National Geographic isn’t obsessing over the metrics for its Albert Einstein Facebook Messenger bot. “We want this to be fun – and if you try to measure ROI on something like this, you’re just setting yourself up to fail,” said Dennis Camlek, EVP of strategy and consumer marketing at National Geographic. Nat Geo launched the bot […]
Verizon completed its $4.5 billion acquisition of Yahoo’s search, email and digital media assets on Tuesday, almost a year after announcing its intent to buy the first-wave internet giant. Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s embattled CEO since 2012, is leaving the company. Just because Verizon has cleared the first and most fundamental hurdle in creating Oath, the […]
After years of will they/won’t they, MoPub is finally going to take better advantage of Twitter data. The mobile exchange, acquired by Twitter in 2013, is testing so-called audience packages in the form of audience segments powered by proprietary data coming from Twitter. The product is in alpha with a select set of partners. “The Twitter […]
Tapad has tapped a new CEO. Are Traasdahl will step down as Tapad’s CEO, effective immediately, the company said Thursday. He will be replaced by Sigvart Voss Eriksen, a Telenor exec who’s been with the operator for more than 15 years, most recently as head of advertising technology. Telenor, a Norwegian telco with more than […]
Developers like Lucktastic, a F2P sweepstakes app, play a seemingly never-ending game of balancing quality vs. scale when acquiring users. Increasingly, they’re turning to mobile video and playable ads to find users who stick around after the install. “In a category like ours, you need scale to succeed, but we also really have to care […]
Kiip is giving SDK-averse apps another option to test its demand. On Thursday, the mobile rewards ad network rolled out the ability to use JavaScript tags as a lighter-weight way to serve campaigns into a publisher’s app. Early test partners include music discovery app SoundHound and The Meet Group, which operates a suite of social […]
Sam’s Club doesn’t take a wholesaler’s approach to mobile re-engagement. “We’re always thinking about how to segment and target our users,” said Drew Frost, senior product marketing manager at the Walmart-owned, members-only retail club. “Our main focus is on finding and engaging what we call our higher-value users.” For Sam’s Club, high value is derived […]
New York-based coffee lovers probably want to receive targeted push notifications with discounts on lattes at their favorite Brooklyn coffee house – but not if they’re traveling in Chicago that day. It’s hard to get that level of granularity right, which is why a lot of brands aren’t taking advantage of context, location, weather and other […]
Disused phone booths in New York could soon go programmatic. Nine-year MediaMath vet Ari Buchalter is stepping in as CEO of Alphabet-backed smart cities startup Intersection, best known for its interactive LinkNYC kiosks replacing neglected phone booths with Wi-Fi hotspots across New York City – and he’s bringing his data-driven sensibilities with him. “When people talk […]
Mobile-first? Passé, says Google. The future is being driven by artificial intelligence. “Mobile made us reimagine every product we were working on,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Wednesday at Google’s I/O developer conference in Mountain View, Calif. “Similarly, in an AI-first world, we are rethinking all our products and applying machine learning and AI to […]
First-party audience data is an app publisher’s most precious asset. Which is why, as developers and brands dip their toe further into mobile programmatic, private marketplaces are their safety mechanism. On Wednesday, MobFox took the wraps off a PMP for mobile audiences, where app publishers can make their data and inventory available programmatically and select […]
Agencies want to take advantage of location data, but roadblocks still stand in the way. For Mobext, the mobile arm of Havas Media Group, fragmentation and quality-control issues top the list. “A lot of companies have hopped on the bandwagon in the location space, and that’s created a lot of clutter in the offerings available […]
Whisper, an app that lets its anonymous users post what’s on their mind, is still going strong after five years – even after other secret-sharing social apps like Yik Yak have closed shop. One reason for its longevity is that it is making money through programmatic advertising. Demand partners include Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, OpenX […]
When it comes to location-based based data, targeting is the low-hanging fruit. The ripe opportunities center on using location to enhance behavioral profiles and connect online ad exposure with real-world activities. Easier said than done, however. Advertisers and agencies are interested, but the technology is still developing and there’s a fair amount of BS flying […]
America’s most data-driven retailers and product manufacturers increasingly use mobile channels to drive shoppers to a store. Take the big kahuna. Walmart two weeks ago began offering discounts for products selected online and then picked up at a store. Walmart clears the margin on those discounts because the retailer can push products through its stores […]
Facebook is lusting after lucrative online travel ad dollars. And on Thursday, Facebook launched its next assault on the travel industry – encroaching further on Google’s turf – with the global rollout of Dynamic Ads for flights. The release will allow airlines and flight advertisers to retarget users across Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network with ads tied […]
An advertiser looking to boost response rates for a mobile offer can employ a simple solution: Target commuters on crowded trains. And if there’s a delay or disruption, response rates rise further. The reason? The more crowded the subway car, the more consumers immerse themselves in their phones to avoid contact with the strangers next […]
Facebook’s big bet on messenger bots was an oversell from the start. What’s shaking out now is a more reserved and perhaps more useful idea of what a bot can be and how a business can use it. “Rather than having chatbots be ‘the star of the show,’ as was the implication last year, Facebook […]
More than 4,000 app developers will descend on San Jose, Calif., on April 18 and 19 for Facebook’s F8 conference, where, if you believe the rumor mill, Mark Zuckerberg will regale them with splashy announcements about group chatbots for Messenger and possible hardware offerings from his secretive Building 8 Lab. But at its core, F8 […]
Mobile attribution player Kochava souped up its anti-fraud offering on Thursday with a consolidated suite of reports, including access to a global blacklist that updates itself. The dashboard helps advertisers visualize what’s happening with their traffic in real time, with views into things like abnormally high click-to-install ratios, ad stacking clicks and questionable IP addresses. […]
It seems crazy that a marketer at Match Group, which reported $295 million in dating-service revenue in the fourth quarter of 2016 alone, would spend half a day each week downloading and collating CSV files. But that’s just the way it’s been, said James Peng, head of mobile and social acquisition at Tinder and OKCupid […]
The mobile app Ibotta, which offers users cash back on purchases from retail and brand partners, is turning its receipt verification system into an in-store attribution tool. Ibotta users can link a loyalty card account or upload a picture of a store receipt to get cash back on products for which it offers discounts. But […]
The Netherlands-based telco Altice will acquire Teads in a cash deal that values the outstream video ad tech firm at $307 million, the companies confirmed Tuesday morning. It’s the latest in a string of acquisitions for Altice. Earlier this month, the company bought the US programmatic platform Audience Partners for an undisclosed sum, and last year it closed […]
Foursquare debuted a foot-traffic measurement tool called Foursquare Analytics on Monday. Foursquare Analytics, which uses opted-in users to measure in-store traffic, began in private beta last year with brands like TGI Fridays, Equinox and Taco Bell. Brands that pay a monthly subscription fee to use the SaaS product. TGI Fridays matches customers from its CRM […]
When Norwegian telco Telenor acquired cross-device vendor Tapad in February 2016, it seemed comparable to Verizon buying AOL. One year later however, Telenor is using Tapad’s tech to drive sales and customer acquisition for its own products, rather than making its data available on the open exchange. Tapad also continues to operate as a standalone […]
Want to know what large-scale mobile ad blocking looks like? Go to Asia, specifically China and India, where the bulk of the world’s new smartphone users are entering the market. A PageFair report last year said mobile browsers with pre-installed ad blockers more than doubled over the previous year and now outnumber those without ad […]
XAd only wants advertisers to get paid if someone actually walks in the door. On Thursday, the location-based mobile ad network said it would allow brands to transact on a cost-per-visit (CPV) basis. Advertisers will be able to make media buys based on foot traffic-related KPIs and only pay for performance. It’s an appealing proposition […]
Viewability vendors, including Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify and Moat, are banding together in an uneasy alliance to tackle in-app viewability using open-source software – but the problem is far from solved. “The spirit of the open-source initiative is a good thing,” said Moat CEO Jonah Goodhart. “It’s not comprehensive measurement, though.” Opening The Way In […]
The revenue opportunity around mobile ad spend is too big to ignore, said Dan Rosen, global director of advertising at Spanish telco Telefonica, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in early March. It’s why telcos like Verizon, Telenor, Telstra and SingTel are spending big on ad tech. Telefonica carved out a niche in the mobile […]
Hotel and travel brands are looking to pour more performance dollars into Facebook. For years, hotel operators have used the social platform as a source of online check-ins, reviews and customer service responses, but “the next step was taking it to advertising,” said Chris Georgas, digital marketing manager for Fairmont Hotels. After debuting its Dynamic […]
