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.
Advertisers and agencies will soon be able to buy ads on the Facebook Messenger home screen – but they lack the necessary levers to optimize performance or customize creative. “We’re recommending to our teams to be aware of the opportunity, but we’re really waiting for the inventory to be unbundled,” said Kieley Taylor, senior partner and […]
While mobile app advertising is in dire need of standards, that prospect is easier said than done. Confusion and wrongheadedness in the industry is rife, even among user acquisition specialists. “Ask a room full of UA managers to explain how mobile tracking works and I think most won’t be able to explain the whole process,” […]
Financial services marketers can’t bank on regular demand- and supply-side platforms to find the prospects they’re looking for. The data just isn’t there, said Phillip Rosen, CEO and co-founder of Even Financial, an ad tech provider for financial marketers. On Tuesday, the company added a programmatic marketplace offering to its existing supply-side API to help […]
Episode, a choose-your-own-adventure storytelling app, is choosing a road to revenue centered on the user experience first. Monetization is delicately balanced with the demands of UX for the interactive app, which allows users to immerse themselves in fictional narratives. “But there is a lot of revenue to be made if we can get people engaged,” […]
You’ve got to be a tough cookie and have good fortune to crack the China market. And success in other regions is not a guarantee of success in the People’s Republic. Such was the case with Criteo, which, after investing heavily in the domestic China market, discreetly pulled out in late May, nearly three years […]
DoubleVerify is looking for a home. AdExchanger has learned that the independent verification company recently hired a banker from tech-focused investment firm Pacific Crest Securities. Final bids were due Tuesday, and sources tell AdExchanger the deal price could be somewhere in the $350 million range – a lofty bid, though considerably less than the reported […]
The target audience for Lenovo’s Data Center Group is the definition of niche: chief information officers at Fortune 500 companies who are in the market for complex storage, networking and server solutions. To reach that niche, Lenovo has increasingly turned to targeted digital and social ads. “We’re not interested in big, general blasts of information […]
MoPub, Twitter’s mobile ad exchange, is looking to get stickier with the buy side. On Thursday, after five months of beta testing, it launched a solution that aims to help marketers aggregate inventory types based on performance and to target them programmatically. Advertisers that want a lot of installs, for example, can take advantage of […]
Outdoor gear retailer REI is hitting the slopes with personalized local advertising. The brand, working with dynamic creative optimization (DCO) platform Jivox, is running hyperlocal campaigns on social channels informed by weather data, interests and past purchases. In particular, REI has been piloting a new Jivox product that allows brands to add new targeting dimensions […]
The mobile ad industry is a fragmented mess of ad networks. Singapore-based mobile game publisher IGG (I Got Games), which has about 17 million monthly active users globally and spends multiple millions on performance-based user acquisition (UA) every month, works with 100 different networks at any given time. “It’s labor-intensive,” said Mark Zhang, IGG’s SVP […]
Singular and Apsalar are consolidating, and they’ve got their collective head in the marketing cloud. On Tuesday, the duo announced that they will become one and marry their respective technologies – Singular’s mobile marketing analytics tech and Apsalar’s mobile attribution and DMP offering – to take on the likes of Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce on the mobile […]
As the marketing chief at a sprawling enterprise software company, SAP CMO Maggie Chan Jones has unique insight into marketer pain points. At the top of the list: fragmentation. “There are thousands of marketing technology providers across different marketing functions,” Jones said. “One of the biggest headaches a marketer has is trying to sell one […]
The best-laid plans of app developers are often belied by the actions of actual users. When Guy Tal, CEO of Bel Media Group, an Israeli app publisher with around 100 gaming, social and utility applications, soft-launched Tinder-like Android dating app WeMeet, he and his team assumed users would be easily attracted to the service because […]
Marketers know they need to wise up on cross-channel identity and attribution technology. But it’s hard to know how to approach the vendor landscape when it feels like the entire LUMAscape is blowing up your inbox every morning. “’Barbarians at the gate’ is an apt analogy – sometimes, that’s how it feels,” said Simon Shulman, […]
National Geographic isn’t obsessing over the metrics for its Albert Einstein Facebook Messenger bot. “We want this to be fun – and if you try to measure ROI on something like this, you’re just setting yourself up to fail,” said Dennis Camlek, EVP of strategy and consumer marketing at National Geographic. Nat Geo launched the bot […]
The duopoly isn’t a duo when it comes to brand safety. The nuances of how their respective platforms operate mean that Facebook and Google face their own particular challenges to ensure brand safety. While the primary risk on YouTube is adjacency – ads appearing within or beside unsavory or questionable content – the personal nature of […]
Facebook made several overtures to openness on Wednesday with tools designed to give advertisers more control over where and how their ads appear across in-stream video on Facebook, Instant Articles and the Audience Network. “Advertisers want separate controls for inside the news feed environment and outside the news feed environment where ads are more deeply […]
Self-styled gentleman hacker Michael Tiffany is standing down as chief exec of White Ops. On Wednesday, the company announced that Tiffany, who co-founded White Ops in 2013, is transitioning to the president role, where he’ll work more closely with the engineers focusing on product innovation and on evangelizing fraud prevention in the industry. Sandeep Swadia, […]
After years of will they/won’t they, MoPub is finally going to take better advantage of Twitter data. The mobile exchange, acquired by Twitter in 2013, is testing so-called audience packages in the form of audience segments powered by proprietary data coming from Twitter. The product is in alpha with a select set of partners. “The Twitter […]
Regulators will always be playing catch-up with technology. Is self-regulation the answer? By the time regulators do act to protect consumers, it’s generally more reactive than proactive. “The pace of change is much quicker than it used to be,” Martha Coakley, the former attorney general of Massachusetts, said Wednesday at an event hosted by marketing […]
Tapad has tapped a new CEO. Are Traasdahl will step down as Tapad’s CEO, effective immediately, the company said Thursday. He will be replaced by Sigvart Voss Eriksen, a Telenor exec who’s been with the operator for more than 15 years, most recently as head of advertising technology. Telenor, a Norwegian telco with more than […]
Procter & Gamble has a reputation for putting its partners through the wringer – and sometimes out of business. Some ad tech CEOs are hopping mad about it. “The death of AudienceScience is on P&G’s doorstep,” said one ad tech chief exec. AudienceScience, P&G’s longtime buying platform, was forced to close its doors last week, less […]
Procter & Gamble has anointed MediaMath as the next demand-side platform in its growing DSP roster. P&G is also working with The Trade Desk, and with Neustar as its global data management platform. On Tuesday, MediaMath revealed that it had received a $175 million credit facility led by Goldman Sachs with participation from Santander Bank. […]
Apple is rolling out products to cut down on autoplay video and retargeting. At its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose on Thursday, Apple said it’s planning two features in the next version of Safari, dubbed High Sierra, that will cut down on ads that stalk you around the internet and videos that play uninvited. […]
Developers like Lucktastic, a F2P sweepstakes app, play a seemingly never-ending game of balancing quality vs. scale when acquiring users. Increasingly, they’re turning to mobile video and playable ads to find users who stick around after the install. “In a category like ours, you need scale to succeed, but we also really have to care […]
Investors are putting Facebook’s feet to the fire about fake news. At the company’s annual shareholder’s meeting on Thursday, investors questioned CEO Mark Zuckerberg about how Facebook is combatting the spread of false news on its platform. Advertisers have become increasingly sensitive to brand safety issues since the YouTube/Google Display Network debacle kicked off in […]
Kiip is giving SDK-averse apps another option to test its demand. On Thursday, the mobile rewards ad network rolled out the ability to use JavaScript tags as a lighter-weight way to serve campaigns into a publisher’s app. Early test partners include music discovery app SoundHound and The Meet Group, which operates a suite of social […]
Bottled water brand Essentia Water is getting its feet wet with digital marketing. “Our number-one goal is to bring our brand messaging to life across digital platforms, regardless of the channel,” said Zola Kane, Essentia Water’s senior director of digital marketing. Essentia, purveyor of what it calls ionized alkaline water, launched an integrated brand campaign […]
Sam’s Club doesn’t take a wholesaler’s approach to mobile re-engagement. “We’re always thinking about how to segment and target our users,” said Drew Frost, senior product marketing manager at the Walmart-owned, members-only retail club. “Our main focus is on finding and engaging what we call our higher-value users.” For Sam’s Club, high value is derived […]
New York-based coffee lovers probably want to receive targeted push notifications with discounts on lattes at their favorite Brooklyn coffee house – but not if they’re traveling in Chicago that day. It’s hard to get that level of granularity right, which is why a lot of brands aren’t taking advantage of context, location, weather and other […]
