Platforms

While it has become typical for industry watchers to declare that the mobile web is suffering at the expense of apps’ success, a report Monday revealed consumers use both at almost equal levels. “The New Mobile Mantra,” from WPP’s research unit, Millward Brown Digital, found that of the 30 most-visited mobile properties, browser and app […]

Jack’s wearing a lot of hats. After several months of will they/won’t they, Twitter announced Monday morning that Jack Dorsey will go from interim chief exec – shoes he’d been filling since Dick Costolo stepped down in June – to permanent CEO of the company. He’ll also continue on as CEO of Square, the mobile payments startup […]

Publisher-facing ad platform PubMatic has let go about 50 employees, or 8% of its global headcount of 600. Many of the cuts were in India, where the company has significant development and support operations. The changes were motivated by a desire to improve the overall level of service, including by bringing service teams in-market to […]

Deep-linking vendor Button announced the Button Marketplace on Thursday in an attempt to sustain the mobile app world without the need for digital ad dollars. “It’s an entirely different paradigm for apps,” said Michael Jaconi, Button’s co-founder and CEO. “You can’t capitalize on search and intent in this world like you did for the web.” […]

Getting 2 million YouTube views on a video of Lindsey Graham smashing cell phones was a very good thing for political website Independent Journal, which orchestrated the stunt. But it didn’t do much for Graham (who made the video after Donald Trump gave away his phone number publicly). The Republican senator from South Carolina is […]

When AOL agreed in June to bring Microsoft’s sales organization into AOL, nearly doubling the amount of front-line salespeople to a total of 1,000, head of sales Jim Norton saw an opportunity. AOL knew there were a number of ways it could improve its sales force to better align with the organization’s structure: custom solutions […]

Of all the threats posed by the ad-blocking trend, perhaps the scariest scenario for publishers is that paid media placements could be filtered at the network level. Now that nightmare seems to be coming true, as Israeli ad-blocking tech company Shine has said it will integrate with wireless carrier Digicel to screen ads aimed at […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by John Trimble, chief revenue officer at Pandora. Like many events in the ad business, the conversations that happen offstage at Advertising Week can be even more impactful than those that take place in the […]

At AOL’s annual programmatic upfront (now called the “Future Front”) Monday, its parent, Verizon, staged a showy coming-out party for a video content network called Go90. Besides Go90’s official launch, Verizon revealed it had secured its first upfront commitment from agency holding company Publicis Groupe. The deal has a couple of implications. On the content […]

If Facebook wants to grab budgets from TV media planners, it has to speak their language. To make buying and measuring digital video ads easier for TV buyers, Facebook has unveiled support for TRP [target rating point] buying this week. TRP buying enables advertisers to plan, buy and measure online video and TV campaigns holistically. Media […]

First there was Right Media. Then there was the Yahoo Ad Exchange. Now there’s BrightRoll. Yahoo started off Advertising Week on Monday with the announcement that it had consolidated all of its programmatic ad tech under a single umbrella – the BrightRoll brand. The purple platform has been on a bit of an ad tech spree […]

Merkle, which bills itself as one of the industry’s largest privately held agencies, is moving beyond database services into tech territory. The company on Monday launched MerkleOne, its version of a people-based marketing platform for advertisers and publishers, including inaugural sell-side partner News Corp. “M1 will enable advertisers to bring their own data, anonymize IDs […]

PulsePoint is planning to get acquisitive. On Monday, the programmatic platform announced $30 million in debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank, the majority of which will be used to buy companies to complement PulsePoint’s existing tech stack. PulsePoint – which was formed through the merger of Datran Media and ContextWeb in 2011 – had previously raised a […]

Influencer marketing startups think it’s time to become a more strategic part of content marketing initiatives. Part of the problem is that influencer marketing doesn’t get its own budget line, said Pierre-Loïc Assayag, founder and CEO at the influencer management platform Traackr. It’s as likely to come under the jurisdiction of a PR firm as […]

AdsNative added $8.5 million in Series A funding to its war chest on Thursday as it moves to offer an alternative to the market’s dominant ad server. AdsNative’s solution combines a native, mobile-optimized ad server with the option to add on a yield optimizer and exchange. By solving for publisher problems capturing mobile and native […]

In a perfect world, products gel. For Facebook, achieving a harmony between its buy- and sell-side offerings has propelled its go-to-market strategy. While Facebook’s ad server, Atlas, is its buy-side play, LiveRail, the video SSP it acquired last July, services the sell side. “Ideally, everything works very well together,” said F. Scott Woods, head of […]

Rubicon Project-owned Chango recently poached customers from eBay Enterprise who were using a white-labeled version of Chango’s product, AdExchanger has learned. In what could be construed as a cautionary tale to any company bundling and reselling a partner’s technology, Chango sales reps approached the dozen or so retailers, some of them with significant media budgets, […]

Former Google and BrightRoll exec Bruce Falck has joined Turn as CEO, the company revealed Tuesday. Most recently, Falck was COO of video marketplace BrightRoll, which Yahoo acquired last fall. Prior to that, he spent eight years at Google, where he was instrumental in expanding the Google Display Network and DoubleClick businesses. His transition to […]

Pandora knows sound. Now the music streaming service is experimenting with sight and motion in its quest for new users – and mobile is the central battleground. More than three-quarters of Pandora’s roughly 80 million monthly active users listen on mobile. “We want to acquire and engage high-quality listeners – aka users who actively use the app […]

Twitter’s comms chief, Gabriel Stricker, departed suddenly in July, and now more execs will likely follow. A key marketing figure is already job prospecting, sources say. Bottom line: If Twitter doesn’t find a permanent chief executive quickly it risks a flight of talent within its marketing organization. And it’s not at all clear how much longer […]

Brands are on the constant hunt for engaged audiences. It’s why they attend upfronts for television, NewFronts for digital, future fronts for programmatic, podcast upfronts for audio – and, now, AppFronts for apps. General Electric hosted its first AppFronts on Tuesday in New York City, gathering together an audience of brands and agencies for an event […]

Remember when Facebook said it wouldn’t allow independent viewability verification on its properties? And remember when WPP’s GroupM agencies Unilever, Kellogg and others were extremely displeased with that proposition and said they would curtail spending on platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, where third-party viewability tags weren’t welcome? Well, Facebook announced Thursday that it’s planning to […]

Jack Dorsey will apparently not be the next full-time CEO at Twitter, bringing Adam Bain, the company’s top sales exec and a presumptive candidate for the job, a step closer to the throne. Dorsey has been whispering to Square investors that he will stay on as CEO of the payments company, Re/code reported Thursday. But […]

AOL has packaged a number of its creative point solutions into a single platform called ONE by AOL: Creative, which the company revealed Tuesday. The self-serve banner, video and mobile ad creator was built on the back of Pictela, a rich media tool AOL acquired in 2010, which provided templates for marketers to create custom, […]

Demandbase has acquired Seattle-based WhoToo, a behavioral data platform focused on B2B marketing, for an unidentified sum, the company disclosed Thursday. Underscoring the deal was Demandbase’s desire to beef up its behavioral marketing data set and hook into clients’ existing data-management platforms. “This isn’t just data for data’s sake,” noted Chris Golec, CEO of Demandbase: […]

HookLogic raised $15.5 million in Series C funding and will sell AutoHook, a suite of lead-gen and marketing tools designed for automotive companies, the company announced Thursday. Terms of the AutoHook sale to auto consultancy firm Urban Science were not disclosed. In addition to previous investors Bain Capital and Intel Capital, this funding round included […]

In the two years since Facebook’s huge image-sharing platform sold its first ad, Instagram has focused on fixed-price advertising from big national brands. In keeping with the platform’s emphasis on aesthetics and high design, many early advertisers were lifestyle companies like Starbucks and Disney. With Instagram’s 300 million global users now accustomed to seeing ads, […]

There’s no need to freak out, but content blocking in iOS 9 goes beyond the mobile web and in some cases will also apply to in-app advertising. And that’s because of an in-app browsing mechanism in iOS 9 called Safari View Controller. It’s basically a more streamlined version of Apple’s current webview framework that developers […]

AOL’s acquisition of Millennial Media for $238 million was a coup for its purchaser, if not for its investors. The mobile ad platform went from an opening-day share price of $23.50 to $1.75 when AOL announced its intent to purchase Thursday. But Elgin Thompson, managing director at investment firm Digital Capital Advisors, cautioned not to […]

Does Verizon have access to rich user data? Undeniably. Will Verizon successfully capitalize on that opportunity? Questionable. After all, Verizon’s user data is only as valuable as its data practices. Verizon could certainly benefit in the wake of an acquisition spree that somewhat resembled a line of falling dominos – AOL into Verizon, Millennial Media […]