CANNES, France -- Programmatic video ad tech platform operator TubeMogul used the Cannes Lions festival to announce food brand Mondelēz International would use its services to buy and serve all of its video ads. "Programmatic is getting to be less scary," says TubeMogul's CEO Brett Wilson. "You're seeing more brands embrace it directly. "It doesn't mean they’re going to log in and do everything [...]

SAN FRANCISCO -- It was the operating system that nobody loved. When LG Electronics acquired webOS from HP in 2013, it bought a technically sound OS that had struggled to make headway during the mobile platform wars. Now the electronics group is hoping webOS can finally flourish by simplifying the smart TV experience, with the system embedded on the group's smart [...]

mDialog, a Canadian firm that has built a live video ad insertion engine, has been acquired by Google, the company announced in a blog post.  More in this report from TechCrunch.  Terms have not been revealed. Last year at the Brightcove customer summit, we spoke with Greg Philpott is the founder and CEO.  We have republished that video today.

CANNES, France -- WPP's GroupM recently declared it would no longer buy advertising spaces from open trading exchanges from next year. The global boss of GroupM's data-driven unit backs that strategy. "It’s our ambition to not buy any media in an open marketplace," says Xaxis global CEO Brian Lesser. "Our clients expects us to give them competitive advantage in the marketplace. By the [...]

CANNES, France -- It seems like it was only a few months ago that the topic of video ad fraud cast a long shadow on the digital advertising sector. Now everyone is running around trying to eliminate the dark arts. And one tech vendor says those arts could already be extinguished before 2014 is done. "You can never over-hype ad fraud - 20% [...]

CANNES, France -- Yahoo will open up its recently-unveiled Ad Manager Plus ad software to use on a self-serve basis - and is offering users' search history as a targeting characteristic. "People use search every day to show (purchase) intent - that search-based data has never been able to be used in a programmatic environment," according to Yahoo's head of the Americas, Ned Brody. "Display [...]

CANNES, France -- Many brands nowadays are keenly commissioning content videos - but are they diving in to the opportunity in the right way? "What you see too often - we saw a lot of it on YouTube and at the Cannes awards - people are sacrificing brand equity or brand truth to get noticed," says David Benson, Google's branding solutions director [...]

SAN FRANCISCO -- Ad group WPP is already making video and TV shows on behalf of advertisers, through its GroupM Entertainment division. But it wants to bring distribution platforms together to take its content to larger audiences. "The big aggregators have advantages, whether they're Yahoo, AOL, Google or YouTube," says the division's CEO Peter Tortocici. "They already deliver audiences at scale and [...]

SAN FRANCISCO -- TV subscribers want to be able to watch their programming digitally wherever they are. But creating a harmonious access point when the US' patchwork market comprises dozens of different operators is a significant undertaking. Angie Britt, the advanced products VP at cable operators' joint marketing association CTAM, says the sector-wide "TV Everywhere" initiative to do just that is great [...]

SAN FRANCISCO --  BlackArrow SVP Chris Hock says the company helps pay-TV operators make money from their content, no matter what screen it is served on. The San Jose, CA, firm's technology is used by traditional cable operators in up to 32 million US homes, Hock says. The outfit's product suites include software for campaigns, audience targeting, analytics, linear TV ad insertion [...]

AT SEA  OFF THE COAST OF FRANCE — GroupM has put its money where its mouth was by creating a unit dedicated to using new-wave technologies to target TV ads, says the man put in charge of the group. "Being able to utilize the technology that’s been installed in set-top boxes to identify households and zip codes and ad zones based [...]

CANNES, France -- Although people talk about serving highly targeting, personalized ads in TV broadcasts in the same way as is becoming possible online, this is unlikely to happen for some years, according to Real Media's founder. "There is some automation that can come in from the digital world," says Simulmedia CEO Dave Morgan. "But the idea of changing the ads at [...]

AT SEA  OFF THE COAST OF FRANCE -- When Terence Kawaja first introduced the Lumascape, the visual map illustrating an alarming array of ad tech companies, he backed up the image with a call for a simpler world. But that simplification isn't going to happen, the media finance expert now concedes. "Fragmentation is here to stay - fragmentation happens," Luma's CEO and [...]

CANNES, France - Marketers are striving to marry up their online video and TV ad operations as the tectonic plates of media shift beneath them, says one ad data group tryingto help. Simulmedia chief marketing officer David Cooperstein says "programmatic" ad-trading techniques, "for less-than-premium inventory, is probably the best way to monetize it at the moment". "They’re trying to leverage TV but [...]

CANNES  -- Yahoo's acquisition of Tumblr a year ago was all about helping brands go beyond conventional display ad formats. And now Yahoo has started promoting Tumblr content marketing slots across its network. "The traditional inventory … haven’t really provided marketers the environment to tell a rich, engaging, robust story," says Yahoo's head of the Americas, Ned Brody. "Unlike the small piece [...]

CANNES, France -- So-called "programmatic" techniques for controlling and automating online ad trading came in to this world in low-quality ad inventory. But now even top-tier publishers are becoming happy to sell their ads in this way. "Three years ago, they would have never worked with a SpotXchange - today they are," says the ad tech company CEO Mike Shehan. "The whole [...]

CANNES, France -- It's commonly thought that the European market is generally adopting so-called "programmatic" ad automation and trading techniques later than the US. But it looks like the quality publishers there are buying in with greater gusto. "Premium publishers in Europe, they seem to have got involved in this much earlier," according to Marco Bertozzi, EMEA president of the Audience On [...]

CANNES, France -- The conservative British mid-market tabloid is a gargantuan celebrity traffic driver online. Now it wants to both align and connect with a leading social messaging service. "It’s a little bit like WhatsApp," says Jon Steinberg, the BuzzFeed president who was named Mail Online north America CEO this week. "It’s this giant thing that everyone goes to but somehow not [...]

CANNES -- BBC Worldwide is working with Google's advertising divisions as they try to amalgamate how the publisher sells its TV and digital video ad inventory. "Quite a lot of our best customers are buying on television and buying online - linear and digital," BBC Worldwide's global strategy and sales VP Tom Bowman tells Beet.TV's Andy Plesser in this program about [...]

CANNES, France -- Heineken's US advertising boss is growing confident on the imminent melding of TV and online ad buying. "We’re getting to the point where the wall between traditional television and digital video are coming down," Ron Amram tells Beet.TV. "You can literally see across it - looking at GRPs across the whole landscape. "With programmatic ... you can potentially buy all [...]