Liz is a former Reporter for AdExchanger.com where she covered agencies and wrote the daily news roundup. Previously, she worked as a music journalist for BestNewBands.com, and has also worked as a freelance writer and editor for Elite Daily and L/A Mag. Fluent in French, Liz worked for a time at l’Alliance Française de Washington after earning her degrees in political economy and French from Bates College in Maine.
DC-based XAPPmedia builds voice-activated mobile ads, and the company wants to use these units to bridge traditional and digital broadcasting. To advance that goal, XAPPmedia on Wednesday debuted a mobile audience ad service called JAX in partnership with mobile app developer jacAPPS. JAX is designed to let commercial and public radio stations monetize their mobile […]
With all the recent talk about automating the ad-buying process, it’s easy to forget about content. But Drew Panayiotou, president and CEO of BBDO’s Atlanta division, thinks agencies will sink or swim depending on their ability to produce the “next generation of content.” “Content is dramatically changing as media is changing,” Panayiotou told AdExchanger. Panayiotou […]
Agency and ad tech vet Alan Schanzer landed at Pandora as SVP of Agency Relations on Jan. 13, and his goal is to broaden the streaming radio company’s relationship with advertisers. “I’ll be helping to develop Pandora’s strategy with holding companies, major advertisers and agencies, and, at the very top level, help them understand the […]
Can BitTorrent – often regarded as the de facto file sharing protocol for online content piracy –achieve the legitimacy to attract brand advertisers? While that remains to be seen, the company took a step toward improving its ad offering when it unveiled a partnership with Adzerk on Wednesday. Adzerk, which works with publications like social […]
WBEZ’s “This American Life” spinoff, “Serial,” shattered the iTunes record for the fastest podcast to reach 5 million downloads. From its October premiere through Jan. 1, the episodes were downloaded 31 million times. But for “Serial,” the sleeper winner was email marketing solutions provider MailChimp, the podcast’s sponsor whose brand went viral thanks to the […]
In December, JUICE Mobile spun off its beacon network into a standalone ad tech company called Freckle IoT. Already the largest beacon network in the Canada marketplace, the company describes itself as “a testing ground for the activation of next-generation connected devices.” The Toronto-based firm’s goal is to build a platform capable of talking to […]
Video platform M&A exploded in 2014, particularly in the second half of the year, according to data from Coady Diemar Partners. A report from the boutique investment banking firm highlights substantial growth in the ad tech sector, led by demand for technology assisting in the convergence of TV and digital video. Four of the top 11 […]
While advertisers are eyeing the vast possibilities for location tracking, behavioral targeting and interest discovery associated with wearables and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the intimate nature of such devices creates consumer privacy concerns. Despite the opportunity around wearables, it might behoove advertisers and agencies to temper their excitement a little. “Wearables will generally be […]
Financial marketers notably increased their investment in programmatic media during the third quarter, according to Casale Media’s Index Exchange. Programmatic spending by financial and brands increased 53.2% over the previous quarter in Q3 2014, the company said Thursday in its quarterly programmatic spending report. Casale/Index Exchange was unable to provide YoY change in financial industry spending. […]
The Trade Desk made headlines this week when it raked in $45 million in debt financing and brought on Microsoft, RGM Group and Delivery Agent alum Gabe Greenberg to manage its Advanced TV division. The company positions itself as both a DSP and a DMP, and its leaders have longstanding roots in automation, according to […]
Marketing software and media services provider Integrate raised $5 million on Tuesday, led by Trinity Capital Investment, bringing its total raised funds to $40 million. Integrate, which started in 2010, provides an integration pipeline to enable lead-gen automation. For example, a client looking to acquire customers within a particular demographic would use Integrate to find […]
Facebook’s declining organic reach has plagued small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) since it tweaked its algorithm about eight months ago. A study by analytics platform SumAll, released in October, highlights exactly what that fallout looks like for smaller advertisers on Facebook. Because Facebook’s algorithm change reduces the reach of Facebook posts, it has made it […]
Spotify is getting into the local ad game, courting brands with a platform that helps advertisers geotarget audiences in the US. The music streaming service will debut its Spot Radio Platform for brands on Jan. 1. The tool is backboned by Triton Digital, a marketing service to the media industry and a tech provider whose […]
Google revealed on Wednesday key insight on how consumers see ads online, pooling data from its advertising platforms over June and July. The company compiled the results in a study called “The Importance of Being Seen: Viewability Insights for Digital Marketers and Publishers.” Get the PDF here. “We’ve had Active View available on the Google Display […]
As more advertising happens programmatically, it’s increasingly difficult to blend automation and creative design. And though Brooklyn-based digital agency Huge doesn’t buy media, it feels the influence of automation in advertising and doesn’t necessarily feel it’s for the better, at least from a creative standpoint. With roughly 1,000 employees, Huge operates offices in Atlanta, Washington, […]
There’s no doubting the ad server’s importance in managing digital media. “It is the central hub for all digital placements, and provides advanced reporting on things like reach & frequency, multi-touch attribution, geo-targeting, time to conversion analyses, and overall media effectiveness,” IPG Mediabrands’ Mitchell Weinstein told AdExchanger. But how important is it for companies to own their […]
Advertisers need to be inventive to adhere to health marketing regulations, particularly since 2011, when the IAB banned health marketers from using cookies to target patients. PageScience’s approach is to bring contextual, cookie-less targeting to its clients through page scoring. On Wednesday, the company made public its Health Insights dashboard, which lets brands and agencies […]
Popular messenger app Kik, which hosts a colossal 185 million users, revealed it had snapped up GIF messaging firm Relay on Wednesday for an undisclosed sum. Additionally, the company secured a $38.3 million round of Series C funding, which it will use to invest in new-product development and expand its engineering and business-development teams. Relay […]
Mozilla, which makes the Firefox web browser, officially released on Thursday its in-browser ad product, which the company first announced in February. Early adopters include media agency Mindshare North America, online booking site Booking.com, and The Weinstein Company’s video-on-demand portal Radius-TWC. How it works: Individuals opening Firefox for the first time will see tiles filled […]
SHIFT is among the first Facebook marketing partners to integrate with the newly rebuilt Atlas ad platform. CEO James Borow said the company’s customers will soon be able to leverage Facebook’s data within SHIFT’s new platform to reach people in mobile apps outside of Facebook-owned mobile apps. “The inventory is not just locked within the […]
Healthcare and advertising is a complex pairing because of a variety of regulations around consumer targeting. While the sector has been slow to adopt programmatic, Publicis’ health arm, Publicis Health Media (PHM), is diving into automation with its programmatic platform AOD Health, released in October though a partnership with VivaKi, though the company declined to […]
Kik, a messaging app geared toward millennials , is diving deeper into native advertising with a feature, released Thursday, dubbed Keywords. The app, which originated in 2009 and has about 150 million users, first brought brands into the fold in August, with the launch of Promoted Chats. “The concept with Promoted Chats was to give […]
Mobile audience targeting firm adsquare has secured a $4.3 million Series A funding, led by Target Partners and existing investors. The Berlin-based company will use the money to fuel international growth with new offices opening in the UK and France, in addition to driving product development. Two years ago, the founders built adsquare in response […]
As agencies adopt programmatic practices, their compensation models are also evolving to accommodate emerging technologies, new client needs and transitioning costs of operations. Though several agencies that AdExchanger spoke to were willing to weigh in on the changes they’ve observed, many brand executives declined to detail their own shifting compensation models, citing the sensitivity of […]
Publicis Groupe reported a meager 1% organic growth rate for 2014’s Q3 on Thursday, with the displeased CEO Maurice Lévy blaming key account losses at Razorfish and lingering “distraction” on the failed Omnicom fusion. Publicis’ revenue in Q3 grew 4% YoY to reach $2.21 billion. “We have been too much focused on [the merger] and […]
Interpublic Group (IPG) reported Q3 revenue of $1.84 billion, an 8.3% increase YoY and an organic increase of 6.3%. IPG Chairman and CEO Michael Roth attributed the solid quarter to strategic digital developments and to the competitiveness of its agencies. IPG’s media agencies are housed in its Mediabrands entity and include Initiative, BPN, ID Media […]
Digital ad revenues in the US hit an historic high in the first half of 2014, reaching $23.1 billion, according to the IAB’s Internet Advertising Revenue Report released Monday. Notably, the IAB reported that mobile jumped 76% YoY and overtook banner ads. In another Monday release, the VivaKi AOD Benchmark Report saw CPMs increase across display, social, […]
Plenty of companies offer social analytics, but the industry seems to lack a unified definition of what constitutes social native marketing and how best to measure sponsored content on social channels. And according to analytics company Socialbaker’s CEO and co-founder, Jan Rezab, all content is going to move to social channels one way or another. In […]
Germany is leading the attack in the EU’s deepening privacy war against Google. Late last Tuesday, a legal ruling levied by Hamburg data protection commissioner Johannes Caspar required that Google obtain Germans’ expressed permission in order to access their data, or face $1.27 million in fines. “Our requirements aim at a fair balance between the […]
The confluence of health data and advertising is a privacy-sensitive subject, and marketers have generally been slow to adopt automation in the health care sector. But two Publicis Groupe agencies are looking to bridge the gap between automation and health care marketing. On Wednesday, VivaKi and Publicis Health Media (PHM) unwrapped their programmatic buying solution […]
