COLOGNE – Despite the many innovations birthed by the advent of digital marketing, there’s still much to be done to deliver ads to people that don’t annoy them. This is why IBM and its Watson artificial intelligence assets are teaming up with demand-side platform pioneer MediaMath to create an infrastructure that supports cognitive bidding. The partnership is designed to provide marketers [...]

COLOGNE – Sky TV is developing a portal for advertisers to plan their addressable television campaigns. Just don’t say it’s about “biddable” inventory. To Jamie West, Group Director of Advanced Advertising at Sky, programmatic transactions in the broadcast world are about automation. The notion of biddable inventory is not “particularly relevant for a broadcast world,” West says in this interview with [...]

COLOGNE -- What do you get when you combine the content heft of Yahoo and AOL with the ad platforms each, and their owner Verizon, has rolled up over the years? The newly-formed company is called Oath, and it is targeting new mobile video ad formats as the top priority for its developer staff. "Mobile video is where we’re really putting a [...]

COLOGNE – If you want to understand what future social commerce will be, go to China. That’s the advice of Havas Global MD Dominique Delport. “I think that we are on the verge of a massive transformation in the way brands are trading with people directly,” Delport says during a break at the 2017 DMEXCO advertising and trade show. He cites as [...]

COLOGNE -- This was the year that a Mindshare division launched an initiative to personalize advertisements - but also when Google removed personalized ads from within Gmail. The promise of personalized ads has rumbled on for a long time. But the work involved, and even the ethics, are still playing out for many. UM Worldwide's chief innovation officer is one agency exec [...]

COLOGNE -- Once upon a time, "programmatic" was when publishers gave away their unsold inventory in real-time bidding auctions for cheap rates. But that was then. Now programmatic is growing up. And you can thank private marketplaces, the technology tools which allow publishers to put controls over who they let in to buy and sell, and how. That means the programmatic trading [...]

COLOGNE – With the ad industry’s preoccupation with premium video and digital media transparency, things like search engines tend to fly beneath the radar. But considering how search has morphed into personal digital assistants, it’s still a key driver of growth and opportunity for advertisers. This is particularly resonant for Microsoft, which unveiled Bing in 2009 as the successor to MSN [...]

COLOGNE – As the number of ad tech providers ballooned from 350 in 2012 to 3,500 in 2016, so did advertiser concerns about digital media transparency. “It became so complex and messy that we needed to push the envelope,” says Dominique Delport, Global MD of Havas Group. To provide more clarity and faith in the programmatic transaction process, Havas started with [...]

Rob Norman wants to help advertisers buy advertising with outcomes, not proxies, in mind - but that doesn't mean brands should be fixated on end goals. Around the industry, new attribution and tracking technology is drawing executives to seek pricing ad pricing models that involve paying only when outcomes like product purchases are recorded. That is likely to be one of the [...]

COLOGNE - The industry is at an inflection point in the maturation of programmatic transactions. Ahead of the curve lies a big influx of brand advertising dollars from buyers who have been clearly articulating their needs about ecosystem transparency. This is the viewpoint of Rajeev Goel, Co-Founder and CEO of PubMatic, the marketing automation software provider. On the eve of the [...]

The talking is over, the forecasts are becoming reality. The time is now for the age when advertisers and media buyers can better target their television ad buys using datasets beyond basic age and gender. So says one veteran media buyer who now helps enable the opportunity for peers through one of the major digital platforms. "As someone who worked at media [...]

It’s hard enough for brands to deal with the leviathan that is Amazon.com. It doesn’t get any easier when those brands also are dependent on many different retailers to sell their products. Performance marketing technology provider Criteo, perhaps best known for its online consumer retargeting expertise, is leveraging its learning loop capabilities to assist not only brands but retailers and others [...]

It is barely a year since a hard-hitting ANA report blew the lid off practices in which US advertising agencies were accused of keeping up to 20% of clients' media budgets for themselves after engaging in "pervasive" kick-backs and rebates. But that was just one of the controversies that has come to live under the moniker of ad industry "transparency". Speaking with [...]

Incremental change and “a minor tweak” don’t cut it in the media agency world anymore. This is the rationale behind the coming together of WPP’s Maxus and MEC in a new entity called Wavemaker, “a fantastic process that’s been conducted by bringing the teams together around the word,” says WPP Chief Digital Officer Rob Norman. The bottom line is a global [...]

Could blockchain technology, with its security and transparency, cure the ills of an often-murky digital media ecosystem? GroupM’s Rob Norman believes the attributes of blockchain will be a focus of the upcoming DMEXCO advertising and media trade show because of "an inevitable demand" from advertisers and agencies for some type of open ledger system for data. “I’ve never really come across [...]

What exactly constitutes “transparency” in the digital media ecosystem? To Hearst’s Mike Smith, it’s a multidimensional subject of debate that he parses into three categories: Pricing of ad inventory, who sells it and ad fraud involving creative assets. In this interview with Beet.TV, Smith acknowledges the complexity of the programmatic transaction path and talks about efforts by the Internet Advertising Bureau [...]

Retailers and ecommerce companies have joined verticals like high-end fashion and luxury in embracing programmatic digital advertising buys, increasingly attracted by audience guarantees. “Ecommerce has definitely grown into a major business,” says The New York Times Director of Programmatic Advertising, Sara Badler. Under Badler’s direction, the Times is making a major push to expand its programmatic ad offerings across Europe, Latin [...]

About a year ago, performance marketing technology provider Criteo had a lock on lots of e-commerce companies. What it lacked was access to brand marketers that did not have their own e-commerce sites. “Those brands have a challenge in creating a performance solution because the sales are actually measured in third-party ecommerce sites that they don’t own,” recalls Jonathan Opdyke. After the [...]

While there might be some bad players in the digital media ecosystem, transparency basically boils down to having a full understanding of the ins and outs of programmatic transactions. What’s hampered understanding is that while automation has speeded things up, machines can’t watch for the things that humans can. This is how PubMatic CMO Jeff Hirsch views the widely discussed issue [...]

Not that long ago, the only presence Condé Nast might have had on Netflix was when a Sex and the City character was reading an issue of GQ or Vanity Fair. Now the publisher has its own Netflix production recently green-lighted for a third season. It’s all part of the evolution not only of Condé Nast itself but also of its [...]