Identity

Digital ad fraud has lately gained mainstream awareness, and many marketers at leading brands now realize the threat that fraud poses to their ability to track online advertising. A Wall Street Journal piece last week chronicled concerns at organizations like L’Oreal, General Motors and Verizon Communications. Fortunately for marketers, as the bad guys are shifting their […]

Advertising intelligence provider Integral Ad Science has acquired Simplytics, a UK-based mobile ad server and analytics platform. The deal brings mobile verification capabilities for in-app and mobile Web campaigns to Integral’s existing verification services for video and display ads. “We’re very excited because Simplytics is complementary to what we do and once we add our fraud […]

Pushing hyperlocal mobile advertisements is becoming increasingly viable for businesses as tech giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter, as well as startups, enter the space. One such hyperlocal ad startup is Thinknear, which was acquired by GPS solutions provider Telenav for $22.5 million last year. AdExchanger spoke with Thinknear CEO Eli Portnoy about the evolution […]

The belief that cookies don’t work on handhelds or tablets, requiring an alternative tracking mechanism, oversimplifies the complex problem of mobile tracking. While advertisers cannot use third-party cookies to track mobile users the same way they would a desktop user, cookies can indeed be applied to an extent in a mobile environment. And while many […]

Location-based technology has come a long way from geofences. As mobile usage grows, location data has become more granular, providing marketers with greater opportunities to fine-tune their messages—but it has also created more complications. Apple, for example, switched on its iBeacon technology on Friday to send customers’ tailored messages depending on their exact location in […]

French retargeting firm Criteo announced on Tuesday the launch of a mobile Web tracking solution designed to let marketers deliver targeted ads to consumers across mobile browsers. Criteo’s mobile Web solution (the company has said it is still in the process of developing a branded name for the product) allows marketers to serve personalized ads […]

The value that Salesforce.com’s solutions bring to marketers, customer experience managers, and sales staff is well-established. But what can Salesforce.com offer for online advertisers? Within the various acquired companies that constitute Salesforce.com’s ExactTarget Marketing Cloud — recently integrated with the Salesforce1 platform — is Social.com. Social.com was made possible when social media commerce company Buddy Media […]

While location-based ad delivery was once limited strictly to geofencing, the ability to combine device identifiers, geographic coordinates, and customer history data has added sophistication to location targeting. PlaceIQ is one of the latest companies attempting to introduce more value into location advertising via two product roll-outs last Friday. PIQ Analytics and PreVisit are designed […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Alex White, general manager of data and trading at DG Peer39. Fraud has always been the online industry’s open secret. There are varying estimates as to its total costs, with […]

Location data is often touted as the key to unlocking the targeting opportunities in mobile ads. How to best leverage location data varies by company, however. For JiWire—a 10-year-old firm that started out as a Wi-Fi hotspot provider—the answer lies in layering data over customized audience segments. AdExchanger talked to JiWire President David Staas. AdExchanger: […]

As the mobile ad market grows, so do the stakes for providing contextually relevant ads. Geo-targeted ads on mobile devices are getting a boost from companies like Google, Foursquare and Twitter, which are in various stages of rolling out new ad units that leverage location data. In a blog post yesterday, Google announced ads will […]

As mobile usage grows, so do demands for location-based ads. Helping advertisers optimize their location data has become a highly lucrative space, finds Gil Elbaz, founder of Applied Semantics (which turned into Google’s AdSense) and the startup Factual. AdExchanger talked to Elbaz about the growth of location-based ads and Factual’s latest products, Geopulse Audience and […]

Disagreements continue between the advertising industry and privacy advocates as advertisers point to potential weaknesses in the “Cookie Clearinghouse” project that Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser, and the Stanford Center for Internet and Society’s have unveiled. The Cookie Clearinghouse promises to create two lists of domains: one for those that browsers would permit to […]

“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Eric Picard, CEO at Rare Crowds. For the last few years, Mike Shields over at Adweek has done a great job of calling out bad actors in our space.  He’s […]

Mozilla, maker of the Firefox web browser, must fix three areas within its third-party-cookie-blocking patch before it can be rolled out to users, according to Stanford graduate student Jonathan Mayer, who developed the patch. The problematic areas involve “underblocking,” i.e. inadvertently allowing unwanted tracking cookies past Firefox’s cookie blocking patch, Mayer explained in a blog […]

Mozilla has postponed activating the third-party blocking feature on its latest browser, Firefox 22, according to an update on its developer page.  The blocking feature has been postponed “to collect data on the effect of blocking some third-party cookies,” according to the blog post. A Mozilla spokesperson provided the following statement: “Mozilla has been actively […]

Location analytics company Placed is now offering a ranking system for brick-and-mortar retailers, restaurants and other destinations, based on data from its Placed Panels and Placed Affiliate programs. In March 2013, McDonald’s was the top US business based on the number of visitors, while Applebee’s and Sonic Drive-In both saw increases in their rankings compared […]

Using customer data to personalize or optimize individuals’ website experiences can increase conversion and customer satisfaction, yet a majority of digital marketing professionals do not prioritize it, according to two recent studies from Adobe and Econsultancy. As marketers leverage more digital tools, turning to real-time behavioral and existing customer data helps segment website visitors and […]

“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Bodhi Short, SVP of Operations & Product Development at Integrate. It often takes only two words to pause a deal with brands and agencies: performance marketing. This effect is reinforced […]

As Mozilla’s Firefox joins Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in rejecting third party cookies by default, it’s very likely that winning bid prices for real-time bidding will continue a decline Casale Media began noticing in the second half of last year. According to Casale Media‘s quarterly index, there appeared to be a small drop in the percentage […]

“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is by Douglas de Jager, founder of Spider.io.  In Will Luttrell’s AdExchanger article of last week, he argues that if the display advertising buy side adopts better performance metrics then the problem of fraud […]

In spite of privacy challenges around the use of cookies in a mobile environment, smartphone and tablet activity is apparently spurring more mobile real-time bidding (RTB) and the use of programmatic tools to conduct business between agencies, publishers and developers. Earlier this year, for example, Adfonic claimed that mobile CTRs and eCPMs were much higher […]

As Apple finally shuts down its unique device identifier (UDID), tech companies are betting on ad targeting capabilities touted as privacy-friendly. In describing their products, companies have moved away from the label “fingerprinting” technology, which was popular several years ago, and embraced terms like “device matching” and  “mobile signature.” AdExchanger spoke with two active players in […]

“The Sell-Sider” is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Jim Spanfeller, CEO, Spanfeller Media Group, a new age media company. Mozilla recently announced that the next version of Firefox, one of the most popular web browsers in the world, would come with a default setting that […]

Mozilla’s move to stop third-party cookie tracking in the latest version of its Firefox browser – echoing Apple’s Safari browser attributes – has attracted wide attention across the advertising industry.   And no wonder – Mozilla’s Firefox has about a 23% share among consumers in the browser market. AdExchanger reached out to a selection of […]

Winning a hotel guest takes more than a swimming pool and a spa package. Like its competitors, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide looks for opportunities to give its accommodations an edge over other hotels. With more than 1,100 properties in nearly 100 countries across nine brands, the company has strong brand awareness. But that isn’t […]

AOL’s Q4 results had a number of positives, not least of which was a return to overall revenue growth for the first time in eight long years. And yet, Q4 saw the company’s display ad dollars slip further, with numbers in that segment flat globally and down 3% in the U.S. Read the release. For […]

The Saturday before Christmas came in as a top three December shopping day for many retailers, including Best Buy, Toys ‘R’ Us, and Walmart. Below we present final holiday 2012 data from location analytics company Placed, which analyzes in-store visits of consumers who have opted-in to a mobile location measuring app. Placed’s location-based network does […]

“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Peter Klein, SVP of media services at MediaWhiz, an integrated digital media agency and part of the Hyper Marketing Inc. network. It’s easy to take a prominent stance against […]

“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Yuchun Lee, VP and general manager of IBM’s Enterprise Marketing Management. He was previously founder and CEO at Unica. When the “Four P’s of Marketing” were first developed by E. Jerome […]