As Executive Editor, Sarah oversees AdExchanger’s news and feature coverage and event content. Sarah has written extensively about publishers, sell-side technology and Google. Understanding and explaining the business implications of technically complex topics is her forte. Over her years at AdExchanger, she’s documented the rise and maturity of programmatic tech, as data-driven advertising has spread far and wide in its marketing applications.
The Gist co-founder Ellen Hyslop believes women care about sports news – they just don’t care for the way it’s presented. When Hyslop captivated her friends with her account of the Toronto Maple Leafs making it to the NHL playoffs, they all realized they had stumbled onto a winning idea. More women deserved to hear […]
If addressability and cross-platform are the two most important TV buzzwords today, FreeWheel’s latest pilot is killing two birds with one stone. Comcast and Charter are using FreeWheel tech to chop up linear TV ad spots to make it “audience addressable,” across both linear and digital. Instead of the same ad being shown to all […]
Google’s lack of transparency has long frustrated publishers and independent ad tech companies, and its clandestine program “Project Bernanke” has only confirmed their suspicions that Google uses learnings from its auction to benefit itself. Ad tech insiders met the allegations that Google secretly fed publisher ad server data into its buying systems to gain market […]
The third-party cookie may be going away, 80 identity solutions are vying to fill that void, according to analysis by marketing trade group MMA Global and Prohaska Consulting. Even the savviest CMOs have difficulty keeping up with the different identity reconstruction options, said CEO Greg Stuart. “We are at a neophyte level,” he said. Naming […]
How to manage the tradeoff between personalized advertising and privacy is a familiar debate. Whether personalized advertising – or advertising, full stop – works is a less common direction. But in a debate organized by Facebook (surprise!) between IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg and “Subprime Attention Crisis” author Tim Hwang, Hwang challenged the widely accepted notion […]
Internet advertising made a huge rebound in Q4, growing 29% YoY to $45.6 billion, according to the 2020 IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report. “Q4 was the best quarter we have ever seen in 20 years,” said David Cohen, president of the IAB. Overall online advertising in 2020 grew 12% YoY to $140 billion. “The fact […]
Marketers can build better customer experiences if they can find their customers as they pop up in different parts of their buying journey – visiting the website, buying a product in an Instagram story, viewing an ad or seeking customer support. To enable this visibility, LiveRamp built a native connection into Google Cloud Platform. Previously, […]
One reason performance advertisers love search advertising is because they can easily see the return on their ad investment. Based on that insight, Jason Fairchild co-founded tvScientific and raised $1.5 million in seed funding from prominent names in ad tech and search advertising. The platform aims to deterministically link someone seeing a commercial to that […]
Seven ad tech companies made transactions valued at over $1 billion in the first quarter of 2021 – double the amount that’s happened in the past few years combined. “We’ve got a perfect storm here of different forces lining up, which created such a strong quarter,” said Conor McKenna, LUMA Partners director. The ad tech […]
Publications like Scary Mommy, Fatherly and The Dad speak to the joys and insecurities of being a parent. These brands have created enviable engagement with their community of moms and dads, that span across platforms: email, websites and both old social media sites (Facebook) and new (Twitch). “You can’t ask for a healthier media company,” […]
The end of the third-party cookie won’t happen for nearly a year, but thanks to GDPR, Axel Springer was prepared for the shift: the publisher hasn’t used third-party data in the ad campaigns it sells since the end of 2018. Instead, it’s shored up its technology, working to create scalable first-party data. The German news […]
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. What’s one way to combat subscription fatigue? Create a bundle. “Our view is that what Apple has done, what Netflix has done, we want to do in the active lifestyle category,” said Outside CEO Robin Thurston. In February, the […]
TikTok offers fertile ground to build a media brand. Ten weeks after launching on TikTok, fashion-focused media brand Rag Report is posting twice a day and seeing its audience grow 200% each week. The Wednesday I scheduled the interview, it had 170,000 followers. But by the time we spoke, the numbers were already out of […]
Even though The Weather Channel’s advertising business remained strong during the pandemic, relying on advertising alone is risky for a media company, even one that specializes in unique data and tech. “We’re at an inflection point. With all the changes happening in advertising with privacy, and identifiers and cookies being eliminated by the big tech […]
When BuzzFeed ramped up its affiliate business recently, one group of products consistently popped up in its top ten: sex toys. Though some might blush, BuzzFeed was proud of its nuanced, sex-positive coverage of sex toy product recommendations. BuzzFeed wasn’t trying to sensationalize, but to be inclusive of all sexual orientations and body types in […]
Food52 is taking the lid off its first-party data platform. The hybrid publisher-retailer concluded it needed to improve ad buyers’ access to its data, said Matt Greenberg, SVP of brand partnerships at Food52. Advertisers were asking Food52 about its data, so the demand was already there. And publishers are building first-party data solutions left and […]
What’s a gym CMO to do when gyms – which normally promote health – get banned for health reasons? That’s exactly the situation Blink Fitness CMO Michelle Horowitz found herself in during the pandemic. The fitness chain operates 110 gyms across 10 states, all of which had different rules about gym openings. Blink Fitness hustled […]
Google drew a line in the sand on March 3rd, when it said it wouldn’t build or support cross-site identifiers. But single-site identifiers, specific to an individual publisher, are fair game – and something Google wants to encourage. To that end, Google is dusting off an old/new ID type: the publisher provided identifier (PPID) in […]
GroupM wants to move from using 40 to 50 supply partners globally to five to six partners. As part of that push to consolidate its programmatic supply chain, it struck a global deal with the SSP PubMatic. “We want to use our scale effectively to help clients,” said Andrew Meaden, global head of investment at […]
The majority of BuzzFeed’s ad deals – 65% – now use its first-party data to target ads. And the publisher also provides data matching, insights and optimization powered by data from its 104 million monthly users. To make these data capabilities easier for advertisers to access, BuzzFeed is collecting them into one product, dubbed Lighthouse. […]
Cardlytics dropped $275 million on Dosh Monday to access Gen Z and millennial consumers – who don’t bank the way older generations do. Both companies are similar, delivering personalized offers (Cardlytics also uses these insights to build analytics based on consumer purchase behaviors). But Dosh works with banking upstarts like Venmo, Betterment and Ellevest while […]
Walmart Connect, the retailer’s internal media network for search ads and sponsored product listings on Walmart.com, added a trio of partnerships on Tuesday. Retail intelligence company Stackline, performance marketing agency Tinuiti and retail growth agency Harvest Group will now enable buying through Walmart Connect, which rebranded from Walmart Media Group in January. Setting up the […]
Industry Preview is a special, limited-run audio series featuring interviews with key leaders in marketing, media and technology who share their predictions and key priorities for 2021. This podcast is sponsored by Engine Media Exchange. Research forecasts are constantly being revised and replaced based on emerging data – all the more immediate during a pandemic. “We […]
Last summer, Penguin Random House became the first advertiser to use MediaMath’s Multicultural Marketplace, which the DSP built to help brands spend their programmatic advertising dollars on multicultural publishers. One of the “Big Five” trade book publishers, Penguin Random House has seen an explosion in demand for titles written by Black, Latinx, Asian and Pacific […]
Katie Ford has joined cannabis compliance company Fyllo in February as chief operating officer, leaving Twitter after a two-year stint as head of global brands. The time was right to fly the nest. Ford was the first board member of Fyllo, which was founded by her former Amobee colleague Chad Bronstein. She served as chief […]
Magnite’s revenue grew 69% YoY to $82 million in Q4 2020. Not including its merger with Telaria, revenue grew 20% YoY. The company will nearly double in size once the acquisition of SpotX closes in Q2. In Q4 2020, SpotX had $71.6 million in revenue. Here are the seven highlights you need to know from […]
Direct-to-consumer advertisers pumping tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars into their Facebook ads each month know the power of a good creative message. The best ad creatives drive ROAS (return on ad spend) that can be orders of magnitude higher than a failed message. But how can busy, short-staffed marketing departments test new creative […]
PubMatic, in its first earnings call since going public, reported Q4 revenue of $56.2 million, a 64% increase from the year before. The company was also profitable, with a 72% gross margin. The exchange’s stock rose 10% in after-hours trading. Despite the pandemic, PubMatic grew revenue 31% for the full year, totaling $148.7 million. That […]
Despite the pandemic, The Trade Desk’s year over year Q4 growth accelerated in 2020, increasing revenue 48% to $320 million. In Q4 2019, the demand-side platform’s revenue grew 35%. In 2020, marketers using the Trade Desk’s sent $4.2 billion in ad spend through the demand-side platform. Spurred by the pandemic, they doubled the amount they […]
Amazon hired Google’s former group product manager Sam Cox and Amobee’s former chief product officer Jamie Fellows to supercharge the growth of its demand-side platform. Cox and Fellows will lead a DSP product team that employs a few hundred people, in an organization headed by Matt Battles, VP of multichannel advertising. Amazon confirmed the hires […]
