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.
The money keeps flowing to cross-device, and Drawbridge is the latest beneficiary, picking up $25 million in Series C on Thursday, led by Sequoia Capital. The new round brings Drawbridge’s total funding to $45.5 million since it was founded in 2010. The company will use a portion of its Series C to pursue more licensing […]
Mobile marketing automation platform Appboy is on a quest to steal some market share from the CRM incumbents with $20 million in Series C financing led by Battery Ventures. The round, announced Wednesday, brings the New York City-based company’s total funding to $45.5 million since 2011. Appboy plans to use the cash to keep on […]
Pinterest’s rumored acqui-hire of deep-linking startup URX is a go. On Tuesday, Pinterest announced that it’s bringing the San Francisco-based URX team into the fold, but not its technology. URX, which started as a deep linking provider before becoming a mobile retargeting platform, will work with its customers to sunset its advertising product. As of […]
Conversational UI is hot right now, and Playbuzz is hopping aboard the trend with a static content format that’s designed to mimic the layout of an SMS text conversation, including emoji, images and GIFs. Dubbed Convo, the main purpose of the unit is to spice up editorial, improve engagement and generate more time spent. That’s […]
Xaxis is getting its ad tech house in order with the creation of a new role: chief technology officer. Filling those shoes at the WPP programmatic trading desk is Bob Hammond, whose career spans some of the most recent greatest hits in ad tech M&A. Hammond, whose appointment was announced on Tuesday, served as CTO […]
Like most app developers, SGN – whose games have been downloaded more than 700 million times – is looking for long-term love. But in the casual gaming space, retention rates usually leave something to be desired. Only about one-third of users relaunch an app within 24 hours of the original install, according to Appsflyer. After […]
As a matter of course, tech talent flows between companies in Silicon Valley – there are former eBay employees at Facebook, ex-Yahoo execs at Uber, prior Google people at Snapchat – but Twitter seems to be particularly susceptible to departures. “The Twitter diaspora has been very sad for the company,” said Mike Ng, who left his […]
With additional reporting by Kelly Liyakasa. Rovi Corp., a maker of cloud-based analytics technology for TV and media companies, revealed Friday it would acquire TiVo for $1.1 billion in cash and stock. The combined company will be called TiVo once the deal, which is subject to regulatory and shareholder approvals, closes. “The combined capabilities of […]
A new game from Rovio Entertainment serves as the foundation for a sweeping augmented reality rollout to promote the upcoming “Angry Birds” movie, due out in May. Rovio launched its campaign and the game, called “Angry Birds Action,” on Thursday. It’s more than a one-off effort, though, said Alex Lambeek, chief commercial officer and EVP […]
Transparency could be a way for brands to differentiate. Because building trust with consumers is about more than telling them why your brand is great and expecting them to just believe it. “Trust is earned in drops, but lost by the bucketful,” said Forrester principal analyst Fatemeh Khatibloo at Forrester’s Marketing Forum on Wednesday in […]
There’s nothing investors want to see more from Twitter than monthly active user (MAU) growth. It’s been the recurring theme every quarter since former CEO Dick Costolo flew the coop in June. The needle moved minutely this past quarter. Twitter told investors on Tuesday that its monthly active user base increased from 305 million last […]
Cheetah Mobile is looking to lap up some brand dollars. On Tuesday, the Beijing-based mobile app publisher announced a hook-up that will integrate Kiip’s rewards platform into its suite of apps, including a number of its most popular offerings: antivirus apps Clean Master and CM Security, battery life extender Battery Doctor and mobile game Piano Tiles 2. […]
New York City has more than 8,000 public pay phones, most of which are in various stages of decline and decay – but Sidewalk Labs, a company under Google’s Alphabet umbrella, is helping put a plan in motion to revive those aging kiosks. Through a project called LinkNYC, the city’s neglected phone boxes are in […]
Acorns is an app that allows users to invest spare change left over from daily purchases in the stock market. Now it’s making an investment of its own with the creation of a digital magazine called Grow aimed at millennials. “We’re looking to satisfy a hunger our users have for financial content,” said Jeff Cruttenden, […]
Dutch cross-device data vendor Screen6 has been flying under the radar and avoided the Nielsen verification route like its well-known competition. Last year, Tapad (recently acquired by Norwegian telco Telenor) and Drawbridge had the accuracy of their device graphs evaluated by Nielsen, coming in at 91.2% and 97.3%, respectively. Screen6 CEO and co-founder David de […]
Almost every game developer uses rewarded video to monetize because it’s lucrative – but there’s also a lot not to like about it. “A 30-second video ad just isn’t that engaging, and there’s no reason for users not to put their phone down when the video’s playing and just wait for it to end,” said Tayber […]
Yahoo reported earnings on Tuesday. Details are below – but that’s hardly what people care about now. The real question is: Who’s going to buy it? Verizon’s the clear frontrunner, but there also a few upstarts. One such is a joint investment group that includes big names like former Yahoo interim CEO Ross Levinsohn and […]
Facebook invited three new third-party ad verification partners into its inner sanctum on Tuesday – further evidence that what the buy side demands, the buy side gets. Integral Ad Science, comScore and Nielsen will now be able to verify viewability and attention metrics for display and video ads on Facebook, including mobile web and in-app. […]
Apester, a self-described digital storytelling platform, rounded out its Series A on Tuesday with $12 million, bringing its total funding to $17 million. The fresh infusion, which came after an initial $5 million round in July, was led by Blumberg Capital, with participation from Mangrove Capital, Wellborn Ventures and several others. The cash is earmarked for […]
The irony of digital marketing is that it has to justify itself because it can justify itself. If Michelle Weiskittel, manager of digital marketing at Albertsons Safeway, wants to get the budget to do her job, she must demonstrate as clear a connection as possible between online campaigns and actual sales. Print doesn’t carry that […]
With Oracle’s acquisition of Israeli cross-device vendor Crosswise on Thursday, the number of independent cross-device vendors is getting thin on the ground. Although Oracle declined to comment or disclose details around the transaction, The Times of Israel reported a deal price in the neighborhood of $50 million, citing a source with knowledge of the matter. […]
Ten years ago Axel Springer was a classic print publisher. About 1% of its revenue came from digital. These days, digital revenue tops 70%. It’s been part of what Axel Springer US president Jens Müffelmann calls “a radical transformation” for the German publisher and it was triggered by an unlikely source – circular advertising, long the […]
If there’s one thing that ticks off Jim Kiszka, Kellogg’s senior manager of digital media, it’s paying extra for viewable impressions. “I absolutely resent the fact I have to pay more for viewability,” Kiszka said Wednesday at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC.IO show in San Francisco. “I wish I could have a refund for the last 10 years […]
You know how sometimes you just want to watch a movie without having to log in and scan the catalogs of every streaming video portal? Enter MightyTV, which came out of beta on Wednesday. The startup, from Admeld founder and former CTO Brian Adams, is a free discovery app for iOS that allows users to […]
Apple and Google own the app economy – and that makes distribution and discovery pretty tricky for the average app developer. “These companies … are monopolizing this ecosystem,” said Chris Cunningham, newly minted CRO of beacon and proximity data aggregation company Unacast, speaking at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Mobile Marketplace event on Monday in New York […]
Mobile game publisher I Got Games (IGG) – which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on paid acquisition – was noticing its user retention tank. The culprit? App-install fraud. IGG has 18 million monthly active users evenly distributed across the world, with roughly 40% coming from the Americas, 30% from Europe and 30% from Asia […]
When YP Canada quietly acquired programmatic mobile ad platform JUICE Mobile for $35 million on March 17, its main concern was to assuage any potential investor concerns that the directory and listings behemoth wouldn’t be able to make its debt payments. YP Canada was $1.7 billion in debt and teetering on the brink of bankruptcy […]
The promise of location data is one thing. The undeniable issues around scale and inaccuracy that come along with it are another. “No one disputes that the accuracy and quality of physical data is way below average,” said mobile tech vet Chris Cunningham, who on Wednesday took the reins as CRO of beacon and proximity […]
It’s possible to sync radio ads and digital billboards to reach drivers with cross-channel messaging – but scale, targeting options and measurement are roadblocks to adoption. For one, there’s just not that much inventory available programmatically yet. “It’s nascent,” admitted Mark van de Crommert, CEO of Mediasynced, an Amsterdam-based TV/online syncing company that recently released […]
A little less than a year ago, Snapchat was still at the beginning stages of working out its advertising strategy. Its ad sales team felt small, at least from the perspective of some agency execs, and unable to keep up with agency and advertiser demand. But in recent months, Snapchat seems to be taking itself […]
