Technology

Complex attribution remains a work in progress for retailers, and most still rely on last-click attribution models, according to Forrester Research and Shop.org’s State of Retailing Online 2014 study. The survey found “attribution modeling is very early and very imprecise,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, Forrester analyst and author of the report. Part of the problem is […]

LinkedIn will buy Bizo, a B2B display ad platform, for $175 million in cash and stock, the companies said Tuesday. “It’s exciting for us to bring Bizo’s expertise and technology into our ecosystem,” said Deep Nishar, LinkedIn’s SVP of product and user experience, in a statement. “Our ability to integrate their B2B solutions with our content marketing […]

When Oracle acquired data technology and services company BlueKai in February, the product roadmap seemed to split. Down one avenue, BlueKai’s data-management platform (DMP) would plug a hole in the company’s Oracle Marketing Cloud stack. The second avenue circles BlueKai’s vaunted data exchange, Audience Data Marketplace. Marketing Cloud SVP and GM Kevin Akeroyd was the […]

Quantifind, whose technology is designed to find relevant marketing signals amid the noise of unstructured data, has raised $12 million in a strategic growth round led by Comcast Ventures and Iris Capital. The company had raised about $10.5 million in the last eight months, according to cofounder and CEO Ari Tuchman, although this does not […]

It’s hard times for late stage advertising technology companies. Many public and private investors are gloomy on ad tech, and older startups needing new funds lately find themselves forced to choose between unattractive options, such as going public or raising money at a lower valuation, a painful event sometimes referred to as a “down round.” […]

Just a week after Yahoo’s Q2 earnings call, in which CEO Marissa Mayer said she was looking to position Yahoo as a “mobile-first company,” the M&A bug has hit again: Yahoo is acquiring mobile analytics platform and ad marketplace Flurry. Publishers sell their ad inventory through Flurry’s platform or buy traffic from applications, which also provides analytics to […]

Native advertising doesn’t fit into a 300×250 box. But as the category has taken off, so has the need to gather meaningful metrics in a manner similar to standardized display advertising. So when mobile-centric publisher Quartz developed a special native ad campaign for US Trust touting the bank’s sponsorship of the Aspen Ideas Festival, it […]

Whether or not you think native advertising is all buzz and no bite, one thing is clear: Banner ads have a less than a 1% click-through rate, which means many brand advertisers are on the lookout for a new solution. Retailer Old Navy, whose predominantly teen audience would most certainly roll its collective eyes at a performance-based […]

Following an injection of $15 million in Series B funding, app monetization platform and mobile SSP Supersonic has its eye on the East. The company, which changed its name from SupersonicAds last week, plans to use the cash to expand into Asia — China, Japan, and India specifically — which Supersonic CEO and cofounder Gil […]

This is part of a series on companies advancing programmatic buying in Russia. Read our recent Q&As with Yandex, ADFOX, AiData and HubRus. Between Digital covers both the buy and sell side in the programmatic space in Russia. Its Between sell-side platform launched in 2012 and its Intensity demand-side platform in 2013, and the company employs approximately 20 people with a headquarters […]

It goes something like this: While scrolling through the latest coverage on Syria, or doing research on a work project, you reach the end of an article, only to be greeted with the latest tabloid news about Kim Kardashian. With its teasing photo and promise of outrageousness, it takes all your willpower to resist. And you […]

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 […]