Marketing Tech Comes Home for Publishers: Managing the Ad Tech/Mar Tech Convergence

Digital media types have been buzzing for a while about a shift in the marketing tech world: Marketing tech is being drawn closer to advertising tech, and this is going to change the way advertisers and publishers do business. The messaging in advertising will become more personal, and in order…

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AdMonsters Playbook: Understanding Attention Metrics

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Could Chatbots Kill the Search Advertising Star?

I can’t say I was surprised by findings from research firm L2 Marketing that Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa is more likely to push Amazon Prime products on users seeking a variety of wares. There’s nothing scandalous in that—if I had an Alexa, I’d probably want it to look for Prime…

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Understanding AI’s Potential in Digital Media

Science fiction turns fact—the term artificial intelligence seems ubiquitous at the moment, whether it’s marketing technology firms boasting about superior processing power for campaign personalization or the coming singularity and robot apocalypse.Those of us in the trenches of the digital advertising world have become immune to the lure of buzzwords,…

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Ad Ops Decoder: What Is Viewability?

Viewability has been one of the more contentious issues in digital advertising for several years, in spite of the fact that MS Word apparently doesn’t recognize it as a properly spelled word. That’s appropriate, in a way. Media types have found the viewability issue maddening, and most laypersons would never…

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When the Rosé’s Over: Thoughts on Cannes

No, I didn't go to Cannes last week. Did I want to? Honestly, yachts and rosé have never been my thing (Cheap beer in a dirty rock club? Now you're talking my language), and the gladhanding awards bit makes me roll my eyes just thinking about it. Cannes used to…

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Ad Ops Decoder: What Are Better Ads Standards?

Better Ads Standards are an initiative for promoting “acceptable” ad experiences for users, while discouraging disruptive ads. The overall goal, as stated, has been to keep the spread of ad blocking tools at bay, by assuring the ads in the ecosystem are not so annoying they drive users to start…

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Ops 2017: The Photo Show

I came here to post photos from last week's Ops, but before that, I wanted to add one takeaway from the conference and all the conversations that led up to it. This year's Ops really hammered home something Gavin, Rob and I have been writing and talking about considerably over…

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Ad Ops Decoder: What Is EBDA?

Exchange Bidding in Dynamic Allocation is, in a nutshell, Google’s answer to header bidding. It’s a server-side solution where exchanges and SSPs can bid on publisher inventory along with Google’s AdX in a unified auction. Now, to understand why that matters, we’re going to have to walk back a few…

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Ops 2017: Have Ops Pros Become Storytellers?

If you bother Gavin, Brian and I while we’re in the throes of preparing for the day-and-a-half military precision exercise that is Ops, we’re going to complain about the number of speakers to wrangle and calls to make. I mean with 40+ sessions and the 70+ speakers, it’s a bit…

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