Alibaba’s big IPO filing on Tuesday shows the company is one of the world’s largest ecommerce companies – maybe the biggest. But there’s a subtler message, too: Thanks to its transactional data and exchange platform, the Chinese company is also among the giants of ad technology. “With rich consumer data generated from our China retail marketplaces, we utilize our proprietary algorithms to evaluate the […]
If the message in ad tech company Conversant’s year-end quarterly was one of renewal following a rough 2013, its Q1 was about stability and sustainability as the company beat the guidance it provided in its Q4 2013 call. This was largely due to improvements in the company’s display business as well as its work in […]
Digital marketing attribution is in vogue. AOL will acquire attribution vendor Convertro for approximately $101 million, the company announced Tuesday afternoon. This comes on the heels of Google’s move earlier in the day to snap up competing attribution pure play vendor Adometry for an undisclosed sum. Customers will have access to Convertro in a couple […]
IPG-owned agency Jack Morton Worldwide acquired Genuine Interactive on Tuesday in an attempt to expand its social and mobile capabilities, particularly as they relate to supplementing live events. Finalized May 1, the financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. “Adding digital, social and mobile to live brand experiences isn’t an option anymore,” said Jack […]
Salesforce.com released Tuesday the Radian6 + Buddy Media Social Studio, indicating new life for a string of social acquisitions the company has made in recent years. “For the first time, you can listen, publish content, and track it through to results all as part of a stack that also includes email, Web, and mobile,” said […]
Google will scoop up Adometry, a marketing attribution firm whose product is designed to assign value to incremental media impressions. Some industry watchers, like research firm Forrester, consider Adometry’s solution superior to Google’s home-grown technology. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Austin, Texas-based Adometry and its approximately 130 employees will eventually be incorporated into the Google Analytics […]
Big box retailer Walmart’s software and technology accelerator @WalmartLabs has acquired Adchemy, the developer of a SaaS platform that essentially makes retail product search smarter. Silicon Valley-based @WalmartLabs, which employs 2,100 people, was founded three years ago as a way to develop and scale technology to tap into online buying patterns of the store’s 245 […]
Since going public in Q4 2013, Criteo has had an easier time signing new advertisers – especially in Europe, where the business environment is more cautious overall and advertisers carefully examine credentials when making vendor selections. In the first quarter of this year, the French ad tech company’s business wins in the EMEA region included […]
Video search engine Blinkx has acquired Lyfe Mobile, a 3-year-old startup that delivers targeted ads based on geographic data and other location-based analytics, in an all-cash transaction, the companies said Tuesday. Based in Santa Monica, Calif., Lyfe Mobile offers audience-targeting features using GPS data combined with other data points such as weather, traffic and population […]
Shortly after spending $485 million on DG (now Sizmek’s) TV ads business, Extreme Reach has bought video ad intelligence company BrandAds. Although he declined to name the deal price, John Roland, CEO of Extreme Reach said all 12 BrandAds employees will continue on with the acquiring company. “What the DG [acquisition did was] give us […]
“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 Susan Zhang, data scientist at PlaceIQ. In the early 1900s, David Hilbert set out to prove the consistency of mathematics by reducing all mathematical statements into a formal language, from […]
“Marketer’s Note” is a weekly column informing marketers about the rapidly evolving, digital marketing technology ecosystem. It is written by Joanna O’Connell, Director of Research, AdExchanger Research. As I round out research interviews for my forthcoming State of Programmatic Media report, I had a really interesting conversation with a senior-level operations person at a major […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here. Syncing Screens The “Second Screen” remains an exciting opportunity for publishers and marketers alike. But, still, the viability of these ads is “guesswork,” according to this NY Times article. Nevertheless, the Times quotes Deloitte Digital’s Michael Guay and his analysis of the market: “Your […]
Audio advertisements have been largely one-sided: The advertiser speaks and consumers listen. Startup Xapp Media wants to change that with interactive audio ads. Through an SDK, Xapp Media enables brands to create voice-activated ads that mobile users can respond to with commands like “call now” or “send coupon.” NPR was the first publisher to try […]
At its NewFront event last week, Time Inc. unveiled partnerships with Nielsen and comScore’s cross-platform measurement solutions to simplify the digital ad-buying process. TV-online audience research has become something of a theme at the NewFronts, with AOL and Yahoo unveiling similar plans. Time Inc., a division of Time Warner that will be spun off this quarter, […]
Facebook is rolling out additional video metrics such as unique video views, the average duration of the video view and audience retention over the coming weeks, the company said Monday. “These new metrics are designed to help you learn what’s resonating with people and determine how to more effectively create and promote your videos on […]
Before traditional, linear television ad buys can be fully automated, a couple of core constituents must align. “The [idea of programmatic] doesn’t entirely make me nervous, but it definitely needs boundaries and guidelines,” said Phil Lalonde, SVP of ad sales operations, MTV Networks, recently at a BrightRoll Video Summit. Rob Holmes, VP of advanced advertising at […]
“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 John Nardone, CEO at [x+1], and Ed See, principal at Deloitte for marketing and customer analytics. If you tuned into the Masters Tournament last month, you were treated to a […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here. The Data Of Retail On Friday, Google acquired Rangespan, the second UK company Google has bought this year. Based in London, the company provides back-office services for online retail, with a focus on expanding product selection. Sounds like something Amazon does, no? Rangespan has […]
Deep-linking technology, which routes users to a specific page rather than a main landing page, is quickly gaining traction in the mobile app landscape. But as this technology catches on – Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple and a slew of startups are pushing the technology to publishers who are readily experimenting with it – it’s becoming […]
Two years ago, Yahoo became the first big Internet company honor Do Not Track (DNT) signals, and on Wednesday it became the first to publicly abandon the troubled opt-out standard. The company told the world via a Tumblr post on the Yahoo Public Privacy blog that it would henceforth ignore DNT requests, saying “we have yet to see a […]
There was no agency more present on the NewFront circuit this week than DigitasLBi. The Publicis-owned agency, formed when the holding company merged Digitas and LBi last February, was out in full force as a partner on AOL’s original content, Google Preferred and, at its own NewFront Thursday, as a partner to publishers and tech […]
“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 Christopher Hansen, president at Netmining. It seems silly to think that mobile Web usage caught the advertising industry off guard. Existing ad companies, be they agencies or ad tech, were so […]
“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 Mike Baker, CEO at DataXu. All marketers are rightly daunted by the cost and complexity of collecting vast quantities of consumer data and connecting it to their specific tastes in […]
A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here. Foursquare Transforms Location-sharing app Foursquare is splitting in two. The “check-in” function that defined it from day one will be rebranded as Swarm. Meanwhile a rewritten version of Foursquare will support search and discovery. Foursquare’s VP of product experience, Jon Steinback, said, “Mobile forced […]
Over the last decade, Facebook has evolved from a forum for college students to poke each other to a company trying to position itself as a maturing, cross-device communication platform for marketers and consumers. CEO Mark Zuckerberg certainly hopes this maturation is reflected in the company’s evolving slogan, from “move fast and break things” to the […]
TubeMogul, whose IPO is expected soon, saw revenue from direct users of its demand-side platform (DSP) ramp up dramatically in the first quarter of the year. According to an updated S-1 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, total revenue for Q1 2014 grew to $22 million, 130% more than it made the first three months […]
Unified, a company that helps brands with social ad buys, has acquired social analytics startup Awe.sm for an undisclosed sum, the companies announced Thursday. Unified is a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer and Twitter Ads API Partner. The core of its product is a “Social Operating Platform,” a cloud-based tool that combines social marketing capabilities ranging […]
“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 John Shomaker, CEO at AdJuggler. The New York Times recently ran a column by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis, two professors in NYU’s computer science department, questioning the merits and […]
