Technology

Close to a year after Facebook debuted a real-time bidded ad exchange (FBX) and nine months after the release of its Custom Audiences CRM matching product, Twitter has unveiled plans for similar targeting features. But don’t call it “TWX” yet. Senior director of product for revenue Kevin Weil wrote in a blog post that Twitter is […]

Once upon a time, ad agencies were masters of data. Which is to say, research. Before the internet, firms like Leo Burnett and The Martin Agency wielded – and still wield – sizeable research budgets, which they used to uncover demographic opportunities and strategic consumer insights. These insights were turned into big ideas and placed […]

Video-ad tech firm YuMe has filed its S-1 with the SEC in hopes of raising $65 million in the public markets. The filing, expected by industry observers since the start of the year, comes less than a week after rival video-ad company Tremor filed its IPO. Among other video-ad firms in the wings for a […]

Since its inception in 1999, Restaurant.com has helped customers save $1 billion by offering more than 50,000 gift certificate options at dining destinations across the country. Its premise is simple – help diners and restaurants discover one another, and encourage loyalty to local merchants by brokering savings through discounts. Restaurant.com also acts as a stand-in […]

There were 34 “ad tech & services” deals during the first six months of 2013, double the amount during the same period the year before, according to figures complied by technology focused investment bank Coady Diemar Partners. Total value for H1-2013 M&A activity was up 664% with a collective $1.2 billion spent on acquisitions and […]

As the debate over the intersection of consumer privacy and online advertising rages, a recent announcement that browser maker Mozilla would work with Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society to create a “cookie clearinghouse” appears to have poured more fuel on the fire. Debuted by Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich’s blog on June 19, and then reiterated in […]

As Salesforce.com and Oracle CEOs Marc Benioff and Larry Ellison demonstrated last week, what CEOs say in public can rarely be taken at face value. Following a bitter rivalry and lots of name-calling, Oracle and Saleforce.com announced a nine-year partnership to integrate Salesforce.com’s CRM software and Oracle’s cloud-hosted human resources and financial applications. There was […]

Adobe Systems’ $600 million acquisition of cross-channel marketing automation company Neolane begs the question: What is the use case for an advertiser, and how will the platform fit with Adobe’s stack? In the words of Suresh Vittal, Neolane’s chief product officer, Neolane helps solve campaign managers’ need to distribute content to the right audiences based […]

The mega-vendor wars continue. Today, Adobe Systems announced plans to acquire Parisian cross-channel marketing automation player Neolane for $600 million. The move comes weeks after cloud giant Salesforce.com said it would buy email and CRM vendor ExactTarget for $2.5 billion (AdExchanger story), part of a plan to “double down” on its Marketing Cloud strategy in the […]

Tremor Video has officially gone public, giving the company a valuation of $470 million or so based on the latest stock quote and 48.5 million shares outstanding (Amended S-1). In total, the company raised $75 million by selling 7.5 million shares for $10 a piece — below the previous target of $11 to $12 the […]

Video ad players like Tremor, YuMe, BrightRoll and Videology are quickly evolving from their ad network beginnings to serve both buyers and sellers in a unified programmatic marketplace. Adap.tv is one of those working to create a video ad marketplace with an end-to-end tech stack. The premise is to serve the demand side and the […]

Specialty retailers are getting especially good at weighing the value of consumer behavioral targeting, but still have room to grow when it comes to mobile and, surprisingly, email strategies. According to L2’s newly released Digital IQ Index for Specialty Retail, more than half of specialty retailers are engaged in Facebook advertising, with “the majority of […]

“Paths to purchase are not linear or rational.  The planning of the trip is not the journey. And the customers’ starting point is often not where we believe the starting point is. The funnel has morphed into a journey map. The question is, ‘How do we organize around this journey to support people along the […]

Last week in Cannes, global leaders from the five biggest holding company trading desks convened for a panel discussion hosted by the Rubicon Project. The event took place on a rooftop against the backdrop of the Mediterranean Sea, while on the sidewalk below creatives scurried between beach parties and celeb-packed sessions at the Palais des […]

Disagreements continue between the advertising industry and privacy advocates as advertisers point to potential weaknesses in the “Cookie Clearinghouse” project that Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser, and the Stanford Center for Internet and Society’s have unveiled. The Cookie Clearinghouse promises to create two lists of domains: one for those that browsers would permit to […]

After stints running TV media sales software INVISION and heading corporate development for ad exchange operator AppNexus, former AOL executive Lynda Clarizio is joining investment bank Berenson & Co. to help expand its digital media dealmaking portfolio. Read the release. The post puts Clarizio on the other side of the M&A table from her early […]

WPP Group digital agency Possible hopes to bulk up its targeting and performance-based advertising abilities to bridge earned and paid media channels by partnering with Google’s social technology tool, Wildfire. Read the release. Jason Burby, Possible’s chief performance marketing officer, cited Wildfire’s recent integrations with Google Analytics and DoubleClick as the chief reasons the agency […]

Web publishers using Google’s AdSense program will get new ad formats and better tools for optimizing ads on their sites in coming months and years, Google’s ad chief promised Monday. Susan Wojcicki, Google’s senior vice president of advertising and commerce, hinted at the improvements during a live video Google Hangout on Tuesday celebrating the official […]

It’s been a little more than a year since Kepler Group was spun off (see AdExchanger’s Q&A) from MediaMath, where it had previously been the direct-to-client professional services group. So how’s it going for the world’s first independent agency to be incubated within a demand-side platform? Not bad at all. Kepler is hiring up and […]

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 […]