Platforms

By Allison Schiff and Zach Rodgers. Wall Street never really seemed to get soon-to-be-former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. Costolo will step down as chief exec of Twitter on July 1, the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. [Read the SEC filing.] Founder and board chairman Jack Dorsey will take the […]

Twitter has a DM for brands: We care about DR. “We highly prize the ability to drive ROI,” said Richard Alfonsi, Twitter’s VP of global online sales. So do most of Twitter’s competitors, with Pinterest, Instagram, Google and Facebook all at various stages of buy button rollout. It makes sense. Social platforms are starting to […]

Mobile native isn’t just about look, it’s also about feel – and there’s nothing more native to the mobile experience than a tap. “Brands and users are looking for an alternative to web banners squished into mobile,” said James Cooper, head of creative at New York City-based digital ads startup Betaworks, which announced Tuesday that it […]

Visa wants merchants and consumers to know it’s everywhere they want to be. And, increasingly, everywhere means mobile. The brand is committing more than 50% of its US media budget to digital, including social and mobile, said the company’s SVP and head of North America marketing, Lara Balazs. Last year, it invested 30-40% or more […]

Apple’s stance on data collection: “We honestly just don’t want to know,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s SVP of software engineering, to roughly 5,000 app developers at the tech giant’s Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday. “We don’t mine your email, your photos or your contacts in the cloud to learn things,” Federighi said. “All of this is done […]

Agencies and publishers alike have jumped into private marketplaces. Rocket Fuel, known for its performance-driven campaigns in open marketplaces, has lately begun pitching an offering of its own. For the past six months, it’s partnered with agencies and publishers to enable performance-driven campaigns in premium environments, building on technology put in place by [x+1], which […]

Datasift’s hookup with Facebook is gaining steam. It’s a good thing for the social media data provider, which got cut off from Twitter’s firehose in April, one month after announcing its non-exclusive Facebook partnership. On Wednesday, social analytics platform Pulsar became one of the first Datasift clients to benefit from this connection – it will […]

When Reddit revealed it would produce original video, code for “more premium content,” it was right in line with its pitch to brand advertisers – as well as more tools for publishers – through features like embeddable comment threads. That said, the last thing it will compromise is a solid user experience in its community […]

The fox can’t guard the chicken run. GroupM is not down with Facebook and Google’s reticence around third-party verification tags. “You can’t measure yourself,” said John Montgomery, COO of GroupM Interaction, North America, speaking at AdExchanger’s Clean Ads I/O conference in New York City on Wednesday. The fact that Facebook is working closely with the […]

Brands need to feel confident that their ads are being seen – and “because we said so” is not an acceptable answer. That’s why Yahoo is bringing third-party verification tags from comScore, DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, Moat and several others onto its owned-and-operated properties and onto third-party sites within the Yahoo network. Yahoo is slated to […]

In a move aimed at speeding the conversion path between “pinners” and thousands of retailers, Pinterest will debut buyable pins allowing users to purchase products directly from its website, the company announced Tuesday at its San Francisco headquarters. The feature was specifically designed to make mobile purchases faster and easier as users browse their favorite pinboards. […]

Television has the GRP. Mobile deserves the same. That’s the thinking at comScore. Starting Wednesday, the measurement company will make mobile ad reporting for apps and mobile web generally available within its validated Campaign Essentials (vCE) product. ComScore had done custom delivery of mobile measurement in the past on a client-by-client basis. That same data […]

There’s something fishy going on in China. According to mobile attribution company Apsalar, for every valid in-app purchase (IAP) made in China, there are 273 fraudulent ones. But China isn’t the only place with IAP problems. Taiwan sees 54 fake in-app purchases for every valid one, while Saudi Arabia clocks in at 24.6 and Israel […]

Cxense, a Norwegian provider of publisher-focused ad tech, on Monday acquired Maxifier, whose technology optimizes direct sold campaigns, for $3.56 million in stock. “Our ability to understand customer behavior and data will be injected into Maxifier’s extremely rich ability to forecast and optimize advertising campaigns, and vice versa,” said Geraldo Maroniene, Cxense’s EVP of corporate […]

App developers will inherit the Earth – and Google wants a piece of that. That’s why advertising was high on the agenda for the first time on day one of Google’s I/O developer conference in San Francisco on Thursday. Although Android’s market share is massive – according to IDC, Android has 78% of the market, versus Apple’s […]

That might be the look on your face when you hear that emoji are a highly promising new advertising tool. But it’s true. As Andreessen Horowitz partner Benedict Evans recently mused in a blog post: “The potential to turn messaging into a platform is the Trojan horse that drives a lot of the excitement in […]

When Canadian messaging platform Kik, which aims to become the “WeChat of the West,” hired former Accuen CEO Josh Jacobs as its president of Kik Services, many wondered why someone who had been so ingrained in advertising would pivot to messaging. Or maybe it’s not such a pivot: After all, Jacobs will supervise the new […]

Developing game apps is a hard knock life – because once the development is done, the monetization work begins. “Game developers have specific needs,” said Chung-Man Tam, chief product officer at mobile game discovery platform Chartboost, which launched a collection of tools on Thursday aimed at helping devs take better advantage of their first-party data. Two […]

Video publishers are clamoring for a clearer monetization plan from Facebook. The social network does not yet have a revenue-sharing arrangement, however, which is challenging for publishers who want to measure the value of their cross-platform distribution efforts. “It’s a problem, since there’s no monetization for video yet, but it is coming,” said Nathan Brown, SVP […]

Spotify is preparing to play in a very big pool – the world of original video content. The digital audio firm revealed the development during a New York City partner event it hosted Wednesday. Spotify plans to work with producers and artists to offer its exclusive original content. It will also host non-exclusive content from […]

Magnetic and MyBuys announced Wednesday they will merge, creating a company with a combined gross revenue of $100 million spanning ad tech and marketing tech. With their dual capabilities, they will be able to leverage first-party and third-party data to inform their 700 clients’ advertising spend and marketing efforts throughout the customer life cycle. At the same […]

Collective CEO Joe Apprendi would rather not describe his company’s shift toward self-service as a “pivot.” “We use the word ‘diversification,’” Apprendi told AdExchanger. “We realize that there are clients out there who want to engage with our capabilities in a variety of different ways.” Historically, Collective didn’t offer that variety. Like a lot of […]

What’s the future of content distribution and monetization, particularly as major players like Facebook, Google and Verizon make strategic moves to capture more share in mobile video? This was the dominant theme at JW Player’s JW INSIGHTS conference Tuesday in New York, where a group of execs from Google and AOL’s likely owner, Verizon, gathered for the […]

Female-oriented publisher SheKnows hired as its first CTO Carl Hixson, who’s built digital platforms for Getty Images, HBO, Pearson and McGraw-Hill. He’ll turn his experience toward Momentum, SheKnows’ data-driven content management system designed to help advertisers “create content [and] manage ad units around content in a single, seamless ecosystem,” Hixson said. Momentum is expected to […]

Pinterest revealed Tuesday that marketers this summer will be able to target audiences, buy inventory on a cost-per-engagement (CPE) or cost-per-action (CPA) basis and run video units called Cinematic Pins. “These solutions map to any marketing objective,” said Tim Kendall, Pinterest’s GM of monetization. He described Pinterest’s ad solution set as “comprehensive” – a trait […]

Taboola is paving the way to enter the Chinese market. On Monday, it revealed it had received a multimillion-dollar investment from Chinese search provider Baidu. Baidu does not name the level of investment unless SEC rules require it. “The goal behind the investment is to work together on launching native advertising in China,” Taboola CEO […]

It’s time for the next can of worms: mobile viewability. And the mobile ad vendors are already on the scene. Less than two weeks after the Media Rating Council (MRC) issued its long-awaited interim guidance on mobile viewability measurement, three separate mobile media sellers – Millennial Media, 33Across and JUICE Mobile – have announced their intention to offer a 100% […]

In a small change that speaks to its huge cross-device aspirations, Facebook is ending its support for mobile app install reporting at the device level. On Wednesday, Facebook called up its mobile measurement partners (MMPs) – a group that includes companies such as Appsflyer, Apsalar and Kochava – and told them that as of August 20 […]

In its first earnings call since going public in March, MaxPoint reported revenue growth of 87% to $28.7 million. Its revenue ex-TAC, which excludes the cost of programmatically buying impressions through real-time bidding, rose 90% to $16.8 million. [Read the earnings release.] The total number of enterprise customers rose 62% to 529. In the first quarter of […]

Facebook has confirmed it will begin displaying publishers’ articles natively in the Facebook mobile app, naming nine initial media partners for the program. (Read the blog post.) Participating publishers are The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, NBC, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Spiegel and Bild. “We’ve been comfortable with experimenting with a variety of storytelling platforms over the past […]