Technology

Privacy tech is booming. As of December, there were 230 privacy and security companies listed on Crunchbase – up from 207 in April. Two such startups are Qonsent, a data privacy platform that raised its $5 million seed round on Wednesday and Optable, a clean room and data collaboration platform that released a differential privacy feature this week.

Another Cook In The Kitchen The ecommerce-focused publisher Food52 has acquired Schoolhouse, a lighting and home goods company, for $48 million, Forbes reports. The deal was funded by Food52’s private equity owner, TCG. To coincide with the deal, TCG also contributed an incremental round of funding.  The capital will be used to back Food52’s expansion […]

“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 Joshua Koran, EVP of data and policy at Criteo. While it’s easy for marketers to fixate on Google’s threatened “cookiepocolypse,” being too hyper-focused on engagement tactics misses the big picture. […]

The Last Place You Search ​​Mozilla, which reported its earnings on Monday, expects to generate more than $500M in revenue this year. That’s up from roughly $465 million last year and around the same the year before. Where’s the money coming from? Historically, Mozilla’s revenue has been very reliant on its Google search licensing deal […]

Is Criteo building an “anti-Google machine” with its proposed $380 million acquisition of IPONWEB? Criteo CEO Megan Clarken and Todd Parsons, chief product officer, weigh in and explain the vision. In short: the open web needs a hero.

Criteo is buying IPONWEB, the engineering company that built most of the underlying infrastructure for the ad tech ecosystem. The deal represents a huge chess move on the part of Criteo. So, what does Criteo get from acquiring the company responsible for building the foundation of programmatic advertising as it exists today?

Play Nice Will they? Won’t they?  They will.  Roku is bringing YouTube TV back onto its devices after a monthslong clash with Google that spilled over into Congress. Roku and Google finally agreed on a multiyear extension for Roku distribution of the YouTube and YouTube TV apps, Axios reported. In April, Roku warned customers that […]

Retailers and big retail brands typically embark on Q4 with their plan firmly in place. Pricing and promotions, inventory deliveries and expected sales are all known factors. Companies test, learn and implement during the first nine months of the year and by the holidays they should be riding on rails. And tech providers oblige. The […]

Investors are all about in-game advertising startups. On Wednesday, Frameplay, a company that has an SDK for incorporating ads into video, console and mobile games, announced its $8 million Series A led by Hiro Capital, a VC fund focused on games and esports. The round includes participation from gamer hardware brand Razer’s venture division zVentures, […]

Amazon The Impervious Google and Facebook are reeling from data privacy changes. Tim Cook warned investors that Apple underestimated part shortages and would not meet demand until next year. Macy’s slimmed its store inventory. Disney’s production schedules are delayed by months and even years. And Amazon is – doing great. The ongoing supply-chain drama, COVID-19 fallout […]

Google Fails To Deliver In 2014, Google’s then-CEO Eric Schmidt raised eyebrows when he referred to Amazon as Google’s primary search opponent, rather than Yahoo or Bing.  Fast-forward eight years, and Amazon is now its obvious challenger, and Google has utterly failed to address its own ecommerce vulnerabilities, according to a LinkedIn post by Faisal […]

“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 Sergey Shprints, head of analytics operations at Hearts & Science. For the last two decades, advertisers, publishers and data/tech providers have relied on “centralized identity.” They’ve gotten used to finding, […]

By Samuel Seljan, Senior Director, Data Science, Xandr Digital and television advertising – once culturally and technologically divergent ecosystems – are finally converging to improve how marketers target and reach consumers. As viewership habits shifted away from traditional linear television to internet-enabled connected TV (CTV) or other video-on-demand options, advertisers struggled to reach audiences at scale. Interestingly, […]

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 […]