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.
JEGI Co-President Tolman Geffs will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference on Jan. 23-24, 2019 at the Grand Hyatt New York. “There’s been a hell of a pullback investing in anything that remotely smells like ad tech,” according to Tolman Geffs, co-president of investment bank Jordan, Edmiston Group Inc. But that’s not as dire […]
What does a 13-year-old have in common with a retired woman and a middle-aged man? They all play mobile games. “There’s a misconception that the gaming audience is just kids,” said Brian Ames, president of Activision Blizzard Media (ABM), an advertising division housed within game publishing giant King. “The reality is, though, that gamers are […]
The unlikeliest folks are pushing to pass broad privacy regulations these days. On Wednesday, the Association of National Advertisers, the largest ad trade org out there, urged the Federal Trade Commission to advocate for a national privacy law that preempts the regional laws cropping up all over the country. The FTC is collecting comments in […]
2018 was the year Facebook’s skeletons really came skittering out of the closet, and the drip, drip, drip of bad news is seemingly endless. On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that Facebook shared more data with more partners than previously disclosed, including contact information, private messages and friend lists. Facebook’s response to the Times […]
Advertiser interest in over-the-top is picking up steam and dollars – but cross-platform measurement is lagging behind. Data and analytics company Samba TV hopes to speed the process with the acquisition Thursday of Amsterdam-based cross-device graph provider Screen6. Ashwin Navin, Samba’s CEO and co-founder, declined to share the deal price, but noted that the company used a […]
Working with Amazon is about going in with your eyes open, said Charlie Cole, global chief ecommerce officer at luggage juggernaut Samsonite and chief digital officer at Samsonite-owned Tumi. “Amazon has a proven track record of creating brands in a data-centric way,” Cole said. “I’m always a little surprised when people on the brand side […]
Federal Trade Commission Chair Joseph Simons is in favor of a national privacy regime – but beware the potential unintended consequences, he said. “Depending on how you do privacy legislation, you could have an adverse impact on competition, potentially by entrenching the major digital platforms,” Simons told lawmakers during a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on antitrust […]
Facebook is setting up a kiosk in midtown Manhattan to dole out free hot cocoa and privacy advice. (Yes, privacy advice.) At a one-day public pop-up event Thursday in Bryant Park, Facebook reps will answer questions about how people can use their privacy settings and manage their advertising experience on the platform. The event, a […]
After around a year of avoiding the spotlight, Google CEO Sundar Pichai spent nearly four hours fielding a grab bag of questions from members of the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, discussing everything from the scope of Google’s data collection practices to alleged political bias in search results. The problem, as is often the case […]
AppOnboard is onboarding VC cash hand over fist. On Wednesday, the mobile app demo and analytics startup with a platform allows users to try an application before downloading it, announced its second funding round – $15 million – in less than eight months. AppOnboard’s Series A round in April totaled $15 million. That’s $30 million for the […]
Forrester released a Wave last week examining the emergent location intelligence platform space and here’s your main takeaway: Companies want to apply location data to make decisions across all of their digital touchpoints – but the technology to do that is still in its early stages. Although location data vendors are a dime a dozen – you […]
What do advertisers outside of China need to know about Tencent? For one, it’s got much more going on than just WeChat – the Tencent app with the most name recognition outside of China. Second, WeChat is more than just a social platform: It’s embedded into the fabric of Chinese life. “Global brands have heard about […]
You may have received a news alert from The New York Times Wednesday morning about the latest Facebook data-related misstep as you sipped on your cup of joe. What’s Facebook accused of this time? Providing special pay-for-play access to user data for whitelisted advertisers, including Airbnb, Lyft and Netflix, while penalizing others by cutting them […]
Will privacy legislation be the death of the third-party data ecosystem? Not according to the IAB Data Center of Excellence. Marketers are on tap to spend $19.2 billion on third-party audience data as well as technology and solutions to manage, process and analyze all that data, according to a joint IAB/Winterberry Group report released Wednesday. […]
Mobile performance marketers who work with multiple ad partners spend less to acquire users. A growth marketer who works with five or fewer media sources pays an average of $3.58 per install, according to a report released Wednesday by mobile marketing analytics company Singular. But upping the number of media sources from five to six […]
When Brooks embarked on an initiative to organize its data last year, it was ready to sprint. But a year into the project, the running shoe brand was still nowhere near the finish line. “It was just going so slowly,” said Mark McKelvey, the company’s VP of information technology. Granted, Brooks had a lot of […]
After a protracted, year-long alpha period, the IAB Tech Lab has released the specs in beta for the app version of its Ads.txt initiative to reduce counterfeit ad inventory. The App-ads.txt hold-up was caused by app stores dragging their heels on providing support for the Tech Lab’s preferred solution of using metadata tags – essentially […]
Until now, if an ad fraud scam was uncovered, the criminals behind it would usually fade back into the shadows with impunity, and shortly thereafter, they’d be back at it again – the seemingly eternal game of Whac-A-Mole. This time, there’s accountability. Two global botnets, Methbot and 3ve, are no more, and there are real people […]
The waterfall wasn’t working out for WeatherBug. “We had what I call ‘too-many-SDKs syndrome,’” said Olivier Vincent, president and general manager at the GroundTruth-owned weather app, which has 20 million monthly active users. If you had peeked inside WeatherBug’s ad stack last year, you’d have found the code for as many as eight different ad […]
There’s no point passing a comprehensive federal privacy legislation if the main enforcement agency doesn’t have the means to hold feet to the fire. On Tuesday, all five commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission appeared before the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection in Washington, D.C., to make an appeal for more resources. “Section 5 is […]
Representatives from nine governments gathered in London on Tuesday with pointed questions for Mark Zuckerberg about fake news, misinformation, hate speech, election interference, privacy and data collection. Thing is, Zuckerberg wasn’t there, having declined repeated invitations to testify before the UK’s Digital Culture, Media and Sports Committee. The parliamentarians from Britain, Canada, France, Ireland, Belgium, […]
How Questionable Data-Sharing Practices And A Healthy Dose Of Hubris Helped Bring Down One Of The Most Well-Known Players In Ad Tech The Rocket Fuel brand is dead and buried, the founders long gone, its tech sold off to Sizmek for a song and the code completely rewritten. An ad tech unicorn that courted top […]
Stories. It seems like everybody’s got ‘em, from Snap and LinkedIn to Instagram and Facebook – and now Google. But while AMP Stories might look like a knockoff of the other guys, it’s actually quite a different animal. What’s the story? The main difference: AMP Stories are specifically designed for publishers to create full-screen experiences for […]
The IAB Europe’s GDPR Transparency and Consent Framework – which many ad tech companies now depend on to pass user consent strings – could be on shaky legal ground. On Nov. 9, France’s data protection authority, the Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (the CNIL), issued a warning against a small French ad tech company called […]
Digitally-native direct-to-consumer brands are super-smart performance marketers, but they also appreciate the importance of branding – and they’ve been spending big on out-of-home advertising, particularly in the New York subway system. “The MTA is very excited,” said Erica Amatori, director of marketing at Burrow, a less than two-year-old DTC customizable sofa brand headquartered in Manhattan. “They’ve […]
Instagram is shopping for its share of holiday dollars. On Thursday, Facebook’s much-cooler sibling added three new features designed to help people browse, discover and save items more easily. A lot must happen before someone buys, and while shopping can be a by-product of spending time on Instagram, people aren’t there to fill their cart […]
Sojern is hopping a flight to funding town. The 10-year-old travel-focused ad tech company announced a monster $120 million financing round, technically a Series D, on Tuesday led by TCV partners, a growth equity firm that has also invested in Airbnb, Expedia, ExactTarget, AppNexus and Netflix. This is Sojern’s first raise since its $10 million […]
The news feed is still a money-printing machine for core Facebook. But people aren’t sharing like they used to – Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser used Nielsen data to detect that consumption on core Facebook, including Messenger, was down 13% in September – and now Facebook is putting its faith into what it hopes will […]
Privacy advocates in the UK filed a series of complaints Thursday against Criteo, Tapad, Quantcast, Acxiom, Oracle, Equifax and Experian, questioning whether consumer profiling is legal under GDPR. Watchdog group Privacy International is claiming that the way many ad tech and data companies use data is in direct contravention to Europe’s new privacy law. The […]
The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) released a study on Thursday that found an 84% drop in fraud compared to the industry average when all members in the supply chain are vigilant, badged and on the level. TAG analyzed 75 billion display and video impressions across desktop, mobile web and in-app channels to look for sophisticated […]
