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.
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 […]
Although Facebook’s stock has mostly recovered from its Cambridge Analytica lows, stockholders are unamused by the rocky ride. “Scandal is not good for the company’s bottom line,” said one investor Thursday during Facebook’s 2018 annual shareholder meeting. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has become quite good at acknowledging the scandals over the past year or so. “The […]
Location marketing platform Verve is angling for a piece of the growing programmatic mobile video pie with the acquisition of in-app video ad vendor Receptiv (formerly MediaBrix). The deal, announced Wednesday, opens up a rich new seam of inventory for Verve, said CEO Tom Kenney, who declined to share terms other than to say the […]
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) may have originated in Europe, but its reach and influence stretches across the globe, including to the US. For example, it’s actually easier for large enterprises to apply standards globally. Having already made a major effort to comply with GDPR for EU citizen data, it’s only logical to stay […]
May 25 is here and let’s pretend that companies up and down the digital supply chain are ready for the General Data Protection Regulation enforcement deadline. Good. Now it’s time to start fretting about ePrivacy. Many in the advertising industry have treated ePrivacy almost as an afterthought in the frenzied lead-up to the GDPR enforcement […]
Data matching and cookie syncing aren’t verboten under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) but getting the consent to do it is another story altogether, since consumers need to know exactly what they’re signing up for when they provide unambiguous and specific consent. Like most vendors in the ad tech ecosystem, companies that onboard data […]
Influencer marketing often gets lumped in with vapid Kardashian nonsense, PewDiePie antics and top-of-the-funnel fluff. But there’s no reason sponsored videos can’t be a data-driven user acquisition (UA) channel for performance-minded marketers. User acquisition is about knowing where your audience is, wherever that may be, and being willing to experiment, said Danika Wilkinson, community manager […]
Header bidding-enabled ad spend is on the upswing thanks to mobile. And though it’s still early days for in-app header bidding adoption, that train’s just about ready to leave the station. The number of mobile impressions transacted through unified auction technology increased more than 110% year over year in the first quarter of 2018, according […]
Anyone hoping for an intense grilling of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during his testimony Tuesday before European politicians in Brussels can keep on waiting. Zuckerberg trotted out familiar talking points and was sheltered from the intensity and awkward eye contact of real interrogation by a strange format, in which members of the EU Parliament asked […]
Just because someone doesn’t have a smartphone doesn’t mean she doesn’t need shampoo. But reaching her with the right message on mobile is a knotty challenge, as P&G Indonesia learned while developing a media plan to promote the launch of a new anti-dandruff shampoo from Pantene. Indonesia is a nation comprised of thousands of islands […]
This isn’t a test: Data-driven TV planning is finally having its moment. About 15-17% of advertisers in the US already regularly include addressable or advanced TV buys in their media plans, according to a joint Forrester/Association of National Advertisers survey of 126 ANA members released Wednesday. An additional 20-30% of advertisers plan to start dipping […]
Publishers like to pretend that consumers can’t live without content – but if 95% of media brands disappeared tomorrow, no one would care, said Rafat Ali, CEO and founder of travel publisher Skift, at LUMA’s Digital Media Summit in New York City on Tuesday. Despite the value media people ascribe to the importance of what they […]
Apple just made a move under the radar that could cause third-party attribution providers to become obsolete. In late March, Apple quietly released SKAdNetwork, an API for iOS 11.3 that allows ad networks or advertisers to directly attribute installs from the App Store without relying on an attribution vendor. Apple’s well-documented stance on consumer privacy […]
