Instagram is shopping for its share of holiday dollars. On Thursday, Facebook’s much-cooler sibling added three new features designed to help people browse, discover and save items more easily. A lot must happen before someone buys, and while shopping can be a by-product of spending time on Instagram, people aren’t there to fill their cart […]
Google Ad Manager is the dominant SSP, according to Advertiser Perceptions’ 2018 Programmatic Intelligence Report. But, the 154 publishers surveyed also valued platforms in areas like proactively shared insights and reporting – categories where Google didn’t perform as well as its competitors. “Google is the clear leader,” said Kevin Mannion, chief strategy officer at Advertiser […]
It’s been a tough year for Snap, as its stock tanks and its executive team flees the ship. Despite growing revenue 43% in Q3 to a record $298 million, Snap’s stock hit an all-time low in September of $10 per share. Snapchat is also bleeding daily active users after rolling out an unpopular redesign and facing increasing competition from Instagram. “Snap is struggling to […]
The news feed is still a money-printing machine for core Facebook. But people aren’t sharing like they used to – Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser used Nielsen data to detect that consumption on core Facebook, including Messenger, was down 13% in September – and now Facebook is putting its faith into what it hopes will […]
The B2B martech space is heating up as titans spend billions to build their stacks – and now it’s makeover time at LinkedIn. On Monday, LinkedIn opened the public beta for a revamped version of Campaign Manager, the self-service tool advertisers use to manage and measure campaigns on its platform. The idea is “to make it […]
Pinterest is growing its ad inventory with a new promoted carousel format, which moved out of beta on Thursday. Carousels, which allow advertisers to include up to five images within a single format, can appear within the Pinterest main feed as a related pin recommendation or through search. Users tap the cover image and then […]
Even the mighty miss on revenue – but Facebook is still raking it in per user and Stories monetization across platforms is just getting started. Facebook reported $13.73 billion in revenue for the third quarter on Tuesday, $40 million less than what analysts expected. It’s Facebook’s second earnings miss in a row. But Facebook now […]
Starting Oct. 30, Google will make parallel tracking the default way to run third-party tracking for Google search and shopping ads. It’ll become mandatory for display and video ads by March 2019. For now, only Chrome traffic will use parallel tracking, with other operating systems and browsers to be added throughout the rest of the […]
Snap may have invented the Stories format, but Instagram Stories are attracting most of the ad spend. The two main reasons why sits at the heart of an existential dilemma for Snap: its audience and its scale. Snap’s youthful users are one of the platform’s primary selling points at the same time they’re a potential […]
Although Alphabet’s revenue grew 21% to $33.7 billion in Q3, that fell short of its target, sending its stock sliding 4.5% in after-hours trading Thursday. “We feel good about the underlying strength in the ads business,” said Google CFO Ruth Porat, noting that Google is investing in machine learning to further improve its ads business […]
Last quarter, Twitter’s stock got hammered after user growth stagnated, despite its solid financial results. But analysts appear ready to stop punishing Twitter for its user numbers. Although Twitter shed 4 million users in the third quarter year over year – monthly actives now total 326 million – the company’s stock grew nearly 3% in premarket trading […]
Putting together a sponsored content program is a time-consuming headache for buyers and publishers. BrandVerge, a marketplace where buyers can browse publishers’ sponsored content options, aims to make it faster and easier to create sponsored content deals. The platform claims to shorten the deal-making process by an average of 67%. Smaller agencies and direct-to-consumer brands […]
What kind of stories do people in market for a luxury SUV read? Forbes is answering that question using data, not a gut feeling, so brands can buy sponsorships and branded content based on what resonates with an audience. That question was once impossible to answer. Publishers would know, for instance, if readers indexed highly […]
Oracle kicked off its OpenWorld conference Monday by introducing a customer data platform (CDP) to connect disparate data sources and a subscription management product to capitalize on the blossoming subscription economy. The CDP, CX Unity, is now pre-integrated with the Oracle Customer Experience (UX) Cloud and is designed to tie marketers’ first-party data to anonymous third-party offline […]
Sovrn closed a $25 million Series E round Thursday to help it acquire companies outside of ad tech. Sovrn’s original investors, led by Foundry Group, all participated in the round. “Our business is 100% focused on tools and technologies that help publishers – of which advertising is an important one,” said Sovrn CEO Walter Knapp. […]
Facebook has been going full tilt since March to convince advertisers and consumers alike that it’s a safe platform on which to spend money and time. On Wednesday, for example, Facebook said it’s further reducing the distribution of low-quality, spammy ads within its auction. Advertisers with multiple low-quality ads – those that contain sensational language, for […]
Six top ad exchanges are asking the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) to referee auction dynamics. The CEOs of OpenX, PubMatic, Rubicon Project, Sovrn, SpotX and Telaria collectively signed a letter to advertisers and publishers outlining principles of transparency, efficiency and fair-market practices. They want to clearly state what’s acceptable and what’s not to restore trust […]
What do an international pop group, the creator of “American Idol,” Cirque du Soleil and actor Clive Owen have in common? SAP. “Marketers in the B2B space have to realize one very simple and fundamental thing: We are all human beings,” said Alicia Tillman, SAP’s chief marketing officer. “We as B2B marketers need to speak […]
Facebook’s Marketing Partner (FMP) program is getting a bit of a facelift with the addition of new badge categories and tools to help with measurement and creative. Hundreds of tech companies, agencies and consultants jammed into the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City on Wednesday to get the skinny at Facebook’s sixth global marketing partner […]
The third-party cookie isn’t crumbling so much as imploding. In a Friday email to advertisers and publishers, Facebook said that on Oct. 24 it will start offering a first-party cookie option for the Facebook tracking pixel so that businesses can keep targeting their ads and measuring their campaigns without relying on third-party cookies. Facebook confirmed […]
Brian O’Kelley’s departure as CEO of AppNexus surprised few in the industry who know him. His sharp opinions and independent mindset made him an ad tech provocateur and a fearless leader. But that same personality seemed incompatible with taking a subservient role to Xandr CEO Brian Lesser within the AT&T mega-corporation. After all, this is […]
Facebook has been aggressively pushing its non-core apps to make money, a decision that caused friction between the mothership and the founders of WhatsApp and Instagram, all of whom have recently left the building. So, where does that leave Messenger – a homegrown app with over 1.3 billion users that, thankfully for Facebook, has no […]
MediaMath will stop buying from supply partners that play auction games, preferring to create an economic incentive for fair, transparent programmatic auctions and put an end to auction manipulation. The DSP sent an open letter Wednesday morning to its 50 directly integrated suppliers. The full letter is reproduced at the end of this article. “Auction […]
Facebook may have to roll out a “sorry” button. In the meantime, there’s Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s global head of marketing solutions. After revelations last week about questionable data-sharing practices capped off by a large data breach, Everson was invited to kick off Advertising Week in New York City on Monday and address Facebook’s most recent […]
Six exchanges and a handful of top publishers who work with Index Exchange’s wrapper say they consistently notice anomalies indicating the exchange prioritizes itself. At least two of those exchanges are composing a letter to Index Exchange CEO Andrew Casale threatening to withdraw from its wrapper unless it takes steps to ensure neutrality, AdExchanger has […]
Jay Seideman will present on programmatic best practices at AdExchanger’s upcoming Programmatic IO New York conference on Oct. 15-16. AT&T’s new advertising and analytics unit, Xandr, is capturing the headlines and Amazon is on its way to making the duopoly a trio – but don’t count out Oath. The Verizon-owned digital media company is avidly […]
Although M&A for data-driven companies slowed before the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation took effect, Salesforce charged ahead. The CRM giant dropped $6.5 billion on middleware firm MuleSoft in March. It followed with a reported $800 million acquisition of data integration company Datorama, which closed Aug. 20. A month later, multiple Salesforce customers are already […]
AT&T’s promise to connect data, technology, distribution and content to make advertising better for all constituents is exciting. So exciting, in fact, that industry executives from both the buy and sell sides gathered in support of the idea at the Relevance conference in Santa Barbara, Calif., this week, willing to help make it happen. But […]
Two multibillion-dollar acquisitions and one Justice Department lawsuit later, AT&T’s advertising and analytics unit finally has a name: Xandr. AT&T revealed the brand at its Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara, Calif., Tuesday, a debutante ball for the new unit that gathered 300 top advertising and media executives at the lavish Ritz-Carlton Bacara. The name pays […]
Augmented reality is about to hit its stride thanks to large media platforms, which are leading the way. Snap was early, but over the past 12 to 18 months, Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Alibaba and others have all made big bets on AR by either investing in companies or creating (some might argue copying) […]
