sell-side platform founded in 2005 […]

Danish ad tech provider Adform has released a first-generation data-management platform (DMP) through which its clients can monetize their data and increase yield. “There are a lot of publishers out there that want to monetize their data,” said Adform CMO Martin Stockfleth Larsen. “They’ve sold out inventorywise, but the one area that hasn’t sold out is […]

Before Brazil defeated Croatia at Arena de Sao Paulo to open the 2014 World Cup, the Coca-Cola Co. unfurled across the pitch the fruits of its biggest marketing campaign in its history: a giant mosaic called the “Happiness Flag.” But this campaign, which ended on the soccer field, began online. Activated across 175 countries, the Happiness Flag […]

“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 Eric Berry, co-founder and CEO at TripleLift. Despite being one of the most revered techniques in digital advertising, optimization remains a highly misunderstood concept. While everyone responsible for running a […]