Platforms

Facebook on Tuesday expanded the ad formats publishers can add to their mobile apps via the Facebook Audience Network (FAN). These formats include a native video unit that shows in-feed as well as three interstitial formats: carousel ads, which show up to five ads in a single unit; dynamic product ads, often used by retailers […]

Berlin-based mobile ad platform Fyber wants to help developers get a better handle on pre-caching, the practice of pre-loading video ad content to reduce load times and ad-serving latency. The company announced Monday that it’ll be releasing a tool within the next few weeks that enables developers to exercise more control over the pre-caching process. App developers […]

When Google revealed plans Thursday to exile YouTube ad inventory from the DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) by the year’s end, many in the ad industry felt betrayed. Google’s reasoning for this change isn’t clear, even to its partners. Its stated motivation is that it wants to devote more resources to developing other video ad products. […]

The writing was on the wall. Google revealed late Thursday it will no longer sell YouTube inventory through the DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX). Neal Mohan, VP of video and display advertising at Google, said in a blog post that the tech giant is yanking YouTube inventory from AdX to focus its development efforts on “the formats […]

For Hootsuite, it used to be all about text links on Twitter. Not so, anymore. The early Twitter client on Tuesday revealed native support for Instagram. So now, users can promote content on Instagram as well as across previously supported platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google pages. It also introduced recently link-to-buy functionality within […]

The New York Times hopes to address mobile advertising problems with a customizable native in-stream ad unit called Mobile Moments, set for a mid-September launch. The publisher built the unit in-house using insights from its editorial team. It will be available both on apps and the mobile web, and a few advertisers have already signed […]

Accuen has a new chief exec in the form of Megan Pagliuca, who comes to Omnicom Group’s trading desk after five years as general manager of digital media at Merkle. Pagliuca replaces Josh Jacobs, who helmed Accuen for nearly four years before leaving in March. Jacobs later turned up as president of Kik Services, where […]

Facebook has pulled the plug on a plan to limit device-level data collection for mobile app campaigns in the wake of a revolt by large app marketers against the policy change. A representative for the company confirmed to AdExchanger that Facebook will no longer stop app marketers – including some of the world’s largest mobile gaming […]

There’s nothing wrong with an 80% or 90% fill rate, unless you’re a cash-strapped medium-sized app developer. “That 10% or 20% can be a killer if you need the revenue,” said Anton Losman, chief product officer at DigitalClick, an indie dev studio with about 10 million downloads. Losman, who handles monetization for DigitalClick’s handful of apps, […]

French performance marketing company Criteo turned in a solid second quarter, growing its revenue ex-TAC by 65% to €110 million (US$120 million), up from €67 million (US$73 million) last year. Criteo continued its client growth streak, adding 730 net new advertiser clients in the last quarter to total about 8,500. It claims those clients are spending more, too, resulting […]

Sonobi, an ad tech company serving both publishers and agencies, has raised $10.4 million in Series A funding and made a few notable hires. Among the appointments is Tony Katsur, who joins as president. A former senior exec with Rubicon Project and CEO at Maxifier, Katsur said he was drawn to the company’s audience insights, […]

Charlene Li, CEO of Altimeter Group, will appear at AdExchanger’s Omni.Digital conference on Sept. 10, an event designed to educate marketers on advanced solutions for building seamless cross-channel brand experiences. For digital advertisers, emerging channels present new inroads to consumers, but new challenges accompany those budding opportunities. “Clients have limited time, they have limited budgets […]

Publishers seeking to create more competition and access for programmatic buyers have embraced header bidding over the past year. AppNexus first brought header bidding technology to market in 2009, back when RTB first started, but not many of its customers used it. Now it’s seeing increased demand from publishers adding its header bidding (or pre-bid) […]

First Facebook bought TheFind. Then Twitter grabbed TellApart. Now Yahoo wants a piece of the ecommerce pie. The company revealed late Friday its acquisition of Polyvore, a social shopping site founded in 2007 by former Yahoo engineer Pasha Sadri. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Although it preceded Pinterest by three years, Polyvore’s audience […]

Ad tech partnerships are fast and frequent, as vendors move to establish a presence in disciplines where they were formerly lacking, or to bolster their inventory pool. Certainly, these integrations are easier with the emergence of standards like openRTB, but there’s still more to it. “Now that everyone can support openRTB, you have to do […]

Neustar is banking on growth in its marketing services division, the primary point of conversation during its Q2 2015 earnings call. That the company will likely lose a major contract that supplies number portability services to the United States might be a financial hit, though CEO Lisa Hook was adamant that it won’t affect Neustar’s growing marketing […]

The flurry of marketing tools that LinkedIn rolled out last year is paying off for its ad business, said CEO Jeff Weiner during the company’s Q2 earnings call. Its Marketing Solutions business grew 32% in the second quarter to $140 million. With 52% of all traffic to LinkedIn coming from mobile, the platform saw a […]

Performance marketing agency Merkle is one of the first agencies to use Google’s cross-device measurement platform, as well as an early strategic partner with Facebook’s Atlas cross-device product. As such, it has unique insights into what company CSO John Lee refers to as Facebook’s and Google’s “distinct pros and cons,” with the caveat that it’s […]

Facebook is mostly an app company now. Desktop monetization of Facebook’s owned and operated properties keeps shrinking both in actual numbers and as a percentage of the overall business. In the second quarter of 2015, desktop revenue shrank 8% and contributed less than one-fourth of Facebook’s total ad revenue, the company said in its earnings disclosure […]

Twitter finally appears to be catching the worm. Or at least its Q2 isn’t a can of worms à la last quarter’s earnings leak. The company reported a solid Q2, beating Wall Street’s expectations with a 61% year-over-year increase in revenue to $502 million for the quarter, 25% of which came from direct-response – the “fastest-growing […]

Rubicon Project branched out into new areas in a strong Q2 that saw revenue grow 88% to $53 million. Managed revenue grew 48% to $227.2 million. Rubicon increased its cut of managed revenue, with take rate going up from 18.4% from last year to 21.4% this year. (Read the full earnings release here.) The company closed […]

As advertisers apply more data to their television buys, how will old measurement standards meet their needs? The idea ignited a debate during a panel on the state of TV at AOL’s New York headquarters Tuesday. “I don’t know if we need a standard currency,” said Dan Aversano, SVP of client and consumer insights at […]

In the words of Andreessen Horowitz partner Benedict Evans, “Mobile is eating the world.” While the investor community grows dubious about the viability of ad tech, mobile startups still seem to be able to bring in the cash. Two such companies, app data and analytics firm PushSpring and deep-linking outfit Yozio, both announced Series A […]

Pandora took its Sponsored Listening product out of beta on Monday. The mobile ad format lets brands sponsor an hour of uninterrupted listening for Pandora users in exchange for 15 seconds of engagement with an ad. “Advertisers are hungry for a model that lets them buy attention and we’ve seen really great interest from the […]

As feeds become the new standard for web design, there’s a greater need to develop ad units that accommodate them. Such was the thinking behind the IAB’s Wednesday release of specifications for three kinds of in-feed advertising channels: social feeds (notably sponsored Facebook or Twitter posts), product feeds (which encompass ecommerce sites like Amazon and […]

When Univision embarks on an 18-month partnership with Snapchat, it will be the latest test for the nascent social platform to prove its value as a content hosting platform for broadcasters – and for brands advertising against that content. The partnership, revealed Thursday, centers around Snapchat’s Live Stories product, “a curated stream of user submitted […]

Pandora is enjoying rising ad prices aided by its SMB sales efforts, CEO Brian McAndrews told investors during the company’s second quarter earnings call. “Our advertising investments, particularly in local, are paying off,” McAndrews said, adding, “RPMs were up 25% year over year, to a record $49.94.” According to McAndrews, Pandora’s success with local advertisers […]

Sometimes it takes a few bad dates before you find the one. So it would seem to be with Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who after some less than ideal pairings with sales execs may have found her perfect match in Lisa Utzschneider. Just nine months after her initial hire as head of sales for Yahoo […]

Twitter is looking to capitalize on the when and the where by connecting advertisers with audiences interested in specific events. The rather prosaically dubbed “event targeting” tool, announced Thursday, is separate from Project Lighting, Twitter’s reported upcoming dive into live event curation. But clearly the two are philosophically linked. With event targeting, advertisers will be […]

In-app fraud is turning into another expensive headache for advertisers. According to research released Thursday by fraud detection firm Forensiq, programmatic in-app ad fraud was responsible for roughly $776 million worth of wasted budget in 2014, a number Forensiq projects will crack the $1 billion mark this year. That might seem like a relative drop […]