There was a time around 2009 when you couldn’t talk about Zynga without also talking about Facebook. Back then, FarmVille, CityVille and CafeWorld were beyond ubiquitous. But Facebook wasn’t mentioned once on Tuesday during Zynga’s third-quarter earnings call. That’s partially because Facebook’s users are increasingly mobile, with 1.39 billion monthly actives out of 1.55 billion […]
Frito-Lay, the $14 billion chip-and-dip division of PepsiCo, wants to engineer 360-degree marketing programs. Ram Krishnan, CMO of Frito-Lay North America, recently outlined a 70-20-10 plan, which will enable it to do so. The brand will allocate 70% of its resources to proven methodologies, 20% to partners who prove value (Krishnan called it “validated risk”) […]
For branded content to be a success, it must hurdle two key challenges. First, it must be authentic, entertaining and relevant, and second, it must be distributed effectively. Via a partnership with Guardian Labs, website design company Squarespace is attempting to do just that. The 39-part series “Side Hustle,” unfolding over Q4 2015 and Q1 […]
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Alex Magnin, chief revenue officer and partner at The Thought & Expression Co. Data has become table stakes for publishers wooing large advertisers. That’s how it should be. Data is the fuel that powers […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here. Greater Lesser WPP Group media agency network GroupM named Xaxis CEO Brian Lesser to helm its North America business, Ad Age’s Alexandra Bruell reports. “It reflects the direction we’re going in in terms of our data and technology and driving that business forward on […]
Neustar’s $450 million deal to acquire MarketShare Partners, announced Thursday, brings together two major digital marketing measurement players that will “help CMOs justify their existence to the CFO,” said Neustar CMO Lisa Joy Rosner. The purchase price is $390 million once tax considerations are factored out of the deal, the companies said. Read the press release. The […]
Everyone talks about TV dollars leaking into digital, but what happens behind the scenes to make those dollars move? Vic Walia, senior director of brand marketing for Expedia, said it involves change management and rewiring old assumptions. “We’ve always invested heavily in TV as a brand, but we wanted to extend our reach beyond our […]
ComScore is keeping busy. The online measurement firm announced Thursday that it’ll be entering into a strategic global partnership with Spotify, selling its enterprise digital analytics business to Adobe and launching a new “total home” opt-in panel to measure connected devices in the household, including show-level viewing across Netflix, Roku, Apple TV and Chromecast. ComScore’s […]
The $4.4 billion check that Verizon wrote to AOL is evidence enough of its commitment to ad tech. But Verizon appears to be less committed to providing its users with an intelligible loyalty program – and that could prove to be the fly in the ointment for its lofty consumer data plans. Many Verizon customers […]
Adding a different advertising partner on desktop can be as easy as adding a tag. But for the mobile web and apps, assuming such flexibility is a recipe for disaster. Since mobile is so complex, publishers must think about a slew of factors at the very beginning, when they are formulating their mobile strategy. The […]
“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in programmatic TV and video. Today’s column is written by Oscar Rondon, senior director of TV strategy at TubeMogul. Brand marketers all seem to agree on what the future of TV buying should look like. It should include the automated planning, buying and delivery […]
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Russell Glass, head of products at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. With the momentum behind ad blocking currently looking unstoppable, the ad industry is having a collective moment of reflection. It boils […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here. Get With The Times The New York Times has carved out a subscription revenue stream that other publications can only admire, but “video still hasn’t become a significant revenue driver for the company,” according to Politico. And the result is a wholesale digital video […]
Facebook continues to see hand-over-fist growth in its ad revenue and user base, according to Wednesday’s third-quarter earnings report, which pegged overall advertising revenue at $4.3 billion. That’s a 45% gain over Q3 2014, and 57% higher when currency fluctuations are factored in. Facebook’s user growth continues to accelerate. Since the platform’s first-ever billion-user day […]
Eight months after former CEO George John stepped down and the company started a search for his replacement, Rocket Fuel has decided to give head of sales Randy Wootton the keys to the city. Wootton was first hired in March to oversee a reorganization that split the company’s sales efforts clearly into three channels: agencies, direct […]
Criteo is prepping a Universal Match product as a serious contender in the cross-device arms race. The company is pooling anonymized data from two-thirds of its 9,300 brand customers in its consumer database. Every brand that participates provides CRM data (not unlike Google’s Customer Match) that would enable them to target specific users cross-platform through […]
Mic CEO Chris Altchek looks at digital publishing and sees opportunity. His goal: to reach every college-educated millennial in the US – all 40 million of them. In the past year, Mic has grown from 9.5 million to 14.5 million uniques, according to comScore. But that growth transpired in the most modern of ways: Mobile […]
SDK mediation is still a major headache for developers. “We constantly hear from publishers that they want full control of their inventory – they don’t want to send their inventory into a black box,” said Ajitpal Pannu, chief business officer of mobile ad exchange Smaato, which on Wednesday launched a tool designed to act as an […]
GroupM hopes its purchase of digital/media agency Essence on Wednesday (for undisclosed terms) will add a whole lot of Google expertise into WPP’s cluster of media agencies. After all, the formerly independent Essence is Google’s digital agency of record. “Google, as you might imagine, is keen on its global digital agency using the full set […]
AppNexus unveiled a publisher suite Wednesday designed to offer an alternative to DoubleClick for Publishers [DFP], the dominant solution in the market. The AppNexus Publisher Suite includes an ad server, completely rebuilt after its acquisition of OAS [Open AdStream] in September 2014, and supercharged with forecasting from its acquisition of Yieldex in March. Publishers can […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here. YouTube Welcomes Moat Et Al Google has opened the door to third-party viewability measurement on YouTube. Moat, Integral Ad Science, comScore and DoubleVerify have all been approved to track campaigns on the video platform, beginning in early 2016. The move follows a similar concession […]
The difference between UGC (user-generated content) and regular brand-generated content, no matter how clever, poignant or seemingly genuine, is the difference between a friend’s recommendation and an ad for a restaurant. Who would you trust more? According to Crowdtap, UGC is 35% more memorable – and 50% more trusted – than other forms of media. Dave Scott, […]
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Simeon Simeonov, founder and chief technology officer at Swoop. While most ad tech companies busily rake in short-term revenues, a handful of major players are quietly taking the law into their own […]
It seems every time there’s a partnership between a marketing tech company and an ad tech vendor, MediaMath is involved. Its most recent hookups: Oracle and IBM. When working through the technical and logistical intricacies of these integrations, MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki takes a back seat, seeing himself as “champion and cheerleader.” “My role is […]
The Washington Post on Tuesday released a video product called FlexPlay that loads videos faster in diverse environments and customizes them to extract more engagement. Advertisers can use FlexPlay for video ads that run on the Post’s website, as well as those that run offsite, in exchange for a premium on the CPM. The idea […]
It might surprise those who think of Merkle as only a CRM agency to hear it has a media practice that employs 400. Although the division has taken four years to construct, Merkle has over the past several months recruited a handful of media agency heavyweights (including ex-Razorfish COO Michael Komasinski) to help support its […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here. WPP Eyes Essence The Wall Street Journal reports WPP Group is in talks to buy 10-year-old Essence Digital, a fast-growing digital agency with strong programmatic chops. Essence’s No. 1 client is Google, but the agency has been working to diversify its client base with […]
Google is beta testing a solution within DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) that will allow publishers to bring in high-value impressions before reserved inventory in their ad server. Jonathan Bellack, Google’s director of product management, made the announcement at the IAB Ad Operations Summit on Monday during a discussion about header bidding that pitted Google (anti-header […]
“Brand Aware” explores the data-driven digital ad ecosystem from the marketer’s point of view. Today’s column is by Tony Ralph, director of advertising technology at Netflix. Every time I open a mobile web browser I’m reminded of Wirth’s law. Wirth’s law postulates that software becomes slower more quickly than hardware grows faster. Mobile hardware advances […]
