Pinterest is one of those up-and-comers in the world of social advertising. The image-based social network doesn’t divulge audience numbers, but comScore pegs it at around 60 million monthly active users (MAUs). Of course, that’s not quite the volume of Twitter’s 271 million MAUs or Facebook’s 1.3 billion, but it’s still nothing to sneeze at, especially as […]
AOL added another premium ad format to its programmatic offerings on Monday. A full-page mobile ad, the Road Devil Interstitial for Mobile, is part of an effort to add more premium, brand-friendly units to its programmatic inventory. The unit offers brands the ability to display a store locator, bring in recent tweets or play a video […]
Rocket Fuel closed on its acquisition of [x+1] Friday, transforming itself from what was primarily an ad network company into a credible platform play focused on the software-as-a-service opportunity in programmatic marketing. The new Rocket Fuel has far more of the attributes of a “programmatic marketing platform” than the old one, providing clients with the […]
Each day, 7 million fans tune in to YouTube to see bubbly video blogger Bethany Mota make breakfast or braid her hair. The breakout video star draws tweens eager for a taste of Mota’s fashion and beauty must-haves, averaging 100 million minutes of video watched per month. She’s equally attractive to brand advertisers, clinching campaigns […]
Facebook and Twitter are keen to build more commerce functionality into the social stream. Earlier this summer Facebook began working with select commerce brands to support direct transactions on its platform, and Twitter has been expected to produce something similar after sharp-eyed users spotted a semi-functional “buy” button on the site in July. Well, now that other […]
Ad management platform Marin Software has partnered with Yandex to let its clients automate and manage paid search campaigns on the Russian search engine giant. Basically, if those clients have similar advertising campaigns running on other search engines, they can clone those campaigns and pop them into Yandex. “We have more global clients looking to leverage the campaigns, […]
This is the sixth in a series of interviews with vendors combating the problem of ad fraud. Other companies participating in this series include Moat, Telemetry, Sizmek, comScore, Dstillery and Asia RTB. Read previous interviews with DoubleVerify, Forensiq, Integral Ad Science, PubChecker and Videology. When it comes to catching bots, higher walls and better locks […]
Apple is laying down the law for app developers through a set of new rules, which are slated to take effect in conjunction with its long-awaited iPhone release on Monday. Apple’s alterations restrict developers’ access to data from HealthKit, its factory-installed fitness monitoring app, and third-party app extensions. The new stipulations will likely apply to the next-generation […]
Following a $50 million infusion of cash Thursday, mobile location vendor xAd appears to be sitting pretty. The money is a combination of equity and debt financing. XAd is not publicly disclosing the split. According to CEO Dipanshu Sharma, the company doesn’t “have any immediate plans for the funding,” which came courtesy of Institutional Venture Partners, […]
LinkedIn’s discontinuation of Bizo’s business data service is an opportunity for data-management platform (DMP) and data services company eXelate. The company revealed plans Thursday for B2BX, a data-as-a-service offering for B2B advertisers. The company appointed Frannie Danzinger, Bizo’s former director of marketplace development, to spearhead the new development as VP of strategic solutions and plans to hire more […]
Ad tech companies Ghostery and IPONWEB have combined their technologies to launch an antifraud service Thursday called Ghostery Verified Domains. The service, designed for an RTB environment, enables advertisers to allocate campaign dollars based on the perceived level of legitimate traffic. These levels include verified, masked, suspicious or unknown. “It’s creating an extra data layer […]
When the privacy app Disconnect, designed to let consumers control what information other apps can access, was kicked out of the Play store last week, Google charged it with unauthorized interference with other apps, a violation of Google’s developer agreement. From Google’s perspective, Disconnect damages the functionality and health of other apps in the Play […]
Mobile is social, social is mobile. Working from this premise, video ad server Mixpo began a strategy review several months ago with the intention to build out its social capability. That process concluded Tuesday when the company closed on the acquisition of ShopIgniter, a social rich media specialist with 15 to 20 employees that is a […]
Triton Digital, which builds ad tech for digital and broadcast radio, unveiled its supply-side offering, Triton Advertising Platform (Tap), available in two flavors: one for traditional broadcasters and an on-demand offering for Internet-based radio stations. Over the next 18 months, Triton is going to onboard its roughly 6,000 stations in the US, EMEA, LATAM and […]
If cross-device tracking is a room, then Facebook and Google are the elephants – except Google is the only elephant that isn’t talking. Facebook hasn’t been shy about its cross-device intentions. At the time of the Atlas acquisition in 2013, its ads product director, Gokul Rajaram, noted that Facebook’s goal is to “be able to measure […]
This is the fifth in a series of interviews with vendors combating the problem of ad fraud. Other companies participating in this series include White Ops, Moat, Telemetry, Sizmek, comScore, Dstillery and Asia RTB. Read previous interviews with Forensiq, Integral Ad Science, PubChecker and Videology. DoubleVerify is not new to the ad fraud game. When […]
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Brian Mikalis, senior vice president of monetization at Pandora. Publishers that sell directly to advertisers and agencies are now faced with how to handle programmatic sales. Traditional RFPs have recently started including questions about […]
Despite having close to a half million Instagram followers, upscale retailer Nordstrom knows that “likes” and “follows” are great for growing community and measuring engagement or affinity, but these actions don’t necessarily translate into hard business metrics. Retailers want to know if that showroom-grade snapshot on social actually sold a tube of lipstick. “What we’ve primarily […]
Pinterest has the best data among the social platforms that have yet to embrace ads in a big way. It’s often said the company, like Google, is inherently intent-based, exposing potential future purchases each time a user “pins” the wrap skirt or maple countertop her heart desires. Today Pinterest is creating more granularity around user interactions with […]
Refinery29 started out as a fashion blog, but it’s since expanded its vision: It plans to be the go-to source for millennials on the subjects of beauty, travel and points of view on subjects ranging from dieting to news coming from Ferguson, Mo. It’s also a high-growth company. The digital publication has 15 million monthly uniques, according […]
After committing $100 million to develop original video content this quarter, Amazon has invested a whole lot more in the medium, swooping in Monday with $970 million in cash to acquire the video gaming platform Google had been eyeing: Twitch Interactive. Read the release. Variety first reported news of Google’s interest in May, citing sources claiming it […]
As the ad tech industry consolidates, some veterans of the space are looking to apply their skills to new fields. One result is Orchard Platform, founded in November and led by CEO Matt Burton, formerly sales engineer for AdMeld. The platform facilitates direct lending, bringing together institutional investors, loan originators and consumers. Most of Orchard’s […]
While music streaming giant Spotify has the capabilities and the insights to offer marketers granular audience segmenting and hyperlocal targeting, its focus on user experience supersedes the development of advertising products, said Gary Liu, head of Spotify Labs. The user experience is “definitely a primary focus if not the primary focus for our ad platform […]
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is by Megan Pagliuca, VP and GM for digital media at Merkle Inc. It was penned in response to Rob Griffin’s recent piece, “The Death of the Third-Party Ad Server.” Rob Griffin’s […]
This is the fourth in a series of interviews with vendors combating the problem of ad fraud. Other companies participating in this series include White Ops, DoubleVerify, Moat,Telemetry, Asia RTB and Integral Ad Science. Read previous interviews with Forensiq, Integral Ad Science and Videology. To combat ad fraud, many in the industry have been looking to technology that detects […]
It’s a bit of a three-way Catch-22: SnapChat needs to monetize, advertisers need to see solid engagement metrics and ROI and SnapChat users need to feel like they’re not being blasted by irrelevant advertising. Therein lies the rub for several of the agencies AdExchanger spoke with following The Wall Street Journal’s report on a new […]
No one would disagree that smartphone users are spending a ton of time in apps, and here are some more numbers to prove it. A report released Thursday by comScore found that apps now account for more than 50% of all digital media time spent, though it’s interesting to note that mobile growth isn’t vampirically […]
The Local Media Consortium, a 55-member-strong organization of local media startups, newspapers and local television news websites, signed a three-year contract with Yahoo on Tuesday enabling reach extension through the Yahoo platform. Members will also be able to take advantage of Yahoo’s targeting capabilities on behalf of their advertising clients. “If you take a local dry cleaning […]
Ever since his company, Automated Insights, announced a partnership with the Associated Press (AP), CEO and founder Robbie Allen says it’s been a bit of a whirlwind. The idea that his Durham, N.C., firm’s technology could automate what reporters do with the appropriate data inputs clearly has larger implications. As The Washington Post and Poynter, among […]
Fitness app RunKeeper is trying to monetize for the first time via a partnership with mobile rewards ad network Kiip to embark on a subtle version of advertising – but don’t call it advertising. Kiip founder and CEO Brian Wong doesn’t really like the word, mainly because for many people mobile advertising is synonymous with […]
Google won’t have to break up its ads business after being declared an online monopolist. Meanwhile, Amazon faces a lawsuit from the FTC alleging that it charged advertisers more than necessary for ecommerce ads.
Buy-side experts said it’s another example of a Big Tech platform taking advantage of the lack of transparency built into programmatic ad auctions. And they’re not optimistic change is coming.
This week, the Commerce Media Newsletter catches up with a startup from outside the world of data-driven advertising, but with an interesting position when it comes to ecommerce advertising. That’s Clearco, a Canadian fin tech company founded in 2015.
Halo Collar, a dog collar brand with direct-to-consumer origins, is preparing for its retail expansion by honing its first-party data strategy and incrementality measurement.
The company is launching an accelerator program to help tech vendors pitch their solutions in a way that makes sense to advertisers.
TWC is building a monetization model that treats weather as both a contextual and an emotional signal, and it’s using AI sales agents to bring it to market.
