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.
Placed has found a new home. Foursquare is buying the location-based measurement company from Snap. Separately, it raised $150 million in fresh funding courtesy of The Raine Group, some of which is going to fund the acquisition. The rest is earmarked for R&D. The deal, announced early Friday morning, comes less than two years after […]
Mark Zuckerberg has four top priorities for Facebook in the year ahead – but stepping down as chairman of the board ain’t one of them. At Facebook’s annual stockholders meeting on Thursday, numerous resolutions to create a check on Zuckerberg’s power – he simultaneously serves as chair of the board and CEO – were vetoed, as expected. Although […]
Firefly is moving fast. On Thursday, the San Francisco-based startup, which places digital ad displays on the top of private rideshare vehicles and taxis and then splits the revenue with drivers, announced its expansion into New York City, the acquisition of digital ad company Strong Outdoor and $30 million in Series A funding. The round, […]
On the surface, LinkedIn’s plan to acquire cross-device data company Drawbridge may seem like a head scratcher. What does a B2B social network want with a probabilistic cross-device vendor? The deal creates potential for LinkedIn’s marketing products that go beyond Drawbridge’s existing technology assets. If LinkedIn wanted access to an identity graph, it could have […]
While good-acting companies knock themselves out trying to comply with data protection and privacy laws, and regulators debate the minutiae of cookie consent policies, bad actors simply couldn’t care less. The front door may be locked, but the basement windows are wide open. Unauthorized data harvesting from mobile apps has continued nearly unabated in the […]
Facebook is bringing playable ads, an interactive format that lets users demo a mini version of an app before downloading it, to Audience Network starting Wednesday. It’s available within rewarded video and interstitial placements. In the coming weeks, Facebook is also planning to expand access to its rewarded video unit to all publishers across the […]
LinkedIn is buying Drawbridge. The acquisition was announced quietly on Tuesday via a mere mention buried in a blog post, and the deal price was undisclosed. The deal is expected to close by the end of June. Drawbridge CEO Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan and CTO Devin Guan are coming aboard, although LinkedIn declined to share which other […]
France’s data protection authority is giving publishers until the spring of 2020 to design and deploy GDPR-compliant cookie consent notices. Until then, scroll consent – aka, soft or tacit consent – will be acceptable. At a meeting in late April, representatives from the Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés told French industry trade organizations […]
When it comes to ad tracking in Safari, Apple usually taketh away. But sometimes Apple giveth advertisers a little something. Meet privacy-preserving ad click attribution for the web. Think of it as Apple throwing a bone to advertisers who need a way to measure the effectiveness of their ads in Safari, which is where tracking […]
Although the Justice Department could try to block the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger (maybe), Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai bestowed his blessing on the deal earlier this week. If T-Mobile and Sprint manage to merge, they’ll have around 126 million subscribers and become the third largest telco in the United States behind Verizon and AT&T, […]
Real-time bidding is under the gun in Europe. On Wednesday, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) opened a formal investigation into whether Google’s ad-exchange data-processing practices violate the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). GDPR celebrates its first birthday on May 25. A complaint filed in September 2018 with regulators in Ireland and the United Kingdom triggered […]
On Wednesday, Comcast Technology Solutions (CTS), a division of Comcast Cable, rolled out a self-serve platform that automates the complex process of connecting a media plan to the creative workflow and also unifies linear and digital ad management. The CTS ad suite ingests an advertiser’s media buy – which could include hundreds or even thousands of […]
The programmatic advertising ecosystem is a mess – even its main architect agrees. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Brian O’Kelley, founder and former CEO of AT&T-owned AppNexus, shared a three-pronged proposal for how he’d start to fix the tangled web he helped weave. First, give consumers control and transparency over their data. […]
Remember Do Not Track? It’s back. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-MO, is reviving the decade old concept in proposed legislation that aims to let consumers opt out of online tracking beyond just browser-based activity. In its original form in 2011, Do Not Track (DNT) relied on voluntary participation from browsers to respect a consumer’s desire to […]
MoPub released an SDK update on Tuesday that gives app publishers access to impression-level revenue data. Historically, that type of data – which lets user acquisition managers attribute revenue and lifetime value to specific users at the impression level – has been hard to come by. Most third-party ad networks haven’t been set up to […]
2018 was a pretty good year for Twitter, all things considered. Users are growing, if you don’t look at monthly active users (MAUs). Twitter is starting to get a handle on harassment, with machine learning models proactively identifying 38% of the abusive tweets taken down every week. And the platform has been profitable for four […]
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 […]
