Technology

A Wednesday hearing held by the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation about the operations of so-called “data brokers” highlighted the disconnect between data marketers and consumer advocates. The hearing followed the release of a report detailing the findings of a yearlong investigation into data marketers. The core disagreement revolves around the extent to which businesses […]

A growing number of ad exchanges, trading desks, DSPs and agencies are emerging to occupy the Chinese programmatic market. AdChina, an advertising-technology company for both the supply and demand side, has been around since 2007 and its CEO, Alan Yan, has seen how the Chinese marketplace has evolved in recent years. “Our original goal, when […]

As major publishers adopt programmatic methods to boost efficiency and cost-savings, one thing keeps them from putting more valuable inventory up for bid: The perceived lack of transparency in pricing. Consequently, an Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) task force made up of publishers has been working on guidelines to clear up the fees and better define […]

Social advertising has become table stakes for multiplatform marketers. On the vendor side, the emerging leaders providing social-ad technologies share a few key commonalities to meet that demand, according to an inaugural Forrester Wave: Social Advertising Platforms report released Tuesday. In a series of interviews with 21 digital marketers, Forrester Research found the average amount […]

Yahoo is making an unspecified portion of its reserved inventory available to demand-side platforms (DSPs), months after display rivals like AOL pledged to put its guaranteed placements on exchanges. Read the release. When Yahoo acquired ad exchange pioneer Right Media six years ago for $680 million, the portal was seen as taking steps far beyond […]

WPP Group’s digital and direct marketing agency Wunderman and its media-buying agency MEC have launched a joint venture called CHOREOGRAPH to address converging client demands in paid, earned and owned media. The proliferation of cross-channel marketing campaigns and the subsequent need to marry transactional, customer and demographic data with audience-level information drove CHOREOGRAPH’s creation. “Over […]

Late last year, we asked a handful of senior execs at platform companies to answer the question, “What will happen next year in marketing and advertising that hasn’t happened before?” This year we invited some of those same contributors to evaluate their earlier forecasts and update them for 2014. The below is from Mark Grether, chief […]

As the programmatic and real-time bidding (RTB) market in the Asia-Pacific region heats up, local inventory is starting to prove its worth and attract interest from advertisers. Demand-side platform (DSP) Brandscreen released its second Real Time Media Insights Report Monday, highlighting the battle between global and local inventories. “The trends that continued from the previous […]

Adobe Systems attributed $316 million of revenue in Q4 to its six-product suite, Adobe Marketing Cloud, a 38% year-over-year increase. Adobe Marketing Cloud, which includes Adobe Analytics, Adobe Social, Adobe Target, Adobe Media Optimizer, Adobe Campaign and Adobe Experience Manager, “continues to do exceedingly well,” said Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen during the Q4 earnings call […]

As enterprise technology companies race to make their respective suites the digital marketer’s platform of choice, building or acquiring to fill product portfolio holes becomes near protocol. Global German software giant SAP, which recorded $5.4 billion in revenue last quarter, is no different – the company’s been active on the commerce (Hybris) and advanced analytics […]

Last year we asked a handful of senior execs at platform companies to answer the question, “What will happen next year in marketing and advertising that hasn’t happened before?” This year we invited some of those contributors to evaluate their earlier forecasts and update them for 2014. The below is from Michael Lazerow, chief marketing […]

Advertising technology company Simpli.fi has raised $16 million in a Series B growth round led by private equity firm Frontier Capital with participation from Contour Venture Partners. Prior to the Series B round, the company had raised $4 million since its founding in 2010, bringing its financing total to $20 million after operating at a […]

Media-buying workflow software provider Mediaocean is opening an “app platform,” designed to streamline and customize the ad sales process across both digital and traditional channels, like broadcast. The Connect Partner Platform is akin to the open APIs that Facebook and Twitter offer to their preferred partners. While the Connect Partner Platform is designed to close […]

You can’t throw a 23-year-old media buyer without hitting a software “cloud.” One of the precocious contenders in this bunch, social-centric SHIFT, has raised $6 million to support an expansion of its Open Marketing Cloud into Europe. The investment, led by DN Capital, brings its total financing to $14 million. The company’s 29-year-old CEO, James […]

Founded in 2004, Cranston, RI-based jewelry brand Alex and Ani scored a spot on Inc. 500’s fastest-growing brands in America list in 2012 and continues to garner a fashion-forward fanbase for its popular charms and bangles. Alex and Ani also has a division, Affinity, that builds corporate partnerships, through which the company sells licensed merchandise […]

The belief that cookies don’t work on handhelds or tablets, requiring an alternative tracking mechanism, oversimplifies the complex problem of mobile tracking. While advertisers cannot use third-party cookies to track mobile users the same way they would a desktop user, cookies can indeed be applied to an extent in a mobile environment. And while many […]

WPP Group’s 24/7 Media – which will soon be absorbed into Xaxis – has acquired 12-year-old semantic ad-tech company Crystal Semantics and its 15 employees from previous owner Ad Pepper Media. London-based Crystal’s technology can be applied a few ways, said Rob Schneider, 24/7 Media’s SVP of corporate strategy and platform development. First, it offers straightforward […]

Just over two months ago, UK-based news outlet The Guardian unveiled the biggest step it has taken after four years of operating in the programmatic space: it opened its own publisher-side “trading desk.” Read the release. Created with help from MediaMath, The Guardian’s trading desk GuardianResponse+ will augment the news company’s existing programmatic tools, including its […]

Location-based technology has come a long way from geofences. As mobile usage grows, location data has become more granular, providing marketers with greater opportunities to fine-tune their messages—but it has also created more complications. Apple, for example, switched on its iBeacon technology on Friday to send customers’ tailored messages depending on their exact location in […]

Both agencies and ad partners draw comparisons between Twitter’s launch on Thursday of retargeting product Tailored Audiences and Facebook Exchange (FBX). Just how technically similar they are remains to be seen, but the industry is buzzing about the ad product’s cross-channel targeting potential. We asked some Tailored Audience partners, media agencies and a beta tester to […]

“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, CEO at The Trade Desk. Mozilla is no longer out alone calling for the end of third-party cookies; others such as Google and Microsoft have joined the fray in […]

After beta-testing retargeting capabilities back in July, Twitter rolled out Tailored Audiences globally Thursday. The offering includes website retargeting along with third-party audience segments, supported by an eclectic crew of ad partners. Advertisers can now “reach users on Twitter who have shown interest in your brand or category even away from Twitter,” wrote Twitter product manager Abhishek […]

Although Amazon has kept fairly quiet about its ad-services pitch to media buyers, analysts believe that marketing services will be a driving force in what sustains and propels the ecommerce giant in the years to come. “Amazon has to push into new areas,” writes David Farnoush, a media analyst for Harmelin Media, in a blog […]

One must forgive Scott Howe, CEO of big data solutions provider Acxiom, for gushing a little. “I’m kinda preaching here but I feel passionate about this, because I’m an agency guy, but I think the days of the silver bullet are done,” he told AdExchanger. He’s referring to advertising and marketing messages that adhere to […]

Back in August, San Francisco-based LiveRamp released GetOnboard, a CRM “data onboarding” software system designed to bridge the gap between marketers’ customer data and their online marketing efforts. By prepping massive amounts of data for every possible marketing service and destination, and by doing it quickly, GetOnboard has been selected by more than 200 customers […]

In 2007, that WPP Group made big waves with its acquisition of display media technology firm 24/7 Media, worth $649 million. By bringing a publisher-facing ad server and network in-house, the holding company had staked out a tech ownership strategy that continues today. Today that premise lives on at WPP, but the 24/7 Media brand does […]

French retargeting firm Criteo announced on Tuesday the launch of a mobile Web tracking solution designed to let marketers deliver targeted ads to consumers across mobile browsers. Criteo’s mobile Web solution (the company has said it is still in the process of developing a branded name for the product) allows marketers to serve personalized ads […]

With mobile accounting for more than 39.7% of all online traffic this Thanksgiving weekend – a 34% increase from Black Friday 2012, according to IBM’s Digital Analytics Benchmark – marketer investment naturally followed that growth curve. The mobile momentum continued Cyber Monday with IBM reporting that smartphones and tablets drove 30% of all online traffic […]

Enterprise software companies are racing to soak up marketers’ budgets by building out their marketing suites with acquisitions, partnerships and new products. Those players include Adobe, Salesforce.com, Oracle and IBM. As the year comes to a close, here’s a snapshot look at these companies’ marketing stacks and some of the gaps that each company has […]

Traffic accidents are more orderly than the backend of most websites. At any given moment, a multitude of information fires off a page — information about who a visitor is, where she came from, her operating system or device profile, which ads are being served up, which videos are being played, etc. This has created […]