COLOGNE -- One source of ad demand is good, multiple sources all facing off against each other is better. That's why video ad-tech platform Ooyala has combined its Pulse ad server and programmatic toolset to let publishers pool demand sources for better effect. Ooyala's programmatic GM Scott Braley says the reboot is called a "Holistic Ad Decisioning" platform. According to the press release: "With a unified view [...]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Two major ways that political advertising campaigns differ from those of brand marketers are the “Super Bowl” effect of intense competition and the detailed CRM databases the campaigns have at their disposal. But true programmatic TV buying won’t be available until the 2020 presidential election, not owing to a of lack of technology but to media sellers coveting their [...]

COLOGNE -- Virtual reality is no longer in the future, it's here and now - figuring out what that means is the next step. To Suresh Vittal, the new VR immersion is a big deal, but also merely an extension of an approach companies should already have been heeding. "Brands can achieve sustainable competitive advantage from focusing on the consumer experience," the Adobe Marketing Cloud marketing [...]

COLOGNE -- For one of the leading programmatic advertising technology outfits, it's been a summer of announcements. Rubicon Project was tapped by Spotify to automate audio ad inventory, by an alliance of four leading US news publishers, by Flipboard to launch a mobile ad marketplace, and even launched an Olympics-themed ad marketplace with multiple publishers. For Jay Sears, Rubicon's SVP of marketplace development, "programmatic" [...]

COLOGNE-As more brands strive to harness technology to create end-to-end solutions for reaching their prospects, the issue of trust looms large. Digital ecosystem realities like ad blocking are “absolutely a wakeup call that you need to be responding to as a client,” said the CEO of the EMEA region for Publicis Media. As he attended the annual DMEXCO business exposition earlier [...]

COLOGNE -- Thank Brian O'Kelley for the new-wave way that publishers are maximizing yield by tapping in to multiple demand sources. In the words of the AppNexus CEO himself: "I invented header bidding back in 2009." Using that technology, publishers don't have to be hemmed to selling their space through just one ad exchange, they can take bids from multiple exchanges at once. "The first [...]

COLOGNE-It’s a fantastic time to be a media agency, according to Zenith Global Brand President Vittorio Bonori. The flip side is that clients’ business models are “under attack,” a situation that the right uses of technology can help to overcome. “Sometimes when we refer to technology it can really seem as something really cold and detached from human beings,” Bonori said [...]

COLOGNE -- TV has always traded on showing a single ad to as large an audience as possible. But the medium is being turned on its head. Pretty soon, advertisers will be using it to show thousands of different ads to individual audiences of just one. When exactly that will happen is anyone's guess. But "no time soon" is a sharp estimate. [...]

COLOGNE-A year ago, headlines abounded in advertising and media circles about the impending death of television and a skepticism about brand marketers’ need for premium video. “Fast forward 12 months to today and the headlines are literally the exact opposite,” says James Rooke, Chief Revenue Officer at FreeWheel. Rooke cites two main reasons for the reversal: an increased recognition of the [...]

COLOGNE -- In the TV series The X-Files, paranormal investigators Mulder and Scully had, at their disposal, a trio of good-guy computer hackers named The Lone Gunmen. What if hard-pressed advertisers, also searching for a solution, could call on such a squad, too? That would probably look a lot like White Ops, a group of do-good hackers that now trains its skills toward advertisers' [...]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Challenged by reach, scale and bidding against brand advertisers for impressions, political campaigns are hamstrung in their desire to do audience-guaranteed buys. But that is bound to change by the next presidential election cycle, according to Jason Tollestrup, Director of Programmatic Advertising & Business Intelligence at The Washington Post. “I think that in 2020 we’ll see a completely different strategy [...]

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Too much TV pretty much sums up this election cycle with regard to political advertising for Susan Parker at Hearst. In the next cycle, publishers will make data for targeting voters easier to manage than it is today and cross-screen reach will be much more important. “I think one of the takeaways for me, particularly when hearing from the buyers, [...]

COLOGNE-While it’s great to be able to track consumers as they move across digital devices, marketers should place more emphasis on peoples’ need states than on making sure they are targeting the same individual, according to Blake Cuthbert. “All of the need states that we can identify allows us to be really super targeted but also hyper relevant,” says the [...]

COLOGNE-Irish public broadcaster RTÉ took the plunge into native branded content several months ago to provide a more immersive experience for advertisers like the Irish Tourism Board. But as the broadcaster continues to expand its reach across devices, it faces the same gremlin as its competitors: accurate audience measurement. “We’re primarily a broadcaster and we’ve been very strong in terms of [...]

COLOGNE -- It's been a long, slow time coming - but now traditional TV is about to undergo a big disruption that it must respond to quickly, says a veteran ad man from the BBC's commercial arm who now runs an ad-tech outfit. Whilst music and then newspapers were buffeted by digital winds of change, ye olde TV has appeared resilient, with about $75bn in [...]

COLOGNE-While few marriages are actually made in heaven, the union of FreeWheel and StickyADS.tv comes pretty close. On the eve of FreeWheel’s European summit, Co-Founder and Co-CEO Doug Knopper prefers to call his company’s acquisition of StickyADS.tv a "partnership" that melds the best of direct and programmatic premium video sales and provides a much broader global scale for the combined [...]

COLOGNE -- Last year, 4C Insights of Chicago bought itself a leg up in the fusion of social and TV advertising, by acquiring TV monitoring outfit Teletrax from Civolution, to know what's airing when and where. Now the online ad targeting outfit is tooling up for further expansion, by taking a $26m series C investment from Kayne Partners along with previous investors. Amongst 4C's [...]

WASHINGTON, DC -- Ten years ago, blogging wasn't new. People had been using weblogs to post tidbits and updates for a couple of years already. But Chris Cillizza saw an opportunity. The journalist launched The Washington Post's The Fix to provide a unique take on political news, in a market that was already becoming crowded. "When I started The Fix 10 years ago, [...]

COLOGNE-With video advertising now generating about 30% of overall revenue, Spotify is beta testing original video series so that brands can reach both paid and free users “in an immersive experience,” according to the digital music provider’s Global Head of Sales. A couple of years ago, Spotify had “only a couple of ad units to talk about,” Brian Benedik says in [...]

COLOGNE-When its deal with Yahoo closes, AOL will gain “unprecedented scale” with which to become the king of content, while Facebook and Google rule social and search. This is the worldview of Jimmy Maymann, President of Content & Consumer Brands at AOL, whose keynote address at the DMEXCO confab was appropriately titled Publishing is the New Advertising. Among Maymann’s various roles [...]