Steve Ellwanger

COLOGNE—Unification remains a key driving force at Verizon’s Oath, which recently unified its adtech stack under the name Oath Ad Platforms. “I’m really optimistic about the opportunity going forward,” says Simon Halstead, Head of Open Demand, EMEA. He’s not alone, according to IAB Europe research about attitudes to programmatic advertising, Halstead explains in this interview […]

COLOGNE – As mobile marketing KPI’s have evolved over the last several years, advertisers are getting “way more transparency than they ever had,” says Adjust CEO & Co-Founder Christian Henschel. Adjust’s SDK resides within its customers’ apps and “we transfer the data to our platform and then help our customers to understand what kind of […]

COLOGNE – When you have more than 4,000 partners in the app marketing space, you have a pretty good understanding of one of the biggest pain points. “What we see in our data is that users are using apps more frequently but for a shorter period of time,” says Ben Jeger, Managing Director, DACH & […]

What was once a lifestyle community for women is now a “life stage community” in the form of Livingly.com, which this year has added two new brands and whose display ads are transacted 100% programmatically. Livingly seeks to attract “unconventional women” and help guide them through life stages, says Greta Lawn, VP, Head of Sales […]

COLOGNE – For traditional publishers, the biggest challenge when producing video content isn’t lack of demand. “There is definitely demand there. The biggest challenge for video is actually having enough premium inventory,” says Emma Newman, VP of UK operations for PubMatic. Driving scale for video is best done via programmatic ad sales, Newman explains in […]

With a nod to the technology legacy of Alexander Graham Bell, AT&T Advertising & Analytics has rebranded itself as Xandr and announced a deal to aggregate and sell the national addressable TV advertising inventory of Altice USA and Frontier Communications. The news comes as AT&T convenes The Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara to explain how […]

TORONTO — As Cadent’s technology powers the targeted-television advertising platform that pools the inventory of Sky and Virgin Media in the UK and Ireland, the company is busy helping to scale dynamic ad insertion in Canada. Among its tasks for Sky and Virgin are creating a “compliant, walled garden” to abide by GDPR privacy strictures, […]

COLOGNE – As publishers have worked to clean up the digital media ecosystem, advances like header bidding have lifted their revenue. But it’s all still a work in progress, according to PubMatic Co-Founder & CEO Rajeev Goel. “One of the biggest issues right now is trust and transparency across the ecosystem,” says Goel. “We’ve all […]

TORONTO—Although Canada is behind the United States in the adoption of addressable linear television advertising—owing largely to inadequate set-top boxes—that’s going to change quickly. “Disruption is here” in the form of Netflix and other OTT providers, says Rich Astley, Global Chief Product Officer of GroupM’s Finecast agency. Canada is a “fascinating market and for many […]

COLOGNE – Given the headline-grabbing allure of advanced television, things like organic and paid search can get overlooked. But search is still one of the best sources of human intent and can provide long-term customer value beyond initial purchases. So says Craig Ellis, Global COO of the IPG agency Reprise Digital, in this interview with […]

The same 90 million shopper loyalty cards that have long fueled Nielsen Catalina Solutions’ digital advertising targeting and measurement efforts are helping to open doors to household addressable. “It’s just the mechanics of doing it differ as to where it goes,” says Tom Eaton, the company’s SVP of TV & Programmatic Solutions. “We’ve had to […]

COLOGNE – Pixability has built its business providing video advertising software across the walled gardens of the biggest social media platforms. Now it’s eying the over-the-top and connected-TV space as well, armed with a new offering that automates data analysis around video creative. “A lot of folks refer to us as the trade desk for […]

COLOGNE – Strategic advisory firm MediaLink considers itself as occupying “the intersection of marketing, media, advertising, entertainment and technology.” To say it’s a busy place to be is an understatement, according to Chairman & CEO Michael Kassan. “We are in an absolute state of transformation. I’ll be kind, I used to say chaos. It’s controlled […]

When Ashley J. Swartz hears the word relevance, the term renaissance comes to mind. Having doubled down on television “not only surviving but thriving,” she sees AT&T’s The Relevance Conference as the confluence of TV’s potential future in one place. “I think it’s incredibly exciting to see that some of the leaders in the marketplace […]

COLOGNE – In a growing direct-to-consumer brand environment, can positive, trusted and emotional content help marketers connect to consumers? CNN has wagered more than $40 million on Great Big Story and is convinced its content philosophy for younger viewers provides that connectivity. Launched in 2015, Great Big Story is an independent digital studio owned by […]

COLOGNE – Brand marketers’ desire to bring functions in-house isn’t necessarily new for advertising or media agencies, but one of the more challenging ramifications of clients’ quest for brand safety is in-housing activities the agencies used to handle. “Transparency still is a huge, huge issue,” OMD Global CEO Florian Adamski says in this interview with Beet.TV […]

As addressable television advertising closes in on some 80 million homes by year’s end, Sorenson Media is emerging as “kind of a new player in this area” with a clear differentiation, says MODI Media’s Marc Cestaro. “They have not only national avails, they have local avails that go across cable and broadcast, which is new. […]

All of the 250 invitation-only attendees of next week’s AT&T event titled The Relevance Conferences are aware that the “new” AT&T will be a big operation with lots of scale. So what exactly should the “official reveal of their offering” communicate to the industry? “What everyone’s anxious to understand is a bit more of the […]

With the race for cross-screen audience measurement becoming more of a marathon than a sprint, under new CEO Bryan Wiener comScore has both feet in the game. Those would be its digital and television penetration and the granularity of its consumer behavior data. “The genesis behind the comScore-Rentrak merger was brilliant,” Wiener says in this […]

COLOGNE – The newly formed Brand Safety Institute and the Trustworthy Accountability Group are pushing the digital advertising industry to invest billions of dollars to fight criminal elements in the same way as the financial services industry has done. It’s a two-step process consisting of “a short game and a long game,” says Mike Zaneis, […]