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 the largest advertiser in the world wants to take you to prom, but you’re not allowed to tell anyone – that was the situation facing AudienceScience. Although AudienceScience provided the technology backbone for Procter & Gamble’s internal trading desk, Hawkeye, for the past seven years, P&G explicitly acknowledged its alliance with the ad tech platform […]
Hallmark is greeting programmatic with open arms. The 102-year-old card company moved all of its media buying to programmatic in 2015, and it’s “one of the best things we’ve done,” said Lindsey Roy, Hallmark’s VP of greeting marketing, speaking at the Mobile Marketing Association Leadership Forum in New York City on Wednesday. Programmatic allows Hallmark […]
Facebook’s making it harder for fly-by-night publishers to monetize low-value websites. On Wednesday, Facebook said it’s starting to use artificial intelligence to lay down the law on links that shunt users to websites with too many ads, as well as ads of a “disruptive, malicious and shocking” nature. Frowned-upon ad types include excessively disruptive units […]
Agencies want to take advantage of location data, but roadblocks still stand in the way. For Mobext, the mobile arm of Havas Media Group, fragmentation and quality-control issues top the list. “A lot of companies have hopped on the bandwagon in the location space, and that’s created a lot of clutter in the offerings available […]
Pearle Vision was having an identity crisis. Over the years, the eyewear chain cycled through around a dozen different positionings, from wholesome and family-friendly to early 2000s-era ads featuring a naughty librarian. “What happened was what happens to many brands as the marketplace changes – there is this urge to change with it,” said Pearle Vision […]
Whisper, an app that lets its anonymous users post what’s on their mind, is still going strong after five years – even after other secret-sharing social apps like Yik Yak have closed shop. One reason for its longevity is that it is making money through programmatic advertising. Demand partners include Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, OpenX […]
When it comes to location-based based data, targeting is the low-hanging fruit. The ripe opportunities center on using location to enhance behavioral profiles and connect online ad exposure with real-world activities. Easier said than done, however. Advertisers and agencies are interested, but the technology is still developing and there’s a fair amount of BS flying […]
Facebook is still growing. The company reported on Wednesday that monthly active users are now 1.9 billion, up 17% year-over year – roughly one-fourth of the world’s population – while daily active usage saw an 18% YoY uptick to 1.3 billion. Mobile revenue, as always, is the majority of overall revenue at 85%, up from […]
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. […]
