Platforms

During Yahoo’s earnings call Tuesday, CEO Marissa Mayer went into some detail about Yahoo’s plans to leverage Flurry’s developer connections to launch a mobile ad network. Mayer said mobile app developers who have downloaded Flurry’s free analytics will be able to turn on monetization with Yahoo Gemini, its native solution, as well as BrightRoll video ads. More than 600,000 apps […]

AOL took its first step toward becoming a “video-led content company” with the launch of AOL Rise, a morning show formatted as two-minute clips tailored for mobile devices, said Dermot McCormack, president of AOL video and studios. AOL hopes people will watch AOL Rise instead of browsing the web or tuning into televised morning shows when […]

Publishers love to wall off their audience data, but is that good for marketers, who need to track consumer activity across devices and various sites and apps? Certainly messaging across channels is more precise when the targeting mechanisms are based on, say, Facebook login data instead of cookies. But what happens when a marketing campaign needs […]

Despite the amount of attention Facebook Exchange generated when it was released way back in 2012, today it’s mostly focused on retargeting desktop users. Consequently, some ad industry insiders are skeptical of its future. When asked directly about FBX’s future at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview conference, David Fischer, Facebook’s VP of business and marketing partnerships, said […]

Pinterest, which just made its Promoted Pins tool generally available, will soon offer more features for its paid advertising products, said Pinterest COO Dan Faul at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview conference on Thursday. These features will include integrating rich targeting features with a brand’s first-party CRM data and solutions around branding and direct-response advertising. Despite this […]

Facebook’s Atlas is mapping a course for cross-device world domination – one agency holding company relationship at a time. In a move reminiscent of its partnership with Omnicom, Atlas unveiled Wednesday a three-year global hook-up with Havas Media Group. Omnicom was an Atlas launch partner back in September when the rebooted ad server rose from Microsoft’s ashes […]

Twitter has acquired Indian startup ZipDial, a company that has capitalized on the opportunity to provide consumers in emerging markets a way to connect with friends, family or, in this case, brands, without incurring large call charges. TechCrunch first reported the deal, and estimated it to be in the $30 million-$40 million range. For Twitter, which has […]

Justin Bieber’s bulge. Those are three words you probably didn’t expect to see – but that’s exactly what was trending the most among college-age girls after images were released from the Bieb’s photoshoot for Calvin Klein underwear last week. For brands targeting girls 18-24, the question is at what point they should be all over that bulge, […]

Agency and ad tech vet Alan Schanzer landed at Pandora as SVP of Agency Relations on Jan. 13, and his goal is to broaden the streaming radio company’s relationship with advertisers. “I’ll be helping to develop Pandora’s strategy with holding companies, major advertisers and agencies, and, at the very top level, help them understand the […]

Yahoo has promoted Flurry executive Prashant Fuloria to head up all advertising products, the company confirmed on Friday. Fuloria’s title is SVP of Advertising Products, a job with oversight of Yahoo’s display, native, video and mobile ad products. He will report directly to Marissa Mayer and will oversee Scott Burke (who runs Yahoo Ad Manager Plus and Yahoo Gemini, and who moves […]

A year after AOL acquired Gravity, AOL-owned publication The Huffington Post has standardized the content personalization tool to power internal and external content recommendation links. This means it’s history for Taboola, HuffPost’s previous recommendation module. Gravity has powered the publisher’s “Suggested For You” internal module for the past six months, and it replaced the Taboola-powered external module […]

WBEZ’s “This American Life” spinoff, “Serial,” shattered the iTunes record for the fastest podcast to reach 5 million downloads. From its October premiere through Jan. 1, the episodes were downloaded 31 million times. But for “Serial,” the sleeper winner was email marketing solutions provider MailChimp, the podcast’s sponsor whose brand went viral thanks to the […]

Most would argue that Yahoo’s de facto policy on the Right Media Exchange had been “do not resuscitate” for quite some time – but now RMX is officially off life support. Several sources tell AdExchanger that Yahoo is finally shutting down the exchange for all non-Yahoo owned and operated networks and publishers. Depending on your […]

As the Financial Times reported last month, The Washington Post is making its content management system (CMS) available to partners, like universities and fellow newspapers. The University of Maryland, Yale and Columbia have already adopted the CMS. Additional users may come from the more than 200 newspaper partners with which the Post has established subscription-sharing […]

Google’s big video reveal this week included a significant update to its premium video exchange, Google Partner Select. At the time of its launch last June, it was unclear how many participants initially were involved in Google’s effort to “bring together the best of brand advertising with the best of programmatic,” Neal Mohan, Google’s VP […]

Last year at CES, Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer presented on stage and revealed Yahoo Advertising as the umbrella housing the company’s ad products. At CES 2015, the company was less central. Simon Khalaf, CEO of Yahoo’s July acquisition of Flurry, gave a “state of mobile” keynote at the APPNATION conference, held at the same time […]

Hear that? It’s the sound of Google quietly mentioning that it plans to report on audibility for video ads at some point later this year. The audibility reference was buried as a footnote toward the end of a larger update on Google’s intention to roll out viewability reporting across all of its ad platforms, including […]

Seeing more video in the news feed? You’re not the only one. Facebook said on Wednesday that video activity on its platform grew dramatically in 2014, bolstering its ambition to become a video platform contender to rival YouTube. In a blog post Facebook said the number of video posts per individual user grew 94% on average in the […]

Just a few months after it hired Digilant COO Nathan Woodman to take charge of its demand-side business, IPONWEB has nabbed another well-known ad tech guy. The 13-year-old ad platform company has hired Bob Walczak, VP product at PubMatic, to oversee BidSwitch, its ad exchange-like product. At IPONWEB, Walczak will run sales and business operations for BidSwitch, a […]

In today’s mobile ad tech landscape, the blind lead the blind. That’s according to Forrester in a report released Monday that aims to help advertisers get some clarity into what’s become an immature and murky market of mobile vendors. Most mobile tech players aren’t clear enough about the services they provide, often using jargon and […]

Oracle has agreed to acquire Datalogix, a data solutions company that shopped itself around in recent weeks, as AdExchanger has reported. As we previously reported, Facebook, Nielsen and Adobe have also shown interest in the business. Although the deal price was undisclosed, Oracle paid about 6.25x for BlueKai. If Datalogix had revenue of $125 million, that means […]

Google spent the year branding YouTube as the de facto video partner for brand advertisers. 2014 was certainly active for Google’s video properties. Its ads and commerce chief, Susan Wojcicki, took the reins at YouTube as senior vice president, Google packaged the top 5% performing YouTube videos for brand buys in a program called Google […]

If banner advertising has peaked, native advertising is still on its way up. Proponents of native cite better consumer engagement and higher rates for publishers. London-based market research firm Mintel pegged the current native advertising market at $1.8 billion, predicting it will rise to $9.4 billion by 2018. Of course, “native” is a broad term […]

If data is currency, then it’s no wonder most companies lock it in a safe (unless you’re Sony Pictures Entertainment, in which case you just put it on a Word document somewhere). But this can be a tremendous point of frustration for brands that want to use the data housed by the big dogs of […]

The second coming of Facebook’s Atlas ad server was probably the biggest ad-tech development of 2014. Marketers could for the first time upload their first-party data for accurate measurement, de-duplication, and targeting across devices. Other platforms will follow (read: Google), but Facebook broke the tape. The “people-based” marketing opportunity will not fully materialize, however, until […]

Is a Facebook video impression worth the same as in video-on-demand? This was one of many questions posed to YouTube and Facebook reps during Tuesday’s TV Of Tomorrow Show in New York. Patrick Harris, Facebook’s director of global agency development, argued that “the CMOs we serve are not thinking about the value of specific impressions. […]

App-install ads are where the mobile cash is – at least for now – and Yahoo is starting to capitalize. The company said Tuesday that it’s making app-install ads available through Gemini, Yahoo’s self-serve marketplace for native and mobile search ads. Advertisers will be able to promote their apps to roughly 550 million monthly mobile users […]

Facebook’s declining organic reach has plagued small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) since it tweaked its algorithm about eight months ago. A study by analytics platform SumAll, released in October, highlights exactly what that fallout looks like for smaller advertisers on Facebook. Because Facebook’s algorithm change reduces the reach of Facebook posts, it has made it […]

Spotify is getting into the local ad game, courting brands with a platform that helps advertisers geotarget audiences in the US. The music streaming service will debut its Spot Radio Platform for brands on Jan. 1. The tool is backboned by Triton Digital, a marketing service to the media industry and a tech provider whose […]

Black Friday came and went and while the results were mixed (The National Retail Federation (NRF) estimated an 11% drop in combined online and in-store retail sales), digital seems to be the bright spot. ComScore, for instance, found $26.7 billion was spent online in the month of November, a 16% increase from last year while Adobe’s […]