Platforms

The $45 billion Comcast-Time Warner Cable (TWC) deal is officially kaput. If the merger had materialized, it would have created an unsurpassable media and cable conglomerate with massive audience reach. From day one, regulators were wary about one company controlling too much broadband access, resulting in Comcast terminating the deal Friday. “Today, we move on,” […]

True or false: Social data is the largest and least biased set of observational data that ever existed. The answer depends on whom you ask. Twitter sees its platform as a sort of public playground of contextual social conversations. All you need to do is have the right tools to mine the insights. LinkedIn views […]

Pandora CEO Brian McAndrews said during the digital radio company’s Q1 earnings call that its mobile programmatic solution, currently in beta, will be generally available in Q3. “During beta, we are open to a handful of customers to ensure we are set up to operationally scale the program similarly to what we’ve done in web,” […]

Turn is making some changes at the top. Bill Demas, CEO of the scaled demand-side platform, will exit the company in what is being characterized as a mutual decision between him and the board. Demas told employees on Wednesday that he will stay on long enough for the company to identify a successor and that he will remain […]

Pangia Games doesn’t have money to waste. What app developer does? Monetization and user acquisition are tricky for anyone – although it certainly helps to have extra cash to throw at the problem. But the smaller devs out there, like Pangia, need to get creative. “We’re a team of two,” said Nick Barbato, managing partner at […]

As it has done like clockwork for the past eight or so quarters, Facebook on Wednesday reported strong audience and ad revenue growth led by mobile. An aggressive investment in video is adding to its momentum, though exactly what video contributes to its top line is unclear. Facebook’s Q1 2015 revenue from advertising totaled $3.5 billion, an increase of […]

When it comes to shopping ads, it’s not all about Google anymore. While Q1 US spend for Google Shopping Ads (formerly Product Listing Ads) was up 37% year over year, Bing/Yahoo is starting to encroach on Google, at least in the United States, where spend increased 72% last quarter, according to the Adobe Digital Index […]

Mail.ru, the Russian internet company, today launched a mobile ad platform called myTarget, opening up the Russian mobile audience to advertisers within Russia as well as internationally. The Russian online advertising market has historically been very insular, which is an issue that Mail.ru wanted to tackle, according to CEO Dmitry Grishin. “It’s usually local advertising […]

Although Yahoo continues to plow ahead on mobile, the company’s Q1 2015 disappointed. Yahoo’s revenue clocked in at $1.04 billion, missing analysts’ estimate of $1.06 billion. During the company’s investor call with analysts, CEO Marissa Mayer suggested programmatic has lowered the prices that Yahoo can command for its inventory. “We see a lot of advertising […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Jeremy Randol, vice president of programmatic sales strategy at Pandora. Five years ago, programmatic buyers were in the driver’s seat, with access to an overabundance of cheap, programmatically accessible inventory. Cookies were all you […]

Spotify added Playlist Targeting to its advertising mix on Thursday, an offering that lets brands access its first-party data to target listeners based on current moods or activities. Playlist Targeting will be available for all brands when it launches out of beta on May 1st. Thursday’s launch adds to Spotify’s video offerings, Video Takeover and […]

The rumors were true. Google’s skippable and click-to-play YouTube ad format TrueView will be available programmatically, the company announced Thursday at the Programmatic I/O conference in San Francisco. The 5-year-old format, priced on a cost-per-view basis, represents more than 85% of in-stream ads on YouTube, according to Rany Ng, product management director for Google. TrueView […]

“im really upset that I have not yet gotten any Girl Scout cookies because I can’t find those freaking Girl Scouts anywhere” Tweets like that make it pretty clear that Girl Scout cookies don’t have an awareness problem. Tweets like that also make it clear that cookie lovers often have trouble finding the Thin Mints, […]

Consider it AOL ONE’s coming-out party. A year after AOL first outlined a vision to unify its programmatic technologies for both advertisers and publishers under a single platform, Tuesday marks the day the product officially ships. AOL has also renamed each of its technologies to more accurately reflect their capabilities. For instance, Adap.tv is now […]

Facebook’s introduction of a cross-device ID last fall was a big deal in marketing circles. Based on the company’s direct relationships with its 1.4 billion users, it offered a viable alternative to the broken cookie. Since then, Facebook has been on a communications and sales blitz, driving awareness and adoption of its “people-based marketing” product […]

MoPub was helping app developers monetize before it was cool. That’s part of what gives Twitter’s mobile exchange its street cred, said Janae McDonough, senior director of exchange at Twitter, who joined MoPub the year before Twitter acquired it in 2013. “We created this opportunity for app developers four years before anybody was thinking about […]

Google’s plan to rival Netflix and Hulu by introducing its own ad-free subscription service has left some questioning as to whether it will restrict content creators enough to move elsewhere. Although YouTube creators will receive a 55% cut of paid subscription revenue for their videos, which is equal to the percentage they earn for pre-roll […]

Video branding and YouTube rights management platform Zefr – the brainchild of entrepreneur Rich Raddon, who sold the streaming video company he co-founded, Movieclips, to Comcast’s Fandango last year – is setting its sights on audio app SoundCloud. “SoundCloud is now partnering with us to understand the fan activity that’s going on on the platform,” […]

Holding company WPP’s Data Alliance and Facebook have expanded their partnership such that WPP clients globally can use data assets from Kantar Media, media agency GroupM and Wunderman’s KBM Group to build unique audience segments to target across the Facebook ecosystem. This partnership is considerably different from what Facebook has with third-party data providers like Acxiom and Datalogix. […]

FOX Sports wants to bring its content to where users watch it. AOL wants more video content. Deal. It was in that team spirit that the two companies revealed Wednesday a syndication partnership that would bring FOX Sports content to AOL properties. “AOL really fits in with our off-network digital strategy,” said Ben Maggin, VP […]

Google’s pitch to brands is that YouTube is a great place to increase brand lift and drive sales, not just impressions. If YouTube star Bethany Mota talks about Tide-To-Go, its impact is like a friend’s social media recommendation, which is why Google is gunning for these direct-sold sponsorships to be part of its own sales process. Similar […]

Papa Murphy’s isn’t biting off more than it can chew when it comes to mobile. The Washington state-based pizza company, which operates 1,400 franchises and corporate-owned stores across the central and western United States, is starting to ramp up its mobile experimentation through a new relationship with mobile messaging and CRM platform Waterfall, announced Thursday. […]

Rubicon Project acquired search and website retargeting firm Chango in a $122 million cash and stock (but mostly stock) transaction, the companies said Thursday. (Read the investor release.) “There’s one area of the market we haven’t addressed in the past, and that’s intent marketing,” Rubicon CEO Frank Addante told AdExchanger. “If Google has the platform for search, […]

Facebook violates EU law by tracking users for targeted advertising, a European privacy panel said Tuesday. The report was commissioned by the Belgian Privacy Commission, which sits under the EU’s European Commission, and is an updated version of an initial draft that surfaced in February. A key development of the update claims that Facebook cookies […]

When “consumer immersion” is your top brand metric, live-streaming video enters your channel-investment strategy. Such is the case for PepsiCo-owned Mountain Dew, one of the first brands to test-drive Twitter’s new live-video app, Periscope. Mountain Dew created a three-minute video asking fans to stop by and say, “What’s up?” and to interact by sending the […]

Montreal-based Frank & Oak, a menswear ecommerce company named by Fast Company as one of the “World’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies of 2015,” thinks video and mobile should be the first entry points into its acquisition funnel. Founded in 2012, the company has more than 1.6 million active users (most of them young males […]

With digital audio consumption on the rise, advertiser expectations about targeting and buying advertisements are also growing fast. These concerns surfaced Thursday during Mediaocean’s “Radio Reinvented” panel in Manhattan. Panelists included executives from Pandora, Spotify and Triton Digital. The panelists revealed there are 143 million monthly online radio listeners in the US, representing 53% of […]

Facebook is working with a dozen mobile ad networks to better track installs beyond mobile media it directly controls. Millennial Media, InMobi and AppLovin are among the networks to sign on for the beta program, but Facebook’s biggest competitors predictably aren’t playing along. The feature is part of a product called Analytics for Apps that […]

Pinterest would not exist without brands. So said Eva Papoutsakis Smith, head of marketing communications and insights at Pinterest, at eMarketer’s State of Mobile breakfast on Wednesday. “Two-thirds of all pins come from brands or business websites,” Smith said. “If you removed all of that, there wouldn’t be a Pinterest.” That said, advertising on Pinterest […]

Welcome to the real Facebook Exchange. Facebook is using its F8 Developer Conference in San Francisco, where it trotted out its Audience Network one year ago, to unveil an expansion of its publisher-facing ad tools. The big news is this: Facebook has extended the capabilities of its LiveRail video SSP – acquired last summer – […]