brand marketing

Reddit reported on Thursday $690 million in ad revenue for Q4 2025, a 75% YOY increase. But the company’s stock is down 38% over the past month.

Programmatic media buying is expected to account for the majority of growth in the CTV market in 2026. This year alone, over 90% of CTV ad dollars were transacted through programmatic pipes. That data isn’t surprising. Programmatic has solved a real problem by helping brands reach TV viewers with targeted precision at much lower costs.

Manscaped’s CMO Marcelo Kertész on flipping its strategy from quick-win performance marketing to building a lasting brand with smarter, long-term growth.

Omnicom revamps its revenue reporting; Amazon will now charge for access to its Selling Partner API; and brands seek sponsorship deals with all sorts of social creators.

Despite programmatic tech adoption, this world of three-letter acronyms is as foreign to some digital marketers as reading a medical journal.

Performance marketing can become a crutch for some brands, warns Duolingo CMO Manu Orssaud, especially app-based businesses that are under pressure to show rapid growth. That’s why Duolingo makes organic marketing a top priority.

Sonos chief marketer Jordan Saxemard spoke with AdExchanger about balancing brand and performance marketing and the evolution toward a new hybrid kind of ecommerce and retail shopping.

Dividing brand and performance makes sense as long as the two sides collaborate closely, says Jennifer Burch, Hasbro’s senior director of global media.

Angela Zepeda is the former CMO of Hyundai Motor America – but not because she’s leaving the brand. She’s Hyundai’s newly-minted chief creative officer. Hyundai recently restructured its marketing department to split the CMO role into two jobs: creative and performance.

If Alex Schultz, Meta’s CMO and VP of analytics, had his way, the term “performance marketing” would be retired. There isn’t a line [between] brand and performance,” he says. “It all performs.”

Lots of marketers are playing around with generative AI. But for Ally Financial, generative AI is a serious investment, not a game or a gimmick, says CMO Andrea Brimmer.

State Farm has spent tens of billions of dollars on TV advertising and brand marketing. But programmatic media buying also has a big role to play in helping nurture leads, says Alyson Griffin, State Farm’s head of marketing.

Performance marketing is more effective when it’s woven into a broader strategy that also includes branding efforts, according to Ally Financial CMO Andrea Brimmer.

In the face of persistent economic uncertainty, marketers are simultaneously hustling to satisfy quickly changing consumer appetites and striving to squeeze the value out of every last marketing dollar. Not to mention needing to adopt full-funnel marketing approaches and allocate spend to channels as flexibly as possible.

In October, Anagram spun off from programmatic platform Digilant and relaunched as a full-service media agency. Since then, it’s set its sights on serving the little guys: midmarket brands.

If you’re a marketer who wants to hear a comforting bedtime story about how brand marketing will endure during the impending recession, you’re not going to get it from Sir Martin Sorrell. The conventional thinking goes that if companies maintain their investment in brand marketing to stay top-of-mind, even when the going gets tough, they’ll be […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. LOL Remember Comscore Rankings? Digital publishing is in a period of self-reflection. Instead of bragging about mass reach, the new norm will be looking at rational numbers to evaluate reach and readership, writes Brian Morrissey, former president and editor-in-chief of Digiday who now writes […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. After this exclusive first look for subscribers, the story by AdExchanger’s Allison Schiff will be published in full on AdExchanger.com tomorrow. Driving downloads is important. But Ben Webley, CMO of game developer Scopely, is looking for users who want to stick around. “We’re […]

Todd Ballard, GoPro’s CMO, has his work cut out for him: Encourage people to buy action video cameras when nearly half the humans on Earth already have access to a sophisticated, high-quality camera embedded directly in their phone. Once a darling of Wall Street, GoPro’s stock has mainly been on a downward spiral, with a […]

Direct-to-consumer brands have just as much to learn about retail as traditional retail brands can learn from DTCs. “DTC founders make the mistake of thinking we know everything, just because we were able to scale and build our businesses faster,” said Nate Checketts, CEO and co-founder of Rhone, a men’s sports apparel startup founded in […]

When DoorDash partnered with The Cheesecake Factory in December to give away 10,000 free slices of cheesecake, the food delivery app set up a cross-functional war room to deal with the logistical complexity. Free food is always a strong customer acquisition tool, but if marketing pushes an offer and product isn’t in the loop, users […]

FTD Companies, parent company of online floral delivery brands ProFlowers and Interflora, wants to get back to the basics of brand marketing. “Our company, like many brands, has been obsessed with directly attributable, perfectly measured marketing for the last five years,” said Jeff Severts, CMO of FTD Companies, who previously served as CMO of Ulta […]

Bottled water brand Essentia Water is getting its feet wet with digital marketing. “Our number-one goal is to bring our brand messaging to life across digital platforms, regardless of the channel,” said Zola Kane, Essentia Water’s senior director of digital marketing. Essentia, purveyor of what it calls ionized alkaline water, launched an integrated brand campaign […]

RocketFuel announced that it is partnering with Dynamic Logic for its new Real Time Brand Optimzation solution which “optimizes the targeting of [brand marketer’s] campaigns based on familiar characteristics such as being in-market for a product or being favorable towards it.” Read the release. Richard Frankel, president of Rocket Fuel Inc. discussed the Dynamic Logic […]

Last Friday, [x+1] announced a new partnership with Knowledge Networks’ KN Dimestore and a “tool that allows marketers to enhance online ad campaign performance by adjusting offers and media on the fly based on real-time consumer feedback.” Read the release. [x+1] CEO John Nardone discussed the new tool and how it works. AdExchanger.com: Can you […]

Brand.net, Vizu and Nielsen announced results of a new study that combined “online attitudinal and offline purchase data measurement, allowing brands to optimize media during campaigns to increase offline sales.” Read the release. Vizu CEO Dan Beltramo discussed the study and the opportunity in display for brand marketers. AdExchanger.com: The study was done across contextually […]

UK’s Telegraph is reporting that traditional media agency Aegis is being forced to reveal discounts for TV and newspaper ads it bought on behalf of yogurt company Danone in Germany. And you thought they only ate schnitzel in Germany. So why should you care? Well, if you’re anybody except a vendor caught in a negotiation […]

Jonathan Mendez is CEO of RAMP Digital, a digital, performance media agency. AdExchanger.com: Why did you found your performance marketing agency, RAMP Digital? JM: I was becoming much more interested in emergent technologies for delivering relevance, namely APIs and semantic driven tools. At Offermatica (now Omniture Test&Target) our platform was 100% JavaScript and while that […]

Gustav von Sydow is CEO and Founder of Burt, an advertising software company and makers of “Rich,” a campaign analytics tool focused on creative agencies. AdExchanger.com: Burt recently presented “Rich” at DEMO ’09. Why was it chosen to present? Can you discuss the value proposition? GvS: Right now, we think of Rich as an educational […]

Helene Monat is President, AdSafe Media, an advertising technology company. AdExchanger.com: What challenge does AdSafe Media solve for marketers? HM: AdSafe Media was founded with the goal of helping brands implement safe and successful digital advertising strategies. While many brands and agencies have adopted best practices for advertising on the Internet, the complexities of the […]