Platforms

Playbuzz, a creation platform for quizzes, polls, trivia, slideshows and videos, raised a $15 million strategic investment Thursday. Saban Ventures, an existing investor in Playbuzz, led the investment, which included participation from Walt Disney Co. Playbuzz’s CEO and co-founder, Shaul Olmert, said the company was looking for “potential partners as well as investors,” but would […]

With the NCAA men’s basketball tournament well underway, digital publishers and broadcasters are clamoring to package “cross-platform” sponsorship deals for big advertisers. The economic implications of sports sponsorships are massive. In the US, global sponsorship revenue reached an estimated $45 billion in 2015, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. That may ebb and flow if the calendar year […]

On Monday, Pandora appointed a new CEO, CFO, COO and CPO. And the company has lately begun evaluating a possible sale. But at least one member of the C-suite is still standing: CRO John Trimble. That may be because while Pandora’s user growth has stalled in the wake of competition from places like Spotify and […]

Some app developers are raking in the cash hand over fist – Supercell made $924 million in profits last year – and others are eating instant ramen noodles for dinner. Most developers make less than $500 a month, according to Vision Mobile. But that doesn’t mean the ramen eaters don’t deserve access to sophisticated analytics and business […]

Brian McAndrews is out as CEO and president of Pandora, where he served since 2013. He has been replaced by company founder Tim Westergren. McAndrews, who has a long history in digital advertising, departs at a time when Pandora faces major growth challenges in the intensely competitive music streaming space. While McAndrews brought a long […]

A group of publishers is testing a header bidding solution from Rubicon Project that is compliant with Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages program. Tribune Publishing is among those who have implemented header bidding for AMP. It’s the first time header bidding functionality has been leveraged in support of the “platform publishing” craze that has lately seen […]

Mom-and-pop shops can now buy and target their Facebook ads through Square as part of a deeper integration between the two partners. The move, announced Wednesday, makes a heck of a lot of sense. Small business owners that use Square can already automatically share their promotions on Facebook. Now they’ll be able to combine their […]

App publishers are paring down the number of software development kits (SDKs) they use to monetize their ad inventory. On Wednesday, German mobile marketing outfit glispa tossed its hat in the ring with the launch of Ampiri, its mediation solution. Ampiri is built from technology glispa acquired from MoneyTap, a St. Petersburg, Russia-based company with […]

Michael Zimbalist – who spent the past 10 years at The New York Times, most recently as SVP of advertising products – is hopping to ad tech, taking a post as Simulmedia’s CMO. “I’m a change agent by career and inclination,” Zimbalist said. “TV is in the early stages of volcanic eruption of change, and […]

Moat CEO Jonah Goodhart finds himself in the middle of the industry’s rocky transition from transacting on ad impressions served to running campaigns with tags to track bots and viewability. He says the first step in this transition is to ditch the served impressions in favor of a standard that’s based on how many impressions […]

LinkedIn is no Facebook, but it is a growing source of referral traffic for publishers. And as it turns to sponsored updates for more of its revenue, LinkedIn is encouraging users to spend more time scrolling through the feed – a move that will only benefit publishers posting content in that feed. Forbes, Bloomberg and […]

Adobe rolled out the Adobe Marketing Cloud Device Co-op – a cross-device system built around Adobe Analytics and the Audience Manager data management platform – at the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas on Tuesday. AdExchanger first reported on Adobe’s attempt to create the data co-op last July. Adobe hopes to patch a big hole in […]

Mobile ad revenue will grow 128% by 2018, accounting for 92% of new global advertising dollars, according to the global ad spend forecast from Publicis Groupe-owned ZenithOptimedia, released Monday. That’s an increase of $64 billion over the next three years. “Consumers are using their mobile devices to consume media in a place where they previously […]

App publishers are constantly walking the line between user experience and making money. That’s the “main challenge” facing Baptiste Chardon, the man in charge of handling monetization for French game publisher Ubisoft’s more than 25 free-to-play mobile titles, which range from kid games to less casual offerings. An additional challenge lies in making sure that advertising […]

Google, Facebook and Twitter have become powerful platforms for political candidates, and each has earned a line item on every campaign’s media plan. But it may require another election cycle before smaller players can break into the big time. In 2015, Borrell Research predicted $1.1 billion would be spent by political buyers on digital media […]

New Balance sells sneakers and sports apparel, but the brand is not all about chasing the transaction. The Boston-based footwear manufacturer, which competes with names like Nike, Under Armour and Adidas, instead seeks to differentiate by pushing stories, not products. As such, it faces a unique challenge in combining content and commerce. “We hear these […]

OpenSlate – which helps brands find engaged YouTube audiences – also wants to make it easier for buyers to understand the value of YouTube inventory in TV terminology. In that spirit, OpenSlate on Thursday launched its YouTube GRP Planning Tool. A number of agencies and brands are already using it, including DigitasLBi. The GRP Planning […]

Following a previous Snapchat campaign aimed at campus students from last year, Goldman Sachs is doubling down with a broad investment across the messaging service’s Discover and Live Story channels. Major financial players like American Express, Visa, MasterCard, Bank of America and JP Morgan have also been early adopters to Snapchat advertising. Goldman’s ad buy, which […]

Targeted advertising on Pinterest has taken a big step forward with the introduction new interest segments as well as first-party data matching. Pinterest hopes to “massively expand the categories for interest targeting” from 30 to 420, said product manager Nipoon Malhotra, who leads the company’s monetization team. And with its CRM data matching capability, Pinterest is following Google […]

Berlin-based RNTS Media group, which owns a portfolio of mobile technology companies, will acquire Israeli RTB mobile ad exchange Inneractive for an initial payment of $46 million, which could rise to $72 million if Inneractive hits incentivized targets. This is the third in a string of acquisitions RNTS Media and its primary business property, the […]

If you hail from the northeastern United States, you’re probably accustomed to the slightly bitter bite of broccoli rabe common in many Italian dishes. It’s the population beyond New York and other big cities – as well as health-conscious millennials – to whom Salinas, Calif., grower Andy Boy wanted to appeal. But Andy Boy had […]

Marketers on LinkedIn have long been able to target titles like “VP of engineering” for sponsored updates and inMails. On Tuesday, LinkedIn rolled out account targeting, allowing marketers to target actual companies in their campaigns, up to 30,000 of them at a time. Wait, LinkedIn couldn’t target by company before? “This has been one of the […]

Back in 2008, before the likes of “Serial,” award-winning public radio producer Nate DiMeo was sharing little-known pearls of American history in his podcast, “The Memory Palace.” The show, in which DiMeo narrates forgotten moments to a curated selection of music, has maintained a loyal, mid-sized audience for the past eight years. But despite donations […]

Facebook’s Atlas ad server promises to deliver marketers a superior way to measure campaigns compared to DoubleClick, which commands the lion’s share of the market. But measurement is just one part of ad serving. And in the one and a half years since Atlas was rushed to market, marketers and agencies that have tested Atlas […]

Facebook on Thursday formally unveiled Canvas, its new full-screen mobile ad unit that offers creatives the real estate they’ve been craving in the news feed. But the richer mobile ads will not be constrained for long to what the company internally refers to as the “big blue app.” At a Facebook press event Thursday, execs […]

In a bid to enhance its header bidding wrapper and improve yield for publishers, Index Exchange has tapped Drew Bradstock as its new SVP of product. Bradstock spent the past five years as group product manager of Google’s Ad Exchange. The move brings Bradstock back to focusing on a fast-growing exchange, he said, that looks more […]

Rubicon Project’s full-year financials paint a picture of a growing exchange. The company’s managed revenue hit $1 billion in 2015. With a growing take rate, 22.6% for the year, that tallied up to $227.3 million, an 81% annual increase. The amount Rubicon takes from transactions on its exchange increased from 19.3% in Q4 of 2014 […]

Affinity Answers, founded under the name Colligent in 2005, has spent a decade building a new metric for brand success. The data measurement company processes the social information of more than 400 million users per day to identify mutual affinities between brands and publishers that help them uncover, target and monetize untapped audiences. The company […]

While big video platforms such as YouTube and Facebook provide unparalleled reach and targetability, marketers aren’t completely sold on the insularity of these environments – or their ability to augment data beyond the platforms’ own four walls. Pixability, which originated as a tool for agencies and marketers to assess high-value YouTube channels and audiences, wants […]

The wave of ad tech consolidation continues with Tuesday’s announcement that Synacor will purchase publisher tech vendor Technorati. The purchase price won’t be revealed until Synacor, a publicly traded company, files its 8-K to the SEC. [Update: Synacor paid $3 million cash.] Technorati posted $7 million in revenue last year, mostly from its aging ad […]