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.
Cosmetic brand EMMA New York is finding customers to seed its sampling program in the most unlikely of places – a gamified trivia app. Founded in 2012, EMMA, which sells luxury makeup products in the US and China, recently started running campaigns on gameit, which came out of beta in early May. Rather than doling out […]
There have been several changes at Medialets in the three months since WPP snapped up the mobile ad platform. It’s got a new chief exec – COO Richy Glassberg took over as CEO from Eric Litman, who remains involved in the company as chairman – and it’s doubling down on its Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditations. Medialets, which received […]
John Nardone, the newly minted CEO of UK-based ad serving platform Flashtalking, feels like he’s come full circle. After spending more than 10 years deep in the ad tech weeds, Nardone, whose resumé includes the chief exec role at [x+1] – which sold to Rocket Fuel in August 2014 for around $230 million – and the co-presidency at […]
Digital advertising is a budget behemoth, but television advertising is still a nearly $70 billion business – a fact that informs the planning process at WWP-owned media agency MediaCom. Because although digital video and streaming is starting to take a big bite out of linear’s lunch, TV is still the dominant consumption source, according to […]
When it comes to native, Zalora cares about context. The Singapore-based online fashion retailer, whose app has been downloaded more than 5 million times since 2014, has been working with German mobile marketing company glispa to integrate native placements into its app experience. Glispa, which started life as a user-acquisition and engagement network, has been plugging […]
Mobile monetization platform Supersonic is looking to help developers get more flexibility around rewarded video with an ad placement-testing tool, which came out of beta on Tuesday. The feature, part of Supersonic’s video mediation SDK, allows developers to test where in their app to serve video that rewards people for watching, and what specific offers […]
Beyond the morass of fraud and viewability hides another tripwire for advertisers: government regulation. That’s why UK-based credit card issuer Barclaycard is getting proactive about compliance. As a company that’s smaller than the competition and still making inroads in the US market, Barclaycard is particularly risk averse when it comes to regulatory issues. To that […]
If mobile and video are the twin engines driving ad tech, then AOL’s rumored $300 million to $350 million acquisition of Millennial Media would put the pedal to the metal. The potential deal, first reported by AOL-owned TechCrunch on Thursday, comes just a few weeks after the official close of Verizon’s $4.4 billion purchase of […]
Viewability vendors mostly speak the same language – but they don’t always provide brands and publishers with the same results. It’s a major pain point and one that the Media Rating Council (MRC) has been attempting to tackle in a three-part series of reconciliation tests, which began back in 2013, to understand why there are […]
Pinterest is proving to be a nice fit for secondhand online clothier Twice. The company, which acts as a sort of hybrid Amazon/eBay-like marketplace for gently used duds, had seen success with all the usual marketing mix suspects – display, search ads, Facebook, Twitter – but it was on the hunt for a fresh channel to reach […]
Data collection can pose a challenge beyond borders. Looking for IT professionals who work at companies with more than $20 million in revenue and headcounts over 250? Fashionistas between the ages of 18 and 34 with an affinity for shoes? Most data providers could take care of that type of request before breakfast in the […]
The technology landscape is a quickly evolving beast – and in some cases, that can feel quite literal. “The volume of vendors is expanding so fast, it’s a bit like the movie ‘Gremlins,’” said Rachel Pasqua, practice lead for mobile and emerging technology at MEC Global, North America, a GroupM agency. But while clients expect […]
As if cross-device wasn’t complicated enough, there’s another wrinkle to consider – shared apps. That’s one of the problems mobile analytics company Kochava is looking to tackle with Wednesday’s launch of Audience Attribution, a toolset aimed at identifying incremental attribution lift at the household level. Existing Kochava customer Priceline and others, including a well-known subscription […]
Advertisers are starting to wrap their minds around the wrist. Frankfurt, Germany-based ING-DiBa – a digital-only offshoot of ING bank targeted at millennial consumers – has been working with mobile supply-side platform PubNative to test custom formats for the Apple Watch, which the SSP made generally available Wednesday. But ING-DiBa is still squarely in the […]
Outdoor gear retailer Cabela’s has a fairly straightforward approach to content marketing: “If it doesn’t add value, then we don’t produce it,” said the brand’s SEO manager, Jesse Farley. But the content landscape itself is anything but simple, and one of the core challenges is figuring out what’s relevant and how it’s resonating before even […]
Data is everything, creative is dead. Creativity is paramount, data is a distraction. “You hear people say both things, but neither one is true,” said Michael Lebowitz, CEO and founder of Brooklyn-based digital agency Big Spaceship, whose client list is a who’s who of blue chip brands, including Nestlé Purina, Samsung, BMW, YouTube, Absolut Vodka, […]
Some bots are good, but most bots are not – and Distil Networks, which announced $21 million in Series B on Tuesday, has its eye on the latter. The round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with pinch hitting from Foundry, TechStars, ff Venture Capital, Idea Fund and Correlation Ventures, brings Distil’s total funding to $38 million. […]
Turn on ad blocking and in most cases you’ll have a better user experience, a fact readily acknowledged by Sourcepoint COO and co-founder Brian Kane. Sourcepoint focuses on circumventing ad-blocking software. But rather than the problem itself, Kane views ad blocking as the surface manifestation of a deeper issue: “The value exchange between publishers and […]
The No. 1 criticism leveled at mobile data-management platforms (mDMPs): Who needs another silo? But that’s not stopping a growing number of ad tech companies from unveiling mDMPs as they move to meet the demands of marketers looking to activate their mobile data. Although several players have been on the scene for a while now – both […]
Driving foot traffic is retail vet Julie Bernard’s passion. “That’s what converts the casual window shopper into a loyal customer,” said Bernard, who took the reins as CMO of location-based mobile ad platform Verve Mobile on Monday after more than seven years at Macy’s in several exec roles, most recently as SVP of customer strategy, […]
Location isn’t all that relevant without context. That’s the thinking at Sense360, a startup co-founded by Thinknear vet Eli Portnoy to help apps tap into sensor data derived from smartphones. Sense360, which landed $2.8 million in seed funding in January, opened up its platform to general availability on Tuesday after roughly six months in closed […]
What will be the fate of probabilistic data in a world populated by Facebook and Google? Steve Glanz, CEO of probabilistic cross-device data provider Crosswise, admits that deterministic data is superior to probabilistic connections – but his answer to that question is still yes because of one major factor: the need for scale. “Obviously, it would […]
Channels are so last season. “I don’t care what device you’re on – I care about reaching you at the right time,” said Robert Spratlen, Viacom’s VP of digital media, data and audience development at Viacom, at Tapad Unify Tech ’15 on Thursday in New York. “Our product is content, our currency is audiences.” These days, […]
Undertone is consolidating around creative. The programmatic ad network acquired Buenos Aires-based rich media startup Sparkflow on Thursday as part of a move to integrate data-driven creative capabilities into Undertone’s overall tech stack, which it calls Virtuoso. The deal was on the smaller side, clocking in at “less than $20 million,” said Corey Ferengul, CEO […]
Pinterest’s advertising business took its next step toward scale with the official launch of its ads API on Thursday. The ads API, which Pinterest introduced in beta in April, comes on the heels of a flurry of brand-focused products from the social platform, including an imminent buy button, a content API for businesses to manage […]
Are You a Human is looking to up its human headcount. The digital security and human traffic verification company plans to spend the majority of its $4.2 million in Series A cash, announced Thursday, to roughly double its current headcount from 25 to around 50 by the end of the year. The fresh injection, led […]
Cheetah Mobile is changing its spots. Known more as an app publisher than an ad tech player, the Beijing-based mobile media company launched its own global ad platform on Monday. It’s part of Cheetah’s grand plan to become “one of the top five mobile ad vendors in the world,” said Cheetah Mobile CTO and co-founder […]
Imagine a 1950s-era housewife hanging a crisp white sheet on a clothesline in her suburban backyard complete with picket fence as a gentle breeze blows. “We recognize that this woman doesn’t exist anymore, the happy woman with the billowing sheet,” said Erika Lamoreaux, associate director of digital media at The Clorox Company, speaking at the […]
The Economist is still mulling the particulars around how it’s going to monetize its just-launched video initiative, Economist Films, but one thing is sure – native advertising will have nothing to do with it. “There will never be a native element to our films because they have to stand alongside the newspaper as a purely […]
GameStop isn’t playing around when it comes to omnichannel, and here’s why. Roughly 60% of GameStop’s customers first engage with the video game retailer online. Of that number, 26% show up at one of its more than 6,600 brick-and-mortar stores within 48 hours and make a purchase. About 40% of its traffic comes from mobile. […]
