Platforms

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 […]

Marketing attribution and device fragmentation continue to prevent advertisers from further investing in mobile advertising, said MasterCard and Chrysler executives in a panel discussion at the Mobile Marketing Association’s New York Forum on Tuesday. Bob Arnold, digital strategy and media lead of North America at Google, moderated a discussion with Benjamin Jankowski, group head of […]

Digital marketing attribution is in vogue. AOL will acquire attribution vendor Convertro for approximately $101 million, the company announced Tuesday afternoon. This comes on the heels of Google’s move earlier in the day to snap up competing attribution pure play vendor Adometry for an undisclosed sum. Customers will have access to Convertro in a couple […]

Google will scoop up Adometry, a marketing attribution firm whose product is designed to assign value to incremental media impressions. Some industry watchers, like research firm Forrester, consider Adometry’s solution superior to Google’s home-grown technology. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Austin, Texas-based Adometry and its approximately 130 employees will eventually be incorporated into the Google Analytics […]

Audio advertisements have been largely one-sided: The advertiser speaks and consumers listen. Startup Xapp Media wants to change that with interactive audio ads. Through an SDK, Xapp Media enables brands to create voice-activated ads that mobile users can respond to with commands like “call now” or “send coupon.” NPR was the first publisher to try […]

At its NewFront event last week, Time Inc. unveiled partnerships with Nielsen and comScore’s cross-platform measurement solutions to simplify the digital ad-buying process. TV-online audience research has become something of a theme at the NewFronts, with AOL and Yahoo unveiling similar plans. Time Inc., a division of Time Warner that will be spun off this quarter, […]

Facebook is rolling out additional video metrics such as unique video views, the average duration of the video view and audience retention over the coming weeks, the company said Monday. “These new metrics are designed to help you learn what’s resonating with people and determine how to more effectively create and promote your videos on […]

Deep-linking technology, which routes users to a specific page rather than a main landing page, is quickly gaining traction in the mobile app landscape. But as this technology catches on – Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple and a slew of startups are pushing the technology to publishers who are readily experimenting with it – it’s becoming […]

Two years ago, Yahoo became the first big Internet company honor Do Not Track (DNT) signals, and on Wednesday it became the first to publicly abandon the troubled opt-out standard. The company told the world via a Tumblr post on the Yahoo Public Privacy blog that it would henceforth ignore DNT requests, saying “we have yet to see a […]

Over the last decade, Facebook has evolved from a forum for college students to poke each other to a company trying to position itself as a maturing, cross-device communication platform for marketers and consumers. CEO Mark Zuckerberg certainly hopes this maturation is reflected in the company’s evolving slogan, from “move fast and break things” to the […]

Unified, a company that helps brands with social ad buys, has acquired social analytics startup Awe.sm for an undisclosed sum, the companies announced Thursday. Unified is a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer and Twitter Ads API Partner. The core of its product is a “Social Operating Platform,” a cloud-based tool that combines social marketing capabilities ranging […]

Google is walking the walk when it comes to promoting YouTube personalities. After hearing from agencies that it was not acting swiftly enough to tout its own programming, the video platform embarked this month on a “massive” TV, print and out-of-home campaign starring several of its high-profile personalities (YouTube calls them creators) that target Millennial […]

UPDATE: Facebook has confirmed that David Jakubowski will be joining the company, and that he will have a role that extends beyond Atlas. UPDATE 8:15PM ET: Jakubowski, through Neustar’s public relations agency, released the following comment via email: “I have been presented with an opportunity that I simply couldn’t refuse. I can assure you that Neustar has […]

Facebook unveiled its mobile ad network at its f8 Developer Conference on Wednesday, noting the Facebook Audience Network will include native advertising formats for developers that “want to invest a little more time.” The ad network buy will be available to all advertisers via a “single click” within the Facebook Advertising interface as well as through its Advertising […]

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong addressed a crowd of close to 2,000 media buyers at its NewFront Tuesday night with an exuberant, “tonight is about connecting content with distribution.” It’s clear, with AOL, that much of that connection will happen through video. Ran Harnevo, president of AOL Video, talked up digital video and its intent to […]

Twitter tried to avoid last quarter’s narrative, centered around flagging audience growth, in its Q1 call Tuesday; instead, the company emphasized a 28% quarterly increase in ad engagements (specifically retweets and favorites), driven by higher-quality ads and the use of rich media. Such was the overall theme: engagement over timeline views and audience growth. Yet, the fact remains the latter […]

Rubicon Project went public earlier this month, becoming the fifth ad tech company – give or take – to do so since the IPO door was flung open around this time last year. Since then its stock has had a bumpy ride, but no more so than some others in its class. CEO Frank Addante […]

It seems everyone and their mothers are pushing native ad units and tools to support them. Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and most recently AOL all have native, in-feed ad units. As these formats catch on, ad tech companies like Sharethrough, Nativo and DistroScale have developed tools designed to automate ad distribution across different publishers’ sites while matching […]

RockYou is clawing its way back. The 8-year-old company, which once produced social games, was one of the first MySpace and Facebook third-party app developers until it suffered a major data breach five years ago that exposed unencrypted user account data of more than 32 million users. That wasn’t RockYou’s only struggle. The company couldn’t […]

LinkedIn has been ramping up its marketing offerings over the last year in the form of self-serve Sponsored Updates and brand Showcase Pages. The professional social platform moved forward Thursday with the roll-out of a Sponsored Updates API the company has alluded to in recent months. It has also formalized two new Certified Marketing Partner programs. […]

AOL introduced its own native ad unit for the mobile Web and apps on Thursday. The ads include an image and text that is inserted in between content on the publisher’s site or app. “Before, if advertisers wanted to work with seven different publishers, they’d have to customize their creative and specs with each one, […]

While both programmatic buying and online video are in vogue, the best way for these two to come together—in the opinions of both publishers and brands—is through private marketplace buys. Programmatic video ad platform BrightRoll has seen 50% of the top 50 publishers engage in private marketplace deals, said company founder and CEO Tod Sacerdoti […]

Facebook reported first-quarter earnings Wednesday, exceeding analyst estimates with ad revenue growth of 82% to $2.3 billion. In contrast, Google’s Q1 revenues were seven times larger at $15.4 billion, but its growth was only 19%. Read the earnings release. Mobile was the star of the show, from both an audience and revenue standpoint. The number […]

Google’s search engine may eventually reward Web sites that use encryption and if it does, advertisers may find themselves cut off from useful data. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, hinted at the recent SMX West conference hosted by Search Engine Watch editor Danny Sullivan that Google is indeed considering revising its search […]

Facebook’s unveiling last week of a mobile feature called Nearby Friends, through which it might enable location-targeted ads, places the company in a highly competitive segment of tech vendors offering similar products. The company that will develop the best location-targeted ad product, however, is the one that will couple it with the most relevant consumer […]