Allison Schiff is the managing editor 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.
Turns out people really like those Snapchat baby face and gender swap filters. The app’s daily active users hit 203 million in Q2, up 8% year over year, and revenue was far better than expected at $388 million, a 48% increase from this time last year, according to the company’s Q2 earnings disclosure. This is […]
Slow-loading ads are still a perennial problem for publishers. Wise Publishing, a Toronto-based publisher of personal finance content with around 5 million monthly unique visitors, acquires a significant portion of its traffic through paid channels. But if an ad loads slowly and a visitor leaves, so does that monetization opportunity. “Dealing with latency is incredibly […]
Ascential, the company that owns the Cannes Lions festival and MediaLink, just bought a slice of the ad tech ecosystem with a 35% stake in marketing analytics company Jumpshot. The investment, worth $60.8 million, values Jumpshot at nearly $173 million. What does the parent company of ad land’s favorite international get together want with a […]
When private equity firm Blackstone announced its plan this week to acquire video-focused mobile ad network Vungle, multiple sources pegged the deal at $750 million – a remarkably large price tag for a company that only raised a little over $25 million. The question is, why so high? Mobile gaming is massive For one, Vungle has […]
Holding your breath on ads coming to Netflix? Time to let it out. There will be no advertising on Netflix anytime soon if ever, the company said in a letter to shareholders on Wednesday in advance of its second quarter earnings call. “We, like HBO, are advertising free. That remains a deep part of our […]
There aren’t a lot of companies that can take a multibillion-dollar fine from the Federal Trade Commission in stride – and fewer still whose stock actually rises on the news. But that’s Facebook for you, whose stock went up 1.8% at the close of trading last week after reports that the FTC is planning a $5 […]
The TDB company that was formed when IBM sold the bulk of its Watson Marketing portfolio to private equity firm Centerbridge in April finally has a name: Acoustic. Acoustic is starting out with a large stable of clients – around 3,500 – inherited from IBM, and a headcount of 1,100. It’s also hiring, with a particular focus […]
It’s hard enough to develop features that work well for one app or site – let alone more than 100. But that’s the task at hand for Kara Chiles, senior director of product development at USA Today Network, a national news service that shares content and resources between USA Today and Gannett-owned local properties across the […]
Firefox is starting to block third-party tracking by default, which will throw a wrench into the business model of any company that relies on cookies. But that doesn’t mean Firefox doesn’t care about how this change affects the bottom line – especially its own. Beyond the normal usability testing done before rolling out a new […]
You are what you watch. On Tuesday, smart TV data company TVadSync, which uses visual automatic content recognition (ACR) technology to track viewing behavior, released a planning and analytics tool that creates clusters of viewers based on the TV and video content they consume. “If you move beyond demographics and genre, you can make people’s […]
Any sign of bad traffic, and mobile game developer Glu flips the kill switch at the ad network and the publisher levels, said John Parides, Glu’s senior director of user acquisition. “This is something you need to be constantly monitoring,” said Parides, who’s been with Glu for almost five years, during which click spam became […]
After more than a year on ice, Facebook is bringing back reach estimates in Custom Audiences. Facebook suspended the metric, which advertisers would use to preview reach estimates for lists uploaded to Custom Audiences, in March 2018 when academic researchers from Northeastern University discovered a vulnerability. The exploit could have allowed someone to infer attributes […]
Streamers don’t browse – at least not on streaming services. Although the majority of households either own a smart TV and/or have a subscription-video-on-demand service (SVOD), most people (58%) still gravitate back to traditional TV channels when they’re not sure what they want to watch, according to Nielsen’s total audience report for Q1, released Monday. […]
Ashlen Cherry, Epsilon’s chief privacy officer, would bet on federal privacy legislation happening – just not before the end of the year. “This can be a bipartisan issue, and there’s an appetite for it on the hill,” said Cherry, who joined Epsilon last October after almost a decade as the global privacy program manager at […]
France’s data protection regulator is going public with its action plan – and targeted online advertising is to be a “priority topic.” The Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL) shared its 2019-2020 agenda in response to appeals from the public, privacy advocates and online marketing professionals looking for guidance on how to comply […]
ALC may be one of the biggest first-party data companies you’ve never heard of – but that’s about to change. Founded in 1978 as the American List Counsel, ALC started life as a provider of data services to direct marketers, which back then primarily meant developing customized consumer data files to support postal campaigns. But […]
Privacy protection isn’t a tick-the-box exercise, and so policymakers need to think outside the box. At the Federal Trade Commission’s annual PrivacyCon event in Washington, DC, on Thursday, the agency invited nearly 20 privacy researchers and academics from around the world to dig into the nitty gritty on consumer privacy, data collection, security and the […]
Last year, Mark Zuckerberg went on a Cambridge Analytica apology tour. This year, he’s got a new theme: DC, bring on your regs. In the absence of regulation, “we’re going to do the best we can,” the Facebook CEO said Wednesday during a fireside chat at the annual Aspen Ideas Festival. But private companies, he […]
Salesforce and Adobe have lately rushed into the customer data platform category. But independent CDPs aren’t standing still. Amperity, a machine learning-focused CDP, lately updated its platform with new AI capabilities that can combine disparate consumer data into unified profiles, said Chris Jones, SVP of product management, who joined Amperity from Microsoft last year. Additionally, […]
Mobile programmatic is in the seventh-inning stretch: It’s come a long way, but there’s still a lot of work to do, says Rick Welch, head of programmatic advertising at Flipboard. In the three years since Welch joined the mobile news aggregation app from Condé Nast in late 2016, more open exchange-oriented players have hit the […]
A bipartisan bill proposed Monday by Sens. Mark Warner, D-VA, and Josh Hawley, R-MO, aims to make big tech companies – Facebook, Google, Amazon, et al. – tell users how much their data is worth. The Designing Accounting Safeguards to Help Broaden Oversight and Regulations on Data (DASHBOARD) Act – another commendable acronym – would require […]
McDonald’s is starting to throw a few ideas on the grill after spending around $300 million to acquire personalization and decision logic tech startup Dynamic Yield in March. Dynamic Yield’s technology has been integrated into the drive-thru experience at roughly 700 McDonald’s restaurants in North America so far with plans to roll out more and […]
Smaato has a new CEO. The mobile supply-side platform told employees Friday morning that Ragnar Kruse and Petra Vorsteher are exiting the company they co-founded 15 years ago. Arndt Groth, who joined Smaato as president in 2017, will succeed Kruse, who had served as CEO since Smaato’s inception. Kruse and Vorsteher are handing over the […]
Uber is suing five ad networks for squandering tens of millions of dollars on low-quality or fraudulent ads – and it’s naming names. The suit, filed in early June in a San Francisco court, calls out Hydrane SAS, BidMotion, Taptica, YouAppi and AdAction Interactive for purchasing “nonexistent, nonviewable or fraudulent advertising.” Users who did see the […]
On paper, the OpenAP consortium makes perfect sense: TV networks banded together to stave off growing competition from the walled gardens. In reality, it’s a bit more complicated. Although OpenAP still counts three powerhouse publishers among its ranks – Viacom, NBCU and Fox – a founding member, WarnerMedia, left the group in April to compete […]
If you’re a data-management platform (DMP) and your name isn’t Salesforce or Adobe, it’s starting to get pretty chilly out there. Oracle’s BlueKai DMP is a strong third, while Neustar and Lotame continue to chug along – but Salesforce and Adobe undoubtedly lead the pack, at least when it comes to how advertisers think about […]
Large marketers are constantly running scores of experiments on their media investments. That can make optimization tricky, said Sadie Daryan, eBay’s global head of display and app marketing. And so eBay has been playing around with a tool from marketing intelligence startup Admetrics, released Tuesday, that uses AI to automatically run thousands of concurrent tests […]
Global digital ad spend may be starting to slow, but it’s still growing like gangbusters compared with the rest of the market. IPG-owned Magna Global predicts in its latest spending forecast, released Monday, that digital ad sales will increase by 14% this year and represent more than half (51%) of total global ad sales ($304 […]
If you’re a marketing cloud, you’ve suddenly got customer data platform fever. On Monday, Adobe rolled out the beta version of its CDP, housed within the Adobe Experience Platform. Perhaps not so coincidentally, Salesforce will host its Connections conference in Chicago this week, where it’s planning to share more details about its CDP, while Oracle […]
Pinterest really wants people to shop on its platform. The newly public company revamped its marketing partner program on Monday and added a new partner category for third-party tech providers that facilitate shopping experiences. But the rebrand of Pinterest’s Marketing Developer Partners program to a global Pinterest Partners program is more than a cosmetic change. […]
