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.
Forrester senior analyst Susan Bidel will appear Oct. 29 at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference, an event dedicated to the advancement of programmatic media and marketing. The ad industry’s collective hand wringing over ad blocking reached a fever pitch in September during Advertising Week in New York City. In reality, however, it’s far from a block […]
Jack’s wearing a lot of hats. After several months of will they/won’t they, Twitter announced Monday morning that Jack Dorsey will go from interim chief exec – shoes he’d been filling since Dick Costolo stepped down in June – to permanent CEO of the company. He’ll also continue on as CEO of Square, the mobile payments startup […]
If native advertising is a message designed to mimic the form and function of its environment, then there’s almost nothing out there as native as a podcast. As in the early days of radio, hosts often read and personalize an advertiser’s message so that it “feels inclusive, like part of the program,” said Matt Turck, […]
The New York Times has a solution to the bot fraud problem: “Buy quality.” So declared Michael Zimbalist, SVP of advertising products and R&D at the Times, speaking at OpenX’s session about trust in the supply chain at Advertising Week in New York City. “You get what you pay for,” Zimbalist said bluntly. “We need to collapse […]
Nielsen’s having a tough week. On Tuesday, comScore and Rentrak, two of Nielsen’s top competitors, announced their intention to merge into a single measurement monolith. And on Thursday, business channel CNBC, a division of NBCUniversal, will officially kick Nielsen to the curb, turning instead to research firm Cogent Reports for its audience measurement. Comcast-owned NBCUniversal […]
If ad blocking is war, long-tail publishers will likely be its earliest casualties. “Ad blocking is a threat to the whole industry, but it has an especially high impact for the small publishers who make up so much of the rich fabric that is the digital experience,” said Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the Interactive Advertising […]
Urban Airship is crossing the streams – but in a good way. The mobile tech company announced a solution called Urban Airship Connect on Tuesday that aims to provide advertisers with access to app data through a real-time streaming API. The solution will be generally available later in Q4. The gist? Consumers are interacting with apps […]
First there was Right Media. Then there was the Yahoo Ad Exchange. Now there’s BrightRoll. Yahoo started off Advertising Week on Monday with the announcement that it had consolidated all of its programmatic ad tech under a single umbrella – the BrightRoll brand. The purple platform has been on a bit of an ad tech spree […]
PulsePoint is planning to get acquisitive. On Monday, the programmatic platform announced $30 million in debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank, the majority of which will be used to buy companies to complement PulsePoint’s existing tech stack. PulsePoint – which was formed through the merger of Datran Media and ContextWeb in 2011 – had previously raised a […]
Just about every brand with a TV budget wants the answer to a simple question: How many people took action after seeing my ad on TV? But it’s not the type of question that can be answered by a gross rating point (GRP). To better understand the impact of its TV advertising, Ford and its […]
Just because people block ads doesn’t mean they hate advertising – it means they hate bad advertising. Slow-loading, third-party tracking, battery-draining, bandwidth-bleeding, pop-upping, visually questionable and sometimes creepily relevant (but, more often than not, utterly irrelevant) advertising. But a straw poll conducted by Dean Murphy, the developer behind the iOS ad-blocker app Crystal, found that 71% of […]
Static ad content is just too old school for apps. That’s the thinking at Quixey, a company mostly known as an app search engine. On Thursday, Quixey announced the release of Deep View Cards, a technology that generates dynamic creative in-feed ad units that mimic an app’s native UI and user experience. The product, now […]
TV networks don’t lack for premium video content. But monetizing that content without pre-roll, mid-roll and interstitials? That’s another story. “For the most part, TV networks are taking the linear television model and trying to directly translate it to digital,” said Zane Vella, CEO of Watchwith, a company that taps into episode-level metadata to place […]
Pirated content and ad fraud are like a nefarious version of peanut butter and jelly – but there’s not lot of awareness in the industry about their connection. “The people who create pirate sites are the same ones who perpetrate clickbot fraud – they’re the ones who spread malware and create the armies of bots that generate […]
Flashtalking is on a quest to become what company CEO John Nardone calls a “single point of truth.” It’s why the NYC-based ad server decided to buy Device[9], a small cross-device recognition company located in Hamburg, Germany. The acquisition, announced Tuesday, was a mostly stock deal. Nardone declined to share the sale price. At its […]
Marketers want integrated analytics solutions – a trend clearly demonstrated by the diversity of the players populating Gartner’s most recent “Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Analytics,” released Monday. Adobe unsurprisingly took the lead, with SAS and Google trailing right behind. But in a sign of where the market is headed, attribution companies like Visual IQ also […]
Pandora knows sound. Now the music streaming service is experimenting with sight and motion in its quest for new users – and mobile is the central battleground. More than three-quarters of Pandora’s roughly 80 million monthly active users listen on mobile. “We want to acquire and engage high-quality listeners – aka users who actively use the app […]
Mobile ad blocking is a disaster for the ad industry. Content blocking is not the harbinger of advertising doom that some speculate it is. So, which is it? If the adoption numbers for mobile content blocking apps the day after Apple’s iOS 9 release on Wednesday are any indication, skeptics might have to change their […]
Brands are on the constant hunt for engaged audiences. It’s why they attend upfronts for television, NewFronts for digital, future fronts for programmatic, podcast upfronts for audio – and, now, AppFronts for apps. General Electric hosted its first AppFronts on Tuesday in New York City, gathering together an audience of brands and agencies for an event […]
Remember when Facebook said it wouldn’t allow independent viewability verification on its properties? And remember when WPP’s GroupM agencies Unilever, Kellogg and others were extremely displeased with that proposition and said they would curtail spending on platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, where third-party viewability tags weren’t welcome? Well, Facebook announced Thursday that it’s planning to […]
Creatives deserve to be part of the conversation around programmatic media. The fact is, they’re not. “There are no true creatives in this room – and that’s a major silo,” said Steven Wolfe Pereira, VP of brand strategy and marketing solutions at Oracle Data Cloud, at the comScore Industry Summit on Tuesday. “Creative people are not […]
These days, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee is focused on multichannel personalized communications. About three years ago, it had yet to implement email. “We really wanted to optimize our outreach, to optimize the customer experience and help customers understand exactly what we’re offering,” said Sherri Zink, VP of medical informatics at BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee (BCBST), […]
The number one thing you should know about Yahoo Japan’s DMP: It’s not a walled garden. “Our data strategy is open, that’s the key word here,” said Toru Takata, SVP and chief product officer for marketing solutions at Yahoo Japan. “Our policy is about being completely open about our data.” Yahoo Japan, founded in 1996 […]
Developers are up to their ears in mobile SDKs – and they’re not going to take it anymore. The trend toward consolidated mobile solutions is real, said Omer Kaplan, deputy CEO and co-founder of app discovery platform ironSource, which has acquired mobile monetization platform Supersonic. The deal was officially announced Thursday following a leak in mid-July when […]
It was an orgy of new products. At its “Hey Siri” event on Wednesday, Apple unveiled enhancements to the Apple Watch and launched the iPad Pro and something called the Apple Pencil, which is basically a super fancy stylus for the new, bigger iPad. The company also rolled out the next generation of iPhone 6 […]
There’s no need to freak out, but content blocking in iOS 9 goes beyond the mobile web and in some cases will also apply to in-app advertising. And that’s because of an in-app browsing mechanism in iOS 9 called Safari View Controller. It’s basically a more streamlined version of Apple’s current webview framework that developers […]
The US market can be a tough nut to crack for an international startup. “If you’re not a US company, there are hurdles,” said Frederic Joseph, global COO and UK chief exec at French mobile retargeting company S4M. “Some people think, at least on some level, that if a company doesn’t come from the US, […]
Mobile numbers are moving up and to the right – and social is along for the ride. Taptica is looking to take advantage of that trend. The mobile DSP announced Tuesday that it would fork over $17 million to acquire programmatic social marketing tech company AreaOne, formerly known as SocialClicks. Both companies maintain their headquarters in […]
Does Verizon have access to rich user data? Undeniably. Will Verizon successfully capitalize on that opportunity? Questionable. After all, Verizon’s user data is only as valuable as its data practices. Verizon could certainly benefit in the wake of an acquisition spree that somewhat resembled a line of falling dominos – AOL into Verizon, Millennial Media […]
Instagram has rounded up a posse of Facebook Marketing Partners since the closed beta launch of its ads API in early August. Mobile analytics company Appsflyer is the most recent addition to a list that includes AdRoll, Adaptly, Ampush, Brand Networks, 4C, Kenshoo, Laundry Service, Publicis-owned agency Mediavest, Nanigans, Olapic, Resolution Media, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, […]
