Platforms

When Taco Bell launched its breakfast option last year, the brand had two main challenges on its plate: driving awareness among millennials and translating that heightened awareness into repeat foot traffic. It was a tall order considering that Taco Bell isn’t known for breakfast and that competition in the quick-service restaurant space is fierce. (See the […]

“The world may have a polling problem,” declared Nate Silver, the former New York Times statistical wunderkind who’s since launched FiveThirtyEight under the ESPN banner, in an article last year. Silver made this claim following the failure of UK polls to predict results of the country’s general election last May. In the US, he noted […]

With a tight marketing budget and a brand on the turnaround, Volvo is open to experimentation. Which is one reason why it’s a launch partner for Time Inc.’s Real Time ad product, which places the Volvo brand next to Time Inc.’s trending content on social media. The advertising product adds Volvo’s logo to Time Inc.’s […]

It’s not easy monetizing kids. Even the words “monetizing kids” are unfortunate. But the developers of kid-focused games still “need to eat,” said Yuri Shilin, owner of KidGames, an Israel-based game developer with a portfolio of dozens of apps for kids, with around 30 million downloads overall. “It’s for sure very hard to make money,” […]

For several months, IPG Mediabrands’ ad tech unit Cadreon has been testing Google’s cross-device measurement system, baked into DoubleClick advertiser products as of June. Krish Sailam, senior product manager of mobile for Cadreon, said the trading desk has run a few beta tests with advertisers, and noted conversion uplift has consistently reached the double digits. Cadreon […]

Pinterest made sense for The Grommet right from the start. The Grommet is an ecommerce site where inventors and entrepreneurs can launch and sell their products – everything from the innovative (lunchboxes that unzip into placemats) to the strange, but cool (liquid that can be applied to the fingertips of gloves to make them touchscreen-friendly). In […]

Chicago-based ad platform company Centro let go 29 of its 725 employees on Monday, or about 4% of total staff. Unlike other recent layoffs in the ad tech sector – including at Turn, Collective and PubMatic – the cuts were not motivated by a shrinking pool of cash, restless investors or slouching revenue growth. Instead, […]

When Pandora announced its intent in November to acquire the assets of Rdio, it was reportedly an attempt to make up an ad revenue shortfall. Though people increasingly listen to online radio, with 143 million each month this year (the number has doubled since 2010, according to Edison Research), streaming services are still working out approaches […]

Header bidding is coming to mobile apps, via a solution Rubicon Project is beta testing with 20 publishers. Early results for the product, FastLane, saw CPM increases of up to 300%. Rubicon will release the product more widely to publishers in Q1 of next year. Unlike the mobile web or desktop, mobile apps bring in […]

Publicis Groupe agency MRY has been working with social media management startup SocialRank to help its clients get smarter about their social audiences and identify niche segments using a tool dubbed Market Intel, which came out of beta on Monday. The company also launched on Monday a product called SocialRank for Teams, which allows agencies […]

Yahoo received yet another blow Friday with the departure of Prashant Fuloria, its SVP of advertising products and engineering, just shy of a year after he was appointed to the role. Enrique Munoz Torres, who leads Yahoo’s search products, will inherit Fuloria’s responsibilities, including oversight of the Gemini and BrightRoll platforms, Yahoo’s advertiser-facing products. Fuloria’s […]

Twitter on Thursday made its first attempt to capitalize on its logged-out audience with the launch of a private beta test program with select advertisers in the US, UK, Japan and Australia to target promoted tweets and promoted videos at users who aren’t logged into Twitter. As of Q3 2015, Twitter had around 320 million […]

Shoppable video is still a novel concept, despite the industry’s efforts to move it into the mainstream (with Google launching shoppable video on YouTube being the most recent example). But NBCUniversal’s Bravo TV still sees the value of shoppable video. The network wanted to expand its digital business and encourage fans to return to its properties on […]

Sell-side platform PubMatic has dismissed more than 100 employees, AdExchanger has confirmed. The layoffs, affecting 20% of the company’s global staff, follow an 8% reduction in October. The combined cuts have reduced PubMatic’s workforce from 600 to about 450. Additionally the company lost two key leaders on the publisher and demand side: Evan Adlman, VP of publisher […]

Consumers don’t want to see repurposed 30-second TV spots in their social feeds, which is why a number of brands and their agencies are investing in content tailored for Instagram. In September, Instagram’s 400 million users began seeing more ads as the image-centric platform turned on 30-second video ads, as well as landscape ads, which […]

When it comes to driving traffic for publishers, Facebook is king. Publishers receive 90% of their traffic from the social network, according to social analytics firm SimpleReach. But what about Pinterest? While the site crossed 100 million monthly active users (MAUs) this year, that’s a fraction of Facebook’s 1.5 billion MAUs, and trails behind Instagram’s […]

Square may be a unicorn – but it’s got its eye on the little guy. “We’re leveling the playing field,” said Kevin Burke, former Visa CMO and now head of acquisition at Square, which completed its long-awaited IPO in mid-November. “We’re helping small businesses close the loop.” Integrating online and offline has long been the […]

Buenos Aires-based game studio Etermax is a rare creature in the app development world. “We don’t focus on user acquisition,” said CEO and founder Maximo Cavazzani. It’s quite a statement considering that Etermax is the developer responsible for quiz app Trivia Crack, which was the most downloaded app in the App Store in late 2014. […]

Tim Armstrong is going to have to look for a new successor. The AOL CEO’s heir apparent, the highly visible Bob Lord, will soon step down from the company, which he joined two years ago to help spearhead an aggressive expansion of the company’s ad technology vision. The Wall Street Journal first reported the news […]

Six out of 10 marketers would reallocate their media spend if digital media owners failed to supply sufficient third-party measurement, according to new findings from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). In an ANA survey of 154 members conducted this summer, 90% of marketer respondents also said they are “not fully confident” that their working […]

Marketers are known for demanding ROI and previous results before they embrace new strategies, but they’re going all-in on the assumption that mobile will be a far more prosperous channel this year than in previous holiday seasons. Industry analysts like eMarketer project a strong holiday for retailers, with mobile commerce expected to grow 32.2% over […]

MoPub is Twitter’s secret weapon – secret because the mobile exchange rarely comes up during Twitter’s quarterly earnings calls. On Friday, MoPub introduced native video mediation to enable publishers to filter their ad requests through whichever native ad network SDK they want, including the Facebook Audience Network and the more than 175 DSPs integrated with the […]

After an initial wave of integration, Millennial Media, the mobile ad platform AOL acquired in September for $240 million, rolled out its first ad product under new ownership – TV Commercial Retargeting. The new ad product is backed by a partnership with Rentrak, which aggregates set-top box data across 25 million households, tapping into data […]

Although the lion’s share of sports fans still turn to traditional TV for live events, one sports media company found a way to amass billions of views from millennial sports fans on Facebook and YouTube alone. Like many major sports broadcasters, Whistle Sports sought the legitimacy that comes from pro-league partnerships with the NFL and MLB.com. […]

There are two ingredients in Refinery29’s recipe for success with Facebook video: subtitles and trailers. The digital fashion and lifestyle publisher made the discovery with native ad platform Adaptly while studying how to make long-form and autoplay video content resonate with audiences on Facebook. Refinery29 focused on Facebook video since the social platform is a solid source […]

App marketing vendors are starting to talk about omnichannel. That includes Swrve, the marketing automation company which announced Wednesday that it had acquired adaptiv.io, a smaller data automation player. The move is aimed at helping brands “orchestrate user experiences across traditional channels and mobile channels,” said Swrve CEO Christopher Dean. That makes sense since no […]

Why did Time Inc. decide to partner with Etermax, the Buenos Aires-based game studio responsible for the hugely popular app Trivia Crack? a) as a native play b) as a form of content discovery c) to encourage mobile engagement d) all of the above The answer: d. “We’re quickly evolving from being a print company […]

Pubs and brands have complained about programmatic inventory on open exchanges for years, but a renewed focus on inventory quality is gaining traction. AppNexus has long positioned itself as the platform for ad networks, but it reversed its policy in recent weeks by removing ad networks that don’t provide direct publisher or seller relationships. Shortly […]

While the rise of subscription video services won’t lure all consumers away from ad-supported offerings, it represents a disruption to current business models – partially driven by ad blocking and consumer demand for better experiences. “If you think about all of the content we consume that is supported by an advertising model, if a consumer […]

There was a time around 2009 when you couldn’t talk about Zynga without also talking about Facebook. Back then, FarmVille, CityVille and CafeWorld were beyond ubiquitous. But Facebook wasn’t mentioned once on Tuesday during Zynga’s third-quarter earnings call. That’s partially because Facebook’s users are increasingly mobile, with 1.39 billion monthly actives out of 1.55 billion […]