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AdExchanger Talks
AdExchanger Talks is an advertising and marketing technology podcast from AdExchanger, the leading voice in ad tech. Listen in as AdExchanger’s award-winning editorial team, led by Managing Editor Allison Schiff, interviews industry leaders and explores the issues and trends that matter to brand marketers, ad agencies, publishers, media companies and technology providers.
The best thing publishers can do with generative AI is experiment with it. If journalists don’t decide the best use of AI in journalism, then others will decide for them, says Christian Broughton, CEO of The Independent.
Forget the well-worn narrative that digital media publishers are always on their back foot, says Liz Gough, the co-founder and newly minted CRO of Puck. In a world of social media soundbites, Puck is proving that there’s a place for long-form, in-depth, dishy journalism.
In this preview of AdExchanger's new podcast Inside the Stack, TripleLift Chief Revenue Officer Ed Dinichert shares his take on the evolution of retail media with AdExchanger head of communities Lynne D Johnson. Listen in to hear how AI, creative and video fit into the retail media equation in our inaugural episode of this new podcast.
The alternative currency bucket could use a rebrand. That referential and somewhat deferential phraseology – a reference to Nielsen – drives Peter Liguori, VideoAmp’s executive chairman, a little nuts. It stems, he argues, from the “absurd notion” that the TV industry “has almost 100% of its eggs in one basket.”
Viant is on an M&A tear, with two acquisitions – IRIS.TV followed by lockr – in less than six months. Although the rationale behind these deals might be obvious to ad tech insiders, Wall Street investors speak a different language, one that Viant CEO Tim Vanderhook has become fluent in as the leader of a publicly traded company.
LinkedIn has been investing in video like nobody’s business. Lindsey Edwards, VP of product management, takes us inside the company’s video strategy, which now includes CTV ads and a creator rev share program. Plus: Why LinkedIn decided to host its first NewFronts presentation this year.
Why bring data to SaaS applications when you can bring the applications to your data? That’s what modern data platforms do, says Erin Foxworthy, global industry go-to-market lead for marketers and advertisers at Snowflake. Cloud-based platforms, meanwhile, are becoming the foundation for technologies that are increasingly integral to how digital advertising functions.
Marketing measurement is messed up – it’s hard to argue otherwise – and most people agree on the reasons why: vanity metrics, imperfect models, unrealistic expectations. But there’s another issue at play, argues Julian Runge, an assistant professor of marketing at Northwestern University – and that’s a simple lack of communication.
Emet Advisory’s Erez Levin explains why the digital ad industry should transact on media quality signals like attention instead of optimizing to outcomes, conversions and flawed attribution models. The former Googler also weighs in on the ruling that Google operates an ad tech monopoly and reacts to the company’s latest cookie pivot.
Americans are dealing with tumultuous change. For an ecommerce ad agency, that means navigating the same tariff craziness, the Meta ad platform going haywire, seeing Temu ads pulled from the US market and AI solutions making a bid to replace human agency services.
In 2017, Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise predicted the demise of supply-side platforms. The category survived, but he’s sticking to his theory that pureplay SSPs are a thing of the past. Plus: An update on Mediaocean’s $550 million Innovid acquisition and Wise’s counterpoint to recent criticisms of The Trade Desk.
AI isn’t something a marketer “does.” It’s not a singular action or task, and there is no AI easy button. And so AI researcher and consultant Cecilia Dones tries to “get underneath” the reasons behind why marketers want to integrate AI into their businesses.
To say that David Jones, CEO and founder of The Brandtech Group, is bullish on generative AI would be an understatement. “Every single facet of marketing can be done better, faster and cheaper using technology and AI,” Jones says. “I’d rather have a fast, efficient machine than a slow, grumpy creative with a big ego.” Tune in for more zingers.
As the newly appointed president of Horizon Media Holdings, Bob Lord is dubious that megamergers between holding companies are actually good for the client. “Bigger is not always better,” Lord says.
Microsoft ad sales vet Rob Wilk joined Yahoo last year to lead revenue for the company’s advertising business with one main goal in mind: to evangelize Yahoo’s owned-and-operated properties. Most advertisers just aren’t aware of the inventory Yahoo has to offer – and that’s on Yahoo.
Now that Teads and Outbrain are one, the vision, explained CEO David Kostman when the deal was first announced, is to become an “end-to-end, full-funnel platform for the open internet.” But what does that mean in plain English?
What does it take to serve mid-size brand clients; how is AI transforming media buying; and why – for the love of god – is measurement still so messed up? Mediastruction CEO and Founding Partner Marilois Snowman has a few thoughts.
For publishers, digital advertising is a lot like playing craps, says Aditude’s Justin Wohl. It’s all about tuning out the noise while placing safe bets that work for your monetization strategy.
According to CreativeX, ad creative is responsible for nearly half of sales lift, which is more than reach, recency and targeting combined. So why doesn’t creative get the credit it deserves? Until recently, says Anastasia Leng, CEO and founder of CreativeX, technology wasn’t advanced enough to measure creative decisions at scale.
Many measurement companies are promoting marketing mix modeling as an easy-to-use solution to overcome signal loss. But that couldn’t be further from the truth, says Maor Sadra, CEO and co-founder of incrementality measurement startup INCRMNTAL.
Agencies now have more breathing room to think carefully and be strategic about signal loss solutions, because signal loss isn’t just a third-party cookie thing, says Sisi Zhang, chief data and analytics officer at Razorfish. Specifically, she says, brands need to spend more time testing alternative identifiers.
It’s not easy competing for business with massive holding companies (which are only getting more massive). But the Omnicom-IPG deal “also creates opportunities for the rest of us,” says Remy Stiles, North America CEO of programmatic agency Kepler.
What do toasters have in common with transparency and online advertising standards? Quite a lot, actually, says Ben Hovaness, chief media officer at OMD Worldwide. If you can trust a set of standards – and companies conform to them – the less transparency you need. It’s like when you plug in a new toaster. “You’re not worried that it's going to burst into flames and destroy your home,” Hovaness says.
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.
Tune into the first episode of the year with guest Andrew Frank, VP and distinguished analyst at research firm Gartner. We cover a lot of ground, from the impact of multiple major Big Tech antitrust trials to practical AI use cases (minus the BS).
Scott McKinley shares his journey from professional cyclist and captain of the 1988 US Olympic Road Cycling Team to CEO and founder of data validation provider Truthset. The road was more linear than one might think.
Feels like we’ve been waiting for the convergence of ad tech and mar tech forever. But it’s finally starting to happen, and the time couldn’t be more ripe, says Heather Macaulay, president of product-focused consultancy MadTech.
What is incrementality testing? “I’ve been doing more interviews with journalists lately and realize I need a better answer to this question,” says Haus Head of Strategy Olivia Kory.
Jared Belsky, CEO and co-founder of indie digital agency Acadia, needs your help. He’d like someone to please explain to him why media arbitrage isn’t a form of stealing.
Personalization and customization are great, but when marketers go overboard with targeting, they don’t cast a wide enough net to attract new customers and foster growth, says JP Jansen, SVP of marketing and CMO for North America at Mars Pet Nutrition.
Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint shares insights from inside the courtroom during closing arguments in US v. Google, ad tech antitrust edition. Plus: Kint noodles on potential remedies in the search antitrust case against Google.
When social media platform Nextdoor launched advertising in 2017, CEO Nirav Tolia declared it would be a $1 billion business by 2020. That didn’t happen. Nextdoor generated $66 million overall in Q3 of this year, and Tolia chides himself for his hyperbole. But Nextdoor has an ambitious plan for advertising growth.
Former Dentsu CEO Wendy Clark, current president of consulting group Consello, sees the renewed controversy around principal-based buying as a symptom of a more fundamental issue: the lack of open dialogue between brands and their agencies.
If the DOJ wins its ad tech antitrust case against Google, it shouldn’t force a breakup, says Arete Research’s Richard Kramer, who proposes this novel solution instead: Google should spin out its network business into a public interest corporation with no hidden fees.
Mike Ryan of Smarter Ecommerce helps advertisers get the most out of their Google Performance Max campaigns. Understanding what’s going on inside this walled garden black box product is now the most pressing concern for many retailers and ecommerce advertisers, he says.
As the former CMO of Sonos, Joy Howard’s job was to make people want to buy new electronics. Now, as the recently appointed CMO of Back Market – an online marketplace for refurbished electronics – it’s her job to convince them not to.
Having nipped at Meta’s and Google’s heels for years, Pinterest is finished with being the underdog. It’s been getting very “serious” about its investments in lower-funnel advertising products, says Pinterest CRO Bill Watkins.
Dotdash Meredith’s Lindsay Van Kirk says the cookie-based buying tools she helped develop in her early career at AppNexus placed too much value on unreliable third-party audiences. But contextual tools like DDM’s D/Cipher, which she now oversees, can build a better ad ecosystem for buyers and sellers.
Omar Tawakol is a serial entrepreneur. He sold two companies in five years, including BlueKai to Oracle in 2014. But he’s in no rush with his new virtual product placement startup Rembrand. He says he’s having too much fun. Plus: Meditating on the end of Oracle Advertising.
Covering Google’s ad tech antitrust trial in Virginia is surreal for anyone who’s been in ad tech as long as Ari Paparo. He knows most of the people on the stand.
If Adam Heimlich could travel back in time to alter the future of online advertising, he would go to Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick in 2007, but not necessarily to stop it.
Advanced audience targeting is perhaps the most significant change in TV ad buying structures, says Alison Levin, NBCUniversal’s president of advertising and partnerships, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
It’s a misconception that Redditors categorically dislike advertising, says newly hired VP of Ad Product Management Jyoti Vaidee. In fact, 60% of Reddit users want brands to participate in communities, she says, so long as their interactions are relevant and respectful.
Have we finally reached peak retail media, or is the recent explosion of RMNs the sign of a healthy and thriving marketplace? “It’s the right question to be asking, especially at this time,” says Gopuff’s SVP of business, Daniel Folkman, who helped spearhead the company’s advertising business.
Serial ad tech entrepreneur Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan founded two startups roughly a decade apart, both for a similar reason: making data available across the enterprise in a way that’s also respectful of the consumer.
Last month, Hyundai eliminated the chief marketing officer role and split the function in two: creative and performance. The move makes sense because two brains are better than one, says Angela Zepeda, Hyundai’s former CMO and now its chief creative officer. But there are critics to this approach.
There’s only so much you can do to measure earned media, says Najah Ayoub, CMO of Piece of Cake Moving & Storage. That’s why the brand invests so much in the customer experience. Plus: Piece of Cake’s hybrid MMM/MTA approach to attribution.
AI-powered systems should make the humans that use them smarter, says WPP CTO Stephan Pretorius. “It has to be people first, not technology first.” Plus: why “technology doesn’t destroy jobs, it destroys tasks.”
What does programmatic media have in common with toilet paper? A lot more than you might think, says Sherine Ebadi, managing director of forensic investigations at Kroll. It’s a question of quality (or the lack thereof).
With Judge Amit Mehta’s ruling expected this fall, Adam Epstein, co-CEO of adMarketplace, breaks down the DOJ’s search-focused antitrust case against Google. Plus: why Google’s Performance Max has some search advertisers hopping mad.
It’s time for advertisers to get more nuanced with their approach to brand safety, says Mia Libby, The Wall Street Journal’s SVP of enterprise. It’s okay to be cautious, but excluding all news from programmatic media plans isn’t the answer.
Once consumers are ready to travel, they’re often ready to spend on almost everything, from beauty and booze to electronics and streaming services. And that creates a unique opportunity for advertisers to reach a new audience with high intent, says Christine Maguire, global VP of commercial business at TripAdvisor.
It’s been almost one year since MediaMath went out of business. Two months later, Infillion acquired the assets out of bankruptcy. Now it’s time for the next phase, says Infillion CRO and CMO Laurel Rossi.
Shoppable TV ads may encourage sales, but they lack the measurement and performance benchmarks advertisers expect. Buyers must create their own benchmarks – and can only do so by actually testing these new ad units, including with their upfront budgets, says Mike Fisher, executive director of investment innovation at GroupM US.
It’s hard to set a strategy for AI adoption without getting a little hands-on experience first, says Betty Louie, a partner and general counsel at The Brandtech Group. You have to play around with the different tools before you even know where the guardrails are, she says.
If there’s one thing that makes advertising measurement consultant Andrew Covato roll his eyes and shake his head, it’s the endurance of last-click attribution. Last click may seem “simple” and “tidy,” Covato says, but it doesn’t reflect the full funnel.
Signal loss is real, but don’t write an elegy for data management platforms just yet, says Andy Monfried, CEO and founder of Lotame, which turned 18 this year. Also in this episode: Lotame’s reinvention of itself as a data collaboration platform.
With the rise of generative AI software and major changes to search platforms even in the past year or two, SEO and SEM tactics are back. Everyone and their mother is trying to figure out how to make search work and what the new world of search marketing even looks like. Enter Navah Hopkins of Optmyzr.
What is Google’s true motive in launching the Chrome Privacy Sandbox? An optimist might give Google credit for not dropping the hammer like Apple did. But it’s hard not to be a little cynical about Google’s goals, according to Samantha Jacobson, chief strategy officer at The Trade Desk.
Alternative TV currencies are ready for prime time from a technology standpoint. But media buyers aren’t quite there yet when it comes to adoption, says Josh Chasin, VideoAmp’s former chief measurability officer.
Roblox’s head of immersive media Ashley McCollum explains how the online gaming giant built its ad platform with demand for programmatic video in mind. And she previews Roblox’s ambitions to grow an ecommerce platform for real-world purchases.
Quad Media President Joshua Lowcock asks all ad tech partners for log files as a matter of course. And if a company isn’t willing to hand them over, that’s a sign it’s probably hiding something. Plus: The fallacy of scale and pondering the true role of a third-party verification partner.
Cookie deprecation and the reduced availability of mobile ad IDs is rocking the ad tech ecosystem. But signal loss is also an opportunity for a younger company to build new privacy-preserving targeting technology and grab market share, according to Remco Westermann, CEO of Verve Group’s parent company, MGI.
Jeromy Sonne only began bootstrapping his ad optimization and analytics startup Daypart.AI in 2023, having missed the heady days of low interest rates and easy money. Still, there’s gold in them thar hills for a programmatic startup that isn’t exactly a DSP, isn’t built on cookie-based data and is native to cloud-based advertising.
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.”
It’s been more than a year since Bloomberg stopped running third-party programmatic display ads on its website – and it was the right move, says Christine Cook, Bloomberg Media’s global CRO.
Businesses will always need to find a compromise between privacy and utility, but it’s more than possible to strike a healthy balance, says Graham Mudd, president and chief product officer at privacy startup Anonym.
It’s not that enterprise analytics is broken. The bigger issue, says Obele Brown-West, president of data intelligence platform Tracer, is that enterprise analytics was never all that functional to begin with.
Advertisers expect direct proof of performance from their streaming ad buys. But even though most people don’t shop via their TV screens (yet), new ad formats can still help brands boost consideration, says MediaLink Managing Director Mark Wagman.
If you’re an ad tech or martech vendor thinking about pitching a marketer, then Kamal Bhandal, global VP of brand and consumer experience at Invisalign, has some important advice for you.
“There is no scale in multicultural media.” Lashawnda Goffin, CEO of Colossus SSP, has heard that statement many times – and it simply isn’t true. Yet the misperception persists, in part because of problematic programmatic practices.
Do people hate ads? No, according to Vegard Johnsen, who joined eyeo as chief product officer last summer after nearly a decade at Google. What people don’t like, he says, is having no real choice over what they see and not being treated with respect.
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.
Over the summer, Gartner placed generative AI at the peak of inflated expectations on its hype cycle covering emerging technologies. Sounds about right. But at the same time, marketers are getting more serious about AI adoption, says Abhay Parasnis, CEO and founder of Typeface.ai.
Rather than a competitor to data clean rooms, Amazon Web Services – which has a data clean room offering of its own – considers itself to be a facilitator of ad tech companies, says Adam Solomon, global head of biz dev and go-to-market for AWS Clean Rooms. Guess there are no competitors in ad tech, only frenemies.
Meet Doceree, a programmatic health care marketing platform with a twist. Rather than allowing brands to target patients on the open web, Doceree has a specialized DSP for targeting doctors with secure messages on physician-only platforms, says CEO Harshit Jain.
Reaching a scaled audience is important for publishers, but scale at all costs is just a race to the bottom in disguise. When publishers have a deep and direct relationship with their readers, advertisers see stronger performance, says Semafor CRO Rachel Oppenheim.
Ad revenue in the US is set to grow in 2024. So pour one out for 2023 – and try not to make the same mistake as last year. Despite a more-than-decent ad market in 2023, media executives nearly manifested a recession out of fear that one was coming, according to professional advertising prognosticator Brian Wieser.
Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+ often get tossed into the same bucket, but they’re different animals. And despite certain benefits, advertisers aren’t in love with all that these two have to offer, says Nii Ahene, chief strategy officer at Tinuiti, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks (our last of 2023!).
The Media Rating Council has the same goals of promoting fair media measurement as it did when it formed in the ’60s. But it has had to polish its methodology to keep pace with change in the TV measurement space, says Ron Pinelli, the organization's SVP of digital research and standards.
As TikTok’s global head of marketing science, it’s Jorge Ruiz’s job to prove that ads on the platform can drive results. But marketing measurement is as much an art as it is a science. Also in this episode: self-attribution, the rise (again) of MMM and how TikTok managed to roll with the ATT punches.
Just because a channel isn’t where a final transaction happens doesn’t mean it’s not a performance channel. Connected TV is the perfect example, says Brian Mandelbaum, CEO of commerce data platform Attain.
It’s not that brands don’t care about supporting the news and good journalism. But an overreliance on keyword blocklists has made it seem that way, says Zefr CEO Rich Raddon on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
Google Analytics dominates the analytics market – but analytics isn’t a zero-sum game, says Ben Young, CEO of insights and measurement startup Nudge. Also: The important of measuring attention and finding "value at the margins."
Local advertisers are spending more on social media platforms today than three years ago, despite being unconvinced social media is the best place to reach their customers. What gives? Corey Elliott, Borell's EVP of local marketing intelligence, explains the story behind the numbers.
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.
The strategy behind agency holding company reorgs makes sense: consolidation of related assets under one roof. But simply merging creative agencies doesn’t solve the bigger client need, which is bringing creative and media closer together, says Jellyfish CEO Nick Emery.
Advertisers that shun legit news sites for fear of blowback from consumers should think twice – people are smarter than they think, says Vanessa Otero, CEO of Ad Fontes Media, a startup that rates the news for bias and reliability.
Despite good intentions, the ad industry still has a misconception that Black-owned media can’t scale, says Justin Barton, SVP of digital strategy and partnerships at Black Enterprise.
Klarna is best known as a BNPL service. But don’t be surprised if you see the Swedish payments company eventually launch its own retail media network, says CMO David Sandstrom.
Is the programmatic advertising industry in a rut? Maybe just call it a midlife crisis, says JiYoung Kim, president for North America at GroupM Nexus, because there are bright spots – namely, retail media.
At The New York Times, paying subscribers come first – an approach that works on advertising side, too. Hear from newly appointed Chief Advertising Officer Joy Robins, who believes that when media has gone astray, it’s because publications didn’t put the reader at the center of their decision.
Super League Gaming CEO Ann Hand shares lessons learned from building in-game ad experiences and insights into the developing in-game ecommerce market. Also: Is metaverse marketing truly dead?
Looking for unvarnished, sharp views on transparency, the lack thereof, defining ad quality and the industry’s new obsession with made-for-advertising websites? Then this is the episode for you, with guest Tom Triscari, CEO and founder of programmatic advisory firm Lemonade Projects.
Armed with Ads.txt and Sellers.json files, Nandini Jammi, co-founder of Check My Ads Institute, spends her days exposing how money flows through the twisted pipes of the programmatic supply chain. Her goal? To defund disinformation, toxic content and hate online.
CTV’s over-frequency problem is as real as the pressure streaming services are under to grow their average revenue per user. But you don’t have to sacrifice one to achieve the other, says Jamie Power, Disney’s SVP of addressable sales.
The ad industry tends to get lost in its own weeds. (Endless consternation about the end of third-party cookies, anyone?) But the concept of privacy encompasses much more, from dealing with misinformation to promoting competition, says Jules Polonetsky, CEO of the Future of Privacy Forum.
For programmatic podcast advertising to really take off, buyers want the same assurances they’re used to on other channels, including brand safety controls and effective targeting. It’s a process, says Lizzie Widhelm, SVP of ad monetization at SiriusXM-owned SXM Media.
It’s happening folks. The Chrome Privacy Sandbox is going live, third-party cookies will be phased out on Chrome by the end of next year – and don’t expect any further deadline extensions, says Victor Wong, senior director of product for all things Privacy Sandbox.
When will Meta monetize Threads, its new text-based app? Too soon to say, according to Alvin Bowles, Meta’s new sales leader. But if past behavior is the best indicator of future performance, it’s only a matter of time (and user engagement).
Taboola CEO Adam Singolda bristles at the terms “clickbait” and “chumbox.” Quality is subjective, he says. Also: Inside Taboola’s exclusive 30-year native advertising sales deal with Yahoo.
One-fifth of the US population is Hispanic. But Spanish speakers are sorely underrepresented in measurement ratings, so advertisers miss out on audience buying opportunities, says TelevisaUnivision’s Dan Aversano. To bridge that gap, media companies must be more comfortable with privacy-safe data sharing.
Data privacy law is becoming more technically complex, and enforcers are getting increasingly savvy about how online tracking technology works. That’s why being a privacy lawyer today means diving into the technical details, says Daniel Rosenzweig, a senior associate at Norton Rose Fulbright.
The cost of customer acquisition (CAC) is about more than what a brand pays to get someone to visit a website or download an app. Advertisers also need to bake engagement and retention into their CAC, says Braze CEO Bill Magnuson.
There’s a prevailing narrative that supply-side platforms are releasing tools to cut out demand-side platforms in a desperate attempt to differentiate. But “it’s much more nuanced than that,” says Magnite CRO Sean Buckley.
Amazon accounts for more than 40% of retail media’s multibillion-dollar total addressable market. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a big opportunity to scale retailer audiences across the open internet, says Criteo CEO Megan Clarken.
The end of third-party cookies isn’t “Armageddon for marketers,” says Wendi Dunlap, Mediahub’s newly appointed EVP of business intelligence and audience science. It’s an opportunity to test, learn and do better.
Why is there so much misinformation circulating online? Because, unfortunately, “it’s a great business,” says L. Gordon Crovitz, co-founder of NewsGuard, which estimates that advertisers are funneling as much as $2.6 billion a year programmatically to misinformation websites.
Ad tech and cloud tech are converging; there’s no doubt about that. But how much of ad tech will get eaten by cloud platforms? That’s harder to answer, says Myles Younger, head of innovation and insights at U of Digital.
Raashee Gupta Erry spent most of her career in the digital marketing industry at agencies and brands, including Essence and Volkswagen US. Then she took a job explaining ad tech to the Federal Trade Commission. “There’s a wind of change happening,” Gupta says.
Brands are keen to invest more into in-game advertising. But advertising in virtual worlds means they’ll have to be careful not to turn off gamers, says Anzu CEO Itamar Benedy.
Retail media is exploding, but there are some obstacles standing in the way of growth. The main issue is a lack of standardized measurement, which is why it’s time for retailers to work together, says Kristi Argyilan, SVP of retail media at Albertsons Companies.
The TV industry is on the path toward better measurement – but buyers are still lacking basic standards. The industry needs to get its act together if it plans to transact on new video currencies at the upfronts this year, says Kelly Metz, managing director of advanced TV activation at Omnicom Media Group.
Do we need to temporarily pause AI development? What are the ethical risks of AI technology? What’s the weirdest AI-generated image or video you’ve seen? In this episode, Peter Prodromou, president of AI agency Boathouse Group, takes on the tough questions.
The ad industry is in a unique position to galvanize global action against climate change, says John Osborn, US director of trade group Ad Net Zero. But it’s not always easy. Not everyone, including people in the ad industry, agree on how to get there.
Spotify is all about audio, obviously. But video advertising is a strategic priority for the audio streaming service. Emma Vaughn, Spotify’s senior director of advertising business development and partnerships, explains why.
In this episode, we’ll take a walk down memory lane with Zach Edwards, Human’s senior manager for threat insights to see what progress the online ad industry has made when it comes to basic privacy and security measures.
Ad measurement is becoming more challenging due to signal loss. But there was never such a thing as perfect measurement, says Jen Faraci, chief data officer at Publicis-owned Digitas North America.
Television advertising has the reputation of mainly being a vehicle for branding. But that’s a misconception, says Arjun Kapur, managing partner and founder of Comcast’s Forecast Labs.
In March 2021, Hudson’s Bay Company, which owns Saks Fifth Avenue, made an unusual move to split its ecommerce business and physical stores into two separate companies. Why? We got Emily Essner, CMO of Saks, to explain.
Brands that don’t invest in diverse media are missing out on revenue. “Audiences in those communities reward you for noticing them,” says Mark Walker, CEO of Direct Digital Holdings.
The digital advertising industry has been too focused on data perfection, according to Analytic Partners CEO Nancy Smith. But as data disappears due to signal loss, brands have an opportunity to regroup around “commercial analytics,” a different measurement approach focused on driving outcomes with less user-focused data.
Performance marketers once turned up their noses at creative, seeming to only care about audience targeting. But signal loss is putting creative back into the spotlight by highlighting how essential even the smallest of details can be, says VidMob CEO Alex Collmer. Also: Hot takes on generative AI art. (Spoiler: Humans aren’t obsolete – yet.)
Are retail media networks overhyped? “It’s a very fair question,” says Ali Miller, Instacart’s VP of product management for ads. The answer is yes and no. Yes, companies are jumping on the RMN bandwagon – but it’s not hype, as long as retail media can prove its value.
Roughly one-third of the US population has a direct connection to the military. And yet many brands “still struggle to authentically connect with this key demographic,” says Mark Harper, GM of military and defense at Recurrent Ventures.
With 100 million customers and a homegrown CDP, Intuit is a data-driven brand, says Intuit CMO Lara Balazs. But beyond conversions, the owner of TurboTax and Credit Karma closely tracks brand reputation as a measure of success.
The combination of attention across streaming and linear television is a massive, undermonetized opportunity, says Blockgraph CEO Jason Manningham. But if traditional TV players don’t get more creative with their data, they’ll lose out to the Big Tech platforms. It’s a familiar tale.
This week we’re republishing one of the most popular AdExchanger Talks episodes of 2022, with Brian O’Kelley, an originator of RTB and now the CEO and co-founder of Scope3, a new startup that aims to help ad tech companies monitor and reduce their carbon emissions. Happy holidays and happy listening!
When online grocery subscription service Misfits Market was founded in 2018, it took a page right out of the DTC advertiser’s playbook, says Holly Eagleson, VP of marketing. But since the release of Apple’s ATT, Misfits has been embracing new channels.
Advertisers often talk about supporting Black- and minority-owned media companies. It’s Mark Prince’s job to help them turn those pledges into action. As SVP and head of economic empowerment at Dentsu Media, he pushes brands to consistently diversify their media mix – and move away from one-off investments.
Mary Engle is EVP of policy at BBB National Programs, a nonprofit organization that’s helping keep self-regulation of the ad industry alive. She’s also spent more than three decades with the FTC. In this episode, Engle gets into the weeds on “commercial surveillance,” the nitty-gritty of ad disclosures, the FTC’s case against Kochava and more.
CTV measurement is a total mess: Agree or disagree? “It’s a mess,” says Lynette Kaylor, SVP of North America ad sales at sports-focused streaming platform FuboTV. And don’t even get her started on using audience panels to measure streaming audiences.
How should advertisers approach a wild-child platform like Twitter? David Cohen, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau – who recently spoke with Elon Musk himself on that very topic – weighs in. Also in this episode: grappling with the term “commercial surveillance,” retail media real talk and marketing in the metaverse.
Generating awareness is great, says Toby Espinosa, VP of ads at DoorDash. But a cost-per-acquisition pricing mechanism allows small businesses to invest in growth without having to worry about cash flow.
The “notice and choice” model makes sense in theory, but in practice? It’s a mess. Privacy platitudes need to stop, says Jessica Lee, a partner at Loeb & Loeb. Heck, some practitioners don’t even know how online advertising works.
Call it a Halloween special. Our apparition of a guest this week, an anonymous ad tech Twitter personality, is staying beneath the invisibility cloak. “I’m not senior enough to get away with running my mouth,” says the @HumanPropensity account operator who goes by corndog.
Bringing data ethics into the marketing department is good for an org’s bottom line, says Jamie Barnard, Unilever’s former general counsel focused on global marketing, and now the CEO of a new privacy compliance startup called (natch) Compliant.
Rideshare marketing should be more than just slapping a screen in the back of a car and running ads, says Cherian Thomas, head of marketing and go-to-market for T-Mobile Advertising Solutions, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
Just like a rising tide lifts all boats, a receding tide grounds all ships. When someone turns on an ad blocker out of frustration, that decision also affects publishers making an effort to serve up respectful ad experiences, says Blockthrough CEO Marty Krátký-Katz.
Marketers are banking on compelling creative and contextual signals for performance, with challenges to addressability, says Forrester Senior Analyst Nikhil Lai. Plus: How TV can reduce digital advertising costs.
After a hiatus from ad tech, Brian O’Kelley is back with Scope3, a new startup to help ad tech companies reduce their carbon emissions. The cynical POV: He’s cleaning up the mess he helped make. It’s a fair criticism, O’Kelley says: “I take accountability for my role in this.”
Retail media has reached escape velocity. “We've grown from basically $0 to a business that's now bigger than The New York Times,” says Walmart Connect VP Jeff Clark. But Walmart still needs to get it right.
Meet your new CTV acronym: HVOD (hybrid video on demand). Why do we need it? The rise of AVOD doesn’t mean SVOD is going anywhere, says Sarah Lewis, global director of CTV at video platform ShowHeroes and a proponent of HVOD.
Roku is bullish on shoppable video. The idea of television commerce isn’t new, of course. QVC, HSN and infomercials, anyone? But the technology exists today to breathe new life into the opportunity, says Peter Hamilton, Roku’s head of television commerce, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
With five state privacy laws set to go into effect next year, consumer privacy and issues related to data collection are top of mind for everyone – but especially people like this week’s guest, Fiona Campbell-Webster, chief privacy officer at MediaMath.
Confusing, murky and complex – the programmatic supply chain is a mess. So why do advertisers accept the status quo? Often, it’s because they have a serious case of FOFO: the fear of finding out, says Ruben Schreurs, Ebiquity’s chief product officer.
Nabiha Syed is CEO of The Markup, a non-profit newsroom that runs in-depth investigations into how companies large and small (but mostly large), use technology to reshape society – and it's having an impact. The new lawsuit facing Meta and several hospitals over data sharing used to target ads on Facebook? Yep, that’s thanks to The Markup.
Yes, the headwinds are blowing for digital advertising. There’s signal loss, regulatory scrutiny, platform privacy changes and a looming recession, to name a few. But McKinsey Partner Emily Del Greco sees opportunity on the horizon for commerce media and new forms of measurement.
Roy Armale, VMLY&R’s global chief innovation officer, believes in tackling technology with human behavior in mind – and being careful not to let the convenience of technology alter our perception of what it means to be human.
General Mills is going deep on its first-party data strategy. Heather Conneran, director of brand experience platforms, shares the CGP marketer’s lessons learned from its time in the digital transformation trenches.
Gayle Troberman, iHeartMedia’s CMO, talks up iHeart’s programmatic advertising ambitions and the power of audio to engage – in some cases even more deeply than video. Also in this episode: Lessons learned from 16 years as Microsoft’s chief creative officer.
Ad tech entrepreneur Chris Cunningham’s early-stage investment firm, C2 Ventures, has a new fund: just over $20 million for pre-Series A companies, plus $2.55 million for pre-seed startups. But there’s one thing he won’t be investing in, and that’s ad tech. Listen in to learn why.
Keyword blocklists are blunt instruments, and yet they persist in programmatic media buying. It’s time to kick blocklists to the curb and start curating keywords by campaign, says contextual pioneer John Snyder, who sold his company, Grapeshot, to Oracle in 2018.
When it comes to their DEI commitments, are brands more talk or more action? We bring together the buy side and sell side – Publicis President Jason DaWayne Smith and Black Enterprise President and CEO Butch Graves Jr. – for a frank discussion about whether the industry has measured up.
Shopify seller turned ad tech CEO and entrepreneur Regina Ye founded her startup, Topsort, last year to help retailers launch auction-based ads on their sites through an API. Performance advertising shouldn’t be so hard for smaller brands, Ye says, on this week’s episode.
For years, data privacy regulators didn’t have the tools – or the teeth – they needed to effectively enforce proper standards on the internet. Then came GDPR. Now they have the tools and the teeth, but seem largely unable or unwilling to disrupt the status quo. At least that’s the story to hear Johnny Ryan tell it on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
Retail media networks are coming out of the woodwork. And it may feel like everyone’s got one. But it’s time to stop using RMN as an umbrella term. The details matter, says Patrick Miller, co-president of commerce at Edge by Ascential, on this week’s episode.
With the lines blurring between traditional TV content and streaming media, YouTube made its upfronts debut this year. YouTube VP Debbie Weinstein explains why.
Probabilistic attribution is a “stopgap,” says newly appointed Adjust CEO Simon “Bobby” Dussart. Using it for now is fine, but SKAdNetwork is the future of measurement on iOS – take it or leave it. Also in this episode: Remaining independent under parent company AppLovin.
Apple’s ATT rollout triggered an industry-wide freakout among mobile ad tech companies. But surprisingly, over the past year Apple has gotten “more accessible,” says Omer Kaplan, CRO and co-founder of ironSource. Also in this episode: Being a newly public ad tech company in a tricky market.
The bad news: The internet as a whole has a larger carbon footprint than the entire airline industry (!!), and programmatic advertising is a contributor. The good news: “The extent to which people are aware of that and open to a conversion is changing at a phenomenally fast rate,” says Amy Williams, CEO and founder of sustainable advertising startup Good-Loop.
You’d be forgiven for thinking of the Video Advertising Bureau (VAB) as a professional thorn in Nielsen’s side. The TV ad industry trade org is largely responsible for the chain of events that led to Nielsen losing its MRC accreditations last year. But “this isn’t personal,” says VAB CEO Sean Cunningham on this week’s episode. “I don't know that anyone's rooting harder than we are for [Nielsen] to get it right.”
Does IAB Tech Lab CEO Tony Katsur have the toughest gig in ad tech? That’s an “accurate description,” Katsur says on this week’s episode. It’s his job, among many other things, to spearhead and speed up Project Rearc, an ambitious industry effort to press reset on how personalized advertising works online.
Clients of growth marketing agency Tuff saw “painful” results on Facebook as a result of signal loss, but it’s been able to roll with the changes, according to CEO Ellen Jantsch. There was even a silver lining. Apple’s ATT accelerated the indie agency’s move away from last-click attribution. Plus: navigating an acquisition while pregnant.
Retail media is returning to the spotlight after its heyday of mascot-branded cereals in Saturday morning TV cartoons, newspaper circulars and cardboard cutouts in store aisles. This time, retail media is powered by first-party purchase data and loyalty programs. We speak to SVP of Kroger Precision Marketing Cara Pratt, an OG when it comes to OGs (online groceries, that is).
Don’t apologize for having to monetize, according to Lisa Howard, global head of advertising and marketing solutions at The New York Times. “[We’re] unapologetic about ads,” she says. But when it comes to digital advertising, less is more.
Kelly Abcarian joined NBCU last year to lead a team tasked with disrupting the measurement status quo. “Marketers don’t buy ratings,” Abcarian says on this week’s episode. “They buy results.” NBCU’s roster of alternative measurement and audience verification providers now includes seven partners – and counting.
Mobile behavior is telling: How is Trump’s Truth Social really doing? How is app usage trending in Russia and Ukraine? Did all those crypto ads during the Super Bowl actually get people to download crypto apps? On this week’s episode, we dive into the trends with Jonathan Kay, CEO of app store intelligence platform Apptopia.
It was hard to imagine how mobile measurement platforms (MMPs) could survive Apple’s ATT changes. But the MMPs aren’t dying, they’re thriving, says Branch’s Alex Bauer, on the heels of raising $300 million.
Former physicist Melinda Han Williams used to spend her time studying “electronic transport in nanostructured graphene devices.” These days, as chief data scientist at Dstillery, she’s creating identifier-free solutions to transport us past the end of third-party cookies.
Privacy and data security aren’t just legal issues – they are also customer experience issues. Consumers don’t like their data “changing hands under the table,” says ActionIQ CEO Tasso Argyros.
It’s a classic tale of redemption. After going bankrupt in 2019, MoviePass is set to relaunch with co-founder and original CEO Stacy Spikes leading the charge. There are a lot of reasons things will be different this time around, Spikes says, including the eventual rollout of an advertising component.
Marketers often rely on a combination of assumptions and incorrect, faulty data that perpetuates stereotypes. Former WarnerMedia executive Larry Adams experienced this firsthand and founded LVA, an “anti-racist” agency that uses proprietary technology to measure the level of inclusion in content.
Nielsen has always “had a challenge with counting appropriately,” says Andrea Zapata, head of research, data and insights at WarnerMedia Ad Sales. That’s why WarnerMedia is going big on alternatives: VideoAmp, iSpot and Comscore.
Amazon vet Lartease Tiffith, the IAB’s newly appointed EVP of public policy, has a wide spectrum of responsibilities: lobbying against bills that ban data-driven advertising, then lobbying for a federal privacy law. He’s a week and a half in, and he’s got his work cut out for him.
What can marketers do to separate the snake oil from the good stuff when it comes to identity resolution and cookieless technology? In a nutshell: “Buyer beware,” says Michael Komasinski, newly appointed global CEO of Dentsu-owned Merkle.
OpenX CEO John Gentry on why the company isn’t going public in 2022, its recent COPPA settlement with the FTC and the ongoing challenge of ensuring quality supply in an open exchange.
Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework left the mobile ecosystem reeling – but the writing was on the wall, says AppsFlyer CEO Oren Kaniel on this week’s episode. ATT reminds him of when Apple pulled the plug on UDID and replaced it with the IDFA.
DMPs are dead – long live CDPs … at least according to Michael Katz, CEO and co-founder of customer data platform mParticle. After years of confusion, the CDP space is finally starting to shake out as marketers get smarter about what they need from the tech.
2021 was a year of reckoning for TV measurement. On AdExchanger Talks, we spoke with three of the most important names in the space about these tectonic shifts: the CEOs of Nielsen, VideoAmp and Comscore. Here are the highlights.
The customer data platform (CDP) market might be crowded, but savvy brands are to sifting through the category to fit their specific needs, says Cory Munchbach, chief operating officer at CDP BlueConic.
The pandemic tossed a curveball to the out-of-home advertising industry. Ad revenue plummeted. But “spending is definitely back,” says Anna Bager, president and CEO of the Out of Home Advertising Association of America. “It’s a rebound.”
Comscore has been capitalizing on Nielsen’s recent missteps – and taking the opportunity to throw shade at traditional panel-based measurement. Samples “don’t work well when you have a problem maintaining them,” says CEO Bill Livek.
VideoAmp is having a moment. (Nielsen is not.) “Winners and losers are emerging,” says VideoAmp CEO and Founder Ross McCray on this week’s episode. VideoAmp recently secured $275 million in financing as it angles to enter the “winner” category.
Online advertising and privacy aren’t mutually exclusive – as long as the former is transparent and permission-based and the latter isn’t completely ignored, says Mozilla’s CMO, Lindsey “Shep” Shepard, on this week’s episode.
Measurement is “the elephant in the room” for the podcast market, according to Elli Dimitroulakos, head of automation in the Americas at Acast. With podcast advertising projected to break $2 billion in spend by 2023 it’s time, she says, for the rise of new tech to cut down on the fragmentation of podcast supply and distribution.
Overly restrictive keyword blocklists are still a big problem for publishers, according to Scott Gatz, CEO and founder of LGBTQ publisher Q.Digital, which experiences this issue acutely as a voice for the LGBTQ community. Niche publishers are often penalized for inoffensive words that commonly appear in their content. It’s time for advertisers to ask themselves what words they’re reflexively blocking – and why.
Change is the law of life – especially for a global chief transformation officer. As the newly appointed change leader at WPP agency Wavemaker, Kathryn Spaeth is bringing her experience from the consulting world to bear in agency land.
Nielsen’s been through the wringer recently with the loss of its MRC seal and alternative measurement companies surging forth to take advantage of its stumble. But CEO David Kenny is confident that the ad industry needs a base standard for TV measurement and that Nielsen has what it takes to keep its spot.
As the brand new president and COO of marketing trade org MMA Global, Lou Paskalis is on a mission to “save marketing from itself.” Here’s what the former top media executive at Bank of America has on his agenda. No punches will be pulled.
What is conversational media? Holler CEO Travis Montaque explains why emoji, stickers and GIFs are a language of their own as well as an opportunity for brands to communicate with consumers beyond the confines of conventional paid media.
Are advertisers ready to buy TV like they buy digital? Yes, indeed, says Dave Clark, GM of Comcast-owned FreeWheel. Demand is quick to follow digital-like capabilities in TV. But one thing FreeWheel isn’t planning to emulate is a walled garden. Also in this episode: Nielsen’s ongoing MRC headache, the programmatic upfront and what climate change has to do with the ad tech industry.
What is privacy? Turns out, there’s no easy answer, even for David Temkin, Google’s senior director of product management for ads privacy and user trust. But change is coming regardless – which means it’s time for the ad industry to get comfortable feeling just a little bit uncomfortable as the ground shifts underfoot.
Stagwell CEO Mark Penn drops by post-merger with MDC Partners to talk media networks, cross-agency collaboration, what it means to be a challenger holding company, the importance of fusing technology with creative (finally) – and the unlikely connection between his esoteric map collection and marketing.
Verizon Media is now officially … Yahoo. Guess everything old is new again. But how did we get here and where is the new Yahoo going? Iván Markman, chief business officer of Yahoo – formerly Verizon Media – joins to fill in the details.
Innovid was one of the earliest players in TV ad tech. The company will go public via SPAC in Q4, placing it in the growing herd ad tech unicorns. Netter discusses its origin story and future roadmap.
The verification category has steadily expanded into adjacent areas like viewability, fraud and brand suitability. In this conversation, Zagorski talks about where he expects future innovation in the never-ending quest to measure quality in advertising.
CEO Lisa Utzschneider describes Integral Ad Science's brand safety efforts on TikTok and other social platforms. “It’s now a strategic imperative for marketers to protect their brands,” she says. “Our customers have become much more sophisticated."
Open AP was founded as a consortium of national TV networks to coordinate their work on new ad initiatives. In this episode, CEO David Levy discusses its progress in helping those networks offer unified planning and audience matching for advanced campaigns that run across linear and streaming TV.
InMobi is one of the largest and longest running mobile ad tech players in the world. Founded in 2006, the company has grown to some 1,500 employees globally, about 1,000 of whom are based in India. The company is now expanding to serve new customers - including a telco-specific business unit announced this week.
Michael Provenzano founded Vistar Media to bring programmatic buying to digital out of home advertising. With demand for digital signage returning after a horrendous 2020, he gives an update on the company – including its recent $30 million investment from out of home giant Lamar Advertising.
The Delta variant notwithstanding, travel is coming back. What form does the recovery take? A conversation with Justin Scarborough, senior director of programmatic at Fort Worth digital agency PMG.
Kinesso SVP Sarah Rose says user-level measurement will still work in a post-cookie environment, but it will be complicated. “It’s going to be a hodgepodge of site-level data, CDP-level data, DMP-level data,” she says.
The CEO of Amazon specialist Alpha Precision Media discusses key changes in Amazon's ad ecosystem: the underutilized power of Twitch, the future of retargeting using Amazon data, changes to sponsored search and attribution improvements.
Outside Inc. has put together an unrivaled portfolio of active lifestyle brands, including Backpacker, Women's Running, Yoga Journal, Outside Magazine, Outside TV, Gaia GPS, Peloton Magazine and more. CEO Robin Thurston discusses Outside’s audience opportunity and his plan to grow subscriptions to 50% of revenue.
Google’s decision to grant third-party cookies a stay of execution until 2023 sparked relief and frustration across the industry. Digitas SVP Liane Nadeau, who has been out in front on the shift to privacy-friendly ad targeting, discusses how this latest change is likely to impact advertisers, agencies and publishers.
Google’s size and fragmented company structure mean it's constantly buffeted by dueling incentives on a range of issues impacting marketers, agencies, publishers, tech and of course consumers – not to mention emerging regulatory pressure. Tara Walpert Levy, VP Americas, Agency and Brand Solutions, discusses the high wire act.
Similar to the Brood X Cicada hatch of 2021, the eruption of privacy-related news has been incubating for a long time. Sheila Colclasure, IPG-owned Kinesso’s global leader on digital responsibility and public policy, describes how we got to this highly-disruptive moment.
DoubleVerify's first institutional investor describes the company’s journey from an ad verification point solution provider in 2008 to a full-suite ad measurement company valued at $5.4 billion.
As addressable TV advertising gains steam, so too has excitement among agencies and advertisers. In this episode, RPA Chief Media Officer Jim Helberg describes the progress he sees and what he hopes happens next. “What once was the power of large blunt objects in terms of audiences could now translate into the power of precision in a world of platforms we could never have even imagined.”
Seems fitting that Gyanda Sachdeva, LinkedIn’s VP of product management, found her first job out of grad school through LinkedIn. These days, she’s in charge of LinkedIn’s Marketing Solutions products, which brought in $3 billion in revenue for Microsoft over the past year.
The ANA has commissioned a new programmatic study to identify where brands are wasting money and make recommendations to bring clarity and more efficiency to the market. CEO Bob Liodice talks about it.
Advertising in games is growing like gangbusters – and tons of new players are coming online. Around 100 million over just the past 15 months alone. Rick Kelley, Facebook’s VP of global marketing solutions and global gaming, dives into the trends driving the gaming industry right now and explains why these new players are seriously lucrative for developers.
Xandr is steadily ramping up in CTV. When AT&T acquired AppNexus in 2018, video was only about 13% of all spend running through the platform. Today video represents 25% of Xandr's inventory and is heading towards 50% this year, surpassing digital display. Welch says Xandr will soon have 20% share of non-YouTube programmatic CTV spend.
Tim Hwang’s 2020 book, “Subprime Attention Crisis,” argues targeted advertising is a bubble set to burst. He argues that the intricacies of programmatic and the perverse incentives of agencies and ad tech platforms to maintain a steady flow of ad dollars have created a persistent opacity in programmatic markets. Therefore he says it’s only a matter of time before the bubble bursts and advertisers pick up their toys and go home. The result will be a collapse of programmatic ad spending and a partial collapse of the free internet.
Rick Webb digs into some less commonly discussed issues with Apple’s new tracking rules, including how they fail to provision for GDPR and how SKAdNetwork doesn’t let app marketers credit multiple sources for a conversion.
In this episode: The future of retargeting, what’s next for Google’s sandbox proposals, and Criteo’s big task of building a single sign-on mechanism that will support the Universal ID 2.0 framework.
Manny Puentes, CEO of Rebel AI, describes the journey and recent sale of his company. And he expresses skepticism that hashed email addresses can be a viable identifier for this industry going forward. “Think about all the places you go today that you’re putting your email into,” he says. “Think about all the offline data you can link up with email. People say that it’s hashed and encrypted, and I get it – but it’s just another ID and this ID originated with something that can be linked with offline data.”
Melissa Burdick is the cofounder and president of Pacvue, which launched in 2017 to help advertisers scale up on big ecommerce platforms, a trend that has hugely accelerated in the last year. “Every week I get contacted by a new retailer. Either they’re starting to create or they are in process of creating a self-service model. I think we’re going to see an explosion of these retailers building through owned and operated.”
Recent announcements from Disney, NBC Universal and others suggest the sell side of the TV ecosystem is ready to fully embrace the streaming revolution. “We saw in particular some of the very large media companies really reorganize themselves around streaming. Once you see that you can say that we’re in a new era,” Horowitz says.
Got a question about the iOS 14 privacy changes, Audience Network, performance marketing or pretty much anything to do with user acquisition and mobile measurement? Well, Eric Seufert, a media strategist and editor of Mobile Dev Memo, is your man and he’s here on the show with a deep dive on all things mobile, from ATT, SKAN and UA to the hottest gaming IPOs.
"TikTok has become a place where brands can show up, let down their traditional guardrails, experiment and try approaching things differently," according to Melissa Yang, TikTok's head of ecosystem partnerships.
There's a big need for marketers to unify their campaign planning and measurement across social, mobile app, CTV and other digital channels. But achieving this dream is getting… harder? Kolin Kleveno ,SVP of addressable media at Tinuiti, offers guidance and some hope.
The pandemic spurred changes to many forecasts – especially in the areas of ecommerce and time spent with media. Geoff Ramey, Chief Evangelist for Insider Intelligence and co-founder of eMarketer, explains the stories behind its new numbers.
Back in November, Experian Marketing Services acquired cross-device data provider Tapad from its previous owner Telenor. In this episode, Experian Marketing Services President Genevieve Juillard describes the rationale for that deal and why she is rooting for greater fragmentation of the identity landscape.
Rupen Desai, global CMO of Dole Packaged Foods, is on a mission to help democratize nutrition. Embracing digital transformation is a big part of that, but there’s more to the story, especially in a year when food insecurity has become particularly acute as a result of the ongoing pandemic.
InfoSum is a company to watch. The four-year-old data services business enables onboarding, the development of new identity solutions and other use cases with a focus on privacy and data security. In this episode, Wetzel describes its underlying technology – including “non-movement of data” and “data bunkers” – and where it's seeing uptake.
Even before the 2020 pandemic sent everyone to streaming environments, NBCUniversal has aggressively developed technologies designed to help advertisers reach out to audiences across all platforms.
“We’ve been on a journey to invest in the convergence on media across digital and streaming for years,” says Krishan Bhatia, NBCU president and Chief Business Officer.
In this Industry Preview podcast, Bhatia gets into how advertisers are trying to achieve scale by reaching across all platforms, the future of linear TV given all its headwinds and the future of the ad pod.
The ad industry is making progress in the fight against ad fraud, says Michael Tiffany, president and co-founder of bot detection firm White Ops, which recently got acquired by Goldman Sach. But don’t rest on your laurels, because when fraud leaves one corner of the internet … it creeps into another. Fraud is on the rise in CTV.
Engine Media Exchange CEO Michael Zaharski grades the industry’s progress in solving the identity challenge, and discusses key challenges facing the TV and CTV channels.
The agency embrace of programmatic is a long story with many twists and turns. This week, Stephan Beringer recounts how and why Publicis Groupe dramatically restructured its VivaKi AOD trading desk six years ago, and describes the aftermath of the episode.
With almost a year of the pandemic under our belt (Ugh), brands have by now figured out a way forward. In many ways, the measures they’ve had to take in response to COVID-19 has set them up for future success – a future without a health crisis, but where streaming and online buying are both happening en masse. In this special Industry Preview fireside, two agency chiefs – Belinda Smith of m/SIX North America and Tom Denford of ID Comms – analyze the vast transformation of 2020 and what 2021 holds for ad buyers.
Manu Mathew was the founder and CEO of Visual IQ, a digital multi-touch attribution company that rose with the programmatic tide and was acquired by Nielsen in 2017. However the MTA segment suffered a huge blow when Google stopped allowing its DoubleClick ID to be linked to ad server log files.
Amazon had a big 2020 - and 2021 is Primed (get it?!) to be even bigger. Listen in to learn how Amazon Advertising is thinking about combining new types of signals, how it's thinking about its diverse range of inventory and how it hopes to tighten brands' relationships with customers.
What does media look like in the post-Trump era? Axios CEO and co-founder Jim VandeHei is betting that newer companies like Axios will have an easier time bridging the divide between the two “bubbles” of media that have emerged. With four years under its belt, the upstart media publication is applying its formula to local news in 2021. A lean editorial staff will write up the news in Axios’ signature, bullet-point style in five cities, including Tampa Bay and the Twin Cities. VandeHei also gives his take on trends like “corporate social responsibility” advertising, revenue diversification and AI in journalism.
AdFin developed a marketer dashboard that drew on log-level data to offer clients a holistic view of their supply chain, but the company went under in 2019. Former AdFin product leader Ravi Patel speaks to the vision, why it failed at AdFin and how he's carrying on the work at PwC.
LiveRamp CEO Scott Howe has a unique view of the advertising industry’s crossroads. The company is one of the key tech firms zeroing in on the reinvention of online identity, and how it will impact advertisers and publishers. Moreover, a lot of this innovation is happening at a time when publishers are hyper-aware of the ways their data is used. And with numerous legislative efforts worldwide designed to regulate data use, the tides are constantly shifting. Speaking to AdExchanger shortly after the US Capitol riots, Howe talks about the future of identity, the opportunity for publishers and the responsibility platforms have around the messaging they allow.
What kind of ad tech exits can we expect in 2021? To answer that question, we turned to Beeswax CEO Ari Paparo, who steered his DSP to an acquisition by Comcast’s Freewheel in December. The king of ad tech Twitter also opines about the future of TV and the end of the third-party cookie.
Bob Lord is the SVP of cognitive applications at IBM. In this episode he discusses emerging applications for AI across industries during this period of rapidly scaling data. “AI can help you make sense of massive data and protect consumer privacy at the same time. We need to learn how to make large amounts of data accessible, useful and productive in a post-cookie world.”
The term “artificial intelligence” means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, which can make it hard to know what’s legit, what’s froth and what has the potential to, well, transform marketing and change the world. David Jones, CEO and founder of You & Mr Jones, explains the difference.
MediaMath has completed the first phase of its SOURCE initiative, which CEO Joe Zawadzki describes in this episode as the industry’s first fully-transparent supply chain. “You can look at everyone that’s involved in the transaction. You know the price that they’re charging. You know the value they’re creating. That hasn’t existed in my 25-year career. That foundation of trust in the supply chain… you can build all sorts of wonderful things on top of it.”
TikTok has many imitators, but what makes TikTok, well, TikTok? It’s the content, says Matty Lin, TikTok’s managing director of monetization and partnerships. Because TikTok isn’t based on a social graph, it’s able to stay laser focused on keeping the content experience authentic. Lin shares more on that, plus TikTok’s priorities for 2021, including a major investment in ecommerce.
In the second episode of AdExchanger’s Industry Preview series, Sheri Bachstein describes the high stakes for advertisers as they rush to adopt privacy-friendly data strategies. She says AI is in a sweet spot to address the challenge. Bachstein is global head of IBM Watson Advertising, overseeing the company’s two media brands, The Weather Channel and Weather Underground, as well as its B2B data unit.
Publishers are in a strong position going into 2021, but only if they can break their long-running dependency on big tech companies. This week's guest, Somer Simpson, has worked on challenges faced by media companies since the late 90s. In this episode, she describes the high stakes these companies face as they take on challenges like privacy compliance, data ownership and user experience.
In the kickoff episode of AdExchanger’s Industry Preview audio series, we talk with Sebastian Tomich, global head of advertising and marketing solutions at The New York Times. He says, "It’s pretty clear that in the future of media, we’re heading to a direct-to-consumer model that is going to be winner take most.”
For our final episode of the year, we decided to resurface our memorable 2019 interview with Brian O'Kelley. BOK, sporting a gray beard, holds forth on a bunch of topics: the sale of AppNexus, the legacy of programmatic and whether he’s really retired from ad tech.
Bonnie Kintzer, CEO and president of Trusted Media Brands, which owns Reader’s Digest, sits at the helm of a storied publishing portfolio that has reinvented itself from digital laggard in 2013 to a digital-first publisher today. Kintzer takes us on its journey of digital transformation.
Pete talks about the shifting revenue mix at Insider – which owns Business Insider, Morning Brew and Insider Intelligence – and breaks down the impact of cookies fading out. He says the lost revenue will be ameliorated by increases in private programmatic deals, subscriptions and first-party data programs.
PubMatic raised $118 million in its public offering on Wednesday, significantly surpassing the $75 million it had set out to generate from stock sales. With a stock price of $29.45 at close of business, the business is valued at just under $1 billion. Rajeev talks about his "sweatpants roadshow" experience and what happens next.
An update with GumGum, which combines computer vision, AI and contextual advertising. It had layoffs this year, but the business has rebounded. “It’s nice to be part of...a company that’s doing great ads without using privacy data," Schraeder says.
Vandenberg launched her company earlier this year, while sick with COVID 19. She talks about that experience and the pandemic's silver linings. "The rat race got so fast," she says. "It’s recalibrated the industry."
Zeta Global is a 12-year-old company traditionally known for its CRM and data solutions. It has moved aggressively into ad tech, acquiring the Sizmek DSP and the Rocket Fuel DMP in the wake of Sizmek's bankruptcy, as well as IgnitionOne’s DSP and other assets.
Advertiser Perceptions surveyed 300 US advertisers and their agents on their use of identity resolution solutions. We dig into the findings
Celtra is pulling away from ad serving and zeroing in on creative production. CEO Miha Mikek explains his rationale for the move and why Celtra no longer adheres to Forrester’s definition of creative ad tech. Also in this episode: Genetic imperviousness to the effects of caffeine and what it’s like to found a company with your spouse.
In our 200th episode, Ari discusses the ups and downs of the ad tech space and its future prospects.
Hugo Loriot, a partner at You & Mr Jones-owned data agency fifty-five, weighs in on the unfortunate lack of participation from the buy side in the cookie debates, the growing role of clean rooms and why Ads Data Hub probably doesn’t pose an antitrust concern for Google.
The app's monthly users have grown from 320 million at the end of 2019 to more than 400 million currently. Chief Revenue Officer Jon Kaplan shares an update on the platform, what's driving the growth and - naturally - ads.
Greg Raifman has had a long career in digital advertising. He started out at ad server Mediaplex in the late '90s, helped take Rubicon Project public in 2014 and is now running the digital subsidiary of Nexstar Media Group, which owns TV stations, websites and apps in 100 markets.
Robin Wheeler, the new global commercial head of Twitter's MoPub, lays out her plan for going after the Fortune 1,000. Historically, MoPub has been super strong with the app publisher community, but less so on the demand side. Now, it’s time to get closer to the buyer.
Sarah is a board member at Campbell Soup Company and president at ecommerce analytics company Profitero. She will appear next month at AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO conference, in conversation with Elizabeth Bennett, VP of global ecommerce at Kraft-Heinz.
Planning for 2021? Break out your blindfolds and dartboards. This week we dig into how marketers are handling the huge uncertainty of this moment, with guest Jed Meyer, Managing Director of Ebiquity North America.
Data-driven marketing giant Merkle has merged five of its B2B agencies into a single global agency brand. Merkle, DWA, gyro, B2B International and Digital Pi are now grouped together under the name Merkle B2B, employing 1,000 people. CEO Michael McLaren discusses the rationale and what's changed with B2B marketing during the shutdown.
As EVP of Oracle CX and Data Cloud, Rob Tarkoff oversees several data platforms and ultimately decides which receive investment going foirward. In this episode he talks about brand safety, contextual targeting, third-party data and the coming identity storm.
Nancy Marzouk founded MediaWallah in 2013 to pursue the emerging market for customer data onboarding and "people-based" identity resolution. She shares her long perspective on the history of identity in ad tech – from cookies to our current petri dish of proposed solutions.
Consumers lives have changed permanently due to the pandemic, and brands will need a hard reset on their data and research strategies, says Omnicom Media Group CEO Scott Hagedorn. Also, worried about the loss of online identifiers? Listen in to hear how Hagedorn and OMG are thinking about it.
"Busting up this inflexibility that I think has hamstrung a lot of us would be a good outcome, in my view," according to Boff. "I love what I think is going to be the speed of change, the agility. Not the set it and forget it but how do we lean into these moments. Things are changing not weekly, not daily, sometimes not even hourly. They’re just changing all the time.”
Google's new VP and GM of ads sees the big picture of Google’s advertising business, from top-of-funnel video ads on YouTube, mid-funnel display ads served through DV360 and Google Ad Manager, and Google search and shopping ads.
Eric leads global brand building and media innovation at the CPG giant, as well as P&G’s programs on racial bias. He talks about the #TakeOnRace films and P&G’s current view in areas like programmatic and supply chain transparency.
With its latest acquisition, Mediaocean has taken a divisive step into digital ad execution - placing itself in direct competition with DSPs. CEO Bill Wise says the company can win on cost. "If you listen to [The Trade Desk] quarterly earnings, they talk a lot about TV and next generation TV and video solutions," Wise says in this episode. "They’re going to run into a wall and that wall is Mediaocean."
Bill Koenigsberg founded Horizon Media in 1989 and grew it to some 2,300 employees and $8.5 billion in client investments. Along the way he has weathered three or four economic recessions. In this episode he talks about the pandemic and its consequences.
You've probably seen ads served by Cardlytics within your digital banking interface, with card-linked offers (e.g. 10% back at Starbucks) matched to your past purchases. New CEO Lynne Laube talks about unlocking relationships with financial institutions, data privacy and other topics.
Amazon’s media businesses are worth far more than people think – approximately $500 billion – or 38% of the company's current market cap, according to investment banking firm Needham & Company. In this episode, Laura Martin talks in depth about how advertising fits in.
Operative is an ad management technology platform serving some of the world’s biggest media companies. Its longtime CEO talks about the growth of his company, its 2016 merger with SintecMedia and what the future holds. "We always wanted to be the company that helps media businesses with their direct advertising business," he says.