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.
Yahoo’s bloodletting on Wednesday also included a number of advertising and sales-related roles, AdExchanger has learned. Yahoo is in the midst of executing a board-approved cost savings scheme that will see 15% of its workforce receive pink slips. The layoffs, the first round of which went down last week, continued Wednesday with the announcement of […]
Video ad spend is on the rise. Video supply, on the other hand: not so much. “Right now, video is mostly launched either in a pre-roll environment or on a social network, so there’s no scalable way to buy other video formats across the web,” said Vitaly Pecherskiy, COO of native advertising DSP StackAdapt. For […]
Intel’s ambitious new brand strategy is no chip shot. Primarily known since the 1990s as “the computer inside,” the microprocessor manufacturer aims to break out of the box with a campaign that “stops focusing on where we are and starts focusing on why we are,” said Penny Baldwin, VP and GM of global brand management […]
The combination of content and commerce can be a complex cocktail to get just right. Alcohol delivery service Thirstie is experimenting to find the right mix. “It’s not that content to commerce is all that hard to do,” said Devaraj Southworth, CEO and co-founder of Thirstie and a former AmEx exec. “It’s just hard to […]
China is a market that gets people excited – a largely untapped potential audience of more than 1 billion people. It’s certainly one of the stated “strategic rationales” behind the recent $1.2 billion buyout offer that browser maker Opera received from a consortium of Chinese companies, including mobile game maker Kunlun and security software provider […]
Brands need to earn the right to advertise directly to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. It’s a matter of credibility, said Albert Thompson, a digital strategist at multicultural marketing agency Walton Isaacson, in charge of the Lexus business. The car brand has a longstanding relationship with LGBT media company Q.Digital, the parent to […]
Spotify was a bit late to programmatic, but now it’s raring to go. “2015 was the year we started opening up, which was huge for us, and 2016 is the year we’re going to be fully open,” said Spotify CRO Jeff Levick. “We’re going to keep expanding and investing heavily in the programmatic channel.” In […]
The one thing that investors really want from Twitter – for it to grow its monthly active users – is seemingly something that the platform can’t deliver. Twitter reported on Wednesday that revenue for Q4 2015 was up 48% year over year, hitting $710 million – with ad revenue comprising $641 million of that number […]
Twitter’s giving its reverse chronological timeline an algorithmic tweak. Rather than automatically seeing the most recent tweets first and then moving backward in time as they scroll, starting Wednesday users will see a curated lineup of roughly one dozen tweets at the top of their timeline culled from the accounts they follow. To determine which […]
If you take the headlines at face value, Google and Facebook are killing it – dwarfing all others in terms of revenue and scale – and there’s not much reason for other publishers to get out of bed in the morning. But there’s a more nuanced story going on. Certainly, Facebook and Google have become the […]
It may not be master over how its software is used, but that isn’t stopping Google from ruling its Play store with an iron first. It appears that some ad-blocking apps are not welcome. Taking a page out of Apple’s playbook, Samsung on Sunday rolled out support for content blocking within the default browser that […]
Online stock trading company TD Ameritrade is investing more in mobile advertising – but is struggling to determine the impact. “Measurement continues to be a challenge,” said Francie Staub, a Razorfish vet and current director of digital marketing at TD Ameritrade. “We’re still trying to connect the dots between exposure and conversion.” TD Ameritrade’s target audience […]
Yahoo will dismiss around 15% of its workforce in Q1, including, more than likely, a large chunk of its global sales force. Five global offices will also get the chop. The cuts are part of a $400 million cost savings plan that will seek to grow profitability ahead of a likely sale of the business. […]
Publishers are always on the hunt for new ways to monetize without killing the UX. It’s a continual challenge, said Matt Blake, chief product officer at FanSided, a Time Inc.-owned network of more than 300 sports, entertainment and lifestyle sites dedicated to fandom. FanSided sites generally only serve two banners – a leaderboard at the top […]
Twitter seems to be having a little trouble on the turnaround front – but that doesn’t mean it’s for the birds. “When I talk to agency and buy-side contacts, they recognize the value of Twitter and that the real-time nature of the platform is unique,” said Dan Salmon, managing director of BMO Capital Markets. “But the […]
[pullquote][/pullquote]Telcos continue to be big ad tech acquirers. Norwegian mobile carrier Telenor on Monday snapped up cross-device company Tapad for $360 million. Tapad is one of the two largest cross-device vendors in the space; Drawbridge is the other. It’s a move somewhat reminiscent of the AOL/Verizon deal, but with more global scale, said Tapad CEO […]
Walled gardens – everybody’s got ’em. In the US and most of Europe, it’s the usual suspects. In China, it’s what the cognoscenti refer to as the “BAT” companies: Baidu (think Google), Alibaba (think Amazon) and Tencent (think Facebook). And it makes cross-device quite the challenge. Although the BAT companies “all have cross-device applications which […]
Remember 2008, when the App Store was full of fart apps? That’s not the sort of inauspicious start Apple has in mind for Apple TV. “Sure, you’ll get lots of weird stuff at the beginning – the Fireplace app was the most popular Apple TV app over the holidays – but we’re going to see […]
Why a user deletes an app is just as important as why that person decided to download in the first place. “Uninstalls are a huge issue and we’ve been trying to get an understanding of what’s really happening there,” said Sudarshan Gangrade, VP of marketing, analytics and partnerships at Ola Cabs, India’s answer to Uber. […]
Ad blocking isn’t the only route to revenue for telcos. Sprint-owned Boost Mobile announced Tuesday that it had inked a deal with Unlockd, a mobile platform that helps telcos reward subscribers for viewing ads on their lock screen. It’s a move that’s nearly the opposite of Caribbean carrier Digicel’s arrangement with Shine to block ads […]
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) wants to help advertisers manage their quality assurance testing for mobile rich media ads. On Monday, the IAB Tech Lab released the MRAID Ads SDK Tester app at its at Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Desert, Calif. The app is a free open-source tool designed to validate the functionality of […]
AppNexus is hitting the market with its own version of mobile header bidding. Announced Monday, the tool – dubbed PriceCheck – aims to help app developers and publishers maximize their yield by accessing as many sources of demand as possible and revealing what each impression is worth. Then the impressions are routed to the advertisers willing […]
Advertisers are understandably looking for scale with their cross-device campaigns – but when they ask for it at the expense of accuracy, that’s a problem. “The marketer has erred on the side of reach, but reach and frequency are a tradeoff,” said Omar Tawakol, SVP and GM of Oracle Data Cloud, speaking at a panel […]
Brands are experimenting with proximity marketing, but consumers aren’t always willing to give up their location data. As Pew noted in a recent study on privacy and information sharing: “Location data seems especially precious in the age of the smartphone.” Spam, the risk of data breaches, overdone customer profiling and data being collected for one […]
Programmatic native ads are now available on the BrightRoll Exchange, opening up access for advertisers beyond Yahoo’s owned-and-operated properties. “We’re offering all third-party RTB buyers access to native inventory,” said Tod Sacerdoti, Yahoo VP of display and video ad products, on stage at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview conference in New York City on Wednesday. The upshot: […]
Battle cries and breast beating notwithstanding, the industry doesn’t seem to be doing all that much to tackle bot fraud, which is expected to take a $7.2 billion bite out of ad budgets in 2016. That’s according to research released on Tuesday by the Association of National Advertisers and bot detection firm White Ops. It’s […]
Some people might describe Foursquare’s shift from location-based social network to a purveyor of location data as a pivot. But Steven Rosenblatt, newly appointed president of Foursquare, prefers the term “evolution.” “We’ve been building the world’s largest location intelligence data company for some time,” said Rosenblatt, who came to Foursquare in 2012 after several years […]
With desktop viewability measurement and the invalid traffic detection and filtration situation starting to get under control, the Media Rating Council is focusing its attention on mobile in 2016. ”We’re getting pretty close here,” said Ron Pinelli, VP of digital research and standards at the MRC, speaking at a town hall meeting on the state […]
The so-called privacy paradox was a big topic of discussion at the Federal Trade Commission’s first PrivacyCon. The event, held Thursday in Washington, DC, brought together around 20 privacy and data researchers who presented their work on consumer privacy and security issues in the commercial sector to an audience of technologists, policymakers and regulators. “There […]
Despite ongoing efforts by the Media Rating Council to close the reconciliation gap between vendors, discrepancies continue to haunt viewable impression counts. And there are some who say the MRC is needlessly adding complexity to the process with its reporting requirements. “There’s a lot of slicing and dicing of the data going on,” said David […]
