Technology

The repercussions of cable heavyweight Comcast’s planned acquisitions of Time Warner Cable and video ad-serving platform FreeWheel are still unknown. One of the biggest questions for ad industry insiders is the extent to which the preexisting relationship between Amazon and FreeWheel, announced in early February, will continue. Although neither Amazon nor FreeWheel have confirmed whether […]

Microsoft has added new ad formats to Skype’s “connection hub,” the screen users see before and after placing calls and while instant messaging each other. The new placements are a logical way to boost Skype’s monetization. The company hopes connection hub ads will generate an at least 20 billion additional impressions per month for advertisers. […]

The term “programmatic” is contentious even among its faithful adherents. Not only does it inadequately describe a range of ad-buying activities, it also implies that everything is done automatically, as if robots are replacing a human sales staff. But a panel during the Premium Programmatic 360 summit (presented by Sonobi and MediaMath) held Wednesday in […]

Traditional radio as a hotbed for ad tech? Well, not really – or at all – but this is precisely the problem Jelli co-founder and CEO Mike Dougherty recognized when his company launched on Wednesday a platform, called RadioSpot, designed to enable programmatic buying for radio advertising. “Radio is a little more simple [than digital […]

Israel-based performance network Matomy on Monday signaled its intent to go public in a letter filed with the London Stock Exchange. As we noted earlier, the company aims to raise $100 million at a valuation of around $400 million. The filing also revealed Matomy has 388 employees, and more than 1,500 clients. Matomy’s business is […]

Although Google is the $4 billion darling of the US display ad space, players like AOL, Amazon and Facebook are closing in on that share. Most noticeably, Facebook, which for the first time last quarter served more ad impressions on mobile devices than on the desktop, experienced a 50.5% increase in US digital display ad […]

Add another vendor to the Marketing Cloud fray. Teradata on Tuesday updated its marketing products, revealed a partnership with Urban Airship and officially began calling its stack the “Integrated Marketing Cloud.” Teradata isn’t a newcomer in the field of marketing tech. The company’s VP of marketing, Wes Moore, emphasized the company has been providing marketing […]

When The New York Times discontinued in February its director of programmatic advertising position, held by Matt Prohaska, partners and advertisers wondered how this would affect the publisher’s programmatic initiatives. Certainly the Times sought to alter its structure, saying in a statement it was “re-imagining and growing [its] programmatic organization and strategy with a focus […]

The conventional wisdom on ad tech margins is that lucrative markups naturally compress over time due to a variety of factors, including competition for media impressions, which drives up the cost of impressions. But some companies, most notably Rocket Fuel, seem to have defied that logic. The programmatic ad platform, which went public last fall, […]

Comcast’s acquisition Thursday of video ad serving platform FreeWheel generated numerous questions, the most common being: What does this mean for the future of Pay TV and digital video ecosystem? Beyond anticipating the convergence of linear TV and digital video ad dollars, there’s still tremendous fragmentation between the worlds of the television operator and programmer, […]

Barely two weeks after basking in the glow of its BlueKai buy, enterprise software giant Oracle is at it again – this time debuting an open paid media partner API program for Oracle Social Cloud. One of the many questions arising from the BlueKai deal (as well as other Oracle Marketing Cloud acquisitions including Responsys, […]

Of the three legacy data-marketing services companies, Epsilon has been the quietest in media and advertising services. By contrast, its competitor Acxiom has rumbled along with its data-management platform (DMP) product, Audience Operating System, and its flashy partnership with Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG). Experian Marketing Services recently incorporated its AdTruth product into its marketing tech […]

Comcast will acquire video ad-serving platform FreeWheel, the companies confirmed Thursday. The development comes just weeks after the cable giant made public its intent to acquire Time Warner Cable for $42.5 billion. TechCrunch first reported the news, and Re/code confirmed Thursday it’s a done deal and pegged its value at approximately $360 million. That’s roughly in line with […]

Native advertising technology startup TripleLift has raised a $4 million Series A round led by True Ventures. The investment, made three months ago, has gone toward building out the company’s RTB-based native ad exchange. New York-based TripleLift’s CEO, Eric Berry, said the money has supported hires in engineering, sales and business development. In addition to […]

Lotame, known for its data management platform (DMP), has received a $15 million injection in Series D funding, led by Sozo Ventures and TrueBridge Capital Partners. This brings Lotame’s total funds raised to $44 million. These new funds, said CEO Andy Monfried, will be used to enhance the platform’s technology and expand globally, particularly in […]

An updated S-1 from IPO aspirant Rubicon Project shows the sell-side platform’s revenue grew 47 percent in 2013, to $83.8 million for the full year. In its earlier filing, submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last month, the company disclosed revenues only up to the third quarter of 2013. The new document […]

Marketing automation platform Silverpop’s recent push into revenue analytics for B2B marketers culminated Tuesday in the launch of Marketing Automation for Ecommerce. The product addresses a multitude of B2C needs, at the core of which is the ability to tie email to revenue. The problem with attributing email to purchase activity is that a customer […]

Consulting activity around marketing technology continues to gain steam, with interest coming both from small boutique firms such as Unbound Company and Freestyle Consulting (both established by former Mediabrands executives) and large established advisory companies such as Deloitte and Accenture. The latest company to join the fray is Concept Corridor, a one-man consulting play founded […]

Much of the debate about the convergence of digital video and TV advertising has centered on budget and measurement. Members of the advertising industry have wondered whether digital video would cannibalize TV ad dollars and to what extent the right metrics are in place to effectively execute cross-platform video buys. A report from Nielsen and […]

Google’s publisher business is on a tear. Last week it struck two private exchange deals with Time Inc. and the 42-member Local Media Consortium. Google will support programmatic direct sales for these sellers and provide wider access to their quality inventory for global media traders such as trading desks at Publicis Groupe’s Vivaki AOD or […]

Palo Alto and Paris-based startup Ifeelgoods is betting consumers will gravitate toward personalized offers over traditional loyalty concepts like deep discounts. The digital rewards network founded in 2010 has launched a Personalized Offers Platform for marketers and established a strategic partnership with VivaKi for an initial rollout to Publicis Groupe agencies Razorfish, Digitas and Performics. […]

“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. Digital advertising moves quickly — sometimes too quickly. The market and technology has evolved significantly over the past five years to drive the […]

You could say digital entrepreneurship runs in the family. Zach James cofounded Movieclips.com in 2009 before embarking on his latest venture into video with Zefr, which helps brands and networks manage and monetize their YouTube video assets. James is also the brother of Josh James, founder of Omniture (which was sold to Adobe Systems for […]

Salesforce.com reported 37% revenue growth in Q4, to $1.15 billion, driven in part by the $2.5 billion July 2013 acquisition of ExactTarget. Its full year revenue was $4.07 billion, up 33% year-over-year. ExactTarget is the lynchpin of ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, which competes with analogous stacks fielded by Adobe and Oracle. Specifically, ExactTarget contributed $96 million in […]

Mobile demand-side platform (DSP) Tapad has hired Ben Regensburger, the former president of the DoubleClick ad exchange in EMEA and APAC before its acquisition by Google. Regensburger will serve as president of Tapad Europe. He joins Jim Clark, formerly of Turn, whom Tapad brought on this month to lead media and programmatic ad sales, as well […]

Time Inc. has set up a private exchange with inventory from its global properties, supported by Google technology. The new, expanded marketplace – called Time Inc. Global Exchange – is built on Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange and spans some 116 million global unique users (per comScore). Advertisers and marketers can use it to reach audiences across […]

Demand-side platform The Trade Desk has received $20 million in Series B funding led by Hermes Growth Partners. The Ventura, Calif.-based company told AdExchanger the move was a natural response to growth in demand for programmatic platforms globally. “We made a strategic decision that we wanted to take in more capital,” CEO Jeff Green said, […]

OpenX Technologies on Wednesday rolled out a mobile native ad exchange called Native O/X. The “native” ad formats include in-stream display, rich media and video ad units that are inserted into an app’s content. OpenX’s launch partners for the exchange include IconApps, Tagged, Run, Mediasmart and Celtra. Presenting ads in a format that matches the […]

Zumobi, a Seattle-based mobile media and advertising technology company that supplies integrated app content to brands and publishers, launched Wednesday the Zumobi Brand Integration Platform for Marketers. Zumobi operates premium mobile app network The Zumobi Network and has worked with publishing partners like Hearst Digital Media and MSN to monetize its mobile apps through its […]

Russian search engine Yandex and Google have agreed to give their respective advertisers mutual access to the real-time bidding (RTB) ad exchanges. Under the agreement, Google’s clients will have access to the advertising inventory offered by publishers in Yandex’s Advertising Network (YAN), while Yandex’s clients will be able to bid on display ads on Google’s DoubleClick Ad […]