Commerce

Through a growing number of API partnerships, car service companies like Uber and Lyft are broadening their reach across the app ecosystem. “With the proliferation of companies in the rideshare space, we’ve [seen] huge demand for people to want to move around,” said Vishay Nihalani, senior product manager at Lyft. “It’s like a basic human need at this point.” […]

On the heels of Lyft’s first national TV spot that aired this spring, the ride-sharing app’s advertising efforts are still in overdrive. As a challenger to Uber, Lyft seeks to convert willing drivers and passengers in less-penetrated markets for the brand, such as New York, by combining big brand activations (TV and out-of-home) with smaller […]

Intent data for a hotel might look very different than it does for a shampoo manufacturer. Whereas luxury and travel marketers have direct access to transaction data that can be used to target and upsell customers, CPG manufacturers often sell at the SKU level through retailers, which retain the purchase data. CPG advertisers need granular […]

Salesforce dropped $2.8 billion on ecommerce platform Demandware on Wednesday, which will underpin the creation of Salesforce’s latest business line: Commerce Cloud. The deal catapults Salesforce into the ecommerce space – a tech category largely dominated by enterprise competitors like SAP/hybris and IBM/WebSphere, though Salesforce first dabbled in ecommerce in 2012, when it acquired site […]

Since its split from PayPal – and the $925 million divesture of its enterprise technology business last summer – eBay has been relatively silent. But judging by its latest quarterly earnings in late April, eBay is busy rethinking its business strategy. The ecommerce marketplace surpassed some analysts’ expectations when it posted a 6% revenue increase […]

When Amazon debuted its Video Direct service on Tuesday, the media hailed it as a rival to YouTube. Video Direct lets content creators post and monetize video directly on Amazon’s Video and Prime platforms. Amazon isn’t commenting beyond the release, but there’s no standalone platform and the only launch partners are media publishers, film studios […]

After completing his first full quarter as CEO of performance marketing company Criteo, Eric Eichmann seems confident. Criteo had “very strong top-line growth,” Eichmann told AdExchanger ahead of the company’s Q1 earnings call on Wednesday. Revenue was up 41% year-over-year to $162 million at constant currency minus traffic acquisition costs and that performance was consistent across […]

If marketing is the creative visionary of a big brand, procurement is its practical, strict counterpart. Marketing wants to spend big on the big idea, and procurement wants to save as much as possible. The two often can’t see eye to eye – and marketing budgets suffer. At the ANA’s Financial Management Conference in Boca […]

Updated with statement from Amazon. Amazon’s forthcoming $8.99-a-month subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service offers strong new competition to Netflix and Hulu. Will it include advertising as well? Not at first, but there is an internal debate at Amazon around the proper role of ads in its video offering. According to one source with knowledge of Amazon’s […]

At Amazon Media Group (AMG), sometimes the objective isn’t to sell advertisers more ads. AMG has a lesser-known service – ecommerce marketing – where it might evaluate a partner’s broader retail health and the roles contextual elements (e.g., Amazon product detail pages), third-party placements or product availability play in the path to conversion. “You can’t […]

OwnerIQ’s unique second-party data-sharing model, where it acts as media buyer and data broker between retailers and manufacturing brands, is showing signs of breaking through the initial skepticism which accompanied second-party marketing. The Boston-based company’s $40 million revenue from 2006 to late 2014 pales compared to its $60 million spike in 2015. Second-party data involves […]

Call it the holistic grail: the ability to connect advertising, ecommerce activity and in-store buying with a single measurement. No one’s filled that gap yet, but a bunch of companies are taking incremental steps. Earlier this month the location analytics shop Placed added a product for attributing in-store lift to its suite. Then last week […]

Cardlytics, which, in its first iteration, fueled card-linked offers for banks and financial services firms, is opening up new ways to monetize around the private bank channel. The company, which sits on transactional data spanning 109 million accounts in the US alone, is eyeing longer-term deals with agency holding groups. It’s also beefing up demand […]

There’s a world of difference between achieving mass reach and engagement in multiplatform video. Just ask Stephanie Horbaczewski, CEO of the fashion and beauty multichannel video network (MCN) StyleHaul. StyleHaul was among the first YouTube MCNs to join larger companies (Maker/Disney, Fullscreen/AT&T and Chernin Group, Collective/ProSieben) when German broadcast giant RTL Group purchased a majority […]

MediaMath on Wednesday announced a new business unit, named Helix, meant to translate the company’s existing retail data assets into a unified product offering. The move follows a string of MediaMath investments in consumer data, beginning with the acquisition of Adroit Interactive in 2010 and continuing with the purchase of Akamai’s Advertising Decision Solutions (later rebranded […]

Q4 ecommerce sales were marked by a strong increase in transaction volume and a spike in mobile conversions, a smattering of retail reports shows. Among specific retailers, Amazon was the runaway winner (no surprise there) and brick-and-mortar players may emerge as losers, if an early glum report from Macy’s is any indicator. Amazon reported dramatic […]

The remnants of eBay Enterprise (which, despite the name, is no longer owned by eBay) is seeking to plant a stake in “post-click” commerce. This is why its private equity owner Sterling Partners merged eBay Enterprise, back in November, with a commerce tech company in its portfolio called Innotrac. The combined entity will be rebranded […]

David R. Bell is a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. He will present his research at the upcoming Industry Preview 2016 conference in January at a session on the confluence of digital marketing and the real world. By day, David R. Bell is a professor of marketing at […]

Programmatic email platform LiveIntent has acquired Mojn, a Copenhagen-based data onboarding company, following LiveIntent’s recent acquisition of the European recommendation engine AVARI. Terms were undisclosed. All 12 of Mojn’s employees, a majority of whom are data scientists, will join LiveIntent, said Matt Keiser, LiveIntent’s founder and CEO. The acquisition will support LiveIntent’s international expansion, an […]

With turkeys almost in the oven, retailers and ecommerce companies are hoping the investments they’ve made all year long in audience segmentation, mobile tech and cross-channel measurement will pay off in the make-or-break holiday season. Ecommerce in particular is looking to benefit from the maturation of ongoing retail and ecommerce trends – such as offline […]

Digital marketers spend a disproportionate amount of budget during the holiday season – but is all that cash actually generating incremental sales? Jewelry brands spend more in Q4, roughly 60% of their annual spend, than they do in the other three quarters of the year combined, based on analysis from Nielsen. Toy brands spend around 56% […]

Marketers are known for demanding ROI and previous results before they embrace new strategies, but they’re going all-in on the assumption that mobile will be a far more prosperous channel this year than in previous holiday seasons. Industry analysts like eMarketer project a strong holiday for retailers, with mobile commerce expected to grow 32.2% over […]

If someone asked you to rattle off the big buzzwords in media, it’s a pretty good bet mobile, native ads and programmatic would be somewhere near the top of your list. Google has just knocked down all three in a single gesture, allowing its publisher customers to expose native ad inventory in their mobile apps to buyers […]

If late-year sales are particularly important to you, then your holiday strategy and product development should now be entering its final lap. What remains is a race to retain customers coming in during the blitz of holiday marketing. “The actual user connections should be in place before the holidays, not just a strategy,” said Richard […]

Deep-linking vendor Button announced the Button Marketplace on Thursday in an attempt to sustain the mobile app world without the need for digital ad dollars. “It’s an entirely different paradigm for apps,” said Michael Jaconi, Button’s co-founder and CEO. “You can’t capitalize on search and intent in this world like you did for the web.” […]

The realm of brick-and-mortar retail data has been steadily absorbed by digital technology in recent years, and that trend took another step forward on Wednesday with the launch of the Cross Device Marketplace by Placed, an in-store attribution firm. While Facebook and Google have put considerable effort into developing retail-specific solutions, Placed founder and CEO […]

Build-A-Bear Workshop, the children’s specialty retailer with strong roots in American shopping malls, is getting a facelift. Plagued by the realities of brick and mortar retail—Build-A-Bear was in a slump with steady profit declines, but has more recently ignited a comeback in sales—the company is transitioning away from its focus on traditional retailing. Instead, it’s […]

HookLogic raised $15.5 million in Series C funding and will sell AutoHook, a suite of lead-gen and marketing tools designed for automotive companies, the company announced Thursday. Terms of the AutoHook sale to auto consultancy firm Urban Science were not disclosed. In addition to previous investors Bain Capital and Intel Capital, this funding round included […]

The wonderful thing about ordering food online is that you can get what you want quickly and accurately, without ever once talking to the indifferent high school stoner taking your order through a choppy phone connection. It’s like consumer nirvana, and it certainly explains why restaurants delight in talking about their upgraded ordering systems. Case […]

Consumer packaged goods companies, historically big TV spenders, are moving money to digital video. MyWebGrocer, an ecommerce platform and ad network for grocers and CPGs, is witnessing this shift. The company, which manages $40 million in digital media spend and which helps CPG advertisers target ads based on its retail partners’ first-party data, has built […]