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 guillotine has fallen for Been Choice, the embattled in-app ad blocker that was allowed back into the App Store after being unceremoniously turfed out in October. As of Jan. 8, almost three months to the day after its first run-in with Apple, Been Choice was notified that it’s going to be removed from the App […]
M&C Saatchi Mobile may be a mobile agency, as its name clearly denotes, but it’s got more than mobile on the brain. “We’re focused on leveraging our client data and adding first-party data to programmatic capabilities to target users with mobile at the center,” said Eric Mugnier, SVP for North America at M&C Saatchi Mobile. “The […]
Berlin-based Fyber is on a tear. On Friday, Fyber, an SSP for mobile app developers, and its parent company RNTS Media announced that they’ve acquired mobile ad network Heyzap for as much as $45 million. RNTS Media will pay $20 million in cash upfront, with an additional $25 million in cash and shares available down the […]
Snapchat is said to be rolling up its sleeves on an ads API, and agencies, advertisers and tech vendors alike are happy to hear it. “There’s a great deal of interest in Snapchat as a platform,” said Noah Mallin, head of social at MEC North America. “The intersection of video, mobile and messaging, combined with […]
Prospecting is one of the biggest challenges facing British carrier O2, especially in apps. “Pretty much every app acts as its own ecosystem – they’re cookieless environments, so actually being able to track someone using traditional methods is nigh impossible,” said Dan Michelson, innovation and capability lead at the Telefónica-owned telecom. O2 is concerned with two […]
When Taco Bell launched its breakfast option last year, the brand had two main challenges on its plate: driving awareness among millennials and translating that heightened awareness into repeat foot traffic. It was a tall order considering that Taco Bell isn’t known for breakfast and that competition in the quick-service restaurant space is fierce. (See the […]
Advertisers carve out a portion of their multibillion-dollar ad budgets – 10% of what they’re spending locally or 5% of what they’re spending nationally – to fund nonprofits that align with their brand DNA. CBS Corp.’s EcoMedia division – one of the network’s fastest-growing units, according to Paul Polizzotto, who founded EcoMedia in 2001 – […]
It’s not easy monetizing kids. Even the words “monetizing kids” are unfortunate. But the developers of kid-focused games still “need to eat,” said Yuri Shilin, owner of KidGames, an Israel-based game developer with a portfolio of dozens of apps for kids, with around 30 million downloads overall. “It’s for sure very hard to make money,” […]
When it comes to cross-device, consumers and ad tech vendors speak very different languages. Consumers use words like “non-court ordered surveillance” and “insidious invasion of privacy,” while vendors and ad industry trade groups refer to “innovation in ad tech,” driving “the Internet economic engine” and delivering a “seamless digital experience.” There’s clearly a disconnect. In […]
Pinterest made sense for The Grommet right from the start. The Grommet is an ecommerce site where inventors and entrepreneurs can launch and sell their products – everything from the innovative (lunchboxes that unzip into placemats) to the strange, but cool (liquid that can be applied to the fingertips of gloves to make them touchscreen-friendly). In […]
Smartwatches will outpace fitness trackers next year while smart things gain traction in the home. Oh yes, and 2016 is the year that mobile browsing will finally surpass desktop, at least on the weekends, according to Adobe’s most recent Digital Trends Index, released Thursday. Weekdays will follow in 2017. “Mobile is what started all of […]
A new consumer privacy and data protection law has hit the books in Europe that will give European consumers far more control over how their personal data is used. European authorities, including representatives from the European Commission, the European Parliament and the 28 EU member states came to an agreement late Tuesday. The General Data […]
The content-and-commerce model is both highly seductive and deceptively tricky for publishers and purveyors alike. People don’t necessarily want to take their wallets out when they’re in reading mode. It’s hard to create authentic content that also serves business goals. Scale is a challenge. But is there still potential there? Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop empire, which […]
Publicis Groupe agency MRY has been working with social media management startup SocialRank to help its clients get smarter about their social audiences and identify niche segments using a tool dubbed Market Intel, which came out of beta on Monday. The company also launched on Monday a product called SocialRank for Teams, which allows agencies […]
David R. Bell is a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. He will present his research at the upcoming Industry Preview 2016 conference in January at a session on the confluence of digital marketing and the real world. By day, David R. Bell is a professor of marketing at […]
Yahoo received yet another blow Friday with the departure of Prashant Fuloria, its SVP of advertising products and engineering, just shy of a year after he was appointed to the role. Enrique Munoz Torres, who leads Yahoo’s search products, will inherit Fuloria’s responsibilities, including oversight of the Gemini and BrightRoll platforms, Yahoo’s advertiser-facing products. Fuloria’s […]
Twitter on Thursday made its first attempt to capitalize on its logged-out audience with the launch of a private beta test program with select advertisers in the US, UK, Japan and Australia to target promoted tweets and promoted videos at users who aren’t logged into Twitter. As of Q3 2015, Twitter had around 320 million […]
Advertisers in India have become addicted to cheap clicks. “But it shouldn’t just about installs. It should be someone actually converting inside an app,” said Deepak Abbot, head of mobile growth at Times Internet, the digital product arm of Indian media titan Times India Group. Times Internet houses a host of apps that run the […]
Square may be a unicorn – but it’s got its eye on the little guy. “We’re leveling the playing field,” said Kevin Burke, former Visa CMO and now head of acquisition at Square, which completed its long-awaited IPO in mid-November. “We’re helping small businesses close the loop.” Integrating online and offline has long been the […]
Buenos Aires-based game studio Etermax is a rare creature in the app development world. “We don’t focus on user acquisition,” said CEO and founder Maximo Cavazzani. It’s quite a statement considering that Etermax is the developer responsible for quiz app Trivia Crack, which was the most downloaded app in the App Store in late 2014. […]
When it comes to mobile ad fraud, everything old is new again. “All the bad stuff we saw happen in web 1.0 in terms of trying to trick users is coming back with mobile,” said Alex Calic, CRO of The Media Trust, a company focused on ad verification and malware detection. That’s certainly the case […]
The digital supply chain is a morass and is losing the advertising industry about $8.2 billion a year, according to a joint study released Tuesday by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Ernst & Young. The price tag includes losses and waste due to piracy, malware and invalid traffic, a trifecta that comprises what EY partner […]
Is carrierwide ad blocking coming to the States? That really depends on who you ask. “Absolutely,” said Roi Carthy, CMO of ad-blocking company Shine. “Simply no way,” said Mike Zaneis, EVP of public policy at the Interactive Advertising Bureau. But there’s a reason for Carthy’s swagger. At the end of September, Jamaica-based telco Digicel revealed […]
Bots are slipping through the cracks. Digital security company Are You a Human claims to have identified a number of bots for sale in traffic that’s already been filtered by well-known verification companies. “The bots we saw through ad units were both on the open exchange and through direct DSP relationships,” said Reid Tatoris, COO […]
Globetrotting business travelers are a tough target to pin down, but they do all have one thing in common – their phones. They also spend a lot of time waiting around airports connected to Wi-Fi. Emirates Airlines took advantage of the confluence with a mobile campaign designed to drive awareness and booking intent around its NYC/Dubai […]
Digital marketers spend a disproportionate amount of budget during the holiday season – but is all that cash actually generating incremental sales? Jewelry brands spend more in Q4, roughly 60% of their annual spend, than they do in the other three quarters of the year combined, based on analysis from Nielsen. Toy brands spend around 56% […]
The battle for the living is taking two multiscreen TV targeting companies to the courtroom over an alleged patent infringement. The end result: The privacy policies of ad tech players tracking cross-screen behavior are coming under increased scrutiny. The action, filed Nov. 6, is being brought by Free Stream Media Corp, which does business as […]
MoPub is Twitter’s secret weapon – secret because the mobile exchange rarely comes up during Twitter’s quarterly earnings calls. On Friday, MoPub introduced native video mediation to enable publishers to filter their ad requests through whichever native ad network SDK they want, including the Facebook Audience Network and the more than 175 DSPs integrated with the […]
Standard notice and choice aren’t going to cut it when it comes to the IoT. “As the Internet of Things ecosystem grows and more devices are connected to the Internet, you might not even know that they are,” said Pedro Pavón, Oracle’s senior corporate counsel, speaking at a two-day International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) […]
Chief marketing officers and chief privacy officers have very different ways of looking at the world. “Are there any marketing folks in the room?” asked security professional Aubrey Turner, addressing roughly 50 privacy pros at an International Association of Privacy Professionals conference in Washington, DC, on Tuesday. No hands went up. “Good – because I’m […]
