Technology

Smartify Media launched in 2020 as a digital out-of-home platform to allow small businesses in Boston to share real-time updates with customers during the pandemic. Now, the company is trying to create a retail media network with small businesses nationwide, like bodegas and other mom-and-pop shops, through its Small Business Revenue+ program.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Unbeatable You The podcasting business is colliding with vlogging, as popular YouTube accounts and podcast hosts branch out into a hybrid video podcast format. The big winner, of course, is YouTube.  One recent report found that YouTube is actually the biggest podcasting […]

P&G publicly signaled its support for Unified ID 2.0 on Thursday. But the CGP giant had already been using UID 2.0 since last year to create anonymized identifiers tied to its first-party data for activation in the bidstream.

Live television is back in style. And according to Magnite, there’s a surge in demand for linear addressable inventory from programmatic buyers. The net result is that SSPs are squeezing linear addressability into their tech stacks. Magnite, for one, ran a test campaign that points to programmatic addressable’s incremental reach potential.

Mobile measurement provider Branch is expanding its offering with the acquisition of a first-party data platform. On Wednesday, Branch bought AdLibertas, a data platform that helps developers gather and analyze their first-party data in one place.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. VC You On The Other Side The food delivery app Gopuff is looking for a $300 million “cash cushion,” The Wall Street Journal reports, to help bridge tough economic times and diminishing returns in the superfast food delivery startup category.   SoftBank, a gigantic […]

Managing digital campaigns for the mid-market is hard. Mid-marketers need to consider speed, smarts, scale and spend. But pick three, writes Marilois Snowman, CEO and founder of Mediastruction.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. AMPed Up And AMPed Out Last year, Google changed its search algorithm to take its thumb off the scale for AMP pages.  Accelerated Mobile Pages are a plague on web publishers. Although they promise somewhat better site-loading times, historically, all they really do […]

Chrome Unboxed, which started in 2015 as a YouTube channel for unboxing videos featuring Google’s Chromebook products, is emblematic of the early struggles upstart publishers have in monetizing their content. Its path to ad-supported profitability shows there’s still hope for the little guys in digital media.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. EA Or Nay? EA Games is looking for a buyer, according to game news journal Puck. And the buyer will probably be a company with a streaming service.  After a (debunked) rumor saying Amazon intends to buy EA, its stock surged 15% in […]

While Chrome dallies on the third-party cookie question, Firefox keeps releasing new anti-tracking features. Marshall Erwin, Mozilla’s chief security officer, dishes on everything from cracking down on fingerprinting to its unlikely collaboration with Meta on privacy-preserving attribution technology.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Leaked Sneak Peek The TV industry waits with bated breath for Netflix’s and Disney’s ad-supported tiers to face off in 2023. In the meantime, Disney’s plans got leaked to Insider. Disney is pushing hard to promote its streaming inventory to advertisers before ads […]

Add MediaMath to the list of Unified ID 2.0 partners. On Tuesday, MediaMath announced its integration with UID2, which is an open-source industry initiative, spearheaded by The Trade Desk, that aims to replace third-party cookies with hashed and encrypted email-based IDs.

For Enthusiast Gaming, a publisher that specializes in ad-supported gaming content and game development, macroeconomic trends have contributed to a perfect storm. But Enthusiast is looking at the bright side, as advertiser interest in game-related properties is on the rise. Enthusiast CRO Bill Drolet talked to AdExchanger about gaming’s cross-platform value proposition, plans for continued direct sales growth, early forays into in-game advertising and more.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Did The Oracle Get It Wrong? Is it time to call it on Oracle Advertising?  The group had painful layoffs this summer and has fallen behind rivals, Insider reports.  Oracle spent $4 billion to package BlueKai, Datalogix, Moat and more into what’s now […]

Signal loss combined with privacy concerns is helping bring old-school panel measurement back in style. Google just started recruiting for a panel this week. Plus: the future of attention metrics.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Back To The Scoreboard Ad tech is revisiting panels. In some cases, that also means revisiting Nielsen. Amazon Prime, which has exclusive airing rights to the NFL’s “Thursday Night Football,” signed a three-year deal with Nielsen on Tuesday to do audience measurement for […]

Everything old is new again. Surveys are on the rise, marketers are turning their attention to MMM – and Google is recruiting participants for an online panel through a partnership with Gallup.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Fair Share In the years before Apple dropped its AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) framework on the industry’s head like a ton of bricks, the company discussed a possible special arrangement with Facebook to cut Apple in on a slice of Facebook’s revenue, The Wall Street […]

Looks like AppLovin’s attempt to wedding crash Unity’s planned merger with ironSource isn’t going to work. On Monday, Unity’s board of directors rejected AppLovin’s bid to buy the company and reaffirmed its commitment to merge with ironSource.

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…  

What’s the rationale behind AppLovin’s bid to merge with Unity (kicking ironSource to the curb in the process)? Adam Foroughi, AppLovin’s CEO, got into the details on the company’s Q2 earnings call.

AppLovin wants Unity – but only if Unity calls off its planned acquisition of ironSource. Why doesn’t AppLovin want ironSource? And how is Apple’s ATT driving consolidation in mobile ad tech? Listen in. Plus: The Trade Desk claims to benefit whenever a regulator starts investigating Google.

Are public ad tech companies totally screwed? “Um, do you want the short answer?” said Rocco Strauss, a partner at independent equity research firm Arete Research. “Because the short answer is … yes,” he said.

The Trade Desk has been hammering the same messages about tailwinds in quarterly earnings calls the past couple years: hyping the CTV business first and foremost, along with the retail media segment and a dash of Google-bashing for good measure. The company’s investor call on Tuesday adhered to the trend.

TFW you think you have a date to the dance … and then it turns out you don’t. On Tuesday, AppLovin offered to buy Unity in an all-stock merger valuing Unity at $20 billion – but the offer doesn’t include ironSource.

The release of Google’s Imagen tool has certainly made news feeds more entertaining in recent months. Who doesn’t want to see pictures of a raccoon dressed as an astronaut or a corgi cycling through Times Square? But while Google’s new text-to-image generator is a really interesting development that illustrates the potential of AI, this type of technology can’t replace human creatives in the advertising industry, writes Graham Wilkinson, chief innovation officer at Kinesso and Matterkind Global.

When people decline tracking cookies or use already-cookieless browsers, such as Safari and Firefox, it can prevent brands from reaching potential customers who may be interested in seeing their ads. In an effort to tackle this addressability challenge, IBM recently ran a test campaign focused on retargeting B2B prospects across Safari and iOS in partnership with MediaMath and alternative identity provider ID5. IBM and MediaMath are longtime partners, but this test was the first time IBM worked with ID5.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Topics Of Concern The Chrome Topics API, Google’s proposed third-party-cookie replacement, may perpetuate problems that plagued digital advertising and which the product aims to solve, writes Aram Zucker-Scharff, The Washington Post’s engineering lead for privacy and security, in a personal blog post. If […]

France’s data protection regulator, the CNIL, just hit Criteo with some not-so-très-bien news. The CNIL is planning to recommend a fine of $65 million against Criteo for alleged GDPR violations, the company announced in an SEC filing on Friday. The filing is very thin on detail. For example, it’s not even clear what practice or […]