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.
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 […]
Concoct an unclear or purposefully bewildering privacy policy with a wonky opt-out mechanism and you might have the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) breathing down your neck. “Many companies are providing opt-outs and they need to be careful about what they’re saying and what it means to opt out,” said Maneesha Mithal, associate director for the […]
If policymakers, academics, privacy researchers and technologists have trouble making sense of the cross-device landscape, what chance does the average consumer have? Even the tech-savvy crowd that gathered in Washington, DC, for the cross-device workshop hosted by the Federal Trade Commission on Monday admitted they don’t always have their finger on the pulse, try as […]
YouTube’s TrueView has trained viewers to count backward from five – and then click “skip.” It’s a now-ingrained behavior that traditional and even nontraditional publishers like Norway’s VGTV are trying to grapple with. That’s because pre-roll engagement rates are the pits – and they often have an unfortunate effect on the engagement rate for whatever content […]
Accuracy is a spectrum when it comes to location data. And because there’s no systematic way to discern between different types of location data, including how granular it is or when it was derived, the buy side is confused and reluctant to spend. “When we ask clients what the stumbling block is for location, they […]
Acxiom’s data onboarder LiveRamp hopes to solve the thorny problem of identity – thorny because consumers have thousands of different identifiers. LiveRamp – which Acxiom now refers to as its Connectivity unit, but we’ll refer to as LiveRamp for the purpose of simplicity – has a solution to accomplish that using deterministic identifiers. On Thursday, it announced a partnership […]
App marketing vendors are starting to talk about omnichannel. That includes Swrve, the marketing automation company which announced Wednesday that it had acquired adaptiv.io, a smaller data automation player. The move is aimed at helping brands “orchestrate user experiences across traditional channels and mobile channels,” said Swrve CEO Christopher Dean. That makes sense since no […]
Attracting mobile users is pricy. Attracting the right mobile users is even pricier. Cost per install in September was $1.53 on iOS and $1.88 on Android, a 24% and 87% YoY increase, respectively, according to the most recent data from Fiksu. The cost to acquire a loyal user, defined as someone who opens an app […]
Why did Time Inc. decide to partner with Etermax, the Buenos Aires-based game studio responsible for the hugely popular app Trivia Crack? a) as a native play b) as a form of content discovery c) to encourage mobile engagement d) all of the above The answer: d. “We’re quickly evolving from being a print company […]
There was a time around 2009 when you couldn’t talk about Zynga without also talking about Facebook. Back then, FarmVille, CityVille and CafeWorld were beyond ubiquitous. But Facebook wasn’t mentioned once on Tuesday during Zynga’s third-quarter earnings call. That’s partially because Facebook’s users are increasingly mobile, with 1.39 billion monthly actives out of 1.55 billion […]
Neustar’s $450 million deal to acquire MarketShare Partners, announced Thursday, brings together two major digital marketing measurement players that will “help CMOs justify their existence to the CFO,” said Neustar CMO Lisa Joy Rosner. The purchase price is $390 million once tax considerations are factored out of the deal, the companies said. Read the press release. The […]
ComScore is keeping busy. The online measurement firm announced Thursday that it’ll be entering into a strategic global partnership with Spotify, selling its enterprise digital analytics business to Adobe and launching a new “total home” opt-in panel to measure connected devices in the household, including show-level viewing across Netflix, Roku, Apple TV and Chromecast. ComScore’s […]
The $4.4 billion check that Verizon wrote to AOL is evidence enough of its commitment to ad tech. But Verizon appears to be less committed to providing its users with an intelligible loyalty program – and that could prove to be the fly in the ointment for its lofty consumer data plans. Many Verizon customers […]
SDK mediation is still a major headache for developers. “We constantly hear from publishers that they want full control of their inventory – they don’t want to send their inventory into a black box,” said Ajitpal Pannu, chief business officer of mobile ad exchange Smaato, which on Wednesday launched a tool designed to act as an […]
The difference between UGC (user-generated content) and regular brand-generated content, no matter how clever, poignant or seemingly genuine, is the difference between a friend’s recommendation and an ad for a restaurant. Who would you trust more? According to Crowdtap, UGC is 35% more memorable – and 50% more trusted – than other forms of media. Dave Scott, […]
It’s nice to present a customer who has previously demonstrated a love for, say, ice cream with a coupon for a discounted cone. But it’s nicer if that offer comes on a hot day in proximity to an ice cream shop and if the payment is taken care of through a seamless integration with one’s […]
It’s been about three years since Zipcar left its digital ad agency in the rearview mirror, and the brand hasn’t looked back. The car-sharing company shifted all of its online ad buying to programmatic channels, turning to Accordant Media, whose stack includes a demand-side platform, an audience-buying platform, analytics, cross-channel attribution and a dynamic creative […]
The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) is going to help the ad industry check IDs at the door. On Thursday, the fraud-fighting coalition announced the launch of a verification program designed to enable legit companies to demonstrate that they are, in fact, legit. Agencies, advertisers, ad platforms and publishers will be able to apply to the TAG […]
If a turnaround story is going to fly, it’s got to take off at some point. But Prashant Fuloria, Yahoo’s SVP of advertising products, is preaching patience. “The reality is that this is a multiyear transformation, and our long-term trajectory will not be defined by a single quarter,” Fuloria said. Speaking of quarters, the results […]
Twitter’s stock took a tumble after trading closed on Tuesday. The reason, as ever? Stalled monthly active users (MAUs). Total MAU growth in Q3 grew a scant 11% year over year to 320 million, an increase of just 4 million users over last quarter. Wall Street was not impressed. Analysts had been expecting at least […]
Millennials are experts at ignoring what they don’t care about – regardless of ad blockers. “Millennials don’t necessarily follow the rules of marketing,” said Kathryn Minshew, CEO and founder of millennial-centric career and job site The Muse, speaking at eMarketer’s Attention event in New York City on Tuesday. “They don’t look where you want them to […]
Hear that? It’s the sound of political advertisers starting to open their wallets wide. Around $1 billion is expected to be spent on digital media during the 2016 presidential election, according to Borrell Associates, and Pandora is looking to attract some of those dollars with the release of souped-up political targeting segments. The music discovery […]
Analytics on Sina Weibo used to be fairly rudimentary – number of friends, number of followers, basic engagement metrics and the like. “The previous version wasn’t that good,” admitted Bryan Cheng, VP of commercial products and platforms at Weibo, commonly described as a sort of Twitter/Facebook mashup. “The point is to provide more actionable data.” […]
App developer Guy Tal isn’t interested in cold calls from mobile service providers he isn’t familiar with who want him to test their software development kit (SDK). “I get approached by companies through email and at conferences all the time and, to be honest, I really can’t be bothered,” said Tal, CEO and founder […]
If ad tech is a dinner party, someone forgot to invite the creative – or, at least, that’s what it can often feels like to the marketers and agencies tasked with creative production and testing. “I’ve been on the agency side and now I’m on the marketing side, and through both of those lenses I’ve […]
The same rules in life apply to beacon advertising programs: Don’t be annoying or people are going to leave the party. “You’d just delete the app if you got seven push notifications in one place,” said Rachel Pasqua, practice lead for mobile and emerging technology at MEC Global, North America. “We’re speaking as an agent […]
Yahoo is entering into a search pact with Google that will allow it to power its Internet search and ad services with some non-Microsoft juice. According to Yahoo, the agreement with Google provides Yahoo with “additional flexibility to choose among suppliers of search results and ads.” Google’s offering will complement the services already provided by […]
The Been Choice saga seems to be coming to an unexpected conclusion – Apple is going to allow the in-app ad blocker to block in-app ads after all, including in Apple News. Just not in Facebook, Pinterest, Yahoo, Yahoo Finance, Google or any other apps that requires end to encryption, a process that prevents third parties […]
Mobile agency Fetch is in serious growth mode. It’s been just shy of a year since Fetch became part of the Dentsu Aegis Network, which reportedly shelled out around $48 million in November 2014 to buy the London-based agency. Although Fetch still maintains its global headquarters in London, CEO and co-founder James Connelly said that […]
Which is better – deterministic data or probabilistic data? It’s a trick question because the answer is “both.” Even Google – whose first-party cross-device logged in user base likely trumps anything anyone other than Facebook could muster deterministically – uses a combination of logged-in user data and statistical matching. With privacy in mind, Google’s recently […]
