“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 Jay Seideman, US director of the targeting and exchange team at Microsoft. At the end of every year, publishers enjoy many wild debates about budgeting, forecasting and sales compensation. […]
Following its spring acquisition of recommendations engine Avail, ecommerce personalization and shopping media company RichRelevance has acquired the assets of data analytics startup Precog, for an undisclosed sum. Founded by former Amazon exec David Selinger in 2006, San Francisco-based RichRelevance currently has close to 200 customers including Walmart, Target and Marks & Spencer. Precog CEO […]
The evolution of commerce has made data the new “MVP” of retail marketing. A common theme at this week’s eTail East conference in Philadelphia, a gathering of 1,150 retail minds, was delivering personalized offers at scale. To do so, marketers are looking for ways to harness data across a range of sources ranging from loyalty marketing […]
David Karnstedt, a veteran of digital media who led and then sold Efficient Frontier to Adobe, has left the company for unspecified “opportunities.” Adobe confirmed Karnstedt is no longer SVP and GM for media and advertising solutions, a position he has held since the 2012 acquisition of search and display ad-management platform Efficient Frontier, where […]
While the US is generally considered the leader when it comes to advances in online advertising, Europe’s varied broadcast industry could point the way for what will happen on these shores in the area of programmatic television, according to a report by Forrester analyst Jim Nail. “TV has never been as central to the marketing […]
Quirky arts-and-crafts catalog company Oriental Trading Co. has been in business for 80-some years. Begun as Japanese immigrant Harry Watanabe’s church-and-carnival sales operation, it has since weathered a 2010 bankruptcy and made its way through multiple hands and advisers before being acquired by billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway last fall. More recently, it acquired toy […]
YuMe’s stock price at the end of its first trading day remained at $9 – exactly where it was when the video ad tech company’s shares were priced the night before. While the opening price was less than the $12 to $14 the Redwood City, CA-based company had aimed for when it filed its initial […]
“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 Ramsey McGrory, CEO at AddThis. The media industry was left stunned with this week’s news that The Washington Post and its 135-year-old legacy is now under the watchful eye […]
As of today, YuMe is the latest video ad-tech company to officially go public, and although it has posted clearly strong revenue growth and profitability in the past year, the company’s IPO has been priced at $9 per share, according to an SEC filing late Tuesday night. Read it here. YuMe is selling 5.1 million […]
On the heels of Accenture’s acquisition of digital marketing and strategy consultancy Acquity Group and the announcement that followed of a partnership with ecommerce platform hybris, executives from all companies gathered today in New York to talk forward moves with hybris’ new parent company, German enterprise giant SAP. “We have, in the past, spent a […]
In a surprise Monday afternoon announcement, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has struck a deal with the Washington Post Company to buy its namesake newspaper for $250 million. Read the release. The purchase comes just a few days after WaPo’s Q2 earnings demonstrated some slight income and revenue gains, though, as usual, that was due 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 Paul Chu, vice president of advertiser solutions and RTB at PubMatic. The recent news of the merger between Omnicom and Publicis shook the advertising world, and, like everyone […]
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 […]
VideoAmp is competing in the measurement space by sharpening its focus on TV audience data, ad performance and, of course, AI. The company is also making strategic hires and promoting from within.
The Prebid Summit in New York City on Tuesday exceeded the event’s reputation for liveliness.
The ad industry has become a community of people who say things like “This is going to sound relatable” and follow it up with a sentence that may as well be Martian to 99% of America.
LG home screen inventory is now available through agentic buying, opening up a premium TV placement to faster, more automated campaign setup.
Reorienting the ad auction so that ad servers bid into Prebid lets publishers access demand from Google AdX without also having to use Google’s ad server.
Starling recently launched as a connected TV SSP and wants to capitalize on the opportunity to address a major pain point facing CTV marketers: the lack of show-level data.
