It’s been almost a year since Vista Equity Partners acquired a majority stake in ad verification company Integral Ad Science. In the wake of the acquisition, the company appointed a new CEO, Lisa Utzschneider, to lead the company. In this episode, Utzschneider discusses her 20 years in senior revenue roles at Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo, […]
Oath is switching things up within its ad and platform executive ranks. The company has named Tim Mahlman president of advertising and publisher strategy, Oath revealed Tuesday. Mahlman replaced Bob Lord as president of AOL’s platform business in June 2016 and has manned AOL’s publisher and ad platform strategy since. Rohit Chandra becomes head of […]
Marni Walden, EVP and president of global media and the highest-ranking female executive at Verizon, will step down and move into an advisory position as of Dec. 31. She will leave the company in February, according to a Verizon SEC filing dated Sept. 28. CEO Lowell McAdam confirmed the news late Wednesday, stating that Walden […]
John DeVine, Oath’s newly minted CRO, faces a steep challenge in integrating Yahoo and AOL’s sales organizations. “Priority one is cultural alignment and making sure we have clarity on who our clients are and where we’ll win in the marketplace,” DeVine told AdExchanger. “We’re going through the process now to bring the two sales teams […]
Yahoo’s new parent, Oath, will have to make do without one of the acquired company’s key ad platform executives. BrightRoll CEO Tod Sacerdoti is exiting the video demand-side platform and exchange he founded in 2006, according to a source with knowledge of the company. Yahoo bought BrightRoll for $640 million in 2014. An unconfirmed number […]
Oath is having its coming-out party in Cannes. On Monday, AOL executives officially launched Oath at the advertising festival in Cannes, following the close of Verizon’s $4.8 billion acquisition of Yahoo last week. The execs also clarified lingering questions about how it will integrate assets from AOL and Yahoo into Oath’s pending ad tech […]
Verizon completed its $4.5 billion acquisition of Yahoo’s search, email and digital media assets on Tuesday, almost a year after announcing its intent to buy the first-wave internet giant. Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s embattled CEO since 2012, is leaving the company. Just because Verizon has cleared the first and most fundamental hurdle in creating Oath, the […]
The Verizon-Yahoo marriage is still on and will close “as soon as practicable” in Q2, the companies announced Tuesday. The companies have jointly amended the terms of their purchase agreement by $350 million, shaving 7% off Yahoo’s original sticker price of $4.8 billion. The agreement puts an end to a monthslong game of “Will they, […]
Pizza Hut set a record during last year’s Super Bowl when it sold $12 million worth of pizza through digital channels. This year, it hopes to set a new one by doubling down on traditional and digital media – early and often. “People are thinking about what they’re doing for Super Bowl Sunday earlier now,” said […]
There’s no splashy programmatic AOL upfront at this year’s Advertising Week. Instead, the company is addressing more serious matters – like the state of integration with Yahoo amid a data breach. AOL’s senior execs are also talking up consumer-driven content and innovative ad formats. “We had this giant emphasis on algorithmically driven media over the […]
Yahoo and AOL sell the same stuff to the same advertisers and, once their sales organizations combine – likely after the deal closes around Q1 2017 – there will be plenty of layoffs. Yahoo CEO Marisa Mayer said as much in Monday’s call to investors as the acquisition progressed. She said the company already has its lowest headcount since […]
Despite similar origins as Web 1.0 content portals, Yahoo’s inability to shake its roots and AOL’s decisive transformation into an ad tech company sent the two down starkly different paths, even as they both landed beneath Verizon’s big red checkmark: the communications giant purchased AOL for $4.4 billion last May and revealed its intention to […]
Verizon won’t complete its $4.8 billion acquisition of Yahoo until next year, but that hasn’t stopped speculation about which pieces of ad tech will come along for the ride. As Yahoo and AOL built their respective ad stacks to serve publishers and advertisers over time, obvious crossovers have occurred. So what’s complementary, what’s redundant and […]
With its acquisition of Yahoo on Monday, Verizon – and therefore AOL – is sinking its hooks into a treasure chest of cross-device data. “It’s very large and very deterministic,” said 360i president Jared Belsky. Cross-device connectivity was ostensibly one of the big motivators behind Verizon’s acquisition of AOL in May 2015, and now the same […]
It’s easy to forget, but Yahoo was once the largest and most promising digital media company – its stock a bellwether for the internet sector as a whole. By Q1 2017, regulatory hurdles permitting, that stock will stop trading as the company’s people, its portfolio of brands and its technology assets are absorbed into Verizon. To honor Yahoo’s important role in […]
By Kelly Liyakasa and Zach Rodgers Verizon emerged victorious in the bidding contest for Yahoo, snapping up the media and technology assets of the still huge if perpetually down-at-the-heels digital media giant for $4.8 billion. The deal, officially announced Monday, dramatically extends the carrier’s addressable audience, adding 600 million monthly active mobile users that […]
“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 Tod Sacerdoti, vice president of display and video ad products at Yahoo. Ad fraud in video and display is nothing new – it’s an issue that has plagued the industry […]
Greek-yogurt brand Chobani stays competitive with larger CPG companies by constantly testing. One of these tactics includes marketing-effectiveness studies, such as a recent research initiative with Yahoo and Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS) to prove search ads drove in-store sales. “If you’re an ecommerce brand, you can measure that sale directly,” said Jessica Lauria, senior director […]
Yahoo reported earnings on Tuesday. Details are below – but that’s hardly what people care about now. The real question is: Who’s going to buy it? Verizon’s the clear frontrunner, but there also a few upstarts. One such is a joint investment group that includes big names like former Yahoo interim CEO Ross Levinsohn and […]
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 […]
Yahoo’s bloodletting on Wednesday also included a number of advertising and sales-related roles, AdExchanger has learned. Yahoo is in the midst of executing a board-approved cost savings scheme that will see 15% of its workforce receive pink slips. The layoffs, the first round of which went down last week, continued Wednesday with the announcement of […]
Yahoo will dismiss around 15% of its workforce in Q1, including, more than likely, a large chunk of its global sales force. Five global offices will also get the chop. The cuts are part of a $400 million cost savings plan that will seek to grow profitability ahead of a likely sale of the business. […]
Programmatic native ads are now available on the BrightRoll Exchange, opening up access for advertisers beyond Yahoo’s owned-and-operated properties. “We’re offering all third-party RTB buyers access to native inventory,” said Tod Sacerdoti, Yahoo VP of display and video ad products, on stage at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview conference in New York City on Wednesday. The upshot: […]
Yahoo doesn’t have a fraudulent traffic problem, a company leader said Friday. Tod Sacerdoti, VP of display and video ad products and the founder of Yahoo’s video ad exchange BrightRoll, was responding to a CNBC report late last week, which claimed widespread fraud in Yahoo’s ads business and sales “ineptitude” as responsible for the downfall of […]
Yahoo received yet another blow Friday with the departure of Prashant Fuloria, its SVP of advertising products and engineering, just shy of a year after he was appointed to the role. Enrique Munoz Torres, who leads Yahoo’s search products, will inherit Fuloria’s responsibilities, including oversight of the Gemini and BrightRoll platforms, Yahoo’s advertiser-facing products. Fuloria’s […]
Yahoo is entering into a search pact with Google that will allow it to power its Internet search and ad services with some non-Microsoft juice. According to Yahoo, the agreement with Google provides Yahoo with “additional flexibility to choose among suppliers of search results and ads.” Google’s offering will complement the services already provided by […]
Of all the threats posed by the ad-blocking trend, perhaps the scariest scenario for publishers is that paid media placements could be filtered at the network level. Now that nightmare seems to be coming true, as Israeli ad-blocking tech company Shine has said it will integrate with wireless carrier Digicel to screen ads aimed at […]
Atlanta-based News Distribution Network (NDN) is the quiet video engine that hums behind a host of traditional and new media publisher sites like the New York Daily News, Los Angeles Times and Hearst. Last March, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer contemplated a $300 million bid to buy NDN following its interest in French web video platform Dailymotion, but […]
First Facebook bought TheFind. Then Twitter grabbed TellApart. Now Yahoo wants a piece of the ecommerce pie. The company revealed late Friday its acquisition of Polyvore, a social shopping site founded in 2007 by former Yahoo engineer Pasha Sadri. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Although it preceded Pinterest by three years, Polyvore’s audience […]
Sometimes it takes a few bad dates before you find the one. So it would seem to be with Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who after some less than ideal pairings with sales execs may have found her perfect match in Lisa Utzschneider. Just nine months after her initial hire as head of sales for Yahoo […]
