MoPub co-founder and former CEO Jim Payne is getting his next startup off the ground with MAX, a platform that helps mobile publishers sell programmatically. The company launched Thursday following around six months of beta-testing with a $3.5 million seed round led by Payne’s investment fund, Breakpoint Capital, and a handful of angels. They include […]
Airfare and hotel prediction app Hopper is different from other travel booking services. When you download Hopper, the app tells you not to buy anything. And that’s because Hopper acquires users at the top of the funnel. “We’re looking for people who are just browsing on social, people who aren’t necessarily looking for a flight […]
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson testified on Thursday in defense of the company’s $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner, which is being contested as an antitrust violation by the Justice Department. Stephenson reiterated AT&T’s defense that without strong content to incorporate into its mobile, streaming and linear distribution, the telco is being left behind by online […]
Just two years after entering Europe, Verve is shutting down its European operations rather than tangle with the General Data Protection Regulation. The company, which runs a mobile marketing platform powered by location data, confirmed to AdExchanger that it is closing its London and Munich offices and laying off around 15 employees on May 11. […]
Marketers use augmented reality and virtual reality primarily for entertainment industry stunts, but programmatic AR and VR advertising are showing early signs of life. The Finnish mobile games developer Rovio, of “Angry Birds” fame, focuses on performance marketing to drive app downloads, but the company is running pilot campaigns with the AR/VR programmatic tech vendor […]
Billboards aren’t a one-to-one media, unless we’re talking about “Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri.” But advertisers are starting to inform their online retargeting efforts with offline exposure data. Established out-of-home media companies, like Clear Channel Outdoor and Outfront Media, geofence their billboards to retarget consumers online, while platforms like Facebook let retailers use offline […]
AdColony further trimmed its executive ranks this week in an effort to streamline the business and get to profitability. The mobile video ad network did away with at least five senior and mid-level roles in North America. AdColony’s former VP of performance, Tim O’Neil, who joined AdColony less than a year ago, was let go […]
This is the third in a series of deep dives from AdExchanger on mobile fraud and mobile data quality, including guides to fraud tactics and threat vectors and practical solutions from advertisers in the growth and user acquisition trenches. Read the first story (“2018 Will Be A Year Of Reckoning For Mobile App-Install Fraud“) and […]
AppLovin is one of the most well-funded indie ad platforms out there – and it’s growing like a weed. The mobile ad network last year received $841 million in debt financing from Chinese private equity firm Orient Hontai Capital. In 2014, AppLovin raised just $4 million in seed funding. Originally, Orient Hontai had intended to acquire a majority […]
Allison Holbrook, digital media manager at DSW, and Kolin Kleveno, head of programmatic at 360i, will speak at AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO conference on April 10-11 at the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco. For the past three years, the shoe retailer DSW used influencers to reach prospective shoppers in their teens or early 20s, more as a […]
The in-app waterfall is drying up. On Monday, Oath released a new version of Super Auction, its replacement technology for the ad network mediation role that mobile networks have traditionally fulfilled. Previously, ONE by AOL would host an auction for AOL’s own demand through its software development kit and send the top bid to the […]
Google is testing header bidding – again. But this time it’s for in-app demand. On Thursday, Google announced the kickoff of a beta test to blow up the waterfall mediation model within its mobile ad network, AdMob, and replace it with a unified auction. “Think of it as [Google’s] Exchange Bidding, but for networks,” said Sissie […]
Reddit is banking on native mobile ads to generate advertiser karma. Starting March 19, advertisers will be able to buy native promoted posts in Reddit’s official iOS app, with Android inventory to follow within the next few weeks, the company said Wednesday. The only visual difference between in-feed native posts and organic posts created by […]
The cross-device identity company Drawbridge abandoned its advertising business in the EU and is trying to reconcile its data business with GDPR regulations beginning in May. Drawbridge founder and CEO Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan confirmed the company’s reversals in Europe in an email to AdExchanger. Drawbridge will transition its EU partner services to the company’s New York […]
This is the second in a series of deep dives from AdExchanger on mobile fraud and mobile data quality, including guides to fraud tactics and threat vectors and practical solutions from advertisers in the growth and user acquisition trenches. Read the first story (“2018 Will Be A Year Of Reckoning For Mobile App-Install Fraud”) and […]
Placed, the Snap-owned location data company, is giving away its analytics tool for free. Starting Thursday, brands and media planners can use a public version of its insights service to view foot traffic trends for around 2,000 businesses in the US. Placed pulls the aggregated data from its audience of around 300 million monthly active […]
AdWords, search, display, the Play Store, YouTube, AdMob, the Google Display Network… App advertisers used to have to run six or more campaigns at once with Google to try and achieve a single objective. But, as of November, there’s been only one way to promote apps across all Google properties: Universal App Campaigns. Google first […]
Mobile texting never quite made it into the marketer toolkit, but some online sellers are re-examining SMS as a more cost-effective way to engage known customers than advertising. And ecommerce tech vendors are beefing up mobile messaging because the channel now supports data-driven segmentation, like retargeting campaigns. These capabilities are increasingly valuable as frictionless mobile […]
Data is helpful in the fight against fraud, but it’s not enough, said Martzel de Domingo, who leads user acquisition at French gaming giant Ubisoft, whose titles include “Assassin’s Creed” and “South Park: Phone Destroyer.” Fraudsters know how to hide behind the numbers. “Some people might not look to see what’s happening after an install,” […]
Ericsson remains keen on ad tech. On Wednesday, the Swedish networking and telecom company announced its acquisition of Placecast, a combo data management and demand-side platform (DSP) for location data. Placecast is now part of Emodo, Ericsson’s programmatic mobile ad platform that helps telcos monetize their subscriber data. Emodo is housed within a newly created […]
Deep-link startup Branch earned its Facebook mobile marketing partner (MMP) stripes on Wednesday and launched an attribution tool for paid media called Universal Ads. Branch is the first MMP added to Facebook’s marketing partner program since around 2013. When the company launched in 2014, it focused on deep-linking across owned-and-operated content – for example, tracking clicks […]
Paris-based app retargeting platform Adikteev – think Criteo for apps – snagged $12 million in Series B on Tuesday. The company plans to spend it on research and development and on expanding its 100-person headcount with around 40 new engineer hires over the next month. The round, which brings Adikteev’s total funding to $14.2 million since it […]
There’s no point eating up engineering resources to build technology that can be provided out of the box, Lomit Patel, VP of growth at IMVU, said at the Mobile Growth Summit in San Francisco last week. Although most mobile growth marketers would rather build than buy, nearly every app relies on a constellation of third-party […]
Apps lean heavily on Facebook for their paid user acquisition efforts, but they also want more control over how and where their ads run. And Instant Articles? No thanks. When Pixelfederation, a game studio based in Slovakia, tested Instant Articles, the return was nil. “The impressions were almost nonexistent, and all of the impressions we […]
A budding sense of optimism around Twitter was substantiated Thursday when the social platform announced its first-ever quarter of profitability and a return to revenue growth. Twitter saw 2% year-over-year revenue growth with a total of $732 million in the final quarter of 2017, after a string of revenue declines last year. Twitter averaged 330 […]
This is the first in a series of deep dives from AdExchanger on mobile fraud and mobile data quality, including guides to fraud tactics and threat vectors and practical solutions from advertisers in the growth and user acquisition trenches. Read the second story (“Mobile Data Has A Quality Control Problem“) and the third (“Anatomy Of […]
The cookie is under pressure. On Tuesday, Amsterdam-based cross-device vendor Screen6 released a tool that CEO David de Jong says can add cookies to cross-device graphs in real time before they have a chance to decay. Device fragmentation, Apple’s recent moves to prevent third-party tracking in iOS 11 and environments where there are no cookies, […]
With Time Warner on board or not, AT&T is pushing forward with its vision for the next potential addressable ad platform giant. CMOs or holding company agencies might pour money into Google and Facebook, but “they’re nervous about the content they’ve produced living in environments they can’t control,” said Brian Lesser, AT&T’s CEO of advertising […]
In-app header bidding is coming to MoPub. On Tuesday, the Twitter-owned mobile ad exchange started testing an advanced bidding solution to replace the app ads waterfall with a unified auction. Roughly a dozen publishers are testing the solution. The closed alpha test does not have a set end date. Until now, advertisers could buy MoPub […]
Product and marketing go hand in hand at OkCupid. There’s a dotted line between user engagement, platform tweaks and the deployment of marketing dollars to reach specific types of users, mainly on social channels like Facebook, Instagram and Snap, said OkCupid CMO Melissa Hobley. “Our product truth is that we create experiences based on depth, […]
