Technology

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 […]

In the face of a potential global recession on top of a horrendous year for ad tech stocks, companies have to find comfort in the small victories. Wednesday was one such victory for Criteo, despite a few troubling trends.

The details are still sketchy, but it looks like Apple plans on launching a demand-side platform of its own. And so we asked the experts: Is it surprising that Apple appears to be launching DSP – and why will this succeed when iAd failed (or won’t it)?

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Speak Softly, And Carry A Big Tech Big Tech is on the defensive in the US, where it’s become politically popular to take shots at Alphabet, Meta and Amazon. But events that have transpired over the past year abroad demonstrate how powerful those […]

Many publishers are betting big on seller-defined audiences (SDA) as a centerpiece of their post-third-party-cookie monetization plans. Problem is, although publishers are eager to test the performance of SDAs, there’s still very little demand from the buy side. AdExchanger spoke with ad agencies and buy-side tech platforms to get their side of the story.

A lot of ink has been spilled about the value of a publisher’s first-party data, but publishers can’t effectively monetize their data programmatically if they don’t have a standardized way to categorize it. On Monday, ArcSpan released Contextual APP, a data processing tool that enables publishers to structure their first-party contextual data into salable audience segments, including seller-defined audiences, using the IAB Tech Lab’s content and audience taxonomies.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Weird First Dates … I Mean Data Nothing beats the holidays for first-party data gimmicks, but summer is putting on a show. On Friday, Cheetos, a Pepsi brand, announced a giveaway for “fannie macs” – as in fanny packs for summer festivals that […]

Google’s decision to kick the can on cookie deprecation even further down the road to 2024 did not come as a shock to many in the digital advertising industry. The longer runway will give advertisers and publishers more time to test post-third-party-cookie solutions. But despite the temptation to procrastinate, publishers and tech vendors told AdExchanger they don’t anticipate straying too far from the road maps they’d already established to meet the previous 2023 deadline.

If another war breaks out, if Apple tightens the screws even more on targeted advertising, if shopping shifted: Amazon would still report strong and healthy earnings. Q2 this year is no exception. Earlier this week, Facebook reported its first-ever drop in year-over-year ad revenue and Alphabet hosted a defensive investor call, during which the C-suite […]

The expiration date for third-party cookies has been extended for another year. We talk through what the delay will mean for ad tech. Plus, an entire corner of the LUMAscape now exists within the Tremor-Amobee deal, the ultimate example in ad tech consolidation.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Googling Through The Headlines Google flooded the zone with news and interviews this week.  On the transparency front, one announcement that will impact ad tech is Google Ad Manager’s new “Revenue Verification Report.” GAM, the Google SSP, will look into buy-side gross revenue […]

Having a profile on a dating app doesn’t mean that you’re dating. It just means you’re out there. The same could be said for many (of the many) cookieless identifiers on the scene. They’ve been deployed by publishers – the code is on the page – but they aren’t getting picked up in the bidstream.

Microsoft’s selection as Netflix’s ad sales partner of choice single-handedly set the stage for Netflix’s last quarterly earnings report. But Microsoft hardly brought up the deal at all when it closed out its 2022 fiscal year on Tuesday. It attributes a good chunk of its current growth to its cloud business.

The onset of the digital media recession, if not the global economic recession, has struck Google. But Google’s doing just fine, though, thanks for asking.

Tremor International has been on a journey to rebuild its biz with assets on both the buy and sell sides of digital media. And with its acquisition of Amobee announced earlier this week, Tremor is now making inroads into linear inventory. Tremor International CEO Ofer Druker spoke with AdExchanger about the company’s plans for its most recent acquisition.

Advertisers love a captive audience, and there are few audiences more captive than mass-transit riders. So it was perhaps inevitable that Intel-owned urban mobility app Moovit would launch an ad platform. Moovit’s advertising service is live for advertisers in Latin America, Italy and Israel, and the company plans to roll it out everywhere its app is used.

At this year’s WWDC, Apple announced updates to SKAdNetwork, its privacy-adjusted mobile measurement framework. For marketers, embracing, understanding and developing a robust strategy for SKAdNetwork is essential for user engagement and measurement on iOS. From there, the key will be maximizing the value of first-party data and designing long-term acquisition and measurement strategies – based on user consent for targeted advertising, writes Katie Madding, chief product officer at Adjust.

The ill-fated (and relatively brief) love affair between telcos and ad tech really is over. On Monday, Singaporean telco Singtel finally sold mobile-focused marketing platform Amobee to Tremor International for $239 million. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter. (Read the release.) Tremor went public in June 2021. Its stock, which is […]

The round was led by Play Ventures VC with participation from Heracles Capital, a $10 million fund focused on mobile investments that was launched in May by Mobile Dev Memo Founder and all-around mobile smartypants Eric Seufert.

Over the past two years, data clean rooms have exploded onto the programmatic advertising scene, and they’re already at the center of some of the most exciting new partnerships and growth opportunities. But despite their rapid adoption, the definition of what a data clean room is – and all of the related nuance – is not well understood.

Google launched Google Analytics 4 (GA4) back in October 2020 to unify digital web and app analytics. Its push toward the new solution underscores the need for advertisers to implement a data strategy built on first-party data. But now the question is whether brands should prioritize the switch to GA4 before the sunsetting of Universal Analytics (UA) in July 2023 and what this transition means, writes Jessica Jacobs, global director of partnerships and growth at Incubeta.

Investment firm North Equity has amassed a portfolio of established media brands like Popular Science, Field & Stream and Saveur with a few new media upstarts mixed in, including The Drive, Task & Purpose, Donut Media and MEL Magazine. In 2021, North Equity launched Recurrent Ventures as its media division. Its CRO, Matt Young, spoke with AdExchanger about Recurrent’s acquisition strategy, its ambitions in CTV and gaming and why the company is prioritizing its private marketplace business to reduce its reliance on open web programmatic.