Platforms

LinkedIn had strong growth across all lines of business in the fourth quarter. Marketing Solutions revenue for the quarter was up 56% year over year, coming in at $153 million. This beat some analysts expectations, which projected that figure at a slightly lower $131 million. [Here are the full results.] Marketing Solutions accounts for 24% of […]

You know the Twitter earnings narrative by now. Enthusiasm around strong revenue from advertising products is dampened by concerns over the growth rate of monthly active users (MAUs). Such was the case with the company’s Q4 Thursday, in which Twitter’s ad revenue doubled from the previous year to $432 million, beating Wall Street estimates. Mobile […]

Jeff Lucas, head of ad sales for Viacom Music and Entertainment, likes photo-messaging app Snapchat. Because its user base is dominated by females under 25, the platform that popularized the “fleeting” SMS aligns closely with Viacom property MTV’s young millennial audience. It’s one of the reasons why MTV is test driving Snapchat’s new Discover feature, part of […]

Twitter has developed ad products for big budgets (like second-screen targeting tool Twitter Amplify), but it’s also trying to show small and midsize advertisers it’s got their interests in mind. Twitter on Wednesday rolled out “Quick Promote,” an update to its 2013 self-serve ad platform. The feature is designed to simplify optimization for promoted tweets, […]

Now that Right Media Exchange (RMX) has been officially sunsetted by the powers that be, the Yahoo Ad Exchange has become a private marketplace of sorts, where demand can plug into Yahoo-owned and -operated supply. Yahoo has made a concentrated effort to streamline its ad business in the past year. The company used CES 2014 as […]

Google has a long history of working with agencies, but its push for premium video – resulting in more direct relationships with publishers – may alienate it from its longtime partners. A seeming point of contention is Google Partner Select, a video exchange established in 2014, promising exclusive access to 30 premium publishers. Typically, Google […]

Twitter is finally giving its promoted tweets wings to fly beyond Twitter’s own walls. In a blog post Tuesday, Ameet Ranadive, Twitter’s senior director of product, said that advertisers will be able to syndicate promoted tweet campaigns running on Twitter to non-Twitter properties using the same creative and audience targeting parameters. Twitter didn’t get specific on how the […]

The recent history of digital advertising is full of ad networks that have pivoted, or are trying to pivot, away from the withering RFP trade. Some have become demand-side platforms or analytics tools geared to advertisers and agencies. Fewer have positioned around the publisher. Family run Casale Media is in that smaller group. Founded in […]

Yahoo’s looking to befriend the devs. During the company’s Jan. 27 Q4 2014 earnings call Marissa Mayer confirmed Yahoo’s plan to use its acquisition of mobile analytics platform Flurry and its SDK as a foundation for a soon-to-be-announced mobile ad network. The Flurry SDK has been installed on more than 600,000 apps, in theory giving Yahoo […]

Face it: It’s unlikely your video campaign will go viral. Unlike Dollar Shave Club’s Michael Dubin, not everyone is a standup comedian. This is why metrics like engagement and target audience reach become much more sellable KPIs. Video platform Virool recognized this. Founded in 2012, the first iteration of the platform was as a self-serve tool for brands and […]

If you happen to have $4.5 million burning a hole in your pocket, congratulations! You can afford a 30-second Super Bowl TV spot. Of course, for most big game advertisers it’s not enough to have 30 seconds of spectacular creative – you also have to support it via online and social channels. “Social is huge […]

A few years ago, pancake purveyor IHOP was doing more push than pull. “We typically did what many clients do – we pushed a lot of information,” said Kirk Thompson, IHOP’s VP of marketing, speaking at the Ad Club of NY’s MeasurementNOW conference in New York City on Thursday. “We knew a lot about [our […]

The name of AppLift’s game is lifetime user value. The Berlin-based mobile game marketing platform launched a tool called DataLift on Thursday aimed at helping mobile advertisers get a better grip on the overall lifetime value of their users. “Price is what you pay, but value is what you get,” said AppLift CEO Kaya Taner, […]

App attribution company TUNE is dog-earing a significant chunk of a new funding round to go on a hiring spree. Announced Thursday, the Series B cash injection was led by Icon Ventures (which happened to have rebranded from Jafco Ventures on Monday), with contributions from Performance Equity Management and Accel Partners, the latter which also […]

Facebook reported ad revenue growth of 53% in the fourth quarter as it put the pedal down on video ads and its mobile ad network. Speaking on the quarterly earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts that Facebook users now watch 3 billion videos per day on average, a figure that only includes videos directly uploaded […]

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 […]