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 […]
A few years ago, industry observers wondered if retailers would survive in the face of ecommerce competition. Now it’s become apparent that brick-and-mortar companies have not only weathered the storm, they’ve emerged as a kind technology platform for vendors to build on. But despite numerous startups catering to retailers, there aren’t any major players like […]
Consumer packaged-goods startup Hello Products is combining TV with offline activations to create a competitive edge for its oral care products. As a challenger to household names like Crest and Colgate, Hello aims to differentiate its ethos through natural formulas and bright and alluring packaging. The brand is now activating digital video and TV with […]
When Alison Lewis joined Johnson & Johnson as its first-ever consumer marketing chief in 2013, the purveyor of popular baby-care products like No More Tears and the ubiquitous Band-Aid, was at a crossroads as a company. “We had really great marketers and agency partners, but we realized we needed a unified approach to brand-building for […]
While affiliate marketing is hardly new – perhaps you’ve heard of Google and Amazon – for some publishers its real value comes from the data and optimization it enables, as opposed to the incremental revenue it generates. At least, this is what Alicia Navarro, CEO and co-founder of content monetization company Skimlinks, was led to […]
Pinterest’s advertising business took its next step toward scale with the official launch of its ads API on Thursday. The ads API, which Pinterest introduced in beta in April, comes on the heels of a flurry of brand-focused products from the social platform, including an imminent buy button, a content API for businesses to manage […]
Macy’s, Walmart, Best Buy: all brick-and-mortar giants looking to go multichannel. But what about the smaller shop owners that don’t have the resources to invest in and maintain digital presences? Many young ecommerce providers are aggregating small businesses into a single, online bazaar. If you’re an independent retailer, these service providers can give you the […]
In 2012, Target had to swallow a few hard truths. Its digital platform relied solely on third-party code and it had little to no engineering talent in-house. And it was playing catch-up with mobile. “My focus has been on moving toward an agile product model where we rewrote our code [over three years] for about […]
Amazon has an ever-growing deluge of data that it’s putting toward a trio of ad units and new consumer-facing projects. In addition to Sponsored Products, Product Ads and Sponsored Links, which underpin its nearly $1 billon advertising business, Amazon is testing numerous consumer features designed to strengthen its ecommerce data set with search activity. “Amazon […]
Retailers might look like they’re under siege, according to Gartner VP and analyst Andrew Frank, but they’re actually sitting on a pile of “underleveraged data.” Unfortunately, much of this data isn’t digestible by marketing technologists. In February, The University of Minnesota published a report demonstrating the causal relationship between search engine advertising and local in-store […]
EBay rolled out the beta version of Promoted Listings on Tuesday, a self-serve cost-per-sale ad product, to select eBay Stores merchants. Promoted Listings, which will be widely available in June, appear in desktop and mobile searches and are optimized based on past searches or purchase propensities. They loosely mimic Google’s Shopping Ads (formerly known as Product […]
Most people think of Overstock.com solely as a discount ecommerce retailer, which is no surprise considering the company ranks No. 31 in Internet Retailer’s recent list of the nation’s biggest e-tailers. But Overstock also features a range of services beyond ecommerce that aren’t intended to be revenue generators, but are instead designed to turn general […]
Because a dress at Intermix will likely cost you in the four-digit range, the Gap-owned fashion retailer incorporates the needs of discriminating consumers into its commerce marketing strategy. Last Easter and Passover an asset allocation team moved product from Intermix’s flagship Madison Avenue store to high-end vacation spots like Bal Harbour in Miami to meet […]
Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba has replaced CEO Jonathan Lu, effective May 10. Announced Thursday during its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call, the company revealed incumbent COO Daniel Zhang would be promoted to CEO while Lu will continue on as vice chairman of the board of directors. Zhang, an eight-year Alibaba vet and original founding member, has held […]
Finally. British grocer Tesco’s customer data science and loyalty division dunnhumby, reportedly on the market for several months now as its parent company explored “strategic options,” will transfer many of its employees and data assets to Tesco’s US-based joint venture partner Kroger. Under the transaction, “dunnhumby Ltd and Kroger will replace their existing exclusive joint venture with a […]
For the first time, Amazon extracted its lucrative Amazon Web Services (AWS) business from its “Other” category, which traditionally included co-branded credit cards and advertising services. When coupled with AWS, the category came in at about $1 billion each quarter. As it turns out, Amazon’s North American ads business brought in $187 million in Q1, a 22% […]
Jet.com, the stealth upstart from Marc Lore, the man who sold vertical ecommerce company Quidsi – parent of Diapers.com, Soap.com and BeautyBar.com – to Amazon for $545 million in 2010, wants to remake the commerce model. Primed to launch in late spring, Jet.com seeks to democratize the Amazon marketplace model. Buyers who subscribe for $49.99 […]
Razorfish Global is updating its media strategy. Or, more specifically, it’s complementing its expertise in customer experience design and commerce with media. “Historically, the organization has gone after standalone media RFPs,” said Razorfish Global Chief Strategy Officer Scott Sorokin. “We can’t win against a media company. We have to pivot around technology and experiences – […]
Linking up internal data assets is a great start – but while this can lead to nifty business results, it also has the potential to disrupt numerous employees and departments within a company. Brand marketers from Macy’s, Sephora and Walmart told their stories about combining customer and marketing data sets during a panel at LiveRamp’s […]
If data is currency, then eBay’s ecommerce marketplace is a bank. But what of eBay Enterprise, the marketing services division that eBay hopes to spin off? While the eBay marketplace has 155 million active users, generated $2.3 billion in Q4 and fields mobile apps that helped transact $20 billion in sales last year, eBay Enterprise […]
Michael Jaconi, CEO of freshly funded mobile commerce startup Button, sees untapped opportunity in the app economy. Specifically, he’s tailoring Button’s Deep-Link Commerce Platform as a utility to help encourage ongoing app usage rather than a one-time app install ad. Uber is among the company’s customers. With a new $12 million Series A round in […]
Single life nears for PayPal as it approaches its emancipation from parent company eBay, a split ostensibly designed to let each company play to its unique strengths. “PayPal will always be vitally important to the success of eBay and vice versa,” said Robert Clarkson, VP, GM, North America, merchant and retail solutions at PayPal, in […]
Instead of investing $25,000 to create a couple of different marketing segments, online luggage retailer eBags wants to invest only a couple thousand to create about 50 different segments. It’s part of eBags’ move from demographics to psychographics, one of many ways it’s refining its approach to digital advertising. Around since the dot-com boom and […]
AppLovin is growing at a blistering pace, but Wall Street investors remain cautious about the business.
High-end ad blockers mimic some of the same behavior as bot traffic. So WiseGuyGaming repurposed the tools it was already using to identify bots to reveal its ad-blocking audience as well.
Criteo has weathered considerable storms in its day, including a painful moment in March 2020 when its market cap bottomed out below $500 million. Can it pull off yet another turnaround?
Disaffection and outright anger toward US sports institutions run deeper than logo-cluttered fields. Leagues and teams are sacrificing player safety and fan enjoyment for marketing dollars.
People Inc.’s referral traffic from Google search is down 70% over the past two years, and by 26% in Q3 alone. But its digital revenue is still growing, albeit slowly.
On Tuesday, Chord, a six-year-old commerce tech startup, acquired Zenlytic, an AI startup with an anthropomorphized data analyst agent named “Zoë,” for $5 million.
