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.
“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Think of PicsArt as the love child of Instagram and Photoshop in app form. Advertising and in-app purchases make up the bulk of its revenue, but the photo-sharing and sticker creation app is branching out with an ad-free subscription […]
Data was center stage Thursday at Meredith’s first NewFront since the acquisition of Time Inc. closed at the end of January. “We’re a data-driven organization,” its chief marketing and data officer, Alysia Borsa, told AdExchanger, referring to “the new Meredith,” where data informs everything from product to advertising to editorial. The women-focused media company, which […]
“This has been an intense year – I can’t believe we’re only four months in.” Mark Zuckerberg kicked off Facebook’s F8 developers conference in San Jose on Tuesday with a joke, and he got a few chuckles from the gathered crowd of 5,000 developers. Facebook’s recent crackdown on API access and data flows in response to […]
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) can finally take down its vacancy sign. More than a year into Trump’s presidency, five new commissioners were approved by the Senate late last week. The brand-new commission, comprising three Republicans and two Democrats, are tasked with tackling consumer protection and privacy at a time when consumers are more aware – and […]
Facebook’s CTO, Mike Schroepfer, faced five hours of intense and technically savvy grilling by members of a parliamentary committee on Thursday. The takeaway: UK regulators don’t trust Facebook. To put it more pointedly in the words of British conservative MP Julian Knight: Facebook is a “morality-free zone” with no respect for consumer privacy or the […]
MoPub co-founder and former CEO Jim Payne is getting his next startup off the ground with MAX, a platform that helps mobile publishers sell programmatically. The company launched Thursday following around six months of beta-testing with a $3.5 million seed round led by Payne’s investment fund, Breakpoint Capital, and a handful of angels. They include […]
Facebook might be weathering more headwinds than you can shake a stick at right now, but that didn’t stop it from posting gangbuster earnings on Wednesday. Revenue for the quarter clocked in at $11.97 billion, up 49% year over year – beating the Street’s estimate of $11.41 billion. Click here to read the release. Proof […]
Twitter was the comeback kid in Q1. The company experienced its second consecutive quarter of profitability, with 21% YoY revenue growth to $665 million – $575 million of it thanks to advertising. Growth would have been higher – around 27% this quarter – if not for the headwind still blowing from the direction of the now fully […]
Although a handful of advertisers have suspended their Facebook campaigns in the wake of the platform’s ongoing data scandal, most are staying the course. “Both advertisers and developers are very understanding about having some features removed that they were using,” said Mark Rabkin, Facebook’s VP of ads and business platform, who took the reins from […]
Airfare and hotel prediction app Hopper is different from other travel booking services. When you download Hopper, the app tells you not to buy anything. And that’s because Hopper acquires users at the top of the funnel. “We’re looking for people who are just browsing on social, people who aren’t necessarily looking for a flight […]
Just two years after entering Europe, Verve is shutting down its European operations rather than tangle with the General Data Protection Regulation. The company, which runs a mobile marketing platform powered by location data, confirmed to AdExchanger that it is closing its London and Munich offices and laying off around 15 employees on May 11. […]
Most consumers are only just learning about the inner workings of the ad-supported internet – and they don’t like what they see. David Fischer, Facebook’s VP of business and marketing partnerships, understands their frustration. “A lot of the discomfort people have is when they feel like they don’t actually know what’s going on with the ad […]
Billboards aren’t a one-to-one media, unless we’re talking about “Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri.” But advertisers are starting to inform their online retargeting efforts with offline exposure data. Established out-of-home media companies, like Clear Channel Outdoor and Outfront Media, geofence their billboards to retarget consumers online, while platforms like Facebook let retailers use offline […]
Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will kill the third-party data ecosystem. Or third-party data isn’t going anywhere. The truth sits somewhere in the middle, said Alice Lincoln, MediaMath’s VP of data policy and governance, at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O in San Francisco on Wednesday. “Third-party data is here to stay – if it’s high-quality,” said Lincoln, […]
“We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry.” A contrite yet confident Mark Zuckerberg, wearing a suit rather than his usual gray T-shirt and jeans, testified Tuesday before a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees in Washington, […]
AdColony further trimmed its executive ranks this week in an effort to streamline the business and get to profitability. The mobile video ad network did away with at least five senior and mid-level roles in North America. AdColony’s former VP of performance, Tim O’Neil, who joined AdColony less than a year ago, was let go […]
Behind the Cambridge Analytica headlines, Facebook on Thursday completed the first phase of its ongoing three-part MRC audit. Phase one was an inspection of served display impressions in the news feed on Facebook and Instagram across desktop, mobile web and in-app. Before the Cambridge Analytica data-sharing scandal broke, Facebook was being pushed to be more open […]
“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Lee Fentress wasn’t always sold on programmatic. But he’s changed his tune since joining the Los Angeles Times as VP of ad sales a little more than three months ago. “I came in pretty skeptical of programmatic, really wanting to do less programmatic and […]
Monster.com’s new CMO, Jonathan Beamer, has a monster job ahead of him. Since its heyday in the late ’90s and early 2000s, the career site, once the most trafficked job platform in the US, lost ground to upstart competitors such as Indeed.com and ZipRecruiter. Monster rested on its laurels, and what started as a scrappy […]
With Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation taking effect May 25, Facebook must alter some of its business practices regardless of any fallout due to the Cambridge Analytica debacle. The Cambridge Analytica revelations merely behoove Facebook to move faster and fix things in light of macro privacy changes hitting the EU. The most recent example is […]
This is the third in a series of deep dives from AdExchanger on mobile fraud and mobile data quality, including guides to fraud tactics and threat vectors and practical solutions from advertisers in the growth and user acquisition trenches. Read the first story (“2018 Will Be A Year Of Reckoning For Mobile App-Install Fraud“) and […]
AppLovin is one of the most well-funded indie ad platforms out there – and it’s growing like a weed. The mobile ad network last year received $841 million in debt financing from Chinese private equity firm Orient Hontai Capital. In 2014, AppLovin raised just $4 million in seed funding. Originally, Orient Hontai had intended to acquire a majority […]
Facebook is going to stop allowing third-party data providers from offering targeting directly on its platform. The move is a direct reaction to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In the past, advertisers could use a feature called partner categories to supplement the targeting they do on Facebook with data from brokers, such as recent purchases or […]
During the 2016 US presidential election, news publishers experienced an uptick in engagement. The Trump era has kept that engine going. Politico is no exception, where traffic is up more than 30% year over year. That’s one of the reasons why Politico overhauled its website on Tuesday, showing more stories above the fold and optimizing […]
Business Insider’s parent company, Insider Inc., launched its first-ever ad campaign on Wednesday to make sure its ad partners know what the heck it is. The campaign, created with help from Publicis-owned agency Digitas, includes a new corporate website and a media push targeting agencies with display and video ads across trade pubs, Facebook and […]
All eyes have been on Google as May 25 draws near. That’s the day the General Data Protection Regulation goes into effect in Europe, where Google has a target on its back. Google laid out its GDPR prep plan Thursday in a letter to partners after months of playing its cards close to the vest. […]
#WheresZuck? Posting a mea culpa on Facebook after nearly five days of conspicuous silence. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which broke over the weekend, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to Facebook to explain what happened and to outline fixes. He promised Facebook would investigate all apps that had “access to large amounts […]
The Cambridge Analytica debacle demonstrated that Facebook has no systematic way of knowing what happens to data once it leaves the platform. What happened wasn’t a data breach – but that isn’t what matters. “Partners are bound by agreements that say they’re not supposed to share the data out, but there’s no way to regulate it, […]
Facebook is running out of eyes to blacken in the wake of revelations over the weekend that Trump-affiliated data firm Cambridge Analytica harvested information from 50 million Facebook accounts without permission. But as long as ads continue to perform on Facebook, the scandals won’t lead advertisers to pull back their spend. “We may see individuals […]
The in-app waterfall is drying up. On Monday, Oath released a new version of Super Auction, its replacement technology for the ad network mediation role that mobile networks have traditionally fulfilled. Previously, ONE by AOL would host an auction for AOL’s own demand through its software development kit and send the top bid to the […]
