Identity

XAd only wants advertisers to get paid if someone actually walks in the door. On Thursday, the location-based mobile ad network said it would allow brands to transact on a cost-per-visit (CPV) basis. Advertisers will be able to make media buys based on foot traffic-related KPIs and only pay for performance. It’s an appealing proposition […]

Are some marketers approaching cross-device backward? Tom Laband, CEO and co-founder of mobile data marketplace adsquare, thinks so. “We see many advertisers start with cookie-derived data and bridge that to mobile IDs using cross-device vendors – and to me, that doesn’t make sense,” Laband said Thursday at a company event in New York City. Device IDs, […]

Most marketers know they need data management platforms and a growing number have either already implemented one or plan to do so soon. Yet marketers in some industries, such as manufacturing and education, are seriously lagging in DMP adoption, according to a survey released Tuesday by market research firm The Relevancy Group. Forty-one percent of […]

This is the latest installment in “PII,” a series featuring the talent that makes the wheels turn in our data-driven advertising world. Read previous interviews with talent from Mindshare, Mediavest | Spark, Razorfish, Essence, INNOCEAN and Clear Channel Outdoor. Former Brightroll and Amazon exec Craig Whitmer recently joined location data company Placed as VP of programmatic. Placed “measures what people do […]

Turn is settling with the Federal Trade Commission for its part in the Verizon zombie cookie debacle. It’s been nearly two years since it was first revealed that the demand-side platform was using Verizon’s unique identifier header (UIDH) for tracking purposes even if a user had opted out of being tracked. On Tuesday, the FTC […]

While the online advertising trade groups have created anti-fraud programs and exchanges have instituted inventory standards, fraud is still on the rise. AdExchanger reached out to some of the people in the trenches about where the digital ad tech and media ecosystem stands now and how progress can be made. Click below for their responses. […]

Despite skyrocketing mobile traffic and climbing mobile conversion rates, British airline Monarch was struggling to determine precisely what was or wasn’t working for mobile media buys. “We persistently got all the data in and still faced the question: What about mobile?” said Robert Foulkes, senior marketing manager for the low-cost airline. Monarch was among the […]

Convenience store chain QuickChek is placing location at the center of its digital strategy. It wants to prove that digital spend leads to foot traffic, said Eric Rush, digital marketing manager at QuickChek, which operates 140 retail locations across New Jersey and New York state. QuickChek only started to seriously invest in digital channels roughly […]

People-based marketing is the natural evolution of data onboarding, according to LiveRamp, the data onboarder owned by Acxiom. On Wednesday, LiveRamp launched IdentityLink, which aims to resolve a single identity across different online and offline touch points. It’s an extension of what LiveRamp already does, said CEO Travis May. LiveRamp’s bread and butter has always been […]

Investors are bullish on location. “We think there is a lot of promise in location,” said Anders Richardson, managing director of Palisades Growth and an xAd board member, speaking at an xAd event in New York City on Thursday. “It’s amazing to me what it allows marketers to do.” In other words, providing a conduit […]

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 […]

WPP’s GroupM upended the industry’s mutual viewability standard back in 2014, when it promised to buy only 100% in-view ads for clients. Now it’s created an executive position to enforce that standard in all of its markets as well as to shield clients from a slew of other brand safety issues presented by digital advertising. […]

Early Wednesday morning, a week after the initial US launch of Pokémon Go, a small milling crowd formed outside Barney Greengrass, an iconic Upper West Side Jewish deli and a “PokéStop” – a real-world location anchored in the augmented reality game interface. It’s not unusual for queues to form for bagels and smoked fish, but […]

Augmented reality seems to have hit its mainstream stride with the runaway popularity of Pokémon Go, and users are having a blast – but location-based marketers are also getting pretty stoked. “This is like the best high-profile marketing campaign for location intelligence that anyone could ask for,” said Foursquare president Steven Rosenblatt. For those living under […]

As fraudsters get smarter, anti-fraud players must evolve to put up a worthy fight. To scale its fraud detection capabilities, viewability and verification measurement vendor Integral Ad Science (IAS) has acquired bot detection company Swarm. Terms of the deal, which was announced Friday, were not disclosed. “Fraud is not going away, it’s getting more sophisticated,” […]

Facebook, which recently took the wraps off a tool that lets advertisers link location-aware ads to store visits, may have more than 1.5 billion users, but scale isn’t the only prerequisite for cracking offline attribution. “My question for Facebook would be: Do they know the spatial outlines of every McDonald’s in America?” said Duncan McCall, […]

Advertisers don’t have a strong enough grip on the technological ecosystem to make informed buying decisions, agreed leaders of several leading ad organizations at AdExchanger’s Clean Ads IO conference. Panelists from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) got on stage in New […]

Cardlytics, which helps advertisers like Starbucks activate audience data from bank partners like Bank of America, Citibank and PNC, is working with Drawbridge to assess how cross-device exposures affect online and in-store purchases. Drawbridge is the first cross-device platform to access Cardlytics Measurement, a tool that gauges metrics like average basket size and the view […]

Blood in the water brings sharks, and high CPMs bring bots. And political spenders, who often outbid brands on targeted inventory, are uniquely vulnerable to digital fraud and bots. “All the ingredients that typically happen for fraud are a part of the political marketplace,” said Mark Schlosser, senior sales director at the ad fraud security […]

Dutch cross-device data vendor Screen6 has been flying under the radar and avoided the Nielsen verification route like its well-known competition. Last year, Tapad (recently acquired by Norwegian telco Telenor) and Drawbridge had the accuracy of their device graphs evaluated by Nielsen, coming in at 91.2% and 97.3%, respectively. Screen6 CEO and co-founder David de […]

The promise of location data is one thing. The undeniable issues around scale and inaccuracy that come along with it are another. “No one disputes that the accuracy and quality of physical data is way below average,” said mobile tech vet Chris Cunningham, who on Wednesday took the reins as CRO of beacon and proximity […]

There’s an opportunity around location that extends beyond targeting consumers with ads for mayonnaise or corn flakes when they’re walking down an aisle in a grocery store. “The location data opportunity is still unfolding,” said Tracey Scheppach, EVP of precision video at Publicis Groupe’s Starcom MediaVest. “As agencies start to get smart about things like […]

Macy’s is getting experimental with location data. “Location data can help us move from cross-device to omnichannel,” said Kimberly Yarnell, VP of digital media at Macy’s, speaking at the Mobile Marketing Association’s mobile location leadership forum on Thursday in New York City. “I like to think about location as being the key to providing context […]

When Heineken moved more of its advertising budget to digital video, it didn’t see results. “Digital never rose to the top [in marketing mix models], in an almost mind-boggling way,” said Ron Amram, VP of media for Heineken USA. But Heineken knew its audience was moving to digital environments, so it didn’t want to leave […]

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 […]

Location data is buzzing at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. “Where you go is who you are,” said Daniel Rosen, global director of advertising at Telefónica, speaking at an MWC Mobile Media Summit (MMS) satellite event. “[It’s] hugely powerful.” That’s coming from a carrier with its own mobile exchange, Axonix, an audience buying platform fueled […]

Best practices and policies to deal with fraud and botnets are emerging, but ad tech companies aren’t sharing them with each other – partially because they don’t want their secrets to slip out to fraudsters, and partially because ad fraud detection is a competitive differentiator. As a result, companies are developing their own policies and […]

Brands are experimenting with proximity marketing, but consumers aren’t always willing to give up their location data. As Pew noted in a recent study on privacy and information sharing: “Location data seems especially precious in the age of the smartphone.” Spam, the risk of data breaches, overdone customer profiling and data being collected for one […]

Some people might describe Foursquare’s shift from location-based social network to a purveyor of location data as a pivot. But Steven Rosenblatt, newly appointed president of Foursquare, prefers the term “evolution.” “We’ve been building the world’s largest location intelligence data company for some time,” said Rosenblatt, who came to Foursquare in 2012 after several years […]

AskMen is firmly in the pro-platform camp among publishers. The men’s website, born during the dot-com boom, now looks to platforms, not SEO, as a way to gain audience and increase recognition. The king of those platforms is Facebook, where video posts earn the publisher millions of views. AskMen, which is owned by Ziff Davis, […]