Platforms

Penry Price has a long legacy as an advertising exec. He went from Google to Dstillery and, as of eight months ago, assumed the role of VP of marketing solutions at LinkedIn. Compared to his previous roles, Price has a slightly different imperative at LinkedIn. Because of the social network’s audience of 300 million business-minded registrants, […]

As advertisers seek ways to extend their broadcast media buys through cross-platform campaigns, cross-screen ad-delivery companies are bridging the technical gap. Such is the case with cross-screen tool Civolution, which has teamed up with Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer Brand Networks to help brands buy social ads in conjunction with live television events. Omnicom’s Resolution Media is […]

Why did Singapore Telecommunications’ ad tech subsidiary Amobee buy Adconion and Kontera for a combined $385 million? For Amobee CEO Mark Strecker, it was a matter of moving Amobee’s focus from mobile advertising to digital advertising. And the company needed Kontera’s technological assets and Adconion’s business organization to accomplish that. Once integrated, Amobee will have […]

Following its glitzy, star-studded digital NewFront in April, AOL got down to business. It closed in on marketing attribution vendor Convertro the same day Google grabbed pure-play competitor Adometry in early May. Then it went shopping again, snapping up TV audience-targeting platform PrecisionDemand. AOL’s acquisitive behavior is not entirely surprising. The company is constructing an […]

One of Facebook’s hidden assets is the waterfall of data signals it gets from other websites and apps. These signals wend their way to Facebook from social plugins, conversion pixels and retargeting cookies embedded on millions of websites and mobile apps. Facebook’s code snippets tell the social network whenever a user lands on a product […]

Monetizing apps in the iOS environment means playing by Apple’s rules, and occasionally adapting to changes in how those rules are enforced. Sometimes those changes can impact the way ads are served and tracked, as happened back in February when Apple (briefly) put a barbed wire fence around the use its Identifier For Advertising for […]

Twitter has snatched up mobile native advertising provider Namo Media, adding technology to enhance exchange-based monetization for app developers. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, and Twitter declined to comment. Namo Media has roughly eight employees, and will merge its product into the MoPub platform. The company’s SDK helps mobile app developers integrate native advertising by […]

The world’s largest independent ad tech company broke character this week. Before snatching up Paris-based ad viewability firm Alenty, as AdExchanger was first to report, AppNexus had been historically inclined to build rather than buy owing to its strong engineering culture. But that may be changing as bargains present themselves in the form of mature […]

User-generated photos and videos are a largely untapped resource for advertisers. The challenge is leveraging the inventory. A few startups have offered up solutions: GumGum helped L’Oréal place ads on publisher sites based on the hair color of women in photos and Stipple lets consumers make purchases directly from an image. British ad tech firm WeSEE is […]

The underlying theme of SAP’s massive annual show SapphireNow in Orlando, Fla. this week was simplicity, or SAP’s lack thereof. CEO Bill McDermott heralded the dream of enabling the enterprise software company to “Run Simple,” while acknowledging the company’s skeptics. “Yes, I do realize there will be some of you, especially the pundits, who say we can’t,” […]

Beginning in September, Yahoo Japan will use Taboola’s video discovery and content distribution network to power recommendations on owned and operated properties, as well as partner publisher sites, with the rollout of Yahoo Content Discovery. Yahoo Japan is a joint venture of Yahoo and SoftBank. In addition to its role as an online search and Internet […]

Two months after the Media Ratings Council (MRC) green-lighted viewable impressions as a viable metric for transacting display ads, real-time bidding platform AppNexus has acquired French viewability vendor Alenty for an undisclosed sum. The deal closed Monday, AppNexus confirmed to AdExchanger. Paris-based Alenty was founded in 2007 by CEO Laurent Nicolas and CTO Nicolas Thomas. It claims to […]

Is Bitly quietly becoming a platform company? The link cruncher rolled out Tuesday the Bitly Certified Partner Program with inaugural partners Percolate, Spredfast, Buffer, Sprinklr, IFTTT, Dynamic Signal and EveryoneSocial. “We’re focused on platform integrations to support owned, earned and paid campaigns with Bitly’s tools and audience data,” said Jennifer Hanser, the company’s newly-hired senior […]

Online advertising-management provider Marin Software has acquired retargeting platform Perfect Audience for $22.8 million. The deal adds to Marin’s social media and display advertising retargeting arsenal and to the flurry of funding rounds, IPOs and acquisitions in the retargeting space over the past year. San Francisco-based Perfect Audience was founded under the Y Combinator seed accelerator program […]

Mobile and video ad spend are rising and, while North America is the leader in ad spend, Europe is catching up, according to quarterly reports from ad exchanges Turn and Smaato. Increased competition for inventory continued to drive up effective cost per thousand impression (eCPM) rates across channels, reported Turn. Social media eCPM rose 64%, […]

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 […]