Technology

Oracle’s deal to acquire Responsys comes with a key question: What will Oracle’s future hold for digital advertisers? When Oracle snapped up Eloqua for $810 million last December, a chain reaction of subsequent purchases followed, from Salesforce.com’s acquisition of ExactTarget to Adobe’s Neolane buy mere months later. As competitors rush to build or acquire digital […]

Although China’s mobile users represent the world’s largest smartphone market (research firm IDC predicts China’s smartphone shipments will exceed 450 million in 2014), numerous challenges constrain non-Asian advertisers’ ability to get a foothold. Still, there’s recourse for advertisers looking to break into the Chinese market, largely in the form of partnerships. Chinese mobile advertising is […]

While publishers generally concede that brand advertisers will pay higher CPMs for “in-view” ads, there’s less acceptance around the different tools, like Nielsen’s Online Campaign Ratings or comScore’s Validated Campaign Ratings (vCE), designed to determine viewability. The big problem is that the viewability solutions have so far tended to focus on the advertisers, leaving publishers […]

Although Amazon and eBay are retail marketplace giants, the companies supply data and sell media placements in very different ways. These differences, reflected in their respective digital go-to-market strategies, trace back to each company’s origin. EBay’s roots in auction-based, consumer-to-consumer (C2C) business give marketers and advertisers a much different value proposition than Amazon’s original B2C […]

Cross-channel marketing software company Responsys has entered into an agreement to be bought by Oracle for a total sum of $1.5 billion, the companies announced Friday. Responsys, which has a customer base of 450 companies, of which many are direct-to-consumer brands like LEGO, Nordstrom, Whole Foods and MetLife, will be integrated into the Oracle Marketing Cloud and […]

Over the past few months, French real-time bidding (RTB) services provider AlephD has expanded work with AppNexus with particular focus on French publishers. Maxime Agostini, AlephD’s CEO, said that despite greater adoption of programmatic methods by advertisers there aren’t many services aimed at the sell side. Although AlephD is already integrated with AppNexus, Agostini said […]

Edit 12/20: Experian’s SVP of government affairs and public policy Tony Hadley (who also testified during the hearing) has written in with his observations. In the wake of Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s (D-WV) hearing on the practices of data marketers, AdExchanger reached out to the three data marketing solutions companies he accused of not complying with […]

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 […]