Technology

Media-buying platform Rocket Fuel’s growth continued to shoot up in the fourth quarter, driven by – according to CEO George John during the quarterly call – a high customer-retention rate, increased sales productivity and reputation. The company reported gross revenue of $85.6 million in Q4 2013, a 113% increase from the same period last year. […]

Criteo has acquired fellow French email marketing and retargeting company Tedemis for €17 million up front with €4 million deferred (based on mutually agreed upon milestones), further underscoring the importance of email data in ad tech. “Criteo and Tedemis are part of the wave to tie different channels together for a more integrated digital marketing […]

Google has notified some customers of its DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) suite that they will no longer have access to DFP phone support or dedicated account reps. The tweak appears to be the result of a decision to raise the ad serving threshold at which publishers qualify to get managed services. A Google rep said […]

The New York Times, which last May made a move – albeit reluctantly – toward programmatic media selling with the hire of the company’s first director of programmatic advertising, Matt Prohaska, seems to have backtracked. Prohaska’s position, AdExchanger has learned, has been discontinued as of Tuesday afternoon. Prohaska was not available for comment. It is unclear […]

Attention, traditional television media buyers: You may soon be replaced by an algorithm. According to “How Software Is Eating Video Ads And, Soon, TV,” a new report from Forrester, programmatic buying has made serious inroads into the online video ad market. As automation of media buys becomes more common and viewing hours of online video […]

Mobile advertising firm Amobee launched Wednesday a platform update, Amobee LTV (an acronym for “Lifetime Value”), designed to provide app publishers and advertisers insights into who their users are and how they’re using the apps. The release follows Apple’s rejection of apps that derive data from the Identifier For Advertisers (IDFA) without serving ads, a […]

Acxiom CEO Scott Howe discusses what his company offers in terms of linking consumers across devices. This is the final part of an interview series that previously featured John Nardone, CEO of [x+1], Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai, and Bill Demas, CEO of Turn. In terms of cross-device linkage, what do your clients want and […]

A week after teaming up with Google, comScore unveiled Tuesday three new partnerships with data brokers Acxiom and Epsilon and digital media company Batanga Media. While comScore’s collaboration with Google involved adding real-time metrics to its validated Campaign Essentials (vCE) platform via Google’s DoubleClick platform, comScore intends for its latest partnerships to expand its data […]

Enterprise technology providers like Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce.com have engaged over the last four years in a marketing cloud arms race, snapping up point solutions at breakneck speed. Consider that from 2010 to 2013, tech giants cumulatively spent close to $30 billion acquiring marketing solutions. The press releases announcing each of these acquisitions tend to […]

Turn CEO Bill Demas discusses what his company offers in terms of linking consumers across devices. This is a continuation of a series that previously featured John Nardone, CEO of [x+1] and Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. On Wednesday we’ll post an interview on this subject with Scott Howe, CEO of Acxiom. In terms of cross-device […]

For a mobile ad startup, getting kicked off Facebook’s platform is pretty much the worst-case scenario. As reported by AdExchanger last week, this nightmare recently became reality for two companies, HasOffers and Kontagent, who were found to have violated data collection policies and were removed from Facebook’s mobile measurement partner (MMP) program. The rejection of […]

“Marketer’s Note” is a weekly column informing marketers about the rapidly evolving, digital marketing technology ecosystem. It is written by Joanna O’Connell, Director of Research, AdExchanger Research.   I recently spent the morning with a group of senior level marketers who normally spend their time thinking about media – the pricing of it, the technologies required […]

Many app developers and ad tech vendors received a jolt recently when Apple began rejecting some apps that retrieve a user’s Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) without serving an ad. Apple’s decision was especially surprising, since the device manufacturer had allowed that activity for nearly two years. Regardless of Apple’s motivations for this change (the company did […]

Three years ago, eBay rebooted its advertising business after stepping back from a five-year alliance with Yahoo, initially established as a way to offset Google’s growing influence online. “[2011 was] the year we formed a partnership with Triad Retail Media and, earlier that year, we bought WHERE Ads, which became the PayPal Media Network,” said […]

BlueKai CEO Omar Tawakol discusses what his company offers in terms of linking consumers across devices. This is a continuation of a series that previously featured John Nardone, CEO of [x+1]. On Tuesday we’ll post an interview on this subject with Bill Demas, CEO of Turn, and on Wednesday we’ll post an interview with Scott Howe, […]

At Industry Preview 2014, AdExchanger sat down with four CEOs heading companies that fielded strong data-management platform (DMP) offerings. One area of traditional weakness for DMPs for marketers, as noted by then-Forrester analyst (and current AdExchanger research director) Joanna O’Connell, centered around the ability to drive insights from mobile devices. John Nardone, CEO of [x+1], […]

Microsoft is providing more transparency into the inventory on the Microsoft Advertising Exchange. The inventory on the Exchange was previously sold in a “blind” manner using a masked URL. Ad buyers can now target the inventory by its top-level domain name and sub-domains, the company said Friday. “We want to give customers a clearer view […]

Senators John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV (D-WV) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) introduced legislation Wednesday that would require data brokers to be accountable and transparent about the information they collect and sell about consumers, but the direct marketing industry is already pushing back hard. “Consumers deserve to know what information about their personal lives is being […]

By Ryan Joe and Judith Aquino Media and cable conglomerate Comcast Corporation’s $45 billion deal to acquire its peer, Time Warner Cable, could be a boon for the advertising and marketing industry, combining Comcast’s superior digital platforms with Time Warner Cable’s audience reach across major metropolitan markets. “[This will provide] a level of scale and […]

French retargeting company Criteo closed Q4 with revenues of €135.9 million, up 57% from the €86.6 million recorded for the fourth quarter one year prior. The company, which has been rooted in retail and travel retargeting since its start, said last quarter exceeded expectations after it clocked €113.8 million in the third quarter, its first […]

Although the jury is out whether consumers will completely cut the cord on traditional TV consumption and migrate en masse to Web streaming, publishers are preparing for the cross-platform possibilities presented by shifting viewer habits. “We’re moving toward consistent measurement,” commented Sarah Baehr, SVP of digital for independent media buying agency Carat, citing the cross-platform […]

Advertising intelligence provider Integral Ad Science has acquired Simplytics, a UK-based mobile ad server and analytics platform. The deal brings mobile verification capabilities for in-app and mobile Web campaigns to Integral’s existing verification services for video and display ads. “We’re very excited because Simplytics is complementary to what we do and once we add our fraud […]

Update 4:00 ET: In a recently-released blog post, Mozilla VP of content services Darren Herman announced the kick-off of an experimental program called Directory Tiles. Normally, when Firefox users open a new tab, they see tiles featuring images from sites they’d visited in the past. New users with no Firefox surfing history will, upon opening the […]

FreeWheel, a technology and services company cofounded seven years ago by Jonathan Heller, Doug Knopper and Diane Yu, helps media companies like NBCUniversal and Viacom connect TV buyers with premium digital video inventory. It also worked with Amazon to help power video ad content for the ecommerce giant. Knopper, who also serves as FreeWheel’s co-CEO, […]

Google is injecting real-time metrics into its DoubleClick ad business via a partnership with comScore, the Mountain View, Calif., company said Tuesday. On day two of the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting, Neal Mohan, Google’s VP of display advertising, outlined the challenges marketers face in measuring the results of digital ad campaigns. “Existing frameworks don’t do a […]

It’s a tumultuous time for the usually staid ad-tech subsector of sell-side platforms (SSPs). As The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday (registration required), PubMatic will chase direct competitor Rubicon Project into the public markets, seeking a valuation of more than $1 billion. Additionally, PubMatic has replaced its top marketer, Larry Harris, with Razorfish and […]

As ecommerce takes off globally, retargeting technology and demand-side platform (DSP) provider RTB House, which works with brands in 29 markets, is educating international advertisers about programmatic buying and RTB. Programmatic buying and RTB in Europe has benefitted from the increase in ecommerce and the growth of the international fashion industry. RTB House started in 2012 in […]

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) kicked off day one of the Annual Leadership Meeting (ALM) by rallying advertisers to raise the bar on marketing. To do this, however, marketers and advertisers need to be more vigilant around traffic fraud. Additionally, they must also realize that consumer attention spans, especially in mobile, are short. Holding Agencies […]

Location-based marketing technology company MomentFeed is betting big on the hyper-local search and marketing movement. Founded in 2010, the Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) company has raised $3 million in seed funding and recently closed a $6 million Series A round. According to its chairman and CEO Robert Blatt, MomentFeed is “the first company to […]

The distinction between an ad exchange and a supply-side platform (SSP) has become muddled as the once disparate but complementary technologies have merged. Rubicon Project’s description of its offering as an “Advertising Automation Cloud” in its S-1 filed Tuesday underscored that shift and showed how companies originating as SSPs have attempted to shed the label. […]