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 out after that kind of exit.  But [...]

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". "Historically, the approach has been to gather large amounts [...]

The organizers of Cannes Lions have announced a completely new program at Cannes Lions titled the "Innovation Festival."  It will be a two-day program, June 25th & 26th held at the Grand Palais. The program will recognize the impact of data on the creative advertising process.  (It happens concurrently with the overall festival.) A number of adtech companies and media agencies are [...]

PHOENIX - The digital adtech  sectors of supply side platforms (SSP's) and ad servers will be dead in two years as publishers and advertisers will demand an integrated offering, says Mike Shehan, CEO of SpotXchange, in this interview with Beet.TV Shehan's SpotXchange has been known as video advertising SSP, has made the move to incorporating ad serving, notes. We spoke with Shehan [...]

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 across the country, maybe around the [...]

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 the former Saatchi & Saatchi finance [...]

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 Pangea Alliance, a shared scheme to [...]

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 recently, TubeMogul platform strategy SVP Max Mead said programmatic [...]

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 than we can contain in the [...]

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 can they be more responsive based [...]

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 and Chairman of Xaxis, tells Beet.TV in [...]

The advertising industry has made small strides in viewability but still has a long ways to go, especially in measurement of this area, says Mitchell Weinstein, SVP, Director of Ad Operations at IPG Mediabrands, in this interview with Beet.TV. Tracking viewability with mobile video and TV remains challenging, he says. "We focus on what we can measure - desktop, display and video. [...]

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 SMG agencies, which is about a 60-person [...]

To combat potential pre-roll ad fatigue, Scripps Networks is focusing on upping the amount of custom ad content it offers to marketing partners, says Bill Murray, VP Sales Strategy & Planning at Scripps Networks in this interview with Beet.TV. "We are looking at how to do integrated custom video ad experiences," he says, and those could be more akin to native videos. A [...]

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 hearing the strategy putting programmatic first from major [...]

The advertising industry is determined to combat digital ad fraud. Case in point: the 4A's is investing resources in this initiative through a new group focused on battling fraud and piracy, says Nancy Hill, President and CEO of the 4A's in this interview with Beet.TV. The Brand Integrity Program Against Piracy, founded by the 4As and other industry groups, certifies that advertising technology companies [...]

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 that propensity of consumers on the web [...]

As programmatic buying becomes more widespread, so do business opportunities for the tech platforms that support this buying style. Case in point -- programmatic video platform Virool is aiming to expand deeper into big global brands this year as brands pursue more "advertainment" style videos, says Brian Danzis, the company's Chief Revenue Officer, at the recent Beet.TV executive retreat. Virool is a [...]

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, the metric television has used for [...]

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 - we saw a number of different app [...]