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.
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, […]
Adobe Analytics and personalization engine Adobe Target can now be consumed as a combo meal. The company said Wednesday that it has integrated the two solutions, also available as separate entities within the Adobe Marketing Cloud, into a single UI to help clients handle what Adobe’s VP of mobile, Matt Asay, called “the mobile problem.” […]
Cross-device data company Crosswise wants to broaden its horizons. The Tel Aviv-based startup, which announced $3 million in Series A funding on Tuesday, will use most of it on sales, marketing and breaking into new markets beyond the US and UK, with China and Western Europe at the top of its list. The round, which […]
The debate around privacy – and where Google stands – is kicking up on the eve of Apple’s upcoming September launch of iOS 9. Why? Because though advertising revenue hardly tickles the bottom line at Apple, its decision to enable content blocking in iOS 9 affects how Google’s developers monetize. Apple’s content-blocking feature allows developers to create […]
Publishers are concerned about content blocking in iOS 9 – but how concerned should they be? At first glance, the single brief reference to content blocking in Apple’s iOS 9 release notes seems innocuous enough. “Use the Content Blocking extension point to give Safari a block list describing the content that you want to block while […]
Remember when Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013? Yahoo appears to finally be doing something with it. On Wednesday, at Yahoo’s Mobile Developer Conference in New York City, the purple platform announced that it will integrate in-app sharing links via Tumblr into the Flurry SDK via its Mobile Developer Suite. It’s pretty much just […]
Does seeing an ad lead to visiting a store? Location data company PlaceIQ wants to answer that ever-thorny question with the launch of Enterprise PVR, a metric designed to measure foot traffic at specific locations by tracking on-device consumer behavior in the physical world. PVR, which stands for “place visit rate,” is a metric PlaceIQ […]
When it comes to customer data, Alimama claims to have the mother lode. “Our data is bigger than Facebook plus Google plus eBay plus Amazon,” said Joanna Wang, CMO of Alimama, the marketing services and data arm of Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba. Beyond the bravado, Wang is referring to Alimama’s potent combination of identity data […]
The programmatic pipes have been laid, but programmatic creative is still ramping up. “There’s a disconnect between media and creative that prevents the industry from taking advantage of what’s possible,” said Adam Cahill, who left his post as EVP and chief digital officer at Hill Holliday in April to found Anagram, a consultancy/agency hybrid focused […]
The marketing cloud arms race has given birth to some truly massive acquisitions over the years. Oracle’s Thursday acquisition of Maxymiser is not one of them. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a smart move, said Rebecca Lieb, an independent analyst most recently at Altimeter Group before its acquisition by Prophet in June. “It’s a […]
The Twitter Publisher Network is now the Twitter Audience Platform – but the name change is more than aesthetic, said Ameet Ranadive, Twitter’s senior director of revenue products. “This is one step in the direction of reaching our total audience,” Ranadive said. Several enhancements were made to the rebranded Twitter Audience Platform (TAP), which came out […]
Even superfans need incentives. In the Pink, a regional Massachusetts-based retailer and the largest operator of Lilly Pulitzer affiliate stores in the US, wanted extra engagement during the busy summer season among “Lilly Lovers,” a term In The Pink founder Gordon Russell affectionately uses to describe his target demographic. “Lilly Pulitzer is to females what […]
Drawbridge has measurement on the mind. The probabilistic cross-device platform rolled out new reporting functionality Tuesday designed to peel away a few more layers of the attribution onion, including reporting around multitouch and cross-device path to conversion. Rather than giving each ad equal weight, Drawbridge is instituting time-weighted attribution on a sliding scale, in which […]
There’s CRM and then there’s MRM – mobile relationship management. In-app marketing company MobileBridge is looking to span the two with cloud-based tech that combines marketing automation and loyalty to boost app engagement. MobileBridge integrates both with a brand’s app and with its traditional CRM partners, including SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, IBM, Marketo and Salesforce […]
The CEOs of Tapad, Drawbridge and 4INFO will appear at AdExchanger’s Omni.Digital conference on Sept. 10, an event designed to educate marketers on advanced solutions for building seamless cross-channel brand experiences. It would seem that Facebook, Google and a very short list of others with access to login data at scale have cross-device cinched. But […]
There are myriad reasons why location data can be defective – and fraud is just one small piece of that growing problem. Growing because the lack of industry standards around the collection and use of location data leads to a fair amount of misunderstanding, unintentional discrepancies and widespread inaccuracy. “Location fraud is the easy part,” said […]
