Platforms

Vendors are racing to offer advertising solutions for Instagram, which recently struck a multimillion-dollar ad deal with Omnicom. One such company is Culver City, Calif.-based startup theAmplify. The 11-employee firm pegs itself as an “Instagram marketing agency.” AdExchanger spoke with President Justin Rezvani. AdExchanger: What problem are you trying to solve? JUSTIN REZVANI: We want to […]

Questions lingered after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) presented to the data marketing space a 100-plus-page push for greater transparency Tuesday. The FTC’s manifesto, “Data Brokers: A Call for Transparency and Accountability,” sparked debate about what a data broker is and the potential pitfalls for a proposed centralized portal through which consumers can control the […]

AdChina, an advertising technology company for both the supply and demand side in China, is expanding its mobile side of the business to incorporate a mobile data management platform (DMP), in addition to the mobile ad network and mobile DSP that the company offers. “Most of our competitors are either PC-only and trying to expand […]

Need more proof Pinterest is preparing for a big monetization push? The social platform has hired Jonathan Shottan, a former Facebook ad product exec who led Facebook Exchange and due diligence on ad tech M&A. Shottan, who has also signed on as an adviser to TellApart, joins Pinterest as product manager for advertising. His first […]

App install ads may be a lucrative product for Facebook, Google and other vendors, but they’re becoming too expensive for app developers, especially since scaling is still a problem for the units. “We found it difficult to acquire new users on mobile devices because it’s super expensive,” said Kenny Rosenblatt, founder and CEO of Arkadium […]

Reaching the holy grail of real-time, one-to-one interaction may sound like a marketer’s utopia, but a number of execs gathered Thursday at a Thought Leadership Summit hosted by AOL felt this importance was overstated. In some instances, real-time processes aren’t the be-all and end-all. “I think real-time (marketing) is only a part of a bigger […]

AOL’s Adap.tv will acquire Jon Mandel’s PrecisionDemand, a TV ad-targeting company that mines set-top box data and layers it with first-party data. In a Wednesday blog post outlining the acquisition, Adap.tv’s Toby Gabriner wrote: “Integrated into Adap.tv’s programmatic buying and selling platforms and, eventually, ONE by AOL, PrecisionDemand will be a key component of our […]

Salesforce.com reported fiscal first-quarter 2015 revenue of $1.23 billion, up 37% year over year at 11 cents per share. This beat analyst estimates of $1.21 billion at 10 cents per share. (Earnings release) Salesforce.com added significant head count – more than 900 – to its employee base this quarter. This was up 38% year over […]

Standalone marketing technology platform Captora has raised $22 million in Series B financing. The company, co-founded by the former chief revenue officer of independent marketing automation platform Marketo, claims to siphon in-site demand data to flag the highest potentially performing areas for a marketer to put their dollars.  The latest round of funding will go […]

Rubicon Project is the latest ad tech company to support automation of direct deals. Its first product in this area, called 49bc, will focus on mobile inventory only. Later this year it expects to add support for desktop and video to the toolset, which is still in private beta. Rubicon is one of about 10 […]

Supply-side platform (SSP) provider PubMatic acquired Mocean Mobile (formerly Mojiva), a mobile ad server, for an undisclosed sum, the companies said on Monday. Mocean Mobile’s ad-serving capabilities and its ad network extend the mobile capabilities PubMatic gained from its 2012 acquisition of mobile development tech startup Mobiprim, according to PubMatic President Kirk McDonald. “We launched […]

Location-based ad network Thinknear (a division of Telenav) on Monday unveiled its Location Score to help advertisers gauge the accuracy of location data. The Location Score is a 100-point scale (100 being most accurate) that helps marketers understand the quality of location data used in their campaigns. The technology uses Thinknear’s platform to quantify the […]

Demand for location-based ad inventory is rising and PubMatic, the supply-side platform (SSP) provider, is one of the latest companies to boost its location-enabled inventory. PubMatic teamed up with location-based ad network xAd to create a programmatic marketplace of location-verified inventory, the companies said Friday. “Location is critical from a mobile standpoint,” said Bob Walczak, […]

A new crop of ad units is on the rise as mobile and social inventory expands, independent trading desk Accordant Media reported in a Q1 analysis. Although 70% of total real-time bidded (RTB) display media is attributed to the “Big 3” primary ad unit sizes, all three fell as a percentage of total programmatic impression volume. Simultaneously […]

As native advertising accelerates, the terminology lags behind. “Native” as a buzzword now encompasses a wide range of solutions – leading to confusion within the industry. One debate is whether in-feed ads (ads inserted in between content) are by default native ads, and whether it should matter. Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and AOL all offer in-feed ad […]

Research from Altimeter Group released Tuesday predicted that content marketing tools will begin to consolidate and eventually merge with marketing tech solutions. “The major vendors—Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle—they’re all talking about their marketing clouds. What is that? It is an amalgam of the tools they’re compiling that cover everything involved with ads,  creative, targeting, serving and […]

Are lock screens the next billboards? A growing number of vendors say yes. One such company is Canadian startup Adenda, which launched an SDK on Tuesday that allows developers to add rich media notifications, ads and animations to an Android phone’s lock screen. “We are providing (app developers) new opportunities for monetization and user engagement,” […]

If Oracle will flaunt the tight integration of its Marketing Cloud, so too will Adobe. The company, at its Digital Marketing Summit EMEA in London Wednesday, revealed (among other Marketing Cloud enhancements) tighter integration between its Media Optimizer and Analytics applications. In so doing, Adobe seems to be in the early stages of positioning itself as a […]

Changes are afoot at Nanigans, as the Facebook ad partner repositions to serve in-house marketers strictly on a software subscription basis. The company has stopped signing new managed services business and will focus on getting its self-serve platform into the hands of marketers in the ecommerce and app verticals. As part of this singular focus […]

Pinterest has finally launched the beta version of the Promoted Pins ad product it first promised last September. As flashy as a Pinterest-related ad unit might seem, however, brands still need results. As if on cue, social media marketing company Ahalogy, working with AcuPOLL Precision Research, conducted a study showing that Pinterest users tend to […]

As if taking a cue from tech counterparts uniting their point solutions onto a single platform (like Salesforce1, Neustar’s PlatformOne and AOL’s ONE), enterprise giant IBM Tuesday rolled out IBM “ExperienceOne,” a cloud and on-premise tech portfolio that is a culmination of its acquisitions and services. These include Sterling Commerce, DemandTec, Tealeaf, Unica and Xtify. It will be […]

CBS Sports SVP and GM Jason Kint will as of May 27 serve as the new CEO of the Online Publishers Association (OPA), a non-profit trade organization representing the interests of premium online publishers like The New York Times, NBCUniversal and the Associated Press. Current OPA president Pam Horan is stepping down after 10 years. […]

Mobile analytics and advertising firm Flurry will allow advertisers to buy VAST-enabled (IAB’s Digital Video Ad Serving Template) video ad units programmatically through its network and marketplace. It also unveiled additional features through its SDK designed to give app developers more options to show video ads on their apps. “For the first time, publishers or […]

When ad tech company IgnitionOne acquired data-management platform (DMP) Knotice, did it become a marketing cloud? CEO Will Margiloff would say the company was one even before. In the most literal sense, he’s right: “We decided back in 2011, well before anyone talked about marketing clouds, that you need to integrate the disparate pieces of […]

Performance Horizon Group (PHG) is an affiliate marketing campaign management provider whose clients have included Sony and T-Mobile. Started in 2010 with seven employees, the company now has nearly 60 on staff in offices in London and Newcastle, England, New York and Sydney. The company is led by some of the founding members of Buy.at, […]

After AOL’s and Google’s respective acquisitions of Convertro and Adometry, the space held by independent marketing attribution vendors immediately shrank. Remaining companies include Visual IQ, C3 Metrics, DataSong, DC Storm, and Encore Metrics. But what is the future of these attribution pure-plays as enterprise stacks invest in cross-channel technologies? “I see a complete collision course with […]

Still thinking of AOL as a media company? Tim Armstrong wants to change your mind. On the company’s Q1 earnings call Wednesday, its CEO repeatedly invoked “platforms,” “mechanization” and, of course, “programmatic” as the underpinnings of the business. AOL’s Tuesday acquisition of multitouch attribution vendor Convertro also hammered this message home. Armstrong’s platform ardor almost […]

Following Google and AOL’s acquisitions of multitouch attribution vendors Adometry and Convertro Tuesday, several questions arose. The first, and perhaps easiest to answer: What was the driving force for the purchasers and how will the technologies plug into their existing platforms? “The macro rationale for both of the acquisitions seems to be the growing need […]

Yahoo will try a new way to monetize Tumblr, via the introduction of posts that can be promoted as ad units across Yahoo’s network of owned and operated sites. While neither Yahoo nor its Tumblr subsidiary confirmed to AdExchanger that this is in the works or when the product is scheduled to debut, the existence of ads designed […]

“Mechanization,” “piping,” and “programmatic” are the keywords at AOL these days as the company puts the pedal down on its ad tech plans. One day after scooping up multitouch attribution vendor Convertro for $101 million, AOL revealed revenue from the company’s ad platform business grew 55% during the first quarter 2014 to $186 million, despite a 3% decline in […]