Technology

Ad exchange operator PulsePoint is trying to find a middle ground between private exchanges, which often require more scale than smaller publishers can manage, and real-time bidding (RTB) platforms, which tend to attract more performance marketers than brand campaigns. In its quest, PulsePoint began its partnership late last year with demand-side platform (DSP) MediaMath to […]

“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 Tom Manvydas, vice president of advertising strategy and solutions at Experian Marketing Services. Many marketers believe that programmatic media-buying platforms will optimize their ad campaigns but, in reality, nothing could […]

Data-management platform (DMP) Lotame rolled out Wednesday its Mobile DMP suite to help businesses collect and manage audience data from mobile devices. The product, which can be added to Lotame’s current DMP offering or used as a standalone product, includes several features designed to help companies monetize their mobile inventory and engage with consumers on mobile […]

The proliferation of DVR services, set-top boxes and IPTV services has created a wealth of data marketers can mine. But the process by which one can purchase these targeted, data-driven ads is still in its infancy. For instance, extending programmatic buying concepts to “advanced television” (a custom system that algorithmically optimizes media against an advertiser’s […]

“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 Richard Sobel, senior director of account management and platform solutions at PubMatic. There are very few industry conversations I’ve had over the past year that perplex me more than the […]

Although 53% of retail marketers now list mobile as their top strategic priority, there is still a disconnect between plans and actual investment, according to a Shop.org and Forrester Research evaluation of 75 brands. Based on data highlighted during the “First Look: 2014 Outlook for Digital Retail” track session at the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) Big Show in […]

Rob Brosnan, a Forrester Research analyst covering customer intelligence and interactive marketing, has secured a new post as SVP of strategy for marketing technology company StrongView. One of the remaining independent marketing-automation platforms, StrongView recently rebranded from the name “StrongMail,” a move company CEO Bill Wagner said is representative of cross-channel buyer needs in today’s […]

As we first reported in November, digital marketing software firm Turn has reeled in a new Series E investment. The $80 million raise was distributed among eight venture capital firms and brings Turn’s total funding to about $138 million to date. (For comparison, direct competitor MediaMath has raised a mere $24.4 million, according to CrunchBase). […]

The advertiser imperative is simple: send the right message to the right user at the right time. The growth of the connected car has presented even more opportunities for brands to reach consumers in a context-specific environment and some service providers have risen to the challenge, like online radio company Pandora, which just began rolling […]

Alibaba Group’s $206 million stake in US startup ShopRunner this fall foreshadowed the Chinese commerce giant’s interests in cross-country expansion. With a looming IPO expected this year and reports of a possible Nasdaq or NYSE listing, all eyes are on the company’s monetization moves. Often referred to as “the Amazon of China,” Alibaba owns close […]

“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 Russell Glass, CEO at Bizo. Real-time bidding (RTB) emerged in the last few years as a new approach to buying and selling online display advertising in real time. The promise of RTB was, […]

When discussing the advances of programmatic media buying outside the US, the stock answer the past few years has been, “It’s catching up.” But at some point in 2013, the investment that marketers, agencies and ad-tech companies have made in Europe and Asia began to appear more concrete and significant. Some companies, like New York-based […]

Speaking in New York today, far from the frenzied CES crowd in Las Vegas, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff heralded what he perceives as a shift from an “anonymous, B2C world to one of one-to-one marketing where the consumer has opted in.” Benioff told a gathering of partners, customers, media and analysts on Wednesday that Salesforce.com’s […]

Thrillist Media Group, the digital men’s lifestyle company dishing up everything from visual case studies on alcohol composition to foolproof ways to fight angst on red-eye flights, is banking business growth on branded content. Owner of myriad media and commerce properties that include JackThreads.com, a members-only men’s shopping site; Supercompressor, a newly launched Pinterest-esque buyer’s […]

As new apps continue to flood the market, it has become harder for app developers to acquire new users, forcing developers and marketers to think beyond installs to drive more revenue. Apple said on Tuesday that App Store customers spent more than $10 billion in 2013 and that it has paid developers $15 billion to […]

Evidon wants to better monetize the data waterfall pouring from its network of 20 million Ghostery users, and will look to new Chief Operating Officer Emily Riley to help it pull that off. Riley, a longtime Forrester analyst who spent the last year driving Audience Science’s pivot from an ad network into a data intelligence […]

Oracle’s deal to acquire Responsys comes with a key question: What will Oracle’s future hold for digital advertisers? When Oracle snapped up Eloqua for $810 million last December, a chain reaction of subsequent purchases followed, from Salesforce.com’s acquisition of ExactTarget to Adobe’s Neolane buy mere months later. As competitors rush to build or acquire digital […]

Although China’s mobile users represent the world’s largest smartphone market (research firm IDC predicts China’s smartphone shipments will exceed 450 million in 2014), numerous challenges constrain non-Asian advertisers’ ability to get a foothold. Still, there’s recourse for advertisers looking to break into the Chinese market, largely in the form of partnerships. Chinese mobile advertising is […]

While publishers generally concede that brand advertisers will pay higher CPMs for “in-view” ads, there’s less acceptance around the different tools, like Nielsen’s Online Campaign Ratings or comScore’s Validated Campaign Ratings (vCE), designed to determine viewability. The big problem is that the viewability solutions have so far tended to focus on the advertisers, leaving publishers […]

Although Amazon and eBay are retail marketplace giants, the companies supply data and sell media placements in very different ways. These differences, reflected in their respective digital go-to-market strategies, trace back to each company’s origin. EBay’s roots in auction-based, consumer-to-consumer (C2C) business give marketers and advertisers a much different value proposition than Amazon’s original B2C […]

Cross-channel marketing software company Responsys has entered into an agreement to be bought by Oracle for a total sum of $1.5 billion, the companies announced Friday. Responsys, which has a customer base of 450 companies, of which many are direct-to-consumer brands like LEGO, Nordstrom, Whole Foods and MetLife, will be integrated into the Oracle Marketing Cloud and […]

Over the past few months, French real-time bidding (RTB) services provider AlephD has expanded work with AppNexus with particular focus on French publishers. Maxime Agostini, AlephD’s CEO, said that despite greater adoption of programmatic methods by advertisers there aren’t many services aimed at the sell side. Although AlephD is already integrated with AppNexus, Agostini said […]

Edit 12/20: Experian’s SVP of government affairs and public policy Tony Hadley (who also testified during the hearing) has written in with his observations. In the wake of Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s (D-WV) hearing on the practices of data marketers, AdExchanger reached out to the three data marketing solutions companies he accused of not complying with […]

A Wednesday hearing held by the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation about the operations of so-called “data brokers” highlighted the disconnect between data marketers and consumer advocates. The hearing followed the release of a report detailing the findings of a yearlong investigation into data marketers. The core disagreement revolves around the extent to which businesses […]

A growing number of ad exchanges, trading desks, DSPs and agencies are emerging to occupy the Chinese programmatic market. AdChina, an advertising-technology company for both the supply and demand side, has been around since 2007 and its CEO, Alan Yan, has seen how the Chinese marketplace has evolved in recent years. “Our original goal, when […]

As major publishers adopt programmatic methods to boost efficiency and cost-savings, one thing keeps them from putting more valuable inventory up for bid: The perceived lack of transparency in pricing. Consequently, an Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) task force made up of publishers has been working on guidelines to clear up the fees and better define […]

Social advertising has become table stakes for multiplatform marketers. On the vendor side, the emerging leaders providing social-ad technologies share a few key commonalities to meet that demand, according to an inaugural Forrester Wave: Social Advertising Platforms report released Tuesday. In a series of interviews with 21 digital marketers, Forrester Research found the average amount […]

Yahoo is making an unspecified portion of its reserved inventory available to demand-side platforms (DSPs), months after display rivals like AOL pledged to put its guaranteed placements on exchanges. Read the release. When Yahoo acquired ad exchange pioneer Right Media six years ago for $680 million, the portal was seen as taking steps far beyond […]

WPP Group’s digital and direct marketing agency Wunderman and its media-buying agency MEC have launched a joint venture called CHOREOGRAPH to address converging client demands in paid, earned and owned media. The proliferation of cross-channel marketing campaigns and the subsequent need to marry transactional, customer and demographic data with audience-level information drove CHOREOGRAPH’s creation. “Over […]

Late last year, we asked a handful of senior execs at platform companies to answer the question, “What will happen next year in marketing and advertising that hasn’t happened before?” This year we invited some of those same contributors to evaluate their earlier forecasts and update them for 2014. The below is from Mark Grether, chief […]