Technology

Yahoo bought back old talent in the form of Amit Kumar with the acquisition of e-commerce startup Lexity, which he founded four years ago. A former engineer and head of product management for Yahoo Search, Kumar graduated to display ads startup Dapper.net, which was snapped up by Yahoo three years ago for $55 million and […]

An ad-network stalwart is struggling. The earnings release on the SEC’s site has few details on the display advertising performance for ValueClick, but the earnings call was another matter. In spite of its acquisition of display ad retargeter Dotomi in 2011, ValueClick continues to search for solutions to shore up the company’s growth potential. Its Q2 2013 […]

Little Rock, AR-based Acxiom is gearing up to launch an “Audience Operating System,” for cross-channel and cross-device ad targeting, in September. “The world is coming to us as big data and insight-based decisioning is exactly what we do,” CEO Scott Howe said during the company’s earnings call. “It is also exactly our vision for the […]

Today, Pinterest introduced “price-watching,” a way for consumers to receive email notifications when the price drops on an item they pinned. Price alerts mark the “first additional application of rich pin data that we’ve seen and I think there will be others,” said Danny Maloney, cofounder and CEO of Pinterest marketing and analytics firm PinLeague. […]

While the New York Times Co.’s digital advertising revenue could have been worse in Q2, the publisher saw its display strategy continued to be challenged by what the company said was a “complex and fragmented” marketplace. Read the release (PDF). Digital ad sales brought in $51.2 million during the quarter, a decline of 2.7%. In […]

Last year MediaMath Sales VP Charles Cantu approached his CEO, Joe Zawadzki, to give his notice. He had gotten a competitive job offer that included a major pay raise and the opportunity to manage a team. Zawadzki asked him, “What do you want to do after this?” Cantu replied, “I want to run my own […]

As more advertising dollars pour into digital — and into agency trading desks — the exchange model’s momentum is likely to continue, no matter what level of integration comes from the merger of Publicis Groupe and Omnicom. Several executives who have served with the trading-desk side of the agency business and moved on said that […]

“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 Jed Nahum, Senior Director of Programmatic Sales at Microsoft Advertising. A friend of mine once lamented, “As an industry, we ruin words.” It’s true. A few years ago, we […]

In its year of existence Facebook’s ad exchange has earned a reputation as an ATM machine for Facebook, and even something of a savior during the company’s rocky post-IPO period. But comments by COO Sheryl Sandberg throw that image into some doubt. During yesterday’s earnings call, she noted, “FBX is actually a very small part […]

Video is a big part of AOL’s new plans to stage a “programmatic upfront” in the fall (AdExchanger story) and content discovery and distribution platform Taboola is likely to be a big part of that effort. The two companies signed a deal late last month that starts with AOL posts adding Taboola’s “recommendation matrix” of […]

Barely two months after promoting its video content among the various other digital NewFront presentations, AOL is now planning a “Programmatic Upfront” for September. As we reported earlier today, CEO Tim Armstrong wants to position AOL as the antidote to the long chain of ad technology vendors that serve as the pipes connecting marketers’ online […]

IBM unveiled today a new initiative, Digital Experience, that allows organizations to create customized versions of IBM products. Noting that clients want the option of deploying either on-premise or in the cloud, this initiative is a reaction to new purchase patterns, explained Gary Dolsen, director of IBM’s digital experience software. “What we’ve found is customers […]

JetBlue, the New York-based airline servicing 78 cities with more than 800 flights per day, stands as one of the first and only carriers to institute a Customer Bill of Rights. In line with that theme is JetBlue’s social media strategy, which initially began as a means of engagement to connect with flyers on Facebook […]

After six months in beta, LinkedIn unveiled its “Sponsored Updates” feature for marketers with budgets of all sizes, and mindful of balancing current trends around programmatic, native advertising and content marketing. Alison L. Engel, LinkedIn’s senior director of global marketing, acknowledged that those terms sum up the latest evolution of the professional social network’s advertising […]

When it comes to variability between desktop and mobile advertising on Facebook, new data from Adobe suggests context and content matter in native ad placement. Desktop newsfeed ads yielded a 14% greater click-through rate than right-hand side ads, according to a recently published study that looked at an aggregate of customer data for cross-channel ad […]

The growing demand for personalized, “real-time marketing” (think: the doings of Oreo and its digital agency 360i that resulted in “Dunk in the Dark” during the Super Bowl), is one of the forces underpinning the push toward unifying the “human” and “technological” elements of the programmatic equation. AOL’s earlier announcement of a new strategic partnership […]

After the stock market closed today, Google reported its results for the second quarter ending June 30, 2013. The revenue numbers: “Google Revenues (advertising and other) – Google revenues were $13.11 billion, or 93% of consolidated revenues, in the second quarter of 2013, representing a 20% increase over second quarter 2012 revenues of $10.96 billion.” […]

On agency holding company Omnicom’s Q2 2013 earnings call today with Wall Street analysts, CEO John Wren and CFO Randall Weisenburger talked “programmatic strategy” as Omnicom’s net income for the most recent quarter increased 2.4% to  $289.5 million from $282.7 million in Q2 of 2012. Read the earnings release (PDF). The holding company is looking to […]

Among Adobe’s visions for its Marketing Cloud suite of products is enabling a streamlined process of creating content and delivering it all the way through to campaign execution, the company said. Just weeks after Adobe’s announced $600 million acquisition of marketing automation company Neolane (See AdExchanger story) to round out its creative and content capabilities […]

“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 Ed Carey, VP of sales at The Rubicon Project. As advertising technology moves from agencies’ back offices to the front — and from auctions to deals — digital publishers are […]

Accuen, Omnicom Media Group’s trading desk, is officially opening trading desk operations across 20 markets in Latin America, giving the programmatic unit coverage in 60 countries. Much of the focus on the nations that comprise Central and South America has tended to revolve around the rise in consumer spending by Hispanics in the US and […]

Retail marketers are focusing most of their digital marketing efforts on paid search and email, according to new findings from Forrester Research and Shop.org’s joint State of Retailing Online 2013: Marketing and Merchandising report, released today. Mobile optimization, unsurprisingly, is another area of interest as more commerce companies look to the mobile device as a vessel […]

After a year existing as a retargeting API feature within ad-exchange operator AppNexus’ system of technology tools, AdExtent says it is launching an independent version of its retargeting offering with a particular focus of augmenting Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) own solutions. In addition to AppNexus, the company is working with MediaMath, Turn and Google’s DoubleClick […]

“Old marketing has always been about archery. You’re there to hit the target and shoot the same arrows over and over again. New marketing is a lot like ping pong. It’s real-time decisioning. You’re leveraging business data, and not just media and marketing data. It’s requiring a lot of new skill sets, especially people who […]

Internet business models have been turned upside down and ad-tech is no exception remarked Youssef Squali, global head of Internet media equity research for Cantor Fitzgerald, during a speech at today’s IAB Advertising Technology Marketplace in New York City.  As a result, he sees this disruption enabling faster, cheaper processes and ultimately, better pricing – […]

The use of data tied to a consumer’s brand loyalty remains data-driven “gold” to marketers. And as addressability propagates across digital and offline channels, the importance of a loyalty strategy only strengthens. In early July, Alliance Data’s data-management and marketing company, Epsilon, announced (see the release) that it had been chosen as the technology platform for Dunkin’ […]

Viewability has been a trending topic in the online ad space this year, particularly as brand marketers and large publishers vent their ever-present impatience with the lack of metrics for advertising that’s more about creating affinity than direct-response clicks and conversions. In April, Google’s viewable-impression metric, Active View, got the approval of the Media Ratings […]

Behold, the many ways to “clip” a coupon. Long-ingrained in the collective memory of many as the stuff of super-savers (and Sunday newspapers), a bevy of businesses and app developers are remaking the way a discount is served. Digital discounts – as an industry – are heating up. Most notably, digital-coupon company RetailMeNot is prepping […]

Mobile advertising revenue jumped from $5.3 billion in 2011 to $8.9 billion last year in an 83% increase globally, according to a new report from the IAB and IHS.  And even though brands are experimenting with more interactive, media-rich ads, search is still king, representing 52.8% or $4.7 billion of all ad revenue. Google took […]

Ecommerce is on the upswing. This sector saw a compound annual growth rate of 18.7% between 2008 and 2012, suggesting it’s one of the fastest-growing industries, according to new research compiled by global boutique merchant bank Siemer & Associates. Worldwide spending on ecommerce totaled $820.5 billion in 2012, which was nearly 21% higher than the […]