Adxperience

Multimillion-Dollar Oops! Google Will Pay Publishers For ‘The Night Of The Yellow Ad’

In December 2018, a training mistake within Google’s programmatic advertising tools caused a yellow 300x250 banner to flood publishers’ sites for about 45 minutes (7:00–7:45 pm), across the United States and Australia, with CPMs above $20. The campaign was funded by The Iconic, an Australian fashion retailer, using a Google DV360 buying seat and ran across Google AdX and Rubicon Project; Google stated The Iconic was not responsible. AdExchanger confirmed at least $1.6 million was spent in under an hour, with total spending potentially exceeding $10 million. Mediavine reported an 840% increase in hourly ad spend during the event. Google plans to pay publishers for the yellow ad, is conducting a post-mortem, and will implement guardrails to prevent recurrence; the incident did not affect other advertisers and is described as unprecedented in scale for programmatic advertising.

SPORT1 wechselt den Digitalvermarkter

SPORT1's online and mobile platforms (SPORT1.de and SPORT1 News/Video apps) reach 8.57 million unique users (AGOF Sep 2017) and 86 million visits per month (IVW Oct 2017). Media Impact will significantly expand its sport advertising power by taking over digital sales for SPORT1 and related sites such as BILD.de, Sportbild.de, Transfermarkt.de, and SportTotal.tv. SevenOne Media had served SPORT1 digitally since January 2012; prior arrangements involved Tomorrow Focus (Burda Forward). The move is driven by Media Impact's adtech infrastructure, contrasting with SevenOne's use of Virtual Minds; Media Impact operates with AppNexus (SSP and Adserver), Google Ad Exchange (AdX) and 1plusX DMP, while SevenOne relies on Virtual Minds. Patrick Fischer, CEO of SPORT1 MEDIA, expects 2018 to bring synergy for the Olympic year and World Cup, developing new products across mobile, OTT and branded content, supported by a modern AppNexus-based adtech stack.

LinkedIn Rolls Out An Audience Network To Serve Sponsored Content Off-Platform

LinkedIn launched the LinkedIn Audience Network to serve sponsored content off-platform. The network extends to desktop placements on Microsoft properties such as MSN and Outlook.com and to third-party publishers via exchanges including MoPub, Google AdX (adx.google.com), Rubicon, and Sharethrough. Initially limited to sponsored posts, the network could expand to formats like native video in the future. LinkedIn is using a brand-safety approach with a whitelist of desktop publishers and is blocking certain mobile ad ID categories (e.g., dating, gaming) to protect its B2B audience. Six thousand advertisers participated in the early beta, reporting 3%–13% lift in unique impressions and up to 80% more unique clicks, with some campaigns achieving up to 4x engagement versus on-platform. LinkedIn previously experimented with off-platform serving via Bizo and Lead Accelerator, which were sunsetted to focus on sponsored content within the audience network strategy.