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.
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 […]
With a divided Congress, don’t expect 2019 to usher in federal privacy legislation a la GDPR… or to see a breakup of big tech. Even if the midterms hadn’t shaken out as expected – with Republicans keeping the Senate and Democrats securing a majority in the House – the chance for congressional action on either […]
The data management platform (DMP) category is now a three-horse race, with Salesforce gaining on Oracle, and Adobe nipping at their collective heels. “Salesforce is definitely on an accelerated path,” said Kevin Mannion, chief strategy officer at Advertiser Perceptions, which released its Q3 2018 DMP wave on Tuesday. “Its upward movement is the most obvious […]
Two years ago, the Timehop app – which aggregates and resurfaces old social media photos – was running on the remaining fumes of its VC cash, enough to stay afloat for just three months. It needed revenue, and, although it had 20 million monthly active users, its inventory was severely undervalued. “We had no real […]
The B2B martech space is heating up as titans spend billions to build their stacks – and now it’s makeover time at LinkedIn. On Monday, LinkedIn opened the public beta for a revamped version of Campaign Manager, the self-service tool advertisers use to manage and measure campaigns on its platform. The idea is “to make it […]
On Thursday, Facebook alerted advertisers, agencies and its marketing partners that starting in November, they’ll need to confirm the nature of their relationships to each other before they’re allowed to share Facebook data amongst themselves. Some businesses are in the habit of sharing data from using Facebook’s ad products with their partners to help with […]
Pinterest is growing its ad inventory with a new promoted carousel format, which moved out of beta on Thursday. Carousels, which allow advertisers to include up to five images within a single format, can appear within the Pinterest main feed as a related pin recommendation or through search. Users tap the cover image and then […]
Even the mighty miss on revenue – but Facebook is still raking it in per user and Stories monetization across platforms is just getting started. Facebook reported $13.73 billion in revenue for the third quarter on Tuesday, $40 million less than what analysts expected. It’s Facebook’s second earnings miss in a row. But Facebook now […]
Starting Oct. 30, Google will make parallel tracking the default way to run third-party tracking for Google search and shopping ads. It’ll become mandatory for display and video ads by March 2019. For now, only Chrome traffic will use parallel tracking, with other operating systems and browsers to be added throughout the rest of the […]
Snap may have invented the Stories format, but Instagram Stories are attracting most of the ad spend. The two main reasons why sits at the heart of an existential dilemma for Snap: its audience and its scale. Snap’s youthful users are one of the platform’s primary selling points at the same time they’re a potential […]
Last quarter, Twitter’s stock got hammered after user growth stagnated, despite its solid financial results. But analysts appear ready to stop punishing Twitter for its user numbers. Although Twitter shed 4 million users in the third quarter year over year – monthly actives now total 326 million – the company’s stock grew nearly 3% in premarket trading […]
When Shpock, a European shopping app, started using search behavior to inform its ad targeting this year rather than just relying on demo data, it began to realize what its users were actually interested in. “For many years, demographic targeting was one of the main options used by brands and agencies alike,” said Jon Hatfield, […]
The in-housing trend prompted Gartner’s first-ever Magic Quadrant report for ad tech, which was released late last week. Even if not all marketers are ready or interested in taking their media buying in-house, there’s a desire across the board for more control over their tech stack – or at least to know what the heck’s […]
Credit card loyalty programs are table stakes for banks – nearly every bank has one. Points often accumulate unused and consumers sometimes forget they’re even there. But HSBC uses data and artificial intelligence to personalize its offers and make its program more redeeming. “There are so many choices in the credit card market, so we really […]
