Platforms

Mobile agency Fetch is in serious growth mode. It’s been just shy of a year since Fetch became part of the Dentsu Aegis Network, which reportedly shelled out around $48 million in November 2014 to buy the London-based agency. Although Fetch still maintains its global headquarters in London, CEO and co-founder James Connelly said that […]

Luxury auto intenders are multitaskers. It’s a behavior that comes in handy for the marketers at Jaguar Land Rover when it comes to maximizing its TV budget. “We still have a big investment in TV, so we’re always looking for ways to extend the reach of that investment in a smart way,” said Kim Kyaw, Jaguar […]

If late-year sales are particularly important to you, then your holiday strategy and product development should now be entering its final lap. What remains is a race to retain customers coming in during the blitz of holiday marketing. “The actual user connections should be in place before the holidays, not just a strategy,” said Richard […]

To borrow a phrase from baseball, B2B programmatic advertising is still in the early innings. A couple of factors have kept B2B marketers from fully adopting the media strategy as rapidly as their B2C brethren. “The biggest difference in B2B and B2C programmatic is the value of the inventory,” said Tony Uphoff, CEO of Business.com. […]

GameSpot readers know what they like – and they know what they don’t like. Owned and operated by CBS Interactive, the video game news and reviews site caters to the mainstream console gamer aged 18 to 40. And they’re an opinionated, assorted bunch. “On the surface level, that might seem like a homogenous audience – simply […]

Putting the “A” in MAU or DAU is about a lot more than enabling users to rack up a bunch of points – it’s about giving those monthly or daily users a reason to be active in the first place. “Customer loyalty is at the heart of everything we do,” said Karah Sutton, marketing and […]

The best way to cover the pope’s visit to the United States on social media was to highlight the moments where he kissed babies. Such an insight feels intuitively right, but USA Today social media editor Mary Nahorniak only made that discovery using CrowdTangle, a social media tool that helps publishers analyze the best-performing content […]

Spotify revealed Thursday that Katz Radio Group will serve as its exclusive representative for geotargeted audio sales in the United States. The radio representation company’s digital division, Katz Digital, will oversee Spotify’s DMA-targeted audio solutions, freeing up the streaming service to focus on broader brand offerings across the platform. Spotify had already been active in […]

Toyota Motors is a big TV spender. It bought, according to Kantar Media, three minutes of commercial airtime during Super Bowl XLIX –trailing only Anheuser-Busch and Fiat Chrysler. Although Toyota will continue to invest in big TV tent poles, it’s test-driving more digital video activation, and is sponsoring premium NBCUniversal video running on AOL’s network. […]

Twitter and Square have more in common than Jack Dorsey as CEO – both platforms have a marked interest in small and medium-sized businesses. While Twitter maintains a suite of Promoted Products aimed at small business owners, including Quick Promote, a tool that allows brands to amplify tweets directly from the Twitter analytics dashboard, Square’s entire […]

Facebook is taking the next logical step in its evolution toward a full-stack ad tech offering, rolling out a demand-side platform (DSP) capable of executing programmatic buys using the company’s “people-based” advertising methodology. In recent weeks Facebook’s Atlas team has pitched the DSP product to agency partners, including Omnicom Group, Havas, Merkle and others, according […]

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 […]