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.
Private ad tech companies are going public, public ad tech companies are coming off the market, private equity is getting acquisitive – and it’s all part of the natural order and an overdue market correction. Time to put a fork in the now timeworn “ad tech is dead” narrative. “We’ve always been bullish on this space […]
At Allstate, the experience comes before the advertising. “You need to create value before you can market against that value – you can’t go out of sequence,” said Allstate CMO Sanjay Gupta. That’s especially true on mobile, which now accounts for 30-40% of Allstate’s online traffic. Allstate is responding to consumer behavior in kind with a […]
There’s nothing sexier than measurement. Well, that’s not true. But it was certainly a hot topic during Advertising Week. Google made cross-device announcements, Nielsen waxed poetic about the future of measurement, Facebook got reprimanded by the industry for mistakenly exaggerating its average view times for video and Tapad rolled out a new time-based metric. The […]
Facebook is being raked over the coals about measurement at Advertising Week in New York City. For the last two years, Facebook was only counting videos that were seen for three seconds or more, resulting in exaggerated reported average view times. The heat was so great that Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s VP for global marketing solutions, […]
The numbers are still being tallied, but Monday night’s presidential debate is likely Twitter’s largest live stream ever, according to Adam Bain, the company’s chief operating officer. Not that Bain wants to be braggadocious. It’s still early days for measurement, but Twitter is seeing audience growth. Twitter’s deal with the NFL to stream Thursday night […]
Another unicorn rides off into the eastern sunset. App marketing company AppLovin has agreed to be acquired by a Chinese private equity firm for $1.42 billion. “AppLovin” could also be used to describe the scene in China right now, where consortia of institutional investors have mobile fever. This acquisition, which was confirmed on Monday after […]
Brands are starting to get more comfortable with performance-based app marketing – but they’re still transitioning. “Even just a year and a half ago when you talked to brand people, things like yield or breaking out ROI numbers by ad partner were like foreign concepts,” said Deniz Gezgin, director of digital marketing at Topps, which has […]
Investors are bullish on location. “We think there is a lot of promise in location,” said Anders Richardson, managing director of Palisades Growth and an xAd board member, speaking at an xAd event in New York City on Thursday. “It’s amazing to me what it allows marketers to do.” In other words, providing a conduit […]
Push is generally the purview of mobile apps, but Vizury wants to give ecommerce players the ability to take advantage of browser-based notifications. The Bangalore, India-based digital CRM company released a tool out of beta on Thursday that segments and retargets users with messages informed by a blend of in-app behavior and website visit data. […]
Business intel and anomaly detection tool Anodot is looking for what doesn’t make sense. “Traditional BI and visualization only gives you answers to the questions you think to ask, but when you’ve got a lot of data, doing that manually becomes almost mission impossible,” said Anodot CEO and co-founder David Drai. The company raised an […]
News Republic users read about 200 pages of news stories per month. “That’s like reading a big book of news every 30 days,” said CEO Gilles Raymond, who founded the news aggregator app in 2008, the same year the App Store launched. It’s that level of time spent that attracted Cheetah Mobile. In August, the […]
Knorr is developing a taste for native. The Unilever-owned seasoning and sauce brand has been experimenting with interactive sponsored content and plans to make it a stock part of its media plan. That’s because it’s the kind of thing that engages millennials, an audience Knorr is particularly interested in courting. Awareness isn’t an issue for […]
“We generally may share information we collect on the site with certain service providers, some of whom may use the information for their own purposes as necessary.” That’s a nearly verbatim quote from a real privacy policy. (Emphases added.) “Vagueness impacts the consumer’s understanding of risk and their willingness to share information,” said Fordham University […]
Fans are passionate about their fandoms – and Movie Pilot is capitalizing on that passion. “We’re a pop culture magazine for a mobile and digital age,” said Movie Pilot CEO and co-founder Tobi Bauckhage. Movie Pilot started in 2012 with a fairly traditional publishing model – reporters reporting and editors editing. Now the vast majority of its […]
Advertising on Facebook and Google is a foregone conclusion for most brands. Hotel booking site Hotels.com does, of course. But it was also looking for an alternative. “There is bias in the walled gardens,” said Helen Cameron-Heslop, senior manager of ecommerce analytics at Expedia’s Hotels.com brand. On Wednesday, Hotels.com announced a year-long partnership with cross-device […]
Glispa keeps scooping up companies. On Tuesday, the Berlin-based mobile ad platform plunked down an undisclosed sum to buy native mobile ad exchange Avocarrot, its third acquisition in less than two years. Glispa bought MoneyTap, a Russian mobile mediation platform, in March, followed by the acquisition of Brazilian mobile performance agency Mobils a couple of […]
There are walled gardens, and then there’s Arbor. The startup, which raised a $6.5 million round on Tuesday, bills itself as a marketplace for people-based data. Think of it as a supply-side platform mated with a co-op for deterministic data. The bulk of the round, led by Canaan Partners with participation from First Round Capital, […]
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has sponsored content disclosures on the mind. A complete lack of disclosure led to an FTC settlement with Lord & Taylor in March after the brand enlisted bloggers to post images to Instagram promoting one of its dresses. As FTC senior attorney Robin Spector told AdExchanger at the time, “What we are […]
Every retailer that isn’t Amazon is thinking about how not to get crushed by Amazon. “Amazon is taking over retail,” said Oliver Chen, managing director and senior equity research analyst at Cowen and Co., speaking at AdExchanger’s Omni.Digital conference in Chicago on Thursday. Based on its recent research, Cowen is betting that by 2017 Amazon […]
Breather, a startup that lets people book work spaces on demand, spends all of its digital ad budget on Google and Facebook – 65% and 35%, respectively – because Google and Facebook work. But figuring out why they work – and what effect they have on revenue per user, lifetime value and the overall customer journey – is another […]
Apple’s Limit Ad Tracking (LAT) feature is about to have a few more limits in iOS 10. Although Apple has allowed users to opt out of seeing interest-based advertising since iOS 6, vendors and advertisers could still use device IDs for functions like frequency capping, attribution, debugging and fraud detection. No longer. In iOS 10, […]
There are lots of private marketplaces for mobile inventory out there. On Tuesday, Adsquare launched a PMP for mobile data. Supply-side players like PubMatic, Rubicon Project and Adform already allow buyers to bid on inventory in a private deal. “We’re enabling data owners to decide who can make use of their data,” said Adsquare CEO […]
Musical.ly is mainly known as a lip-syncing and video sharing app popular with teens, but it’s starting to sing a different tune and expand its user base. “We’re probably that lip-syncing app you hear about from your niece or nephew,” said Kevin Ferguson, director of sales and business development at Musical.ly, which allows users to […]
It’s video FTW for Opera Mediaworks. Reporting earnings under Opera Software for the final time – the sale of Opera’s consumer-facing browser business is expected to close by the end of September – Opera Mediaworks on Wednesday cited a 23% increase in Q2 revenue year over year to $114.4 million. That number represents the lion’s share of […]
When it comes to doling out rewards, app developers like Hothead Games walk a fine monetization line. “You want to give meaningful rewards without hurting your economy,” said Kenneth Wong, senior monetization manager at Hothead, which makes a number of sports-themed and first-person shooter games for mobile. While advertising is part of Hothead’s monetization mix, […]
The Knot’s audience is engaged – literally. Eight out of 10 couples in the US – around 12 million monthly uniques – visit the wedding planning site for advice while getting ready for the big day. But The Knot has transformed itself over the last three years from an online publication to what Mike Steib, CEO and president […]
Western ad tech companies looking for an exit only have a handful of choices. They can IPO like The Trade Desk (not likely), get acquired like Yahoo (slightly more likely), sell to private equity like Marketo or Mediaocean (only an interim solution) or, as is now becoming the trend, find a Chinese consortium with an […]
These are the TV brands you know – Sony, Samsung, LG. But the browser inside their hardware comes courtesy of a third party. And Opera TV, the purveyor of said software, is starting to dip its toe into more consumer-facing fare. “We shipped 42 million devices with our software last year and we’re nearly at the […]
Entrepreneur and investor Peter Pham knows teens, and the term “native advertising,” like, totally makes him roll his eyes. “I’m sick of hearing the word ‘native’ because nothing I’ve seen in the market is actually native to the experience,” said Pham, co-founder of Science, a tech incubator with a knack for getting startups off the […]
Beijing-based Miteno Communication Technology is buying contextual ad network Media.net for $900 million in cash.In other words, a Chinese consortium led by a company you’ve most likely never heard of just spent almost $1 billion to acquire an ad tech company you’ve also probably never heard of. It’s a trend we’re going to see more […]
