AdExchanger News for April 9, 2019

Today's Must Read - Why IBM Is Leaving The Marketing Cloud Business [AdExchanger | Optimizing the News] Today from AdExchanger Tuesday, April 9 Join Us [PROGRAMMATIC I/O San Francisco, April 29-30]( - Day 2, 9:25 AM - "The Creative Renaissance Is Upon Us: The State Of Creative Advertising Technologies" - What does the creative adtech vendor landscape look like? How and why are marketers and agencies really using this tech? And where is the space going? This session will explore these questions, and more, in depth. --------------------------------------------------------------- Today's Must Read [Why IBM Is Leaving The Marketing Cloud Business]( The plan is for Centerbridge to create a new standalone company, official name TBD, from IBM's assets, which include email marketing platform Silverpop and a handful of other capabilities from the Watson marketing portfolio, such as campaign automation, a bidding engine for display and real-time personalization. [More.]( [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [LinkedIn]( --------------------------------------------------------------- More from AdExchanger [Pinterest Lowers IPO Expectations]( “You could argue Lyft was aggressive in their pricing, so perhaps this is a teachable moment for the underwriter of Pinterest to make sure you’re not going to have some difficulty in the secondary market to achieve your cover price,” Elgin Thompson, managing director of Digital Capital Advisors, said. [More.]( [‘Declared Data’ Startup Jebbit Raises $12 Million Series B]( Any mention of marketing tech or ad tech and VCs get very skittish, said Jonathan Lacoste, Jebbit’s CEO and co-founder, who noted a marked difference between now and what it felt like to raise the company’s Series A in 2017 or its seed round two years before that. [More.]( [Inside Alpha Group, Advance Local’s Tech Incubator]( “We want to solve big problems for consumers and clients, not organizational opportunities [for the parent company],” Mike Donoghue said. [More.]( [Don’t Lose The Human Touch When Using Marketing Automation Tools]( When my team at HP uses signal data to personalize digital ads or web experiences – even slightly – we see improved response rates from our customers. For marketing automation tools to be truly effective, however, we need the technology to be the best version of itself. [More.]( [Programmatic Cable Can Unlock VOD Inventory, But We’re Not There Yet]( MVPDs have made tremendous technological strides to improve the ad buying process for traditional TV media buyers. However, there’s still a way to go before dynamic MVPD inventory is unlocked and unleashed into the modern demand side, enabling digital-like ad buying, particularly in the video-on-demand (VOD) environment. [More.]( [Offline Brand Intelligence]( [Connecting the Dots for TV Attribution]( [www.cuebiq.com/tv]( News Round Up A Chance To Serve The buy-side ad tech company Adform announced an investment on Monday by GRO Capital, a Danish private equity firm. The companies didn’t disclose the size of the new round, and Adform COO Oliver Whitten tells AdExchanger that talks with GRO began in December 2018, when Adform backed out of its IPO plan. But he said the cash injection comes at a pivotal moment for Adform, since it wants to ramp up hiring and biz dev to go after ad server business suddenly up for grabs following Sizmek’s bankruptcy. Adform isn’t the only ad server anteing up for Sizmek accounts. Flashtalking CEO John Nardone says that within a few days of Sizmek’s bankruptcy filing, his board had approved a plan to speed-hire about 30 new employees in addition to 15 prior open positions, as many brands and agencies look for an ad server replacement. The ad-serving startup Thunder originally planned a global expansion in 2020, when Google is expected to shut down its advertising ID worldwide, according to CEO Victor Wong, but the board has accelerated that plan because so much of Sizmek’s business in Europe and APAC is suddenly on the table. Oh No, Gizmodo Univision is selling Gizmodo Media Group to private equity firm Great Hill Partners. The Gizmodo properties will be rebranded under the name G/O Media Inc. and led by James Spanfeller, the former CEO of Forbes.com and president of consumer magazines at Ziff Davis. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but sources tell The Wall Street Journal they expect Gizmodo to be sold for well below the $135 million Univision paid for it in 2016. While Gizmodo is another example of a digital publisher selling below a prior valuation, Spanfeller sees great value in Gizmodo’s audience – 67 million people visited its sites in February. He wants to double down on programmatic ad sales as well as ecommerce paid content to whip the company back into shape. [More](. Around The Block The German media conglomerate Axel Springer, the largest news company in Europe, has brought another suit against Eyeo’s Adblock Plus (ABP), a popular ad blocker, [PPC Land]( reports. Axel Springer has taken Eyeo to court a handful of times for alleged anti-competitive behavior, but its efforts never landed much of a blow. It won a [partial victory]( in 2016, when a court ruled that ABP couldn’t force Axel Springer to pay whitelisting fees to serve ads to users who had consented to see ads. But Eyeo’s revenue mostly comes from networks like Google, Criteo and Taboola, not directly from news publishers. The new suit claims Eyeo violates copyright law because “ad blockers change the programming codes of websites and thus directly interfere with the legally protected offerings of publishers.” But Wait, There’s More! - [The Battle For The Last Unconquered Screen – The One In Your Car]( - WSJ - [DTC Brands Are Closely Watching Casper ‘Bellwether’ IPO]( - Digiday - [Spotify: Streaming Conversion Metrics For Music Marketers]( - blog - [Britain Proposes Broad New Powers To Regulate Online Content]( - NYT - [SpotX, BrightLine Expand OTT Ad Partnership]( - MediaPost - [Millions Of Netflix Users Share Passwords, But It’s Not Bad For Netflix]( - Recode - [Triad Launches Planning And Optimization Tool For CPGs]( - release - [EU To Check For GDPR Violations In Microsoft Contracts]( - ZDNet You’re Hired! - [IPG Makes Raft Of Hires To Ad Tech Division In APAC]( - The Drum [Media Needs the Creative]( [Ad Serve from the Source — AdBridge™]( [( Podcasts [The Big Story Episode 37:]( Riding Eternal, Shiny And Chrome [The Big Story Episode 36:]( Agencies And The Supply Side [The Big Story Episode 35:]( Spring Forward, Fall Back [The Big Story Episode 34:]( Google’s On First [The Big Story Episode 33:]( Boiler Room [The Big Story Episode 32:]( Falling Down [The Big Story Episode 31:]( DTC Principles Come To Big Brands [The Big Story Episode 30:]( Is IAB DTC? [The Big Story Episode 29:]( Blood In The Water [The Big Story Episode 28:]( Must See TV [The Big Story Episode 27:]( A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To France [Check out all episodes of The Big Story >>]( [AdExchanger Talks Episode 121:]( National Public Media's Tutuwa Ahwoi [AdExchanger Talks Episode 120:]( MikMak's Rachel Tipograph [AdExchanger Talks Episode 119:]( Brian O'Kelley [AdExchanger Talks Episode 118:]( Adform's Julian Baring [AdExchanger Talks Episode 117:]( 360i's Jared Belsky [AdExchanger Talks Episode 116:]( Triad's Sherry Smith [AdExchanger Talks Episode 115:]( Heat's Jocelyn Lee [AdExchanger Talks Episode 114:]( Jivox's Diaz Nesamoney [AdExchanger Talks Episode 113:]( Nextdoor's Lauren Nemeth [AdExchanger Talks Episode 112:]( Conviva's Bill Demas [AdExchanger Talks Episode 111:]( Sovrn's Walter Knapp [Get More AdExchanger Talks Episodes >>]( Events [PROGRAMMATIC I/O + AdExchanger Awards](, San Francisco, April 29-30, 2019 [PROGRAMMATIC I/O](, New York, October 15-16, 2019 [Industry Preview 2020](, New York, January 28-29, 2020 Share This Email: [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [LinkedIn]( [Google+]( | [Forward To A Friend]( [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [YouTube]( [View in web browser]( This message was sent to {EMAIL} To ensure delivery to your inbox, [add us to your address book](. 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