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 […]
Mobile-first has become a cliché. Today, marketing is more about “customer experience transformation,” said Scott Smith, director of digital and mobile solutions at Moxie, a Zenith-owned digital agency under the Publicis Media umbrella focusing primarily on digital planning, creative services and emerging technologies. That’s just a fancy way of saying brands need to figure out […]
Away from the dancing robots, Power Rangers-themed VR experiences, self-driving race cars and the buzzing of drones, deals do get done at Mobile World Congress. That’s why French location-based dating app Happn came to Barcelona for the show. “We’re here to have discussions, to gather insights, to see what our competitors are doing, to find […]
Ericsson is about to enter an unexpected space: ad tech. The Swedish networking giant is testing a mobile ads platform to aggregate anonymized deterministic data from across telecom operators to power targeted advertising. Ericsson declined to say whether it’s building the platform itself, licensing it or buying an ad tech company to power its nascent […]
The Israeli startup Shine is rebranding to Rainbow as it abandons its ad-blocking roots in favor of ad-targeting and verification services, the company revealed Friday. “We have been really trying to identify a path forward and the commercialization opportunities for the base technology,” said CRO James Collier, who joined the company last July. Shine (ahem, […]
Dash Labs lets users transform their regular car into a smart car. The app interfaces with a dongle, sold separately, that plugs into a port beneath the steering wheel and connects via Bluetooth. But driver data isn’t something marketers commonly use, so company CEO and co-founder Jamyn Edis is on a mission to prove that […]
Some tech providers are looking to phone numbers as the cookie killer – but privacy and user reticence are potential roadblocks. Digits, however, are a tantalizingly sticky bridge between online and offline, said Guy Weismantel, EVP and CMO of call analytics company Marchex. “It’s extremely hard to prove ROI when someone goes offline and you lose […]
Are some marketers approaching cross-device backward? Tom Laband, CEO and co-founder of mobile data marketplace adsquare, thinks so. “We see many advertisers start with cookie-derived data and bridge that to mobile IDs using cross-device vendors – and to me, that doesn’t make sense,” Laband said Thursday at a company event in New York City. Device IDs, […]
As the demand for digital video increases, publishers like Bonnier Corp. are turning to automation to beef up their inventory. With more than 35 special-interest titles, including Field & Stream, Popular Science and Outdoor Life, Bonnier’s editors spend a lot of time on video creation. Even so, “when it comes to a lot of our […]
User retention, good user experience and monetization can coexist, they just require a deft touch. But for devs that monetize mainly through ads, there’s an inherent tension between their retention and re-engagement efforts and the bottom line. They make the bulk of their money through a means that could easily turn off the users they’re […]
Fraud follows the money, but it also picks the low-hanging fruit. Although Methbot was a fairly sophisticated operation, fraudsters are generally lazy, said Augustine Fou, a cybersecurity expert and independent ad fraud researcher. “The general principle is that bots are not going to work harder than they need to,” Fou said. “If they can get […]
Marriott International isn’t joking around when it says that mobile it its sweet spot. The hotel chain’s app is responsible for around $1.7 billion in annual gross bookings. But the app – a revamped version hit the App Store on Tuesday – is more than just a booking tool, said George Corbin, Marriott International’s SVP of […]
Whereas Facebook seems to have outgrown its app developer platform, Parse, Twitter more likely shut down its dev toolkit Fabric in a bid to slim down and focus on its future survival. In January, Twitter sold Fabric to Google and Facebook officially pulled its support of Parse one year after announcing its intention to do […]
As app downloads slow down due to a maturing ecosystem (dropping 20% among the top 15 US pubs, according to a mid-2016 Nomura/SensorTower report), developers are turning to a new success metric: Usage. “Usage is the new currency for the app economy, not downloads, because downloads just tell you that first part of the story,” […]
The mobile monetization firm Button announced Wednesday it had raised a $20 million Series B round, led by Norwest Venture Partners. The investment, which brings Button’s total funding to $36.5 million, will go largely toward expanding Button’s headcount as the startup looks to tack on new products in fledgling verticals like travel booking and media […]
Bellwether retailers like Macy’s, Sears and Nordstrom that once anchored US malls never fully recovered from the onset of web-driven ecommerce. Now they’re facing something new that could either be an opportunity to get back in the game or another threat entirely: mobile commerce. Consumers are spending more time on mobile, including on retail app […]
At long last, AOL is really starting to make use of its 2015 Millennial Media acquisition. On Tuesday, Verizon-owned AOL rolled out self-serve functionality for its mobile supply-side platform, One by AOL: Mobile. It’s basically AOL’s answer to Google’s AdMob or Twitter’s MoPub. AOL beta tested the capability for several months before launch with several partners, […]
Instagram will allow ads in its Stories section, the company said Wednesday. It also unveiled brand measurement tools. “Over the first holidays with Stories we’ve gotten a chance to peek into what people do when they’re home and with their families, at a level of depth and intimacy we haven’t usually had with Instagram,” said […]
Mobile moments – and music – are having their moment. GroupM predicts that music streaming activity linked to “moods and moments” is a targeting opportunity worth around $220 million in new ad revenue. Advertisers are starting to take advantage. Wendy’s, for example, recently hooked up with Spotify as a launch partner on the latter’s Branded Moments product. […]
Kids are accustomed to lying about their age. Most don’t bother with getting their parents’ permission to use Facebook, Kik, Whisper, Snapchat, Instagram et al. And that makes the data resulting from their usage quite murky, said Jenny Mirken, CEO and founder of Jet.me, a chat app and social network developed with the preteen set […]
A year ago, the rise of ad blockers put the online advertising ecosystem into an existential crisis. But not only did the ‘adpocalypse’ never materialize, many of the same stakeholders who were on the defensive now see a chance to reclaim lost ground. “People were literally saying this is the death of the web, and […]
Grabr is an ecommerce app for the stuff you can’t usually find online. “You can think about us as the Airbnb for international shopping and delivery,” said Daria Rebenok, CEO of Grabr, a peer-to-peer marketplace that aims to help travelers make a little extra cash by acting as couriers for difficult-to-obtain items from anywhere in […]
A few years ago, when Twitch CRO Jonathan Simpson-Bint would walk into meetings with agencies and advertisers, they’d cock a dubious eyebrow. “That many people engage on Twitch? You’ve got to be kidding.’ That was the reaction,” said Simpson-Bint, who’s been with Twitch since 2011, three years before Amazon acquired the social gaming and live […]
Kochava has spent the past year building up the Collective, its audience data co-op for in-app advertising. Last week, it picked up its first DSP partner – The Trade Desk – to carry the data. Kochava’s Collective works by gathering data from three sources: aggregated third-party providers, ad networks that pool audience behavior insights and […]
FuturePlay Games relies primarily on advertising to monetize. But it had a devil of a time attributing ad revenue to specific campaigns. “We knew that an ad had been watched on a device, but we didn’t know how much money we got back from it,” said Camilo Fitzgerald, a games analyst at the Helsinki-based game […]
Will Kassoy is CEO of AdColony – again. On Monday, Opera Mediaworks said it is changing its name to AdColony as of January. If the name’s familiar, that’s because it’s the mobile video ad network that Opera Mediaworks bought for around $350 million in 2014. Kassoy was CEO of AdColony at the time, and then joined […]
Despite skyrocketing mobile traffic and climbing mobile conversion rates, British airline Monarch was struggling to determine precisely what was or wasn’t working for mobile media buys. “We persistently got all the data in and still faced the question: What about mobile?” said Robert Foulkes, senior marketing manager for the low-cost airline. Monarch was among the […]
The internet of things will be a top enforcement priority for the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission in 2017 – especially in the wake of the recent distributed-denial-of-service attacks against Dyn. Dyn, which provides online infrastructure and domain services, was the victim of a DDOS onslaught that temporarily shut down major websites like Spotify, […]
Facebook’s app-install ads got a little face-lift Thursday with the launch of dynamic ads for mobile app installs. The ads, available through the Facebook Audience Network, let advertisers target users with dynamic app-install ads based on their recent product browsing history. Facebook first started testing the ads last summer along with an app event optimization […]
A year ago Pinterest was in the process of winding down its sales and marketing services for all but two partner categories: retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG). But after a year spent working on ad tech product releases – like a CRM match program and an expansion of interest-based targeting – it’s throttling up […]
