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.
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 […]
Marketers aren’t all that wound up about Facebook’s recurring ad metric errors. Bugs happen, said Alok Gupta, data science manager at Airbnb, speaking at a measurement event hosted by Facebook on Wednesday. “You’re never going to build a perfect system immediately or ever,” Gupta said. “As long as the bugs or problems are identified quickly, […]
Businesses spend around $40 billion a year on digital content marketing, and Demandbase, which announced a $65 million financing round on Thursday, is looking to cut itself a slice of the pie. Led by existing investor Sageview Capital with participation by a smorgasbord of others, including Adobe Systems, Altos Ventures and Sigma Partners, the financing […]
Wait, there’s good news in the fight against ad fraud? The global monetary impact of ad fraud is expected to go down this year, the amount of mobile fraud happening in the ecosystem is much lower than feared and programmatic can be just as safe as direct-sold if buyers implement the right security measures. The […]
Disused phone booths in New York could soon go programmatic. Nine-year MediaMath vet Ari Buchalter is stepping in as CEO of Alphabet-backed smart cities startup Intersection, best known for its interactive LinkNYC kiosks replacing neglected phone booths with Wi-Fi hotspots across New York City – and he’s bringing his data-driven sensibilities with him. “When people talk […]
Creating Facebook ads manually was wearing thin for TechStyle, the parent company of members-only fashion ecommerce sites ShoeDazzle, JustFab, FabKids and Fabletics. When a brand spends nearly $90 million a year on digital marketing, automation is the key to sanity. “Elegant, hard-working, effective advertising at scale is exciting – but the idea of doing that manually […]
Net neutrality is not long for this world. In a 2-1 party-line vote Thursday, the Republican-led Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to repeal Title II, the regulatory framework used by the former regime to reclassify broadband providers as common carriers. The proposed rule, part of the FCC’s effort at “restoring internet freedom,” will be subject […]
Bots are to web traffic what broken turnstiles are to amusement parks – they make it impossible to get an accurate read on how many people are coming through the door, and that messes with optimization. But at least in the case of a physical location, the visitors are human. On Thursday, bot detection company Distil […]
Mobile-first? Passé, says Google. The future is being driven by artificial intelligence. “Mobile made us reimagine every product we were working on,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Wednesday at Google’s I/O developer conference in Mountain View, Calif. “Similarly, in an AI-first world, we are rethinking all our products and applying machine learning and AI to […]
First-party audience data is an app publisher’s most precious asset. Which is why, as developers and brands dip their toe further into mobile programmatic, private marketplaces are their safety mechanism. On Wednesday, MobFox took the wraps off a PMP for mobile audiences, where app publishers can make their data and inventory available programmatically and select […]
For years, Intel’s five-note jingle was one of the most recognizable sounds on TV and helped build solid brand awareness for its consumer-facing PC business. But a jingle isn’t going to encourage network administrators at a telco to embrace Intel’s open architecture or get senior decision-makers to consider Intel’s hybrid cloud platform. “In the past, […]
