You are here

Tag: Cookieless Targeting

Zeta Global Hones Its Martech Pitch To Wall Street

T. B. Smith, , ,

Zeta Global has had a rocky first two months as a public company. Its stock is down by a little more than a third since IPOing on the New York Stock Exchange in June. But the whims of Wall Street investors don’t always align with the true value of a business. Zeta CEO David Steinberg defended the company’s balance sheet. For one thing, Zeta started off with a net loss of $95 million in Q2 2021, after a net loss of $15 million a year ago. But that’s because Zeta…

Read More

Academic Study Shows European Startup Investments Diminished In The Wake Of GDPR

T. B. Smith, , ,

Investment in European startups has dropped by 36% compared to American or other global startups since the rollout of GDPR. At least, that’s what the data shows in a report published in the academic journal Marketing Science this month. The new report, titled “The Short-Run Effects of the General Data Protection Regulation on Technology Venture Investment,” uses commercial investment data from Crunchbase and VentureXpert, an investment data base owned by Thomson Reuters, to track startup investments from the two years before and after the enactment of GDPR. Liad Wagman, one…

Read More

Amazon Advertising Revenue Eclipses $7B – And Is Still Picking Up Speed

T. B. Smith, , ,

Amazon doesn’t disclose advertising revenues in its quarterly earnings reports. It bundles the ad group into an “Other” category, which consists of advertising and analytics services. But even without a specific number, it’s clear that Amazon’s advertising business is both massive and growing fast. Amazon’s Other category earned more than $7.9 billion in Q2, up by 87% year-over-year, the company reported on Thursday. Most of that revenue comes from ad sales. Advertising across the internet took a hit in Q2 2020, but Amazon’s ad business has grown by more than…

Read More

Google Cruises On Digital Ad Resurgence And Retail Client Gains

T. B. Smith, , , ,

Alphabet reported total revenue of almost $61.9 billion in Q2 2021, a 62% year-over-year increase. The company’s Q2 profit jumped from $7 billion in 2020 to $18.5 billion this year. The eye-popping growth rate is misleading. Q2 last year was a disaster; The first time Alphabet (or Google before that) ever reported a yearly revenue decline. On top of the pandemic gutting last year’s revenue, Google unexpectedly recorded nearly $1 billion in savings when its server equipment outpaced expectations in terms of its usable lifespan, according to CFO Ruth Porat.…

Read More

Taboola Targets Ecommerce And Affiliate With $800M Deal For Connexity

T. B. Smith, , , ,

Taboola has had a busy month. Three weeks after the company began trading on the Nasdaq, it acquired the commerce-based ad tech company Connexity for $800 million on Friday. Connexity is a logical and alluring takeover target. Taboola places recommendation boxes on publisher sites to connect visitors with advertisers and other publishers. Connexity is also rooted in the sell side. It connects visitors on a publishers’ websites to merchants and retailers, with an affiliate link business – Connexity acquired the affiliate marketing company Skimlinks last year – and through its…

Read More

Adelaide Raises $2 Million From Angel Backers To Develop Its Attention-Based Ad Metric

T. B. Smith, ,

The online ad tech startup Adelaide raised $2 million its first investment round from a crew of industry angel investors to build out its attention-based advertising currency, the Attention Unit [AU], as an alternative to campaigns determined primarily by viewability. Adelaide’s AU factors in the context of the ad placement and the likelihood that the viewer is engaged and will spend time on the page, said CEO Marc Guldimann. Last year, Adelaide spun out of the ad tech startup Parsec Media, which works with publishers to sell attention-based ad campaigns…

Read More

Cloud Data Company Snowflake Gives Ad Tech A Boost By Joining UID2

T. B. Smith, , , ,

The Unified ID 2.0 (UID2), the programmatic industry’s open web advertising identifier, has steadily added to its partnership roster of brands, agencies, ad tech vendors and publishers in the past couple years, becoming the most-used ID aside from walled garden platforms like Google, Facebook and Amazon. But UID2’s newest addition is perhaps its most interesting and ambitious yet – the cloud data service Snowflake. Typically, Snowflake operates on top of the company’s cloud infrastructure, namely Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), to layer in…

Read More

Amperity Raises $100 Million As The CDP Category Grows Up

T. B. Smith, , , , ,

The customer data platform (CDP) craze isn’t over yet. The CDP startup Amperity raised $100 million on Tuesday at a valuation of a little more than $1 billion dollars. The new round brings Amperity’s total funding to $187 million. Amperity last raised $50 million in Series C funding in 2019. The billion-dollar valuation mints Amperity as the second unicorn CDP, after Segment was acquired by Twilio last November for $3.2 billion. “When everything went down last year during the pandemic, I would have sworn that many of these massive customers…

Read More

The Trade Desk Launches Solimar, Its Pitch For The Open Internet Vs. The Walled Gardens

T. B. Smith, , ,

The Trade Desk introduced its latest DSP dashboard, Solimar, on Wednesday, as well as a venture capital arm called TD7. The company’s first startup investment is in the ad-bidding software company Chalice Custom Algorithms. Solimar consolidates The Trade Desk’s data marketplace for targeting and measurement into a single interface, with data onboarding and identity resolution built in as well. By bringing together data onboarding, targeting and measurement, The Trade Desk is trying to spur more brands to plan campaigns based on specific KPIs – for instance, Walmart or Home Depot…

Read More

Merkle Acquires LiveArea, A $250 Million Bet On Commerce Integrations

T. B. Smith, , ,

Dentsu-owned Merkle has acquired LiveArea, an experiential commerce agency, for $250 million, the companies said Tuesday. Merkle will add LiveArea’s 590 employees to its roster. LiveArea works with retailers and brands, though mostly retailers, on commerce and marketing. It provides design and creative strategy, but its primary offering integrates customer data with ecommerce tech such as order management systems (OMS) and marketing clouds. A few of its clients include Adidas, Advance Auto Parts and Barbour. Brands and retailers’ customer data tends to exist in siloes that support individual business functions,…

Read More