Publishers

The market is not being kind to digital media companies. The nearly 40% drop in BuzzFeed’s stock price on Monday and the decline of its valuation from $1.5 billion when it went public in December to roughly $300 million now is no doubt causing other digital-native publishers to rethink their IPO plans. But any doom and gloom about the long-term viability of digital publishers in public markets is likely overblown.

Connected TV may be the media industry’s shiniest new toy, but it’s not squeaky clean – it’s rife with ad fraud, and high CPMs only make the channel a better target for con artists. Several industry execs discussed why the industry’s best shot is to increase transparency as much as possible across the bid stream at IAB Tech Lab’s Transcend summit.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Baby Steps Babylist began as a registry to combine a gift registry and services (like helping new parents by arranging dog walks) with an affiliate revenue model. Although the approach worked well, 85% of Babylist’s sales went to a single retail partner, CEO […]

As clients look for alternatives to third-party cookies, ad agency Dentsu can steer them to its in-house Contextual Intelligence tool, which launched today. Although contextual targeting is often considered inferior to demographic or behavioral targeting, it can drive performance. Jewelry retailer Pandora piloted the tool during the 2022 Valentine’s Day season. Ads placed using the solution represented 2% of campaign spend, but drove 36% of revenue, a 24x return on investment.

Cookie deprecation is hanging over the media and advertising industry like a storm cloud. New identity solutions built on first-party data are clearly one solution, but publishers and advertisers differ on whether they’re building their own proprietary solution or a shared shelter that will scale – and explained why at AdMonsters’ Ops conference in New York City.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Brick By Brick-And-Mortar The march of the retail media networks cannot be stopped.  Dollar General on Tuesday announced a rebrand of its advertising business, now DGMN (for Dollar General Media Network), to extend its data to ad-buying across the web. According to the […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Whoop Deduped Open Bidding, Google’s alternative to header bidding that maintains its high take rate, has been in the hot seat since last year, after a state-led antitrust suit revealed the lengths to which Google went to stymie header-bidding adoption.  The Trade Desk cranked […]

You’ve probably heard (dozens of times) by now that first-party data will be the key to post-third-party-cookie ad targeting. But what exactly is first-party data? How does it differ from second-party, third-party and zero-party data? And what makes first-party data more suited to a privacy-centric ad experience?

In order to gain access to performance advertising budgets (and prove out the power of publisher first-party data), Vox Media is relaunching Group Nine’s G9 Direct performance marketing solution under the new name VM Connect. The relaunch is also a milestone in Vox Media’s integration of Group Nine’s digital properties and tech stack following its […]

The programmatic market continues to boom as marketers shift more of their budgets to digital channels. But despite the incredible scale of this ecosystem, the market is still maturing – and true price discovery and price setting at a level of granularity that reflects true marketplace dynamics can help fill some of those gaps, writes Andrew Casale, president and CEO of Index Exchange.