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.
Following on the heels of its buy button announcement and its recent CardSpring acquisition, Twitter announced the introduction of what it’s calling Twitter Offers – another step by the social network to add more commerce functionality to its offering. Twitter bought CardSpring back in July. The platform enables the creation of payment applications, a clear complement […]
Mobile carrier data is rich data – it’s deterministic, it’s first-party and it has cross-screen potential. Berlin-based data company zeotap is looking to help mobile carriers capitalize on that richness. Founded earlier this year, zeotap has secured $1.3 million in seed funding from HitFox Group and several angel investors, which it plans to use to […]
PocketMath cofounder and CRO Casey Grooms just started making a salary in July. The Singapore-based mobile DSP, which began life as AdMunch back in 2011, had been completely bootstrapped until now. On Monday, PocketMath announced the close of its first funding round, $10 million in Series A cash from the VC arm of Japanese ecommerce […]
Apple CEO Tim Cook might have called iAd a “very small part” of the company’s business in the past, but Apple is starting to take programmatic seriously and the partners are piling up. Following Wednesday’s announcement of Rubicon partnering with iAd on the demand side, seven more names are officially on the list: Tapsense, The Trade Desk, […]
Drawbridge sees itself as the democratizer of cross-device identity. “We’re the folks that provide cross-device connectivity for inventory that isn’t on Facebook and we do it without PII,” said Nimeshh Patel, Drawbridge’s VP of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Headquartered in San Mateo, Calif., Drawbridge – whose technology analyzes various non-personally identifiable data points, […]
When it comes to performance metrics, AIG’s online marketing chief Daniel Loebl isn’t joking around. “In my work, we don’t have soft metrics,” said Loebl, whose official title is assistant VP of the digital center of excellence at AIG in the US. “I don’t allow them in my spend. Something either gets conversions or not.” […]
The 50% viewability standard might fly (sort of) in the US, but it’s not yet considered to be a viable currency in the UK. But UK-based media auditing body ABC – think of it as the equivalent of the Alliance for Audited Media in the US – released a report and related vendor certification Wednesday […]
App developers are test-obsessed. They don’t spend a dime without knowing how it’ll turn out. That could be part of the reason why they haven’t done much spending on in-app mobile YouTube pre-roll. Until recently, Google Analytics provided developers with feedback on things like rate of install, AdWords performance, how often an app is opened, […]
When it comes to digital media, Allstate is in good hands: its own. Starting in Q1 2015, the insurance giant will bring its digital media-buying function fully in-house. Although Allstate will now take care of all of its own programmatic buying, its media agency, Starcom, will continue to take the reins on traditional planning and […]
Adobe’s having a good couple of months. Following Forrester’s high ranking of Adobe’s enterprise marketing suite last month, the software company unveiled a series of mobile enhancements to the Adobe Marketing Cloud on Tuesday. Adobe customers can now tap into in-app messaging capabilities and send personalized follow-up emails and other messages based on a consumer’s […]
At Pandora, the watchword is “engagement.” “At a certain point, it’s not how many people you bring to your product, it’s about how much engagement you see, and for us, engagement means time spent,” said Heidi Browning, SVP of strategic solutions at Pandora. The same sentiment was expressed by Pandora CEO Brian McAndrews during the […]
Engagement metrics are all well and good, but before someone can be engaged by an ad, that person has to be able to see it. And with more time and money shifting over to mobile, the viewability debate is heating up there. “Viewability is the first step towards engagement, and we’re starting at the front […]
There’s nothing more cliché in the ad world than the phrase “right message, right time.” But as the cross-device game heats up, it’s a platitude that’s gaining a new lease on life. Kahuna, a Sequoia Capital-backed mobile marketing startup which raised $11 million in Series A funding in February, aims to tackle the cross-device messaging […]
Online sales during China’s annual discount event topped $9 billion this year, once again thrusting the country into the spotlight as a commerce powerhouse, and not by a little bit. Singles Day, which was originally created in the late ’90s by a group of Chinese college students celebrating their singleton status, falls on Nov. 11 […]
The mobile value proposition of a company like Facebook or Google is fairly straightforward: Download the free app and it’ll let you converse with your friends or give you directions to help you get where you’re going. In return, you allow yourself to be tracked for advertising purposes. “For carriers, the story is not as […]
Twitter analytics and targeting platform StatSocial isn’t CEO Michael Hussey’s first trip to the customer data rodeo. Back in 2006, Hussey founded PeekYou, a people-based search engine that aggregates publicly available information – Twitter handles, Facebook URLs, blogs, physical address, phone number, interests, schools attended – into customer profiles that are then available for purchase. […]
Like last quarter, Millennial Media’s revenue is up – and profits are down. The mobile ad tech platform, which has been vocal about it’s desire to expand its programmatic capabilities, is clearly still in a period of transition. Though Millennial Media clocked a 24.4% YoY increase in revenue in Q3 2014 to $69.8 million, the […]
Jiffy Lube CMO Jeffrey Lack admits the company had no more than a standard digital strategy back in 2011. “Our digital presence was basically isolated to a national website, a mobile site and a very small pay-per-click program,” Lack said. And as a national oil change chain with thousands of franchisees, that wasn’t doing the trick, […]
However one feels about the merits of FarmVille, it’s undeniable that the game’s creators know a thing or two about app monetization. To that end, Red Hot Labs – a game dev startup founded by the team that created back-in-the-day blockbusters FarmVille and CityVille – released Toro on Wednesday, a new tool aimed at helping […]
What’s better than first-party shopper data? First-party shopper data paired with predictive analytics. That’s the thinking behind Adroit Digital’s acquisition of Arcametrics, a small North Carolina-based company whose technology uses predictive modeling to create lookalike audiences based on high-quality customers. Adroit declined to share details of the deal, including price, although company president Jacob Ross […]
It’s been one year since Criteo went public and the overall growth experienced by the company last quarter is holding steady. The French retargeting firm announced a 71.9% year-over-year uptick in revenue in Q3 2014 to roughly $243 million. (Full earnings release.) Part of that sustained growth is thanks to Criteo’s expanding client base, which […]
Sometimes, a standalone app might be more trouble than it’s worth – especially if we’re talking about a branded game as part of a single activation. For WWE Studios, a subsidiary of World Wrestling Entertainment that focuses on film development and production, that proved to be the case for “Road to Wrestlemania,” its first-ever mobile […]
Linda Woolley wants TAG to have teeth in the fight against online ad fraud. The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) is part of a cross-industry coalition composed of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the Association of National Advertisers (which launched its own anti-fraud initiative with White Ops in July), and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). […]
If an advertiser runs a mobile campaign, but the targeted consumer doesn’t convert on her mobile device, that doesn’t mean the campaign failed. Chad Gallagher, director of mobile at AOL Platforms, has been trying to convince brands of this for quite some time, and it’s one reason that AOL introduced One, a platform that incorporates device-linking and […]
He who has the gold makes the rules. But the in-house trend doesn’t just apply to brands – agencies are starting to buy up ad-tech vendors, as evidenced by Publicis Groupe’s acquisition Tuesday of mobile programmatic vendor RUN. Publicis has been dipping into the ad tech waters for a while. The holding company bought up […]
There’s a time to invest in tech and there’s a time to invest in marketing – for Cardlytics, it’s time to do the latter. The card-linked ad tech company, which enables advertisers to send targeted offers to consumers directly embedded into their online banking experience, announced Wednesday that it’s raised $70 million in Series F […]
The programmatic ad tech consolidation continues. Publicis Groupe has bought mobile-focused ad platform RUN, previously known as RUN DSP, the holding company said Tuesday. Read more on RUN’s blog or read Publicis’ release. Details of the deal – including price – were not disclosed. It’s a significant move for the holding company, whose recent financials have […]
Segmint’s sweet spot has always been the financial sector. But the retargeting company, whose technology has mostly been used to help enterprise banking clients safely tap into reams of highly sensitive first-party customer data, is planning to use a $9 million injection of Series A funding to expand more deeply into the insurance vertical. The […]
Criteo is looking to crack the cross-device nut with deterministic data. The French retargeting company launched a cross-device solution Tuesday that uses hashed email addresses – got to watch that personally identifiable information – to connect consumers across mobile web, apps and desktop. The solution is in the process of being rolled out to current […]
The gaming/Facebook love affair is showing no signs of cooling off. CPMs among gaming advertisers on Facebook were up 548% year over year in Q3 2014, according to Facebook ad partner Nanigans in its most recent benchmark report. To put that into perspective, e-commerce advertisers saw a 255% year-over-year increase in CPMs. On average, CPMs […]
