Mobile numbers are moving up and to the right – and social is along for the ride. Taptica is looking to take advantage of that trend. The mobile DSP announced Tuesday that it would fork over $17 million to acquire programmatic social marketing tech company AreaOne, formerly known as SocialClicks. Both companies maintain their headquarters in […]
AOL’s acquisition of Millennial Media for $238 million was a coup for its purchaser, if not for its investors. The mobile ad platform went from an opening-day share price of $23.50 to $1.75 when AOL announced its intent to purchase Thursday. But Elgin Thompson, managing director at investment firm Digital Capital Advisors, cautioned not to […]
Does Verizon have access to rich user data? Undeniably. Will Verizon successfully capitalize on that opportunity? Questionable. After all, Verizon’s user data is only as valuable as its data practices. Verizon could certainly benefit in the wake of an acquisition spree that somewhat resembled a line of falling dominos – AOL into Verizon, Millennial Media […]
Instagram has rounded up a posse of Facebook Marketing Partners since the closed beta launch of its ads API in early August. Mobile analytics company Appsflyer is the most recent addition to a list that includes AdRoll, Adaptly, Ampush, Brand Networks, 4C, Kenshoo, Laundry Service, Publicis-owned agency Mediavest, Nanigans, Olapic, Resolution Media, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, […]
Adobe Analytics and personalization engine Adobe Target can now be consumed as a combo meal. The company said Wednesday that it has integrated the two solutions, also available as separate entities within the Adobe Marketing Cloud, into a single UI to help clients handle what Adobe’s VP of mobile, Matt Asay, called “the mobile problem.” […]
The debate around privacy – and where Google stands – is kicking up on the eve of Apple’s upcoming September launch of iOS 9. Why? Because though advertising revenue hardly tickles the bottom line at Apple, its decision to enable content blocking in iOS 9 affects how Google’s developers monetize. Apple’s content-blocking feature allows developers to create […]
Publishers are concerned about content blocking in iOS 9 – but how concerned should they be? At first glance, the single brief reference to content blocking in Apple’s iOS 9 release notes seems innocuous enough. “Use the Content Blocking extension point to give Safari a block list describing the content that you want to block while […]
Remember when Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013? Yahoo appears to finally be doing something with it. On Wednesday, at Yahoo’s Mobile Developer Conference in New York City, the purple platform announced that it will integrate in-app sharing links via Tumblr into the Flurry SDK via its Mobile Developer Suite. It’s pretty much just […]
Does seeing an ad lead to visiting a store? Location data company PlaceIQ wants to answer that ever-thorny question with the launch of Enterprise PVR, a metric designed to measure foot traffic at specific locations by tracking on-device consumer behavior in the physical world. PVR, which stands for “place visit rate,” is a metric PlaceIQ […]
Brands know the importance of images or videos uploaded by fans and customers on social media. But for many, it’s like dying of thirst surrounded by the ocean. Relevant content might exist on Instagram and Twitter, but it’s meaningless without a filter – that is, if a poster doesn’t tag or mention your business. Even […]
The Twitter Publisher Network is now the Twitter Audience Platform – but the name change is more than aesthetic, said Ameet Ranadive, Twitter’s senior director of revenue products. “This is one step in the direction of reaching our total audience,” Ranadive said. Several enhancements were made to the rebranded Twitter Audience Platform (TAP), which came out […]
Kik’s attempt to become “the WeChat of the West” has been bolstered by a $50 million infusion from WeChat’s Chinese developer, Tencent. Kik will use the funds to focus on the US teen market, a decision company President Josh Jacobs said came from observing Chinese-based WeChat’s accomplishments courting native smartphone users. He sees parallels with […]
When Jun Group was founded in 2005, its bread and butter was serving desktop video ads and ads in social and mobile games, rewarding players with virtual currency when they opted in. But the video ad platform has its sights on bigger things today: mobile brand advertising dollars. And it’s using a $28 million investment […]
There’s CRM and then there’s MRM – mobile relationship management. In-app marketing company MobileBridge is looking to span the two with cloud-based tech that combines marketing automation and loyalty to boost app engagement. MobileBridge integrates both with a brand’s app and with its traditional CRM partners, including SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, IBM, Marketo and Salesforce […]
Although Apple’s App Store is seven years old and has a worthy competitor in Google’s Play Store, the app store search and discovery ecosystem is stagnant, say many app store optimization (ASO) platforms. “When we look at the landscape, we see it like the early days of Internet, when search and discovery were a mess,” […]
There are myriad reasons why location data can be defective – and fraud is just one small piece of that growing problem. Growing because the lack of industry standards around the collection and use of location data leads to a fair amount of misunderstanding, unintentional discrepancies and widespread inaccuracy. “Location fraud is the easy part,” said […]
Deep linking is handy if a user already has the app in question installed. If not, the conversion rate is far from impressive. It’s an issue deep-linking company Branch is looking to solve with the launch of Deepviews, a tool that automatically replicates in-app content in the form of a mobile web page, as opposed […]
The executives in this story will appear at AdExchanger’s Omni.Digital conference on Sept. 10, an event designed to educate marketers on advanced solutions for building seamless cross-channel brand experiences. It’s still unclear how effective mobile advertising can be, despite its explosive growth. For instance, mobile passed desktop in terms of user content consumption in early 2014, but still […]
The Millennial Media train needs more steam. Revenue for Q2 was up just a smidgen from Q1, increasing from $63.2 million to $65.8 million quarter over quarter. But the same was not true for year over year revenue, which declined from $67.3 million. The majority of that revenue came courtesy of managed media, which represented […]
Berlin-based mobile ad platform Fyber wants to help developers get a better handle on pre-caching, the practice of pre-loading video ad content to reduce load times and ad-serving latency. The company announced Monday that it’ll be releasing a tool within the next few weeks that enables developers to exercise more control over the pre-caching process. App developers […]
Some members of the advertising and marketing community are seeing a renewed interest in one of the oldest, least-loved marketing channels: the phone call. Customer call centers and direct phone sales are parts of a consumer funnel that many brands still try to avoid, according to Peter Christothoulou, CEO of Marchex, which provides software for […]
Mobile-first doesn’t mean mobile-only. That’s the thinking at mobile marketing automation company Leanplum. “You want to design a journey for customers that they find useful,” said Momchil Kyurkchiev, CEO and co-founder of Leanplum. The company announced $11.6 million in Series B on Wednesday, led by Kleiner Perkins and with participation from Shasta Ventures, bringing the company’s […]
Facebook has pulled the plug on a plan to limit device-level data collection for mobile app campaigns in the wake of a revolt by large app marketers against the policy change. A representative for the company confirmed to AdExchanger that Facebook will no longer stop app marketers – including some of the world’s largest mobile gaming […]
There’s nothing wrong with an 80% or 90% fill rate, unless you’re a cash-strapped medium-sized app developer. “That 10% or 20% can be a killer if you need the revenue,” said Anton Losman, chief product officer at DigitalClick, an indie dev studio with about 10 million downloads. Losman, who handles monetization for DigitalClick’s handful of apps, […]
Carriers are looking for additional sources of cash (see the AOL/Verizon merger), and zeotap, a Berlin-based platform that helps mobile network operators monetize their data, is angling to capitalize on that need. To do that, the company will use the majority of its $6 million in Series A, announced Tuesday, to fund international expansion into […]
Best practice No. 1: A tiny burger on a tiny screen isn’t going to convince anyone of anything. When Opera House, the creative strategy arm and ad lab under mobile ad platform Opera Mediaworks, consults with a brand or an agency on a mobile campaign, developing the right creative is the big thing – especially when […]
In the words of Andreessen Horowitz partner Benedict Evans, “Mobile is eating the world.” While the investor community grows dubious about the viability of ad tech, mobile startups still seem to be able to bring in the cash. Two such companies, app data and analytics firm PushSpring and deep-linking outfit Yozio, both announced Series A […]
While a new piece of mobile tech seems nifty, will it irritate consumers? It’s a deceptively simple question and one that Warren Zenna often has to ask himself. As EVP and managing director of Mobext US, the mobile arm of Havas Media Group, Zenna and his team are constantly presented with a steady and constant […]
What leads users to install an app is important, but what happens after the install is critical. That’s one of the main reasons behind attribution company TUNE’s purchase of real-time analytics and messaging startup Artisan Mobile, announced Thursday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Rumors about the buyout were first circulated by VentureBeat on July […]
In-app fraud is turning into another expensive headache for advertisers. According to research released Thursday by fraud detection firm Forensiq, programmatic in-app ad fraud was responsible for roughly $776 million worth of wasted budget in 2014, a number Forensiq projects will crack the $1 billion mark this year. That might seem like a relative drop […]
