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.
The economy might be tanking, but hey, cannabis sales are on the rise and Denver-based Spherex is riding the wave. “The dispensaries are starting to look like the toilet paper aisle,” said Dan Gardenswartz, CFO of Spherex, a company that produces cannabis concentrates and products, including a THC and CBD-infused sparkling water called Phyx. Spherex […]
Facebook is banning ads for hand sanitizer, disinfectant wipes and COVID-19 test kits in an effort to prevent price inflation for high-demand health products. On Thursday, Rob Leathern, Facebook’s director of product management, tweeted about the ban and said Facebook will be “ramping” its automated enforcement for problematic COVID-19-related ads and commerce next week. “If […]
Fox Corporation bought itself a piece of the free ad-supported video on demand (AVOD) action earlier this week with its $440 million acquisition of Tubi. The deal follows Comcast’s acquisition of Xumo in February, reportedly for around $100 million, and Viacom’s (now ViacomCBS’s) $340 million purchase of Pluto TV early last year. There are now […]
Related: Which coronavirus-related consumer behavior shifts are here to stay? It’s COVID-19’s world right now. Consumers – and marketers – are just living in it. The virus is having a palpable impact on how consumers shop and consume media and goods, and marketers need to figure out how to communicate with people in a new […]
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg denied recent reports that it plans to share smartphone location data with the US government to help health authorities track and understand the spread of coronavirus infections. On a call with reporters Wednesday to talk about Facebook’s response to the coronavirus outbreak, which includes a coronavirus information center with real-time health […]
How do all these changes affect marketers, and how should they adapt their messaging and media strategies to the COVID crisis? Click here to find out. Once the coronavirus-induced toilet paper panic buying dies down, consumers will probably chill on their TP sprees. But COVID-19 has the potential to create more permanent behavior changes in […]
For Mike Baker, trekking to the top of a snowy mountain in Colorado and then snowboarding down isn’t all that different from the gumption it takes to found and nurture a startup. “It’s not for everybody, but for people who are crazy enough to enjoy sacrifice and grit, it’s great – the journey is also the […]
Data protection in the time of the coronavirus is a tricky proposition. Although health data is considered extremely sensitive under the General Data Protection Regulation and usually requires explicit consent, a subsection of the law includes a clause within Article 9 that allows for the processing of personal information without consent if it’s necessary to protect “against […]
If someone goes to the bathroom while a beautifully shot commercial plays full-screen on their TV, was it actually viewable? Not so much, said Luke McGuinness, president and COO of TVision Insights, a TV analytics company that helps brands measure whether people are actually paying attention to their ads. TVision, founded in 2014, started out […]
It’s a little difficult to strike handshake deals when, you know, you’re not supposed to shake hands. An increasingly denuded 2020 events calendar – the live event components of the upfronts are the latest cancelations – could soon start to have a chilling effect on their ability to attract new clients. “Lead gen and pipeline […]
First, in legalese: The second set of modifications to the proposed regulations promulgated by the California attorney general’s office for the California Consumer Privacy Act was released late Wednesday afternoon. Now, in English: The third version of the AG’s draft regs just dropped and it’s time to get out your highlighters. This latest draft incorporates […]
When it comes to use, familiarity, market share and mindshare in the customer data platform (CDP) ecosystem, the big marketing clouds lead their smaller indie counterparts by a mile. But a peek under the hood reveals a more nuanced story. The marketing clouds are sucking all the air out of the room, but it’s the […]
This is the third in AdExchanger’s “Meet the CDPs” series. Read previous interviews with mParticle, Acquia-owned AgilOne, Segment, ActionIQ, Lytics, Bluecore, Microsoft, Tealium, Optimove, Adobe, Treasure Data and BlueConic. Amperity is more than happy to explain to clients and prospects what its technology isn’t designed for. Candor helps win deals, said CEO Kabir Shahani, who co-founded the […]
Although LiveRamp prefers to publicly minimize its reliance on third-party cookies, those little text files are the glue that connects offline data with web browsing. “Put it like this,” said Ari Paparo, CEO and co-founder of Beeswax. “If cookies disappeared tomorrow, LiveRamp would be very affected.” To be fair, that would be true for most […]
Despite the grueling news cycle and string of roiling controversies over the last few years, how Facebook tells its story to marketers hasn’t changed much since its early days, according to Mark D’Arcy, Facebook’s VP of global business marketing and its chief creative officer. “Even before I joined, the story went like this: When you […]
The new coronavirus is wreaking havoc worldwide as uncertainty reigns, and marketers aren’t immune. This week on The Big Story, the team diagnoses the effect of COVID-19 on 2020 ad budgets, work productivity and the industry conference circuit. Advertisers won’t necessarily spend less, but they will probably start shifting budget to channels where they know […]
It’s nearly le denouement pour le cookie consentement en France. The Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (the CNIL), France’s data protection authority, is on the cusp of finalizing its updated consent guidelines for cookies and other trackers – and the stakes are high. “The question is not whether consent is applicable – of course […]
Shaun Hekking, SVP of national sales at Newsweek, has blunt words for publishers that don’t accept cannabis advertising: “There’s no reason we can see not to work with cannabis advertisers.” “We’ve been covering cannabis editorially since before Woodstock and writing about the business side since the early 2000s,” said Hekking, who joined Newsweek early last […]
Customer data platform mParticle has raised a $45 million Series D round to invest in data quality tools, data governance and partnerships. Led by Arrowroot Capital, the haul, announced Monday, brings total funding to $121 million for a company founded well before the category became a mar tech investment darling. “The space is hot,” said […]
This is the second in AdExchanger’s “Meet the CDPs” series. Read other interviews mParticle, Amperity, Segment, ActionIQ, Lytics, Bluecore, Microsoft, Tealium, Optimove, Adobe, Treasure Data and BlueConic. A customer data platform is about a lot more than simply combining data. The real promise of a CDP is analytics, said Omer Artun, chief science officer at Acquia, a SaaS digital […]
First it was Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, then Facebook’s global marketing conference followed by F8 and the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Fear over spreading the coronavirus is scuppering events around the world, and rightfully so. As of Friday, there are 31 active cases of coronavirus reported in Spain, with three in Barcelona. […]
Guess you can’t please everyone. Comments on the second draft of the California attorney general’s implementation regs for the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) are rolling in, and no one seems all that satisfied. Privacy advocates, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, think the California attorney general is watering down the law, while ad industry […]
This is the first in AdExchanger’s “Meet the CDPs” series. Read other interviews with Acquia-owned AgilOne, Amperity, Segment, ActionIQ, Lytics, Bluecore, Microsoft, Tealium, Optimove, Adobe, Treasure Data and BlueConic. When mParticle was founded in 2012, the moniker “customer data platform” didn’t exist yet. David Raab, founder of the CDP Institute, wouldn’t coin the term until 2013. And […]
Big tech is all in on differential privacy. It’s a foundational concept within Google’s Privacy Sandbox; Apple applies it to the study of diagnostic device, health and web browsing data; and, just last week, Facebook used differential privacy to protect a trove of data it made available to researchers analyzing the effect of sharing misinformation […]
Journalists regularly embed organic social posts, such as tweets, Instagram content or YouTube videos, into their stories. So, why not monetize them like any other type of ad inventory? It’s an idea that appeals to Nick Kaplan, director of programmatic at women’s lifestyle publisher SHE Media. Since October 2019, SHE Media has been experimenting with […]
While Pinterest’s stock has been challenged since the company went public in April 2019, it anticipates direct-to-consumer and small and medium-sized businesses will be a huge growth vector. “The Fortune 500 are great – but, this is the thing, there are only 500 of them,” said Harold Klaje, head of global growth at Pinterest. Pinterest […]
It’s a rough time to be in the clickstream data analytics biz. On Tuesday, Connexity-owned Hitwise announced that it would cease US operations. The closure is “due to events outside of our control,” Hitwise said on its homepage. “This is a very sad time for us at Hitwise after 20 years of operations providing first-to-market […]
Intermarché, the third-largest supermarket chain in France, distributes close to 970 million printed circulars a year. Beyond requiring beaucoup papier, “a lot of younger people simply don’t read them anymore,” said Anne-Marie Gaultier, Intermarché’s CMO. And that’s if they even receive them. It’s difficult for Intermarché to know if its flyers are making it into […]
Four former Krux and Salesforce executives launched a marketing data startup called Habu this week to help with omnichannel orchestration – just don’t call it a customer data platform. Habu, which means “hub” in Japanese, is positioning itself as a modular operating system for marketing data. Put another way, data management platforms failed to fulfill their […]
It’s boom time for billboards. On Tuesday, OOH automation platform AdQuick announced a $6 million Series A round led by existing investor Initialized Capital – Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s early stage venture capital firm – with participation from WndrCo; Shrug Capital; The Todd & Rahul Angel Fund; Michael Kassan, chairman and CEO of MediaLink; and […]
