Allison Schiff is the editor-in-chief of AdExchanger, where she covers mobile, Facebook (sorry, Meta), measurement, privacy and the app economy. Allison received her M.A. in journalism from the Dublin Institute of Technology in Ireland (her favorite place), and a B.A. in history and English from Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.
Too bad there isn’t a Black Friday deal on Facebook inventory – because it’s getting pricey. Following a massive 38% spike in CPMs on Facebook between September and the week before the election, prices dipped back to more normal levels during the first week in November before climbing back up again, according to digital agency […]
The first half of 2020 was pretty lean. This year is on track to be the slowest since 2015 in terms of deal activity, according to LUMA Partners. But set the table and get out the gravy boat, because strategic M&A started to pick back up in Q3 and the momentum has continued into the […]
The more the merrier. App attribution company AppsFlyer has a late breaking addition to its $210 million investment round, which closed in January: Salesforce Ventures. Although Salesforce is only taking a small percentage of AppsFlyer as part of the round extension – less than 1% of the company, according to AppsFlyer CEO and co-founder Oren […]
IBM has been banging the drum for years about the role artificial intelligence can play to support everything from cancer treatment to retail personalization. More recently, though, IBM has started to prioritize practical advertising applications of its cognitive computing system, Watson. Last month, IBM brought its AI to ad tech through partnerships with Xandr, Magnite, […]
Guess telcos really aren’t that into ad tech after all. On Thursday, Norwegian telco Telenor sold cross-device company Tapad to Experian in a transaction advised by LUMA Partners. Experian is acquiring 100% of Tapad for a cash consideration of roughly $280 million. Not too shabby for an ad tech company getting sold in 2020. Tapad’s […]
Snap is embracing direct response advertising with both arms. It’s been launching performance-focused ad products for Snapchat at a regular clip over the past couple of years, and on Thursday it added a few key new features to its app ads toolkit. Performance advertisers on Snapchat can now optimize for installs directly from Lenses, implement […]
Nielsen is developing an identity resolution solution to help advertisers measure audiences across platforms after third-party cookies and other mainstay identifiers go ta-ta. “We’ve been working aggressively on our cross-platform journey for the last couple of years,” said Mainak Mazumdar, Nielsen’s chief data officer. “But we accelerated this when we started to see what was […]
It’s supply-side platform week for Unified ID 2.0. On Tuesday, PubMatic signed onto the initiative, one day after Magnite and Index Exchange signaled their support for the open source project. The goal of Unified ID 2.0 is to create a standard identifier for the ad industry using hashed emails as a replacement for third-party cookies. […]
YouTube launched audio ads in beta on Tuesday to help monetize the moments when people are listening to music but not actively looking at their screen. The 15-second ads, which were in a limited test phase since late 2019, are available to all advertisers globally and can be bought through DV360 and Google Ads. Audio […]
For nearly a year, advertisers using Facebook’s conversion lift studies tool were unknowingly being fed faulty data. A code error caused the reached conversions metric to be undercounted for conversion lift tests conducted on Facebook by several thousand advertisers between Aug. 15, 2019, and Aug. 31 of this year. Advertisers use conversion lift studies, a […]
Magnite is the latest ad tech company to throw in with the Unified ID 2.0 initiative, an open source ID spearheaded by The Trade Desk. On Monday, Magnite said it will adopt the ID initiative to use encrypted and hashed email addresses as the basis for a standard identity replacement for third-party cookies. The Trade […]
Ad viewability is now table stakes, but audibility measurement is still in its very earliest stages. It’s been two years since the Media Rating Council released its standard for digital audio measurement – defined as two continuous seconds of play in a fraud-free environment and with the volume on – and there still aren’t any offerings on […]
TV measurement is hamstrung by household-level data. Despite the scale of set-top box and smart TV data, there’s no easy way to connect ad exposure on a television to a specific person within a household. “And if you don’t break TV data down to the person, it’s very difficult to do cross-media measurement or run […]
Newly public livestreaming TV service FuboTV hired its first SVP of ad sales in June. “That in itself speaks to the importance that we’re putting on the ad sales piece,” said Diana Horowitz, the Scripps and Comcast vet now filling that newly created role at Fubo. Fubo, which reported its first earnings in early November, […]
It’s a toss-up what’ll happen about a national privacy law, even under a Biden administration. Depending on the result of the upcoming Georgia Senate runoffs, Congress could be headed for at least two more years of gridlock. But with the recent passage of the Consumer Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) – which amends and strengthens the existing […]
Mobile ad networks have been busily stress testing SKAdNetwork in preparation for Apple’s IDFA changes – but they’ve been doing so with one arm tied behind their back. For months, two of the most crucial pieces of information necessary for attribution were absent in the postbacks coming from SKAdNetwork, which is Apple’s API for enabling ad […]
Demandbase’s July acquisition of B2B marketing vendor Engagio is bearing fruit. On Tuesday, Demandbase released a new version of its platform called Demandbase One, which combines its existing marketing automation and account-based marketing offerings with inbound B2B marketing capabilities from Engagio. Demandbase One includes the core Demandbase ABM platform, which uses predictive analytics to help […]
Spotify is acquiring podcast monetization and publishing platform Megaphone from its parent company, Graham Holdings, in a deal reportedly worth $235 million. The acquisition, announced Tuesday, underscores the streaming audio platform’s ongoing big bet on programmatic and is only the latest in a series of moves Spotify has made to support its growing podcast platform. […]
Subscribe to AdExchanger Talks on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts. Celtra is a DCO OG. The company, founded in 2016, has been in the dynamic creative optimization business for nearly 15 years. But last year, Celtra stopped classifying itself as a DCO provider and embraced a new category: […]
The Trade Desk is on a tear, striking three partnerships in quick succession over the course of a week to support the Unified ID 2.0 initiative. First was LiveRamp, then Criteo, followed by Nielsen. Each partnership tackles a different piece of the development process for UID 2.0, which aims to use encrypted and hashed email […]
The recent shift away from second-price auctions toward a first-price model, spurred on by Google, has led to new methods for helping buyers optimize their pricing and avoid overpaying for impressions. Bid shading is one of the most popular techniques. But while bid shading can save buyers money, there are two interrelated complaints about it […]
So, there’s an election or something happening in the United States right now? And, apparently, it’s also a workday. Sure. But there has to be a better strategy for getting through the day than repeatedly stress-refreshing the AP’s live election tallies. Here’s how the ad tech community is staying chill, if such a thing is […]
🚨🚨 Privacy news 🚨🚨 The Consumer Privacy Rights Act, on the ballot as Proposition 24, has been approved by voters in California, passing with 56.1% of the vote. We are thrilled to announce the passage of #Prop24, the California Privacy Rights Act, with a decisive majority of Californians supporting the measure to strengthen consumer privacy […]
In October, Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind the Firefox browser, launched a marketing campaign to “unfck the internet,” because, well, the system is a little “fcked up,” said Lindsey Shepard, Mozilla’s CMO. “People are constantly being inundated with messages about complex topics, from data breaches to hacking, and a lot of big tech companies are […]
As Americans head to the polls, advertisers and publishers need to remain agile with their paid media strategies. There’s a lot we can’t know about what comes next. “As we’ve seen throughout several points this year, it’s all about staying flexible, making sure messaging is relevant and appropriate – but not going dark,” said Ken Blom, […]
This is the 13th installment in AdExchanger’s “Meet the CDPs” series. Read previous interviews with mParticle, Acquia-owned AgilOne, Amperity, Segment, ActionIQ, Lytics, Bluecore, Microsoft, Tealium, Optimove, Adobe and Treasure Data. The marketing clouds are taking up a lot of mindshare as they belatedly foray into the CDP category. But “you’d be surprised at the number […]
Although Snap and Pinterest say they benefited revenue-wise from the Facebook boycott over the summer, Facebook barely felt a ding. Advertising made up nearly all of Facebook’s revenue in the quarter – $21.2 billion of $21.5 billion overall, a 22% year-over-year increase. And Facebook now has more than 10 million active advertisers across its services – […]
Scaling your marketing ops isn’t an easy task when you’ve got 60 million monthly active users and a massive store of historical data going back nearly two decades. Just ask Pandora. “It’s been a really big challenge for us,” said David Hassler, director of software engineering at the music streaming platform. For the past two […]
If Donald Trump owned H1 for programmatic ad spending, Joe Biden is dominating the second half of the year. After spending big on display and native during the first half of 2020, the Trump campaign scaled back precipitously on programmatic starting in August, down to nearly zero in September, and has kept its foot on […]
Smart TV manufacturer Vizio is reorganizing to bring more television data into its advertising and content business. Inscape, Vizio’s data and automatic content recognition (ACR) subsidiary, has been combined with Vizio Ads and SmartCast, Vizio’s smart TV content platform. The three will now function as a single unit. Prior to the strategic reorg, announced on […]
