Robert Andrews

This time last year, Forbes magazine wrote Scott Ferber “has what it takes to be world-class business builder”. After all, six years after founding the online ad network Advertising.com with his brother in 1998, a 35-year-old Ferber sold the company to AOL for a hefty $495m. Many a founder would have taken the opportunity to cash […]

There are several techniques for identifying what has become the scourge of the internet for advertisers – code that fires up web pages just to ensure ads are displayed for which a buyer must pay. Now online ad tech vendor OpenX is trying a twist on fraud detection, with a third-generation iteration to its so-called “Traffic Quality Platform”. […]

How does pricing for branded content shape up against that for display ads? The two are like chalk and cheese, suggests Gannett national sales president Randy Kilgore. “It’s very different because it’s not a formula,” Kilgore tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Some of these things are six-month programmes where you send people out and do videos […]

What does a $31 billion market cap earn the world’s largest ad agency holding group? A status as amongst the most diversified and forward-thinking of communications agencies out there. When Sir Martin Sorrell took a controlling stake in what was then a shopping basket maker, Wire & Plastic Products, in 1985, little did most peers suspect […]

LONDON — News publishers traditionally like to keep hold of their own ad sales operations, selling advertisers on their own unique contextual properties. But now we are seeing some of them warm not only to programmatic mechanisms but also to collaborative working. The Guardian, CNN International, the Financial Times and Reuters are together forming the […]

They are two of the largest video ad tech outfits. Now TubeMogul and Ooyala’s Videoplaza unit are integrating to create a marketplace for the programmatic trading of video ads between premium brands and publishers. The pair say TubeMogul’s platform will connect with Videoplaza’s Konnect suite to allow access to Videoplaza’s inventory on a programmatic basis. Speaking with Beet.TV […]

The Digital Content NewFronts, the event in which digital content owners get to shop their latest productions to marketers eager for an audience, is coming up on April 27 in New York. “The NewFronts are expanding to almost two full weeks,” says IAB president and CEO Randall Rothenberg, whose organization stages the event. “There is more interest […]

Developers have spent the last couple of years tweaking websites for smaller screens using “responsive” design techniques. But screen size is not the only way to adapt experiences for mobile screens. “When we talk about creating a responsive experience … to deliver mobile use the same experience they would have on the desktop … how […]

Advertisers’ quest for buying only ads that can be viewed by human users may end up costing them more to advertise in the long run, says an influential digital advertising decision-maker. “If we work out the fraud and viewability issues, it’s going to have a constraining effect on inventory,” David J. Moore, President of WPP Digital […]

Publicis’ VivaKi unit is rethinking the way it delivers programmatic services, moving from a centralized offering to threading the discipline throughout sibling agency departments. In this video interview, SMG programmatic SVP Mac Delaney tells Beet.TV the move mirrors the way digital has always been centralized first, distributed later. “My team is rolling into the individual […]

After originally being considered a last resort, so-called “programmatic” methods of trading online ad inventory are moving up publishers’ pecking order, according to one platform exec. “The traditional model is ‘let’s sell everything we can up-front through a direct sales model and then whatever’s left let’s push in to our SSP platform or exchange environments’,” SpotXchange platform SVP Sean Buckley tells Beet.TV. “Now we’re […]

Quantcast is known for helping brands measure their website performance. Now it is also trying to offer “Big Data” services to clients. “We see consumers in the US around 800 to 900 times a month – we process around 30 petabytes of data every day,” according to company SVP Adrian D’Souza. “We’re able to predict very well what […]

The Media Ratings Council says it started tackling the question of whether online ads are truly viewed by consumers or not in order that online ads can be priced similar to analog ones. “We see it as a stepping stone to a means to another end – an audience based currency on GRPs (gross rating points, […]

We’ve known for some time that the video games industry is bigger than Hollywood. But the growth of mobile gaming is underlining that position. “The phone is your primary device,” says business development mobile ad tech provider AdColony‘s VP Matt Barash. “Maybe gaming is the new cinema. It’s where people spend a lot of time. “Recently, we had the Super Bowl […]

AOL is learning the unique ways in which consumers want to watch its original video line-up via mobile devices. In this video interview, Marta Martinez, Global Head Video Sales at AOL Platforms, tells Beet.TV that the company’s videos are available on 166 devices… “(Consumers) normally watch three shows – in 65% of the cases, they watch […]

Dutch video technology company Civolution says it has a recipe for helping advertisers stay in touch with consumers, even as they distract themselves from TV viewing with alternative media devices. Civolution’s technology can trigger online ads in time with broadcast TV ads.  It has recently rebranded it’s TV synch company as Teletrax. “Let’s see you […]

These days, many ad tech vendors offer to give brands and networks the data that reveals the true effectiveness of their ads. But which side wants to see that data, and which would rather look away? “If a big ad network doesn’t like what they see…  they don’t necessarily want to come back (to us),” […]

Netflix may not want to open up its audience ratings to industry onlookers – but that doesn’t mean measurement houses aren’t trying to put some numbers on the video behemoth’s growth regardless. “We are actually going to be able to have measurement for content that’s playing on Netflix because we have the audio tags – […]

MySpace may have struggled to retain relevance over the last few years, but its latest owner recently rolled up the social network in to a proposition it hopes advertisers will find appealing. Interactive Media Holdings, which also owns Specific Media, Vindico and Xumo, has reacast as Viant Ad Cloud. “We realised, four or five years ago, we […]

In the emerging world of digital video advertising, many in the industry are getting excited by the possibility of programmatic-style real-time video ad buying, as well as by dynamically-inserted video ads. But video ad tech platform Videology says most of the ads its clients buy in videos are bought more in advance like that, just […]