Technology

As he intimated back in 2011, Monetate isn’t just servicing the e-commerce industry with its website optimization technology and analytics, says CEO David Brussin. It’s addressing the individual consumer as well. And yet, in spite of expanding into travel, financial services, and publishing, among other areas, Brussin thinks e-commerce giant Amazon is one of his […]

AdExchanger is in the French Riviera, where some 12,000 people have gathered for the 60th annual Cannes Lions festival of creativity. We’ll have updates throughout the week, and a definitive (!) answer to the question, Can Big Data can play nice with the Big Idea? This morning Adobe hosted a discussion around advertising and trust, […]

Annalect Group, the digital and analytics division of Omnicom Media Group, will use Salesforce.com’s Marketing Cloud to support the social marketing offerings across Omnicom’s agencies, according to the companies. Omnicom already uses various Salesforce.com products such as Radian6 and Social.com. Today’s news highlights the company’s efforts to further “bundle” its work with the cloud software […]

It would be generous to say the attribution puzzle is half-solved. A quarter or an eighth solved is more like it. But the direction is clear. Advertisers are getting better at allocating conversion credit to brand interactions up and down the funnel. Platform companies are helping them, but their efforts can sometimes seem clumsy, calling […]

While it was not mentioned at Apple’s WWDC keynote address earlier this week, the newest version of iOS includes a new privacy feature that pushes more advertisers into adopting its latest user tracking system. After Apple announced nearly two years ago that it was shutting down access to the unique device identifier (UDID), which many […]

“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 Sid Shah, Director of Business Analytics for Advertising Solutions at Adobe. As a technical, data-savvy CMO, you want to make all key strategic decisions based on data and predictive […]

WPP Group’s trading desk Xaxis is known for its proprietary approach to technology. The GroupM unit has incubated numerous ad platforms, a legacy of WPP’s 2007 acquisition of 24/7 Media. It offers these products to clients as an alternative to licensing from vendors. By contrast, trading desk rivals VivaKi AOD (Publicis), Cadreon (IPG), and Accuen (Omnicom) are […]

Google remains on a warpath to drive industry-wide adoption of its ad tech “stack” strategy, positioning integration of past acquisitions as proof it is serving key constituencies. In March, Google called out the integration of Admeld and publisher direct sales. Today at its thinkDoubleClick client advisory board, it will highlight the inclusion of Wildfire (acquired […]

Worldwide advertising revenue for Amazon will reach more than $800 million in 2013, as the company leverages its rich customer data and deals with the challenges of mobile advertising, according to a new forecast from eMarketer. “We’ve been looking at Amazon as a business for a while now, and at this point we felt there […]

Salesforce.com has said it will acquire the digital marketing platform ExactTarget for $2.5 billion, making this the cloud software company’s largest acquisition to date. One driver of the deal was Oracle’s acquisition of marketing automation provider Eloqua last year. At the time, AdExchanger and others speculated that Salesforce.com would snap up ExactTarget or Eloqua competitor […]

When Publicis Groupe launched it five years ago, VivaKi Audience On Demand was among the first holding company trading desks. And Google was its key partner, supporting a great majority of AOD’s ad serving and auction-based display media buying. But those days are over. As of Q1, Google’s DoubleClick Bid Manager (formerly Invite Media) is […]

Apple CEO Tim Cook answered the question “How important is the mobile advertising business for Apple?” at All Things D’s D11 conference earlier this week with the following statement: “We got into mobile advertising because we want developers to make money…It wasn’t about Apple making money.” Cook also noted Apple’s mobile advertising business isn’t “large […]

“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 Eric Picard, CEO at Rare Crowds. For the last few years, Mike Shields over at Adweek has done a great job of calling out bad actors in our space.  He’s […]

For the past year, executives at The New York Times Company speaking on its quarterly earnings calls have singled out a particular challenge for the newspaper publisher’s display ad business: programmatic media buying methods. With this month’s hire of online ad veteran Matt Prohaska as programmatic advertising director, the NYT still regards exchange and automated […]

You know viewability is a big deal when rivals in a given space band together to promote a new open source standard around it. That’s what’s happening in online video as TubeMogul organizes a group of fellow video ad tech vendors including BrightRoll, Innovid, LiveRail and SpotXchange to support OpenVV (or Open VideoView), a viewability […]

Google is giving advertisers and agencies up-to-the-month access to its industry performance benchmarks for display advertising. Called Display Benchmarks, the tool presents aggregated ad performance data that can be filtered according to variables such as click-through rates, ad interaction times, video completion rates, and other metrics.  And it works across ad formats/sizes (including mobile), verticals and […]

Moving beyond smartphones and tablets, Opera Mediaworks introduced AdMarvel, an ad network for internet-connected TVs that brings together an ad exchange, ad serving and ad management functionalities. “A connected TV looks a lot like a tablet computer,” explained Opera Mediaworks CEO Mahi de Silva. “Given our experience in the tablet and smartphone space, as well […]

Email and search continue to drive the most referrals to ecommerce sites, according to Q1 2013 data from website optimization company Monetate. But word-of-mouth through social media does influence purchases, despite a lack of last-click attribution for the channel. After analyzing more than 500 million online shopping experiences, the Ecommerce Quarterly report found conversion rates […]

Mozilla, maker of the Firefox web browser, must fix three areas within its third-party-cookie-blocking patch before it can be rolled out to users, according to Stanford graduate student Jonathan Mayer, who developed the patch. The problematic areas involve “underblocking,” i.e. inadvertently allowing unwanted tracking cookies past Firefox’s cookie blocking patch, Mayer explained in a blog […]

“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 Brian Stempeck, SVP of Strategic Business Development at The Trade Desk. About three times a week, I hear the same question from presidents, media directors or technology directors of […]

Streaming audio player Pandora has increasingly focused on building ad revenues from the local level up but has met with some hurdles in trying to pry ad dollars from the $15 billion terrestrial radio market. This week it struck deals with two media buying and planning software providers, Mediaocean and STRATA , which Pandora hopes […]

Mozilla has postponed activating the third-party blocking feature on its latest browser, Firefox 22, according to an update on its developer page.  The blocking feature has been postponed “to collect data on the effect of blocking some third-party cookies,” according to the blog post. A Mozilla spokesperson provided the following statement: “Mozilla has been actively […]

Five years into the exchange-buying trend, attention tends to focus on what’s broken in agency/network relationships. Black-box algorithms, opaque margins, impression fraud, and a tendency to overpromise and underdeliver have damaged trust in digital ads and the platforms that traffic them. So the story goes. But for many agencies, these concerns are outweighed by the […]

Smartphones – and Apple’s iPhone in particular – may seem ubiquitous in the US (see AdExchanger’s Q1 mobile RTB report). Yet worldwide, Samsung beat out Apple and Android-based smartphone sales in the first quarter 2013, according to Gartner. Gartner found 426 million mobile phones were sold in the first quarter, up 0.7% from Q1 2012. Worldwide smartphone […]

Based in Beijing, China, Redpoint Ventures-backed Domob says that its mobile in-app ad network is booming and well-positioned to take over the Chinese mobile ad market, according to its co-founder and COO Zhang He.  Moreover, the company’s executive team is now in place, plucked from Chinese internet services companies Baidu and Sohu.com among others. But […]

Three years ago, AdExchanger covered FastPay, a startup offering credit lines to digital media companies. Since then, FastPay has raised about $35 million in credit and equity itself, expanded its clientele, and is about to launch a new product. FastPay steps in when an ad network owes money to a publisher but hasn’t yet been […]

Last month, BlueKai signed a deal to build a data management platform for MLB Advanced Media, the interactive business division of Major League Baseball, designed to connect the company’s 30 team websites for advertisers. MLBAM was the fifth publisher BlueKai has added to its client list this year. CEO Omar Tawakol tells AdExchanger that while […]

“Real-time bidding inventory has been lagging because of publishers’ concerns that giving buyers the ability to bid on every single impression will drive their yields down, when in fact it should make them less under-sold. We’re now seeing a change in the supply side where they’re enabling more and more of their inventory to be […]

Aol was able to maintain its hard-won profitability and ad sales gains Q1. But just as Aol was finally able to turn US display around with a decent growth of 6%, the usual powerhouse of third-party network revenues showed signs of slowing down. Read the earnings release. The company’s third-party network revenues growth slowed to […]

ValueClick announced after the stock market closed today that it has seen revenues grow 13% over Q1 2012 to $165.4 million on (GAAP) earnings of $0.34 versus $0.25 from a year ago. Read the release. Aol’s Daily Finance aggregated ValueClick earnings expectations before the release, saying that “the average [Wall Street] estimate for revenue is […]