Allison Schiff is the editor-in-chief 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.
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 […]
Some say the ad tech venture capital funding well may be running dry, but mobile-centric companies still seem to be doing all right. “Over the past couple of years, mobile’s been somewhat insulated from the general sentiment around ad tech, at least on the private side,” said Michael Katz, CEO and co-founder of mParticle. “Clearly […]
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. […]
