Technology

The recent bonanza of mobile M&A has more to do with the maturity of the market than it does with any defensive measures related to Apple’s new privacy features, according to Paul Müller, CEO and co-founder of mobile measurement company Adjust. Müller knows a little something about M&A. He sold his company for roughly $1 […]

Ad management solutions provider Freestar announced Wednesday that it acquired UK-based Google AMP monetization company Triple13. Terms of the deal were not made public. However, in a conversation with AdExchanger, Freestar CEO Kurt Donnell disclosed that the deal was fully funded from Freestar’s balance sheet. Freestar will be adding all 15 of Triple13’s employees to […]

Media.Monks, S4 Capital’s content, data and media arm, is going big on Salesforce. On Wednesday, Media.Monks merged with Maverick Digital, a 50-person Salesforce consulting and implementation firm with a presence in North America and India. The deal price was not disclosed. Maverick Digital, whose clients include UFC Gym, Mercy Health and the Chicago Blackhawks hockey […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Mike Brooks, SVP of revenue at WeatherBug. Recent analysis from PubMatic highlights two trends that we at WeatherBug have been experiencing firsthand. One, iOS CPMs have dropped over the last two quarters and, two, […]

As the ad tech industry matures, vendor types historically focused on other markets are expanding to meet its needs. Media and advertising, for example, is now Snowflake’s biggest business vertical, and payment solutions provider FastPay is helping publishers and ad tech companies manage reconciliation and accounting gaps between when ad campaigns are served and advertisers […]

Ads Are There For You Publishers attempting to cut themselves a slice of the commerce pie are running into an unlikely – or maybe not so unlikely – competitor: Google. Seems like everywhere they turn, there’s Google with a new way to penalize them for experimenting with alternative revenue sources. Take BuzzFeed, which has emphasized […]

Roast turkey wasn’t the only thing to gorge on this Thanksgiving weekend. On Friday, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK’s top antitrust regulator, published a 125-page document outlining the next phase of its ongoing antitrust investigation into Google’s Privacy Sandbox. (You can read the whole shebang here.) The document contains an updated set […]

“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 Peri Shamsai, media and entertainment industry lead, NE at Accenture, based on a sales leadership workshop co-run with the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The digital ad ecosystem is undergoing seismic shifts […]

By Ben Kneen, Senior Director, Product Management, Xandr The identity world is fragmented. The death of the third-party cookie is well publicized, but there are other dynamics in play complicating the identity landscape. The growth in video spend across multiple formats, devices and providers is also a huge challenge. Buyers and sellers must adjust to […]

Un-Cornering The Market For years, the public market was quicksand for ad tech. Investors were unimpressed by early public companies like Rocket Fuel, Sizmek and Millennial Media, to name just a few. Wall Street also didn’t want to bet against advertising-dependent companies in competition with Google and Facebook. (The Trade Desk was a notable exception.) […]

Unified ID 2.0 testing could hit a serious snag in Europe. Although beta testing of UID2 in the US and Canada is already well underway, multiple sources tell AdExchanger that The Trade Desk is having trouble lining up an independent administrator to govern and police the use of UID2 in territories where GDPR is the […]

Content recommendation doesn’t have the best reputation. It’s primarily known for spammy clickbait around the web. But it doesn’t have to be that way, said Alon Rosenthal, CEO and founder of WhizzCo, a startup that allows multiple content recommendation vendors to compete for native inventory so publishers can maximize their yield. Typically, publishers only work […]

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

Brands need first-party data, and they’re solving for that need through a mix of creativity, personalized products and the power of good old-fashioned celebrity endorsements. Which is why everyone in ad tech and digital media should take note of these initiatives, which span everything from personalized Oreos (dubbed the Oreo ID) to celebrity endorsements designed […]

At a critical time for the digital advertising industry – and with lawmakers keeping a close eye on ad tech – the IAB currently has no public policy presence in Washington, DC. AdExchanger has learned that the team’s head, Dave Grimaldi, EVP for public policy at the IAB for nearly six years, stepped down in […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by John Sabella, CTO at PubMatic. With international scrutiny and stories about opaque pricing, Google could use some positive PR. Federated Learning of Cohorts 2.0 (what I’m dubbing FLoC2) presents a unique opportunity for Google to prove […]

The twentieth century saw very little disruption for category-leading brands. Del Monte fruit, Nabisco biscuits, Gold Medal flour, Sherwin-Williams paint, Gillette razors, Lipton tea, Ivory soap – across practically every consumer business, America’s top brands in 1923 were the same category leaders 60 years later. But nearly one century on, those rankings are starting to […]

IAB Europe; IAB You’re Up The IAB Europe published a blog post on Friday with the news that the Belgian data protection authority (the APD) will find the Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF), the industry mechanism for conveying consent signals in the bidstream, to be in breach of GDPR. The decision hinges on the IAB […]

“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 Dmitri Kazanski, head of product for North America at MGID. Last click is the most commonly used attribution. Why? Because it’s very simple – but it’s also clearly flawed. A […]

The Power Player ID When Google said earlier this year that it wouldn’t support email-based identifiers, it also made a concession to publishers called publisher-provided IDs (PPIDs). Now, PPIDs – which are primarily based on emails collected by publishers – will be available to Google DV360 advertisers. That’s a big advantage for DV360, but Google […]

Gartner’s fourth annual Magic Quadrant for buy-side ad tech in a nutshell: Keep your eye on Amazon. Amazon is ascending into the stratosphere, where it’s now rubbing shoulders in the “leader” category alongside Google and The Trade Desk. Rounding out the leader quadrant you’ll find Adobe, Amobee, Adform and Mediaocean. MediaMath, Criteo, Verizon Media (ahem, […]

Programmatic and privacy don’t have to be mutually exclusive, even though they’re often treated that way, according to Joe Root, CEO and co-founder of London-based publisher technology startup Permutive. “A privacy-first web is about removing the data leakage that’s inherent in programmatic,” Root said. Permutive aims to stop that leakage with technology infrastructure to preserve […]

The business practices of both Facebook and Google came to light in unflattering ways over the past week. Last Friday, a judge unsealed the 173-page antitrust complaint against Google – and there was a lot of interesting info underneath those black squares. Many of the details allege that Google manipulated the auction to ensure market share […]

The market for first-party cloud data services has exploded. InfoSum raised $65 million in August at a valuation of $300 million, up from $100 million after a funding round last year. Brian Lesser left AT&T-owned Xandr last December to serve as InfoSum’s CEO. And then there’s Snowflake, the cloud data company that went public last […]

Spot Me Some Change Spotify reported quarterly revenues of $2.9 billion, with about $375 million of that coming from its free, ad-supported tier. That’s a nice 75% year-over-year jump for Spotify’s advertising business. The company expects to clear $1 billion in ad revenue at the close of 2021, which will mark the first time it’s […]

Like a good marketer, insurance brand State Farm is looking to reach people where they are – and, increasingly, that’s in games. Gaming is an effective way to get in front of younger audiences, of course. But it’s also about tapping into the enthusiasm that players have for games and gaming-related experiences, said Patty Morris, […]

Get your mop and vacuum ready, because the clean room craze is only getting started. Amazon on Tuesday launched the Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), its cloud-based clean room product, from beta. Marketers can now integrate AMC with the Amazon demand-side platform (DSP) for campaign measurement and analytics. AMC is built on the Amazon Web Services […]

Admix, a London-based startup that helps advertisers programmatically place virtual billboards in mobile and video games, announced its $25 million Series B on Tuesday. The round, which brings Admix’s total funding to $37 million since 2018, includes participation from existing investors (Force Over Mass, Speedinvest and Sure Valley Ventures) as well as a whole bunch […]

Shortchanging YouTube? Are advertisers caught up in the CTV hype? Mike Shields thinks so. In a recent Substack post, he suggests advertisers ditch the various CTV walled gardens and head over to YouTube instead. There are thousands of streaming services, but YouTube and Netflix still corner about 47% of the market and haven’t lost share […]

On Friday, a New York judge unsealed most of the Texas-led antitrust lawsuit against Google – and the devil is in the unredacted details. According to the judge, P. Kevin Castel, Google’s argument that the filing needed to be redacted for privacy reasons didn’t hold water. The multistate suit alleges anticompetitive ad tech policies and […]