Publishers

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Remember Oath? Verizon Media Group, the company formerly known as Oath, is shrinking as the telco shifts its focus and most of its resources to 5G. The media group, which is made up of Verizon’s acquisition and merger of AOL and Yahoo, saw revenues […]

The two minutes of television inventory sold by multichannel video players (MVPDs) – which can be made addressable by targeting through the set-top box – has historically been fragmented across providers, making it complex for a national advertiser to run addressable campaigns at scale. Today, MVPDs are jockeying to sell each other’s addressable TV supply, […]

WarnerMedia’s farewell to the OpenAP Consortium Friday was inevitable. The writing has been on the wall since February, when AT&T’s $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner was finalized. “It makes sense to pull out now [that] they’re owned by a company that has one of the largest data sets available,” said Tracey Scheppach, CEO and […]

Many broadcasters spent the past decade on a quest for scale, with a major spike in local station M&A last year. Now it’s time to start thinking about monetization, and broadcasters know it. “Once you own a lot of stations, the next logical thing to do is ask, ‘How are we going to monetize these […]

WarnerMedia has exited the OpenAP Consortium. It’s a major blow to the TV industry’s attempt to jointly promote audience-based buying on television by creating standardized segments and measurement across their networks. Turner was one of the consortium’s original members in 2017, along with Fox and Viacom. NBCU joined the following year. But now that WarnerMedia […]

Television advertising is getting smarter. And the smartest companies in digital advertising are coming for TV. That means a royal rumble is playing out over who controls the ad serving for data-driven TV campaigns. AdExchanger looked at the TV and video ad serving landscape, where broadcasters and digital ad platforms like Google and Amazon fiercely […]

At AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference in San Francisco on April 30, Laura Nelson, Disney’s SVP of advertising solutions and performance advertising, will share how it’s selling connected TV as consumer habits and advertising preferences change. Disney is on a mission to unify its inventory across platforms and offer buyers alluring scale against much smaller audience […]

Snap teased an audience extension product called Snapchat Audience Network in early April, but the offering is still being baked and the beta likely won’t open until some point this summer. So, advertisers have to wait to find out how targeting will work outside of the Snapchat platform, what data will be available and what […]

BuzzFeed thrives on using data to inform its advertising programs, social strategy and editorial. But its cookie-dependent data-management platform (DMP) had too many holes in how it collected data. So the publisher switched to Permutive, a next-gen DMP that uses a browser’s local storage to find patterns in how its users engage with content and […]

“Let it go, let it go” is the theme song for any advertisers who might’ve had their hearts set on an ad-supported option for Disney+. There won’t be one, Disney revealed during an investor day event on Thursday in Los Angeles. Disney’s direct-to-consumer (DTC) streaming service, slated to launch in the United States on Nov. […]

First there was Ads.txt, then there was App-ads.txt. Now there are Sellers.json and OpenRTB SupplyChain Object Specifications. The two new specs, released for public comment by the IAB Tech Lab on Thursday, are both meant to help advertisers get a better understanding of whether the inventory they’re buying is legit and where it’s coming from. […]

BuzzFeed is in the midst of a transformation from a fast-growing startup to a sustainable digital media company, with Chief Revenue Officer Lee Brown leading the charge. Over the past two years, BuzzFeed’s expanded into every revenue opportunity it can, including programmatic, affiliate and brand licensing. In programmatic, for example, BuzzFeed started with a basic […]

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

Pluto TV is the anti-Netflix. It’s free and ad-supported. Users scroll through channels and watch whatever show is already playing, replicating the channel surfing that’s a hallmark of old-fashioned TV watching. Viacom spent $340 million in cash to acquire Pluto TV in January, validating the concept and its audience. The deal felt like “Cinderella getting […]

McCormick, the 130-year-old seasoning manufacturer, worked together with  BuzzFeed’s food publication Tasty to co-develop Tasty-branded seasonings. For BuzzFeed, selling co-branded products is a revenue opportunity that supplements its ad business. For McCormick, which usually sells in supermarkets, it’s an opportunity to reach millennial chefs and to directly get both customer data and distribution – usually […]

Internet-age companies like Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Netflix, not to mention Chinese technology giants, are spending more on advertising, catching verticals like CPG, automotive and financial companies that traditionally spend the most on ads. There are 10 new-age tech companies among Ad Age’s top 100 global advertisers. In 2017, the most recent full year data […]

NBC Universal and Sky, both owned by Comcast, announced this week that they’re combining inventory and targeting tools. The hope is to help global advertisers expand their reach to international markets across TV and digital. Audience Studio, NBCU’s data-driven media offering, is merging with Sky’s ad tech offering, AdSmart. The combined entity will be called […]

Disney closed its $71 billion acquisition of 21st Century Fox on Wednesday, more than a year after it signed a definitive agreement to acquire the entertainment company, which at the time was going to cost $52.4 billion. Disney’s initial agreement in December 2017 turned out to be less definitive than the term implies. Comcast stepped […]

FreeWheel, the Comcast-owned video ad tech company, hosted its first television upfront on Wednesday and is mounting a campaign to expand its buy-side business. The marketer outreach centers on new attribution features and the launch of FreeWheel Media, which formalizes its buy-side accounts and ad-serving business into a cohesive offering, CRO Brian Wallach told AdExchanger. […]

College-age consumers shouldn’t be too hard for advertisers to find, since many are, not surprisingly, on college campuses. But most college newspapers don’t have a systematic way to sell their inventory. Student-run outlets generally have reps to pound the pavement, visiting small businesses – their bread and butter – one by one to drum up ad […]

Zach Rodgers and Allison Schiff contributed. Comcast is looking to enhance its targeted advertising business by acquiring more ad tech assets, and is evaluating a group of companies that includes Cadent and dataxu, AdExchanger has learned. Comcast is motivated by a range of factors, including stiffer competition from AT&T and its Xandr ad unit as […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Rachel Parkin, senior vice president of strategy and sales at CafeMedia. Two years ago, I looked in my crystal ball and envisioned a future where all media would run programmatically. Today, we have all […]

Marketers are reacting differently to YouTube’s latest brand safety flare-up compared to 2017, when scores of global brands suspended YouTube campaigns over ads monetizing violent or offensive videos. There’s certainly some déjà vu, with Disney, Nestlé’s and McDonald’s halting YouTube spending after YouTube creator Matt Watson showed them advertising on a video that had a […]

Marketers were slow to move their advertising dollars from desktop to mobile, but they are transitioning to connected TV more quickly, according to Roku CEO Anthony Wood. Advertisers’ quick adoption of connected TV contributed to its $151 million in Q4 platform revenue.Total revenue totaled $275.7 million. Next year, Roku expects more than $1 billion in […]

This article is sponsored by Prebid.org. 2018 wasn’t the year header bidding first began disrupting how exchanges and publishers thought about monetizing their inventory, but it may be remembered as the year it reached an inflection point. According to the ServerBid Header Bidding Industry Index, nearly 75% of the U.S.’s top 1,000 websites had adopted header […]

Hearst Magazines named Mike Smith as its first chief data officer Thursday. When Smith joined Hearst in 2013, he introduced programmatic to its sites and oversaw programmatic buying. As chief data officer, Smith will oversee data use in programmatic campaigns, branded content, direct sold campaigns, sales operations and editorial. “When Troy [Young] became president of […]

LiveRamp has added connected TV IDs to IdentityLink, its cross-device identity graph, the company said during its Monday Q4 2018 earnings report. Connected TV IDs are tied to a home IP address, and are used to distinguish households by companies that serve ads over smart TVs or OTT services, including some smart TV manufacturers, multichannel […]

Meredith’s overall Q2 ad revenue grew like gangbusters, but digital ad revenue performance was draggy – and will likely be the same next quarter, the company told investors Monday. Advertising-related revenue nearly doubled year over year to $488.9 million – a 111% increase – and digital represents more than $400 million of Meredith’s revenue for its national media […]

The amount of online media with audience data attached is shrinking, thanks to Apple, which now blocks third-party cookies in Safari, and GDPR, which requires user consent to show personalized ads. But when advertising cookies are missing, marketers have limited, costly alternatives. Some demand-side platforms (DSPs) don’t offer any contextual buying. Or buyers must pay […]

The battle between buying audiences and buying context is over. Glossy, splashy magazine brands know they’ve lost the cheap CPM game to Facebook, Instagram and Google. But they’ve regrouped in recent years, figuring out how to connect with advertisers and consumers and shore up revenue by diversifying away from advertising. At Tuesday’s American Magazine Media […]