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.
“You can never go home again” doesn’t apply to the home screen. Most smartphone users – 98%, according to mobile attribution provider TUNE – have reinstalled an app that they previously deleted. Forty percent of users delete and reinstall apps on a regular basis. But most app marketers don’t differentiate between first-time downloads and re-downloads, mainly because […]
Jordan Cohen’s resume has a clear theme: data-driven marketing. In April, Cohen joined Ladders, a job board for positions that pay $100,000 or more. But before going brand-side, he spent most of his career in the performance space, with recent stints at email content marketing platform Movable Ink and performance marketing company Fluent. Cohen plans […]
Facebook’s scale – 1.45 billion daily active users at last count – has been its armor through a no-good, very bad year of repeated privacy failures, questions of Russian election interference and other controversies. But scale needs to be maintained. Although only a handful of advertisers pulled spend in the aftermath of Cambridge Analytica, that wouldn’t […]
Harry’s and Dollar Shave Club went from upstarts to behemoths, shaking up the century-old razor category in just a few short years. But there’s still more market share to shave off the top. What about women’s razors? That’s the question that Billie, a razor subscription service for women founded last year, is aiming to answer. […]
The sweeping California privacy law, AB 375, that was rushed onto Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk for his 11th-hour signature last week won’t go into effect until 2020. The new law gives consumers a host of new rights, including the ability to compel companies to share what data has been collected about them, the right to […]
Header bidding-like tech is starting to pick up steam on mobile, but it’s still mostly SDK-based, which brings added latency along with the revenue bump. On Thursday, mobile monetization platform PubNative released a hybrid server-side/client-side header bidding tool to help publishers bring in more dough without messing up the UX. Dubbed HyBid, the solution allows […]
Canned audiences are as stale as cigarette smoke in an old casino. That’s why MGM Resorts International is looking for alternatives to what Kelly Smith, MGM’s SVP and chief digital officer, calls “black-box syndicated segments.” In its quest for custom audience activation, MGM is kicking the tires on a new self-serve data marketplace offering from […]
Travel publishers often miss the boat on attribution. Although their content is an integral part of the trip-planning process at the top of the funnel, there’s no easy way to credit its role in an eventual hotel booking. Fathom, a site that publishes curated destination guides and first-person travel accounts, knew it was leaving money […]
Mammoth Media, a media and entertainment network aimed at teens and millennials, wants to do for apps what Viacom did for TV. “Viacom has Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central – program options and content based on demographics,” said Peter Szabo, Mammoth’s CRO and head of partnerships. “We’re taking the same approach with different monetization, and instead […]
As Apple cuts down on lock screen clutter, app marketers should take notice. In the wake of Apple’s latest do-not-disturb feature updates, which give users more control over their notifications, developers need to be judicious about how pushy they get with push notifications. Once users disable push or banish notifications from the lock screen, they […]
Mark Jenkins spent his first two weeks as the new senior director of marketing at Roy Rogers Restaurants, manning the drive-thru window, making gravy, frying chicken and prepping salads. “As a marketing guy, I need to really understand the ops platforms inside the restaurant, the experience and the way things are built,” said Jenkins, who […]
Ad campaigns unfurl across screens, and that’s the way they should be measured. Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS) released a cross-screen measurement tool on Wednesday that links incremental offline sales for an ad campaign to total views across channels, including linear TV, mobile and desktop video, over-the-top (OTT) and connected TV. NCS, which provides purchase-based targeting […]
In Bruce Falck’s office, there’s a piece of paper tacked to the wall with a list of important reminders: GDPR, MRC, transparency, measurement. But rather than focusing on “external factors,” the GM of Twitter’s revenue product and his growing team are “getting back to basics.” Twitter has spent the last two years striking content partnerships, […]
It’s been a weird four months for Aleksandr Kogan. The 33-year-old went from an obscure research psychologist at Cambridge University to one of the villains at the heart of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Kogan, who testified Tuesday before a Senate Commerce subcommittee, apologized for his role in the controversy, but disputes that the data provided […]
Anheuser-Busch InBev isn’t crying in its beer over the sorry state of transparency in the supply chain – it’s taking action with a mobile campaign built on the blockchain. It may sound like a stunt, but this is a serious experiment, said Andy Chang, AB InBev’s global head of media and content. “There are a […]
The global ad market is set to grow even faster than forecasted. Why? It’s the duopoly, folks. In a report released Monday, IPG-owned Magna Global significantly revised its global ad market growth projection from 5.2% to 6.4%, which translates to $551 billion in global ad spend. In Q1, Google and Facebook’s collective ad revenue increased […]
Spotify and TGI Fridays are hooking up with Foursquare as a preferred measurement partner. Solid measurement is what seals the deal with marketers, said Brian Berner, head of US sales at Spotify. “Many of our [brand] partners have a brick-and-mortar presence, so we’ve seen increased demand for measurement that showcases how our ad platform connects […]
The bid has dropped. Comcast on Wednesday again attempted to outmaneuver Mickey and acquire most of 21st Century Fox’s assets with a $65 billion cash offer, putting Disney’s deal in jeopardy. Disney offered Fox a $52.4 billion all-stock deal in December. Comcast wants to disrupt the deal and follow in AT&T’s footsteps: a content distributor […]
Advertisers know linear TV spots drive store visits. Proving it is another story. On Tuesday, Snap-owned location company Placed released a tool that attempts to tie the two together. To power its offering, Placed is licensing viewership data from Inscape, the data division within smart-TV manufacturer Vizio, which has access to around 8 million opted-in […]
Mazel tov, it’s a merger. On Tuesday, Judge Richard Leon gave his blessing to AT&T’s $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner. The judgment capped five weeks of testimony, six weeks of deliberation and a fair amount of nail-biting in executive suites from Dallas to New York City. But now that the deal is finally sealed, […]
Reddit is hoping advertisers upvote its latest ad offering: outstream video. The ad unit is being made available to managed partners on Tuesday, and all advertisers will get a crack through self-serve within the next few months – but programmatic is still a long way off. Although programmatic is on Reddit’s road map, “we’re still in […]
Yieldmo has its eye on your thumb. For the last five years, the mobile ad startup has been working on a platform that collects and analyzes mobile ad engagement data to gather insights and create segments of the people most likely to convert. On Monday, the platform and a small group of select partners finally […]
Mobile programmatic is poised to dominate digital display ad spend this year, but there are still a heck of a lot of kinks to work out. The No. 1 headache for publishers: buyers that try to apply desktop tactics and standards to mobile and then wonder why it’s not working out. Even some of the […]
While both the California Consumer Privacy Act and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation address the collection of personal information by businesses, they are actually quite different. Here’s where they diverge and why the advertising trade orgs are lobbying like bandits to block the California act’s passage. The IAB, DMA, ANA, 4As and NAI decried the […]
Emodo, Ericsson’s mobile ad platform for telcos, is aiming to boost the quality of location data in the ad ecosystem with a tool launched Thursday that uses carrier data to verify mobile audiences on a pre-bid basis. Marketers are shelling out for bad targeting and it’s akin to flushing their budgets down the toilet, said […]
Ads.txt is headed to the app ecosystem. What form will it take? That’s still shaking out. The IAB Tech Lab released guidance on Wednesday with several proposals for how to implement Ads.txt within an app environment. Ads.txt is the Tech Lab’s initiative to reduce inventory spoofing and help advertisers distinguish legit supply sources from the […]
Facebook is hopping into in-app header bidding. Starting Wednesday, publishers can include Audience Network inventory in their in-app unified auctions. All formats will be available, including display, native and video. Facebook joins a long list of other platforms that have gotten jiggy with in-app header bidding in recent months, including Google’s AdMob, Oath, MoPub and […]
Video delivered over the internet to a smart television or connected TV could have a brand safety problem. We’re talking specifically about user-generated digital video streaming to a big screen and the niche OTT channels and streaming services that seem be springing up on a near-weekly basis. That type of video shouldn’t be confused with […]
Social plugins, your cookie-dropping days are numbered – on Safari, at least. At its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, Apple announced that the third-party widgets that litter the internet will no longer be able to place cookies on visitors using Safari. “We’ve all seen these like buttons and share buttons and these comment fields,” said Craig […]
Apple is reportedly headed once more into the fray with the launch of a contextual ad network that could include inventory from Pinterest, Snap and a collective of other apps in the App Store. The move, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, may seem strange in light of macro events like Facebook’s data scandal […]
