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.
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 – […]
Demand-side platforms are getting snapped up left and right. But DataXu, one of the remaining indies, is planning to stay that way. And it’s hitching its wagon to the in-housing trend. “There’s a lot of interest in having greater transparency and control over programmatic technology,” said Mike Baker, CEO and co-founder of DataXu, which released […]
Facebook is taking the wraps off its header bidding solution, but it’s relying on partners to build the technology. On Wednesday, Facebook officially tossed its hat into the header bidding ring after a lengthy beta period by opening Audience Network as a demand source for mobile web publishers that work with a short list of […]
Ad tech has a transparency problem. Some are pointing to blockchain as a possible answer. It’s fairly easy for fraudsters or an ill-intentioned party to weasel their way into a programmatic transaction, said Ken Brook, CEO and co-founder of metaX, a blockchain-based ad tech company that launched into beta on Tuesday. “The supply chain is […]
Nielsen Catalina Solutions is teaming up with Facebook on a cross-media measurement product that aims to analyze how the combination of digital and TV drive incremental sales lift for CPG advertisers. “The biggest ask from all advertisers has been to help them with comparability,” said Fred Leach, director of marketing science at Facebook, Nielsen Catalina’s […]
When Norwegian telco Telenor acquired cross-device vendor Tapad in February 2016, it seemed comparable to Verizon buying AOL. One year later however, Telenor is using Tapad’s tech to drive sales and customer acquisition for its own products, rather than making its data available on the open exchange. Tapad also continues to operate as a standalone […]
XAd only wants advertisers to get paid if someone actually walks in the door. On Thursday, the location-based mobile ad network said it would allow brands to transact on a cost-per-visit (CPV) basis. Advertisers will be able to make media buys based on foot traffic-related KPIs and only pay for performance. It’s an appealing proposition […]
Viewability vendors, including Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify and Moat, are banding together in an uneasy alliance to tackle in-app viewability using open-source software – but the problem is far from solved. “The spirit of the open-source initiative is a good thing,” said Moat CEO Jonah Goodhart. “It’s not comprehensive measurement, though.” Opening The Way In […]
The revenue opportunity around mobile ad spend is too big to ignore, said Dan Rosen, global director of advertising at Spanish telco Telefonica, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in early March. It’s why telcos like Verizon, Telenor, Telstra and SingTel are spending big on ad tech. Telefonica carved out a niche in the mobile […]
[pullquote][/pullquote]Coca-Cola’s global senior digital director has a refreshing point of view on the divide between creative and media: There is no divide. “Creative is media,” said Mariano Bosaz, whose job is to coordinate digital marketing efforts across markets and set the tone for Coke’s digital strategy. Thinking of creative and media in silos harks back […]
Mobile-first has become a cliché. Today, marketing is more about “customer experience transformation,” said Scott Smith, director of digital and mobile solutions at Moxie, a Zenith-owned digital agency under the Publicis Media umbrella focusing primarily on digital planning, creative services and emerging technologies. That’s just a fancy way of saying brands need to figure out […]
The relationship between Lenovo and its agency partners is not what it used to be – in a good way. “That’s not to say that there isn’t a role for the traditional agency, like we have with our creative agency, Ogilvy, to drive the brand framework – we need that,” Lenovo SVP and CMO David Roman told […]
Away from the dancing robots, Power Rangers-themed VR experiences, self-driving race cars and the buzzing of drones, deals do get done at Mobile World Congress. That’s why French location-based dating app Happn came to Barcelona for the show. “We’re here to have discussions, to gather insights, to see what our competitors are doing, to find […]
Ericsson is about to enter an unexpected space: ad tech. The Swedish networking giant is testing a mobile ads platform to aggregate anonymized deterministic data from across telecom operators to power targeted advertising. Ericsson declined to say whether it’s building the platform itself, licensing it or buying an ad tech company to power its nascent […]
Although Verizon’s appetite for ad tech was the main driver behind its acquisition of AOL, it’s content that really sweetened the deal. “Our content is a differentiator for Verizon amidst all of the other telcos,” AOL CMO Allie Kline told AdExchanger. But there’s a lot knocking around under the AOL umbrella – everything from ad tech […]
Fragmentation is to the buy side what agita is to a stomach: upsetting. “Data is perhaps the most important asset we have as an advertising agency,” said Mauricio Sabogal, global CEO of WPP’s Kinetic Worldwide, during the Modern Marketing Summit at the Mobile World Congress on Monday in Barcelona. “There are too many companies managing […]
TrustX GM and President David Kohl was sitting in the front row with a big smile on his face when P&G Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard laid into the digital supply chain at the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting last month. For the past year, Kohl has been working on a project housed within Digital Context […]
The other shoe has dropped: Newly minted Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai on Friday moved to block the implementation of the ISP privacy rules passed under former Commissioner Tom Wheeler. Pai was acting on a request by trade groups to stay the rule rollout, which was scheduled to take effect March 2. “All […]
Dash Labs lets users transform their regular car into a smart car. The app interfaces with a dongle, sold separately, that plugs into a port beneath the steering wheel and connects via Bluetooth. But driver data isn’t something marketers commonly use, so company CEO and co-founder Jamyn Edis is on a mission to prove that […]
Snapchat is settling into ad tech, and so are its partners. Video production and editing startup VidMob, one of five Creative API partners that Snapchat announced in late January, launched a self-serve platform on Thursday that lets advertisers and publishers create, manage and buy Snap Ads within a single interface. The platform combines Snapchat’s recently released […]
Some tech providers are looking to phone numbers as the cookie killer – but privacy and user reticence are potential roadblocks. Digits, however, are a tantalizingly sticky bridge between online and offline, said Guy Weismantel, EVP and CMO of call analytics company Marchex. “It’s extremely hard to prove ROI when someone goes offline and you lose […]
Are some marketers approaching cross-device backward? Tom Laband, CEO and co-founder of mobile data marketplace adsquare, thinks so. “We see many advertisers start with cookie-derived data and bridge that to mobile IDs using cross-device vendors – and to me, that doesn’t make sense,” Laband said Thursday at a company event in New York City. Device IDs, […]
