Ciaran O'Kane
CEO
Articles by Ciaran
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Surviving the Ad Tech Cull
In the face of the Google and Facebook duopoly and squeezed margins, which models will survive?
If you believe every ad tech naysayer in the industry, you will think ad tech is on its last legs. Many people see Facebook and Google growing disproportionately to the rest of the industry and, as a result, think they are ultimately unstoppable. It’s a fair point. Their growth cannot be denied, but on closer examination it’s [...]
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Consultancies Have Huge Opportunity in Programmatic, But Only If They Buy These Ad Tech Companies
Consultancies have been busy acquiring creative agencies and leveraging their existing end-to-end relationship with clients to build market share in digital marketing. Deloitte, IBM, Accenture, and McKinsey are all building internal capabilities to attract more business from brand marketers.
Creative seems to be a focus for much of their activity thus far – where, presumably, fat consultancy fees can be charged to clients. Media buying has not really had a lot of interest for ad [...]
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Why 2016 Was The Beginning of The End of The Current Ad Tech Cycle
There was a lot of M&A this year in advertising technology. According to Eric Franchi’s ad tech M&A tracker, there were eighteen acquisitions in excess of USD$100m (£68.4m) in 2016 – with a combined total of nearly USD$10bn (£6.8bn). This obviously should be viewed as a positive for the industry. Ad tech clearly still plays a crucial part in the monetisation and execution strategies of publishers, agencies and brands.
Despite the M&A frenzy this year there is a sense in [...]
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Why Telcos Are Going to Smash the Google/Facebook Ad Duopoly
The Yahoo saga is finally over. After the most protracted sales process of recent times, Verizon acquired Yahoo’s core assets (content properties, email, search, and an assortment of ad technology) for nearly USD$5bn (£3.8bn). It is likely that Mayer will disappear into the sunset with a considerable payoff – and Verizon has, at last, added a critical piece to its overall offering, which will help it take on the growing Google/Facebook hegemony.
From my high-level perspective, this is a fantastic deal. Verizon will scale, adding several [...]
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King: Testing New Reward Video Ad Format to Monetise 400+ Million Users
King is rumoured to be launching a media business later this year to help build revenue around its incredibly sticky global audience of 463 million monthly active users.
The gaming giant has already made a number of key hires in the new part of the business – most notably Lucia Mastromauro, poached from Google, to be King’s UK MD.
King needs to steer away from interruptive advertising, as it has been proven that this negatively affects in-app purchases. The game-playing experience is [...]
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Why Mobile Is Primed For Ad Tech Innovation – And That Emoji Ad Network
It’s the mobile industry’s big week – when thousands of opinion formers, C-level execs, and journalists from the mobile industry flock to Barcelona to discuss all things mobile for a full week.
Amid the blizzard of hardware launches and high-level keynotes from industry leaders (Zuckerberg is keynoting again!), ad tech will again play its bit part at the show – occupying the fringes instead of rightly being prime time.
Despite its ‘minor’ role at MWC, ad tech is playing a vital part [...]
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Marketing Tech Bellwether Posts Decent Q4 As Potential Suitors Line Up
Marketing technology remains the hot area for digital marketing right now – with increased M&A and investment in the space. Marketo is the public market bellweather for the martech space, given its complete focus on automated marketing. It posted its Q1 earnings late last night much in line with Wall Street estimates, sending the stock higher in after hours trading.
Highlights of fourth quarter of 2015:
– Revenue for the quarter was $58.30 million, an increase of 37.6% on a year-over-year basis – [...]
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Yahoo Cuts 15% of Staff in Anaemic Fourth Quarter
Yahoo’s big news to Wall Street, in its Q4 earnings, was the announcement that it is cutting 15% of its workforce; and looking to reduce costs by USD$400m (£277.6m) by the end of the year. Its Q4 results were in line with Wall Street analysts’ expectations. The company posted fourth-quarter earnings of USD$1.27bn (£881.5m) in revenue; but reported a full year loss of USD$4.44bn (£3.05bn) due to a goodwill impairment – mostly coming from the write-down of the lame duck [...]
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Telenor Acquires Tapad For USD$360M As Telco Ad Tech Stack Race Continues
Telenor, a leading telco in APAC and Europe, has acquired Tapad for USD$360m (£252m). Tapad is a leading device graph company.
The device graph is the hottest point solution in ad tech right now, with continued M&A speculation around remaining players in this space like Drawbridge, Screen6 and AdBrain.
What’s the rationale behind this deal? The thinking from Telenor is simple: to monetise hundreds of millions of its existing user data.
What Tapad offers is a means to take specific [...]
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80% Of Facebook's USD$5bn Quarterly Ad Revenue Comes From Mobile
Facebook strengthened its position as the leader in mobile display after delivering a strong Q4. The company announced in earnings that it is now making over USD$5bn (£3.49bn) in digital advertising revenue. Eighty percent of that is now coming from mobile.
Financial Highlights for 2015
– Revenue for the full year 2015 was USD$17.93bn (£12.53bn), an increase of 44% year-over-year – Income from operations for the full year 2015 was USD$6.23bn (£4.35bn) – Net income for the full year 2015 was USD$3.69bn (£2.58bn) – [...]
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