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.
When a public company is having performance issues, it needs an excuse. For Twitter, TellApart is shaping up to be that boogeyman. After barely a mention of TellApart on its earnings calls for several quarters, last week Twitter CFO and COO Anthony Noto implied that the remarketing platform will hurt revenue through the rest of […]
Twitter’s first-ever NewFronts pitch to advertisers: We’re like TV for millennials. But do people really want to tune in to Twitter to watch long-form live-streaming content? Bloomberg, which announced an expanded live-streaming deal with Twitter on Monday, is betting on the fact that consumers are ready. “When we see millions of people go to Twitter […]
Destination marketers get tripped up on attribution. A tourism board, like the Pocono Mountains Visitors Bureau (PMVB), for example, spans four counties across northeastern Pennsylvania and represents a consortium of hotels, restaurants and activity providers, which makes it difficult to gather real-time metrics on visitation. “Someone might click on an ad and visit our website, […]
Facebook is lusting after lucrative online travel ad dollars. And on Thursday, Facebook launched its next assault on the travel industry – encroaching further on Google’s turf – with the global rollout of Dynamic Ads for flights. The release will allow airlines and flight advertisers to retarget users across Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network with ads tied […]
Ajit Pai is waging war against net neutrality. On Wednesday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Pai laid out his plan for dismantling net neutrality regulations with a proposal to reverse Title II. Title II is the regulatory framework the previous FCC, led by former Chairman and Democrat Tom Wheeler, used to reclassify broadband providers as common […]
Looks like TellApart was a very expensive mistake. On Wednesday, Twitter CFO and COO Anthony Noto called the desktop retargeting platform “a headwind” in which it no longer plans to invest. “We continue to face increasingly negative impacts from products we have discontinued or lowered investment in,” Noto told investors during Twitter’s first-quarter earnings call. […]
When a retargeted ad follows you around the internet even after you bought the advertised item, who failed? For publishers, it doesn’t matter. “Who failed? Honestly, I don’t care – I can probably get a $20 CPM for that retargeting campaign,” said Nicholas Hermansader, VP of ad operations at The Meet Group, a public company that […]
Facebook’s big bet on messenger bots was an oversell from the start. What’s shaking out now is a more reserved and perhaps more useful idea of what a bot can be and how a business can use it. “Rather than having chatbots be ‘the star of the show,’ as was the implication last year, Facebook […]
Facebook may be sidling away from ad tech, but it’s cozying up to marketing automation through a smorgasbord of APIs. At its F8 developer’s conference in San Jose this week, Facebook rolled out the next version of its marketing API suite, which includes new tools to automate creative production and targeting parameters. Those APIs make […]
Tom Edwards is different from most of the other people flowing through the halls of the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose at Facebook’s F8 developers conference this week. Because Edwards isn’t a developer. He’s the chief digital officer at marketing services firm Epsilon. “There aren’t a lot of agency folks here,” Edwards said. “I’m […]
Sorry Snapchat, Facebook isn’t going to quit. At Facebook’s F8 developer conference in San Jose on Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg declared that Facebook is all-in on augmented reality. In fact, AR is a cornerstone of Facebook’s 10-year road map. But for AR to really go mainstream, it needs to evolve beyond selfie masks and rainbow vomit […]
When it comes to third-party verification, the big digital platforms like Facebook and Google have reason to rush. They’re working on deadline. Marc Pritchard, P&G’s chief brand officer, has made it clear platforms need to implement Media Ratings Council-accredited third-party viewability measurement by the end of the year or risk losing the CPG giant’s business. […]
More than 4,000 app developers will descend on San Jose, Calif., on April 18 and 19 for Facebook’s F8 conference, where, if you believe the rumor mill, Mark Zuckerberg will regale them with splashy announcements about group chatbots for Messenger and possible hardware offerings from his secretive Building 8 Lab. But at its core, F8 […]
On the heels of Google’s ongoing brand safety headache, MediaMath is trying to add a few safety bumpers to the sharp edges of the digital ad ecosystem. The programmatic buying platform took the wraps off a product on Thursday that aims to help advertisers find addressable audiences on brand-safe sites at scale. MediaMath vets a […]
Airlines are not known for their great customer service. But while they can’t control the weather, they can do something about their data silos. “We have a lot of data, but the problem is it’s mainly unstructured data sitting in different databases,” said Aurelius Noell, director of ecommerce and commercial IT at VivaAerobus, a low-cost […]
“SMB” is not the first thing that comes to mind at the mention of SAP. But the enterprise software giant is actively courting small and medium-sized businesses like Veritas Studio Wines, a two-year-old boutique vino shop tucked away on a side street in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan. Veritas is plagued by many of […]
Colgate-Palmolive is eager to move away from last-click attribution. But similar to most traditional brands, the CFO is being cautious. Moving to more advanced attribution tactics, such as multitouch, isn’t cheap, in terms of vendor fees and internal human capital. “We would have to sell a lot of toothpaste to get return on investment in […]
Intel’s decision to bring programmatic media buying in-house boiled down to this: audience insights. “Our biggest aha, our epiphany, was that we wanted to have a holistic view of our customer,” Julie Keshmiry, Intel’s global media director, said Tuesday at Programmatic I/O in San Francisco. But getting that view is particularly difficult for a non-customer-facing […]
Chris Turley used to spend his mornings elbow deep in Excel. As a programmatic operations analyst at Scripps Networks Interactive, it was Turley’s daily task to pull information from 13 separate programmatic platforms, mainly data related to paid impressions, CPMs and revenue, and to organize that mess of information into a single spreadsheet for every […]
All telcos acquire ad tech to drive revenue, but not all telcos think alike on how to make that happen. Operators divide into four primary schools of thought when it comes to activating their ad tech assets: open ecosystem, closed ecosystem, internal promotion and content distribution. Singaporean SingTel, for example, is willing to partner with […]
Stick a fork in the Federal Communication Commission’s Obama-era privacy rules. As promised, President Trump signed a bill Monday to repeal the ISP privacy regulation passed last year under former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. The repeal follows Republican-led Senate and House votes to kill the regs in late March. The rules would have required broadband […]
Mobile attribution player Kochava souped up its anti-fraud offering on Thursday with a consolidated suite of reports, including access to a global blacklist that updates itself. The dashboard helps advertisers visualize what’s happening with their traffic in real time, with views into things like abnormally high click-to-install ratios, ad stacking clicks and questionable IP addresses. […]
Location-based shopping app Retale will now offer advertisers a warranty: foot traffic or your money back – at least in the form of a media makegood. As of Tuesday, Retale will start doling out performance guarantees against its ability to drive in-store traffic within specific time parameters. “We don’t talk to anybody anymore that doesn’t say they […]
The Republican-led House voted Tuesday to kill the Federal Communication Commission’s ISP privacy rules. All it needs now is the president’s signature, and that is all but assured. The White House issued a statement earlier in the day to say that President Trump strongly supports repealing the rules. Ad trade orgs rejoice. The House’s decision […]
While live sports events like March Madness are TV’s bulwark, money is sloshing into digital and mobile and fraudsters are looking to score. “This is the rule of thumb: Where there’s money, there’s a motive,” said Patrick Murray, VP of product at fraud-detection and analytics company DataVisor. But certain events or times of the year […]
Twitter has its work cut out. Stalling user growth and a rocky Q4 for ad revenue, which was down slightly year over year, present a particular sort of pickle: the need to buckle down on its key value prop. “People come to Twitter to see what’s happening in the world,” said Jean-Philippe Maheu, VP of […]
It seems crazy that a marketer at Match Group, which reported $295 million in dating-service revenue in the fourth quarter of 2016 alone, would spend half a day each week downloading and collating CSV files. But that’s just the way it’s been, said James Peng, head of mobile and social acquisition at Tinder and OKCupid […]
Ad-supported brand-unsafe content is on the rise. DoubleVerify, which validates tens of billions of advertiser impressions per month, has blocked 8 million ads from appearing on content pages classified as hate speech – up threefold since January. And according to keyword targeting tech platform Grapeshot, the amount of terrorism-related content it sees flowing through its systems […]
Indie programmatic agency Anagram is indie no more. On Thursday, programmatic ad firm Digilant acqui-hired the five-person team behind Anagram in a bid to beef up its custom programmatic ad solutions. “Providing custom solutions is not just about technology,” said Digilant global CEO Alan Osetek. “Technology is only as good as the people who use […]
The UK boycott of YouTube and the Google Display Network jumped the pond Wednesday when AT&T, Verizon and Johnson & Johnson joined the ever-growing pile-on of advertisers suspending their ad spend over brand safety concerns. But the issue at the heart of this developing scandal – ads appearing next to extremist and offensive content – […]
