Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
Marketers are known for a near obsession with data – metrics, iteration and ROI – but a string of CMOs at this year’s ANA Masters of Marketing conference avoided the firm ground of data and measurement in favor risk-taking and experiential concerns. “Advertising isn’t dead, but it’s craving courage,” said Arby’s CMO Robert Lynch, pointing to […]
From global leaders to energetic startups, “internal disruption” has become the driving force behind marketing resources. “The scary thing for me is to see how fast the disruptors are themselves being disrupted,” said Pepsi’s beverage group president Bradley Jakeman at the ANA’s Masters of Marketing conference. He pointed to the speed with which a company […]
If late-year sales are particularly important to you, then your holiday strategy and product development should now be entering its final lap. What remains is a race to retain customers coming in during the blitz of holiday marketing. “The actual user connections should be in place before the holidays, not just a strategy,” said Richard […]
Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are thriving in the red-hot technology industry, particularly in the United States, according to a spate of research reports released Thursday. In many pockets of the industry, there are fewer deals but the value of those deals has skyrocketed. The investment bank JEGI said the number of transactions in the database […]
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the EU’s highest court, on Tuesday invalidated the “Safe Harbor” agreement, which since 2000 has allowed companies to store and transfer data between the US and EU. A pillar of the agreement required the US to ensure equivalent protections to those guaranteed by the EU, but […]
The ad tech community has taken its strategies to legacy marketing channels before – billboards, radio, point-of-sale systems and even linear TV. Now add direct mail to the list. PebblePost launched publicly and revealed a $3 million seed round on Tuesday. CEO Lewis Gersh hopes to bring real-time analytics to direct mail campaigns for the […]
Deep-linking vendor Button announced the Button Marketplace on Thursday in an attempt to sustain the mobile app world without the need for digital ad dollars. “It’s an entirely different paradigm for apps,” said Michael Jaconi, Button’s co-founder and CEO. “You can’t capitalize on search and intent in this world like you did for the web.” […]
As Axel Springer was rolling out its acquisition of Business Insider on Tuesday, the German publishing giant lost a court case it brought against the Acceptable Ads initiative of Adblock Plus (ABP). The decision gave ABP its fourth consecutive victory against European publishers hoping to prove aspects of its technology or business model are illegal. […]
Of all the threats posed by the ad-blocking trend, perhaps the scariest scenario for publishers is that paid media placements could be filtered at the network level. Now that nightmare seems to be coming true, as Israeli ad-blocking tech company Shine has said it will integrate with wireless carrier Digicel to screen ads aimed at […]
Origami Logic revealed Tuesday it had received $25 million in Series C funds, which it will use to more than double its teams across sales, engineering and marketing, said co-founder and CEO Opher Kahane. Origami Logic has an employee count in the lower double digits, though Kahane wouldn’t give an exact number. But clients like […]