Rocket Fuel’s attempt to turn its business from an ad net to a growing software provider continues. The success of that effort may boil down to its chances with three holding companies. The company’s Q2 2016 net revenues fell 7% year over year to $66 million, it reported Tuesday, and GAAP revenue declined 3% YoY. […]
The ANA report on agency transparency erupted last week, intensifying a long-expected public dispute between brands and their media agencies. While the report focused on brands and agency holding companies, its findings could potentially affect ad tech companies. AdExchanger reached out to some leaders in the ad tech sphere to see how they viewed the […]
Data figured centrally in Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaign operations. Hillary Clinton is running a similar playbook. Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz both leaned heavily on technology-enabled voter analysis. But Donald Trump isn’t interested in the data-gathering infrastructure many see as a necessary piece of modern presidential campaigning. “I’ve always felt it was overrated,” […]
If Rocket Fuel successfully escapes the gravitational pull of Desert Planet Ad Network and lands on the verdant fields of Planet Software Platform, its agency relationships will have played a key role. Thus far, Rocket Fuel has had success building relationships with international agencies and independent North American agencies, said CEO Randy Wootton during the […]
More than a quarter of programmatic decisions are made by agencies for their advertisers – up from 20% since September. The revelation was presented by Mark Mahaney, managing director at RBC Capital Markets, at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC I.O conference in San Francisco on Thursday. The figures, which surprised Mahaney, show agencies make 27% of those decisions […]
Randy Wootton will speak about advertiser perceptions on April 14 at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC.IO conference in San Francisco. The past couple of years have been a tumultuous adolescence for ad tech, and perhaps no single company embodies the growing pains as neatly as Rocket Fuel, with its near-solo public spotlight, its dispute over margin transparency and the rough […]
A handful of ad tech employees who started out at agencies are now returning to senior-level agency roles. And they’re bringing a particularly valuable blend of skills with them. According to Accuen CEO Megan Pagliuca, that initial agency experience is key. “There’s a big con of hiring people from ad tech [without an agency background] […]
Google, Facebook and Twitter have become powerful platforms for political candidates, and each has earned a line item on every campaign’s media plan. But it may require another election cycle before smaller players can break into the big time. In 2015, Borrell Research predicted $1.1 billion would be spent by political buyers on digital media […]
In areas where other companies are growing fast – mobile, social and video – Rocket Fuel is actually losing market share, according to its fourth-quarter earnings report released Wednesday. Rocket Fuel reported $46.9 million in revenue from mobile, social and video channels in the last quarter of 2015, an 18% year-over-year decline. In comparison, Rocket […]
“The world may have a polling problem,” declared Nate Silver, the former New York Times statistical wunderkind who’s since launched FiveThirtyEight under the ESPN banner, in an article last year. Silver made this claim following the failure of UK polls to predict results of the country’s general election last May. In the US, he noted […]
French performance marketing giant Criteo’s promotion of its president and COO Eric Eichmann to CEO, effective Jan. 1, recalls Rocket Fuel’s recent leadership change. Eichmann succeeds JB Rudelle, Criteo’s founder and longtime chief, who will move into an executive chairman role. So why is this happening? Generally speaking, Criteo is worth more than every ad […]
Ad-tech companies shed hundreds of employees from their payrolls in recent weeks. Turn, PubMatic, Collective and Centro all laid off workers, adding to the toll of Rocket Fuel’s large job cuts earlier this year. The cited reasons vary but often boil down to simple survival as ad tech companies position themselves for profitability in a tough market. […]
Glenfiddich, a family-owned maker of single-malt Scotch whisky, is among the first advertisers to place an addressable TV buy through DISH Network’s new programmatic marketplace, which launched in October. Glenfiddich’s media planning and buying agency, Resolute Digital, is using Rocket Fuel’s demand-side platform to serve an addressable, 30-second TV spot to the brand’s target audience […]
Rocket Fuel is speeding up the rollout of its device graph. Starting in Q1, the programmatic platform company will make cross-device targeting the default mode for marketer and agency clients of its self-serve DSP. Those customers include Microsoft, which does its own US digital ad buying in-house. Microsoft’s top B2B marketing exec in the US, […]
Eight months after former CEO George John stepped down and the company started a search for his replacement, Rocket Fuel has decided to give head of sales Randy Wootton the keys to the city. Wootton was first hired in March to oversee a reorganization that split the company’s sales efforts clearly into three channels: agencies, direct […]
DISH Network is subscribing to the programmatic playbook, enabling greater automation and data application for buyers bidding on addressable TV spots. The satellite pay-TV provider, representing 8 million addressable households nationwide, on Monday debuted a programmatic marketplace and supply-side platform running on IPONWEB. Its initial demand partners are Rocket Fuel, TubeMogul and DataXu. After an […]
IBM is pushing deeper into the cloud and paid media. Big Blue on Thursday launched the IBM Universal Behavior Exchange (UBX), a platform that unifies marketing tech acquisitions including Unica campaign management, Silverpop marketing automation, Coremetrics analytics and Xtify mobile personalization. It also named 25 UBX partners, including a handful of ad tech players like […]
Online political spending – while still trailing far behind the budgets assigned to TV – is poised to match or exceed even the world’s largest brand advertisers. But with no established agency or ad tech model in place, agnostic tech providers are looking to blaze new trails in the hypercompetitive DC market. Rubicon Project and […]
Eyebrows and heart rates went up in 2012 when political ad spending across digital media surpassed $150 million. Analysts are shocked that campaigns and super PACs are projected to spend only $1.1 billion in 2016. The media research firm Borrell Associates released a report on Tuesday that demonstrates the gradual embrace of digital marketing methods […]
Rocket Fuel turned in a better than expected second quarter, bolstered by enterprise sales of its DMP/DSP products, deal-making with holding companies, and cost savings from layoffs earlier this year. The successes helped the programmatic ad network and ad tech company post a 30% rise in gross revenue to $120 million and achieve “positive adjusted […]
Agencies and publishers alike have jumped into private marketplaces. Rocket Fuel, known for its performance-driven campaigns in open marketplaces, has lately begun pitching an offering of its own. For the past six months, it’s partnered with agencies and publishers to enable performance-driven campaigns in premium environments, building on technology put in place by [x+1], which […]
When Rocket Fuel’s interim CEO, Monte Zweben, took to the company’s first-quarter earnings call Wednesday, he was representing a significantly different company from the one that delivered lousy news to Wall Street three short months ago. “We are a new Rocket Fuel,” Zweben said. That newness manifests not only in the company’s cost controls, including […]
As it grapples for profitability, ad net/programmatic media platform Rocket Fuel has initiated layoffs as part of what it called “a new efficiency program that is expected to reduce the publicly traded company’s operating costs by $30 million annually.” Read the release. The move comes just one month after co-founder George John stepped down as […]
George John, co-founder of ad network/programmatic media platform Rocket Fuel, has vacated his CEO position. Board member Monte Zweben will temporarily step into his place as the company searches for John’s successor. Read the release. “The company’s evolution over the last couple of years put it in a different operating regime, which requires a different type […]
Rocket Fuel appears to be bracing for a chilly wind, at least when it comes to the insertion order-based media sales business that has been the core of its revenue engine for the past several years. The programmatic platform company reported Q4 revenues of $139.5 million, a 63% lift compared to Q4 2013. That’s a […]
Facebook has decertified more than half the seat holders on its Facebook Exchange (FBX) as part of a revamp of its marketing partner program, unveiled Tuesday. Among the partners no longer badge-certified to buy on FBX are some very big ad platform players, including Adobe, Advertising.com (AOL), Rocket Fuel, IgnitionOne and Dotomi/Conversant (Epsilon). In total, […]
It’s a mobile world and Rocket Fuel wants a piece of it. The ad network, known historically as a desktop display player, announced Tuesday the launch of Local Lift, a tool that purports to drive in-store foot traffic and measure the results by connecting mobile clicks to store visits. Although this isn’t Rocket Fuel’s first […]
Gartner Research’s first-ever Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Hubs, released Wednesday, assumes that ad tech, marketing tech and CRM will naturally converge. As such, it pits enterprise platforms like Salesforce.com against ad tech regulars like Rocket Fuel [x+1] and Turn. No doubt many in the industry will debate whether or not this is fair, or […]
Rocket Fuel is adding SaaS to its revenue mix, but slowly. During the company’s Q3 earnings call with investors on Wednesday, CEO George John said Rocket Fuel now has 137 “licensee customers” buying through one of its three software-as-a-service channels. Those channels are: Rocket Fuel’s self-serve offering, called Mission Control; the company’s partnership with Dentsu subsidiary CCI in Japan; and [x+1], the […]
You’ve got to hand it to electronic giant Philips’ global head of media, Sital Banerjee, for taking the bullet as the buzzkill on a panel at DMEXCO. “Many times, I find (my marketers) to be more knowledgeable than some of our external partners,” he said, sharing a neon-lit stage with a handful of agency and […]
