Salesforce has shifted back into gear on ad tech M&A after a three-year quiet period. The company will snap up data management platform Krux in a move that could bring its marketing stack into closer parity with its archrival Oracle. The acquisition’s price tag is $700 million, a number that will put smiles on the faces […]
Business intel and anomaly detection tool Anodot is looking for what doesn’t make sense. “Traditional BI and visualization only gives you answers to the questions you think to ask, but when you’ve got a lot of data, doing that manually becomes almost mission impossible,” said Anodot CEO and co-founder David Drai. The company raised an […]
Banks, brokerages, insurance companies, mortgage providers and the like want to direct their advertising spend toward users they know will convert, which requires granular audience targeting. “The KPIs are just much more performance-oriented,” said Jordan Bick, VP of financial services at Pandora, which recently began working with financial services advertisers. “They want to know how […]
Advertising on Facebook and Google is a foregone conclusion for most brands. Hotel booking site Hotels.com does, of course. But it was also looking for an alternative. “There is bias in the walled gardens,” said Helen Cameron-Heslop, senior manager of ecommerce analytics at Expedia’s Hotels.com brand. On Wednesday, Hotels.com announced a year-long partnership with cross-device […]
There are walled gardens, and then there’s Arbor. The startup, which raised a $6.5 million round on Tuesday, bills itself as a marketplace for people-based data. Think of it as a supply-side platform mated with a co-op for deterministic data. The bulk of the round, led by Canaan Partners with participation from First Round Capital, […]
Breather, a startup that lets people book work spaces on demand, spends all of its digital ad budget on Google and Facebook – 65% and 35%, respectively – because Google and Facebook work. But figuring out why they work – and what effect they have on revenue per user, lifetime value and the overall customer journey – is another […]
ComScore replaced its CEO and rearranged its leadership team Wednesday amid an internal investigation of its accounting practices that started shortly after comScore and Rentrak completed their merger in February. Because of the ongoing investigation, which is being conducted with the help of independent counsel, comScore hasn’t reported Q1 or Q2 revenue. Co-founder Gian Fulgoni […]
MasterCard is partnering with location data company PlaceIQ to help retailers and merchants connect what people buy to where people go. The relationship, unveiled Wednesday, “paints a much richer picture than location or transaction insights can provide by themselves,” said Shubhra Srivastava, VP of media solutions at MasterCard. “Location data complements transaction-based insights and provides […]
Mary Hennen will speak at AdExchanger’s Omni.Digital conference in Chicago on September 8. At home design retailer The Tile Shop, “The very foundation of everything we’ve done is understand who our customers are, and who they’re not,” said Mary Hennen, VP of marketing and ecommerce. Minneapolis-based The Tile Shop has 117 locations in 31 states, and first-party data is […]
Merkle is introducing Publisher Addressable Marketplaces, which matches its advertisers’ CRM data with publishers’ subscriber data in order to target real people through partners like Pandora, Trusted Media Brands, Viant and LiveIntent. Publisher Addressable Marketplaces’ data onboarding and targeting capabilities are similar to Facebook’s hugely successful CRM matching program Custom Audiences, and its introduction comes […]
A survey of marketers found deterministic data is used more often and is more effective at driving revenue than probabilistic methods. But the line between the two has become blurred as more companies turn to a combined approach. The findings come from a “State of Identity Management” report from market research firm The Relevancy Group […]
Cross-channel marketing company Signal announced $30 million in fresh funding on Tuesday – seeming evidence that ad tech funding isn’t drying up for everyone. That brings Signal’s total funding to around $70 million since it was founded in 2009, including a $13.3 million round of venture capital in March. Raising funds hasn’t been a problem, […]
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 […]
It’s common for marketing to do its thing on one side of the room while product toils away on the other. Often they just ignore each other. Sometimes they clash. “Everyone felt the tension,” said Jeff Bordogna, VP of product at Relay Foods, a Virginia-based healthy online grocery retailer serving 12 regional markets across the […]
If the comments submitted to the Federal Communications Commission in response to its broadband privacy proposal are any indication, consumers feel a deep mistrust of the online ad industry. As Rick from Arizona declared: “There’s already too much theft of my personal information from internet advertising, etc. and it must be STOPPED.” The public comment […]
Viacom and American Express on Tuesday announced Vantage Intent – a Viacom product powered by AmEx – to help advertisers use purchase intent to find audiences across TV, digital and social. As a premium offering within the data and audience platform Viacom Vantage, Vantage Intent is designed to analyze roughly $1 trillion worth of AmEx’s […]
Location data newbie Unacast is looking to help mature the still nascent beacon market. The Norwegian startup, which aggregates beacon and sensor data across proximity solution providers, announced its $5 million Series A on Tuesday led by Open Ocean Capital and Investinor, bringing the company’s total funding to $6.6 million. Unacast will double its headcount […]
Companies like Google and Facebook arguably have access to far more consumer data than Internet service providers. So why does the Federal Communications Commission call out the broadband guys in its privacy proposal? The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law addressed that question at a hearing on Wednesday. The meeting was to discuss […]
The money keeps flowing to cross-device, and Drawbridge is the latest beneficiary, picking up $25 million in Series C on Thursday, led by Sequoia Capital. The new round brings Drawbridge’s total funding to $45.5 million since it was founded in 2010. The company will use a portion of its Series C to pursue more licensing […]
Transparency could be a way for brands to differentiate. Because building trust with consumers is about more than telling them why your brand is great and expecting them to just believe it. “Trust is earned in drops, but lost by the bucketful,” said Forrester principal analyst Fatemeh Khatibloo at Forrester’s Marketing Forum on Wednesday in […]
Indie data management platform Lotame has remained relatively quiet since the acquisition of cross-device tool AdMobius in 2014. Because Lotame rode out the wave of DMP consolidation between 2013 to 2014 (Oracle acquired BlueKai, Neustar snapped up Aggregate Knowledge and Rocket Fuel bought [x+1]), Lotame CEO Andy Monfried claims his company has one key advantage […]
The irony of digital marketing is that it has to justify itself because it can justify itself. If Michelle Weiskittel, manager of digital marketing at Albertsons Safeway, wants to get the budget to do her job, she must demonstrate as clear a connection as possible between online campaigns and actual sales. Print doesn’t carry that […]
With Oracle’s acquisition of Israeli cross-device vendor Crosswise on Thursday, the number of independent cross-device vendors is getting thin on the ground. Although Oracle declined to comment or disclose details around the transaction, The Times of Israel reported a deal price in the neighborhood of $50 million, citing a source with knowledge of the matter. […]
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Thursday formally approved its privacy proposal for Internet service providers, despite dissent from several commissioners. “It’s as if we all forgot how the Internet economy actually works today,” said FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly, who opposed the proposal aimed at curtailing how telcos and ISPs collect, share and monetize customer […]
Scale is becoming less of a differentiator among digital publishers – meaning they’ll soon have to focus on metrics like engagement. According to comScore’s “Cross-Platform Future in Focus” report, released Wednesday, 20% more digital media properties, including publishers and ecommerce sites, have topped 20 million uniques in the past year. That’s a total of 206 […]
All those telcos getting excited about tapping into their data just received a sober piece of news. On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposed a new set of rules that could put tough restrictions on how broadband providers use customer data. Data collection has been top-of-mind for telcos as they endeavor to monetize the […]
It’s been a busy 10 months since AdExchanger published its inaugural Marketer’s Guide to Cross-Device Identity. Since then the market has seen significant developments, including technology evolution, merger activity and shots across the bow from government regulators. Below, we pick up where we left off with an important update to our overview of the […]
Beacons might not work for every business. But for a company like Live Nation Entertainment, owner of ecom platform Ticketmaster and a bunch of major music festivals (Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo, C3, Electric Daisy), beacons offer significant value-add for sponsors. Following a two-year pilot, Live Nation this year will roll out a location-powered platform, designed to help […]
When IBM revealed Friday it had closed its deal (financial terms weren’t disclosed) for The Weather Co.’s product and tech business, it began setting expectations on how those assets will be used. There are two things to consider. First, The Weather Co. has digital publications that sell advertising. Second, it sits on a massive front […]
Walled gardens – everybody’s got ’em. In the US and most of Europe, it’s the usual suspects. In China, it’s what the cognoscenti refer to as the “BAT” companies: Baidu (think Google), Alibaba (think Amazon) and Tencent (think Facebook). And it makes cross-device quite the challenge. Although the BAT companies “all have cross-device applications which […]
