Allison Schiff is the editor-in-chief 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 growth and product teams at delivery service app Postmates count on the same types of data to do their respective jobs: in-app behavior data, engagement data, location data and campaign data. All those data points, however, have to flow seamlessly for Postmates to balance the needs of its users, merchant partners and 65,000 couriers […]
Jebbit has a fresh approach to data collection: Ask the consumer to participate. The Boston-based startup, which announced a $6.8 million Series A on Wednesday, is helping enterprise brands and professional sports teams get consumers to proactively share their first-party data. The round was led by Manifest Investment Partners, with pinch-hitting from several strategic ad […]
Ever click on an ad by mistake? You and the rest of internet-connected humanity. On Tuesday, Facebook said it’s going to stop counting those errant clicks in its reporting for ads served through Audience Network and start barring publishers from including clickable white space in the background of their native ads. Beginning next week, if […]
AT&T just hired an ad platform whiz kid to take charge of its new TV and video ad business – but that’s the easy part. On Friday, AT&T revealed that Brian Lesser, GroupM’s CEO of North America, will helm a new business unit so the telco can attempt to realize the potential of its vast deterministic […]
Mobile app install ads are still a multibillion-dollar business for Facebook. But is Facebook taking too much credit? It’s hard to say, because Facebook is what’s known as a self-attributing network, i.e., a walled garden. A self-attributing network is just what it sounds like: a platform that, usually because of its scale, has the power […]
Mobile data exchange adsquare is proposing an alternative method to cross-device matching: starting with device IDs rather than cookies as the core identifier. On Tuesday, adsquare introduced mobile cross-device capabilities into its exchange through partnerships with Tapad, Drawbridge and Adbrain. Crosswise is coming soon. Rather than building mobile audiences based on cookies, the industry’s de […]
[pullquote][/pullquote]Even vendors need vendors. On Monday, cross-device provider Screen6 launched an offering called The Hub that Chief Strategy Officer Keith Petri called “a DMP for platforms.” “The fact is, data management is not as straightforward as our clients or even we have viewed it,” he said. The ecosystem is choked with data platform players ranging […]
Facebook is on a slow and steady quest to make Messenger as sticky as possible on the road to achieving its mission of becoming the WeChat of the West. “We see Messenger as an app to help people run their lives,” said Kemal El Moujahid, lead product manager for Messenger and M, Facebook’s virtual assistant. […]
Twitter’s revenue and user growth story – especially US user growth – is grounded in a harsh reality. Overall revenue for the quarter came in at $574 million, down 5% year over year. Ad revenue was also down 8% on a YoY basis, clocking in at $489 million. This is the third quarter in a […]
Facebook is pretty much minting money at this point. Despite concerns over ad load maxing out in the news feed, Facebook posted revenue of $9.32 billion for the second quarter, up 45% year over year from $6.43 billion. Mobile ad revenue at $8 billion was responsible for the vast majority of Facebook’s overall revenue in […]
Brands want high-quality mobile inventory – but they don’t have a standard way to define it, they can’t effectively measure it and there’s no easy way to find it at scale. Which is why mobile ad tech company Sabio Mobile, whose clients include Toyota, Wells Fargo, McDonald’s, Viacom and Lowe’s, released a validated publisher tool […]
Apple sits on a trove of first-party customer data through its App Store, everything from credit card information to time-stamped app downloads tied to specific device IDs. Yet there are inconsistencies between the install counts and engagement metrics developers see in Apple’s UI and what they’re told by their third-party measurement partners – and that’s “not […]
Uber’s rider-focused ad spend has increased twentyfold in the last year and a half. “The onus that puts on us to be really clever in our targeting and thoughtful is incredibly high,” said Kellyn Kenny, Uber’s VP of marketing, speaking at Tune’s Postback conference in Seattle on Thursday. Although user acquisition is still a top […]
Fraud fighting takes teamwork. Mobile measurement and attribution platform Tune rolled out a fraud prevention solution on Thursday that aims to help marketers and ad networks share campaign data and take action on it in real time. “Marketers and their ad partners need to collaborate rather than finger point; there’s enough blame for everyone to […]
Winter is coming – for companies that aren’t taking the new EU privacy regime seriously. Ad tech players are particularly vulnerable, said Todd Ruback, chief privacy officer at digital governance company Evidon, which sold its consumer-facing privacy extension, Ghostery, in February in order to dedicate itself to enterprise compliance. “The ad tech industry is the weak […]
Ask Facebook for access to its data and the official answer is going to be, “Nope.” But under certain circumstances, a limited number of advertisers and agencies are tapping into impression-level Facebook campaign delivery data, AdExchanger has learned. The data-sharing arrangements are euphemistically referred to as “clean rooms.” These clean rooms are safe spaces where […]
Back when real-time auction app Tophatter was founded in 2012, it spent as much as 95% of its user acquisition budget on Facebook. But with a solid user base of around 12 million registered users, it’s been making a concerted effort to mix up its UA strategy. “In the beginning, Facebook was a big gorilla, but […]
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 […]
