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.
Beyond the money they mint with their owned-and-operated inventory, Google, Facebook and Amazon are, each in their own way, bidding into nearly every programmatic auction that takes place across the open internet. Although programmatic is growing year over year, independent ad tech players are increasingly fighting over the remaining crumbs while the walled gardens cut […]
TransUnion is busily expanding its digital marketing product portfolio. On Wednesday, the credit bureau and consumer data provider acquired marketing tech platform TruSignal. The deal – TransUnion declined to share terms – arrives less than a year after the company hired seasoned ad executive and former MediaLink managing director, Matt Spiegel, as EVP of digital marketing solutions […]
The digital advertising business ain’t easy – just ask any traditional publisher. But there are bright spots. The New York Times had its best year last year for ad revenue – $709 million – in the roughly 15 years since print writ large really started to suffer, said NYT COO and EVP Meredith Kopit Levien, speaking Tuesday at […]
Mobile growth marketers are going through a few growing pains in the transition from ad networks to programmatic. “There’s a lack of knowledge, a lack of resources, a lack of data and it requires a lot of research to find the right partners,” said Gabriel Sampaio, growth lead for digital channels at Rappi, an on-demand […]
Tealium has raised $55 million in new funding, its sixth round, the company said Wednesday. The round, led by Silver Lake Waterman with participation from ABN AMRO, Bain Capital and a smorgasbord of others, brings its total funding to $160 million since 2012. Most of the cash will go toward growth in order to capitalize […]
Facebook says it’s finally going to start rolling out its long-overdue Clear History feature “in the coming months.” That activation means Facebook will have less access to certain forms of targeting data. On Tuesday, Facebook warned advertisers that the tool, which will eventually give people the ability to see and delete the data that third-party […]
Browser fingerprinting isn’t a new tactic, but it’s newly in the headlines as all of the primary web browsers – Safari, Firefox and now Chrome – crack down on the practice in the name of privacy. The main problem with fingerprinting from a privacy perspective is that there’s no way for a consumer to opt out or to […]
Nearly everything Disney does these days seems to be for the love of DTC. CEO Bob Iger told investors on Wednesday that acquiring 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets for $71 billion will create synergies for Disney’s direct-to-consumer streaming vision. “I feel really confident in our plans and the plans we’ve announced, because of what we […]
The California Consumer Privacy Act is regulation in flux. A flurry of amendments to the law are now wending their way through the California State Assembly that would, if passed, either clarify certain aspects of the law or defang it – depending on whom you ask. “It’s all part of the philosophical debate between the […]
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A man walks into a bar after seeing a TV ad … but there’s no way for the advertiser to prove it ever happened. On Tuesday, TV data company Alphonso inked a partnership with PlaceIQ to use the latter’s location data as a bridge between sitting on the […]
Oops emails, TBD subject lines, sending messages to the wrong segment, sending notifications at the wrong time – even the most data-driven marketer is going to screw up sometimes. Embrace the mistakes, said Spencer Burke, VP of growth at Braze, speaking at the MAU show in Las Vegas on Wednesday. “It’s not something you need to […]
The in-housing trend is real, but agencies aren’t getting kicked to the curb. Their role is simply evolving. “Agencies have been around for years, and they’re not going away,” said Freddie Liversidge, HP’s director of digital activation, speaking at AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO show in San Francisco on Tuesday. HP recently completed a multiyear process to […]
Video tech startup VideoAmp is on a hiring spree, thanks to a $70 million cash infusion. The round, announced Wednesday, was led by investment bank The Raine Group, which kicked in $50 million. Ankona Capital contributed the rest, bringing VideoAmp’s total funding to just over $100 million since 2014. VideoAmp isn’t taking any money off […]
“Today, we’re going to talk about building a privacy-focused social platform,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared, with only a mild sense of irony, as he kicked off the F8 developer conference in San Jose on Tuesday morning. One would be forgiven for wondering if Facebook is even capable of such a pivot, and Zuckerberg recognized […]
Travel is a personal experience, and travel marketing should be too, according to Sheila Schottland, senior director of brand marketing at Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. “People travel for different reasons – family, business, leisure – and they have different needs,” she said. “Because these moments are relatable, we make sure that our media mix follows suit, […]
Keep calm and … develop automated systems for advanced TV ad buying? A question mark loomed over OpenAP when founding member WarnerMedia announced its sudden departure last week from the targeted TV advertising consortium it helped create in 2017. But the group’s remaining members – NBCU, Viacom and Fox – are forging ahead with the […]
Gamut President Rachel Williamson has two words to describe local over-the-top (OTT) ad buying: “It’s hard.” Inventory is scattered. Data is fragmented. And advertisers need different strategies to hit different demos based on geography. A buyer might want to reach 34-year-old moms, for example, but that can mean one thing in Birmingham, Ala., and another […]
With its $4.4 billion acquisition of Epsilon/Conversant, Publicis Groupe becomes a data controller – and that ups the regulatory ante under the General Data Protection Regulation and, likely, any other privacy legislation that comes down the pike. Controllers, in GDPR parlance, determine how and why personal data is processed. Controllers are also required to establish a […]
On Tuesday, the IAB Tech Lab explained how it would start phasing out the decade-old Video Player Ad-Serving Interface (VPAID) spec in favor of a new specification – snappily dubbed Secure Interactive Media Interface Definition (SIMID) – that specifically supports interactive video ads. The IAB Tech Lab, which has been working on a VPAID replacement since 2017, […]
Twitter is angling for its sliver of the performance advertising pie dominated by Facebook and Google. A top priority for the Twitter revenue team this year is to work on enhancing its Mobile App Promotion product, the company’s answer to app install ads. The opportunity is ripe, CFO Ned Segal told investors during an earnings […]
WarnerMedia’s farewell to the OpenAP Consortium Friday was inevitable. The writing has been on the wall since February, when AT&T’s $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner was finalized. “It makes sense to pull out now [that] they’re owned by a company that has one of the largest data sets available,” said Tracey Scheppach, CEO and […]
Many broadcasters spent the past decade on a quest for scale, with a major spike in local station M&A last year. Now it’s time to start thinking about monetization, and broadcasters know it. “Once you own a lot of stations, the next logical thing to do is ask, ‘How are we going to monetize these […]
WarnerMedia has exited the OpenAP Consortium. It’s a major blow to the TV industry’s attempt to jointly promote audience-based buying on television by creating standardized segments and measurement across their networks. Turner was one of the consortium’s original members in 2017, along with Fox and Viacom. NBCU joined the following year. But now that WarnerMedia […]
When people join a browser-based video conference call, their top worry is usually whether their hair looks OK. But there’s a bigger concern lurking. WebRTC, the open source technology used by browsers and apps to enable real-time communications over the internet, is being exploited to camouflage the dissemination of malware-infected ads. Programmatic exchanges appear to […]
Snap teased an audience extension product called Snapchat Audience Network in early April, but the offering is still being baked and the beta likely won’t open until some point this summer. So, advertisers have to wait to find out how targeting will work outside of the Snapchat platform, what data will be available and what […]
“Let it go, let it go” is the theme song for any advertisers who might’ve had their hearts set on an ad-supported option for Disney+. There won’t be one, Disney revealed during an investor day event on Thursday in Los Angeles. Disney’s direct-to-consumer (DTC) streaming service, slated to launch in the United States on Nov. […]
First there was Ads.txt, then there was App-ads.txt. Now there are Sellers.json and OpenRTB SupplyChain Object Specifications. The two new specs, released for public comment by the IAB Tech Lab on Thursday, are both meant to help advertisers get a better understanding of whether the inventory they’re buying is legit and where it’s coming from. […]
Story updated to include a comment from Snap. Snapchat is on track to lose US users for the first time this year, according to eMarketer, thanks in part to continued aftershocks from its disastrous 2018 redesign. And Snap’s loss could be Instagram’s gain. Monthly users are set to decrease 2.8% year over year at Snapchat […]
Sens. Mark Warner, D-VA, and Deb Fischer, R-NE, introduced a bipartisan bill on Tuesday that would prohibit large internet companies like Google and Facebook from using deceptive design practices known as “dark patterns” that subtly manipulate users into sharing their personal data. Click here to read the bill in full. Dark patterns enable companies to […]
Q1 2019 in a nutshell: Ad tech isn’t doing as poorly as you’d think (all things considered), TV and data are colliding, DTC is sizzling, private equity is still gung-ho on M&A, and so are the marketing clouds. It’s not a bad report card, despite a general sense of caution and trepidation about macro factors […]
