Platforms

A denim-clad Jack Dorsey took the stage Wednesday morning at the National Retail Federation’s Big Show in New York, claiming to be a man of “very few words and even fewer characters.” “We hear [the word ‘technology’] so much it tends to lose its meaning,” the chairman of microblogging mainstay Twitter and CEO of payments […]

Data-management platform (DMP) Lotame rolled out Wednesday its Mobile DMP suite to help businesses collect and manage audience data from mobile devices. The product, which can be added to Lotame’s current DMP offering or used as a standalone product, includes several features designed to help companies monetize their mobile inventory and engage with consumers on mobile […]

Twitter has rolled out two new prongs to its “Tailored Audiences” targeting regime, which debuted last month as a vehicle strictly for website retargeting. Among the new segmenting features are CRM matching and Twitter ID targeting. The latter allows the serving of ads based on a user’s public characteristics, such as keywords appearing in a […]

The race to reach consumers on mobile devices has advertisers juggling a mountain of data as they try to deliver relevant ads. Mobile ad network AdTheorent, whose clients include Samsung, Pepsi and IBM, argues that weather conditions, along with other data points, should be included in ad-serving decisions. AdExchanger spoke with CEO Anthony Iacovone about […]

Alibaba Group’s $206 million stake in US startup ShopRunner this fall foreshadowed the Chinese commerce giant’s interests in cross-country expansion. With a looming IPO expected this year and reports of a possible Nasdaq or NYSE listing, all eyes are on the company’s monetization moves. Often referred to as “the Amazon of China,” Alibaba owns close […]

In a rare instance, Yahoo’s advertising products shared the limelight with the company’s consumer-facing ones when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer unveiled the company’s new ad products among other new offerings at the Consumer Electronics Show. Ad agency execs responded to Yahoo’s new ad products optimistically, however, some areas remain unclear, such as the development of […]

Speaking in New York today, far from the frenzied CES crowd in Las Vegas, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff heralded what he perceives as a shift from an “anonymous, B2C world to one of one-to-one marketing where the consumer has opted in.” Benioff told a gathering of partners, customers, media and analysts on Wednesday that Salesforce.com’s […]

Yahoo is mothballing some of the most prominent and widely known parts of its ad tech system, including pioneering real-time bidding platform Right Media and its data management software Genome, executives announced at the company’s CES presentation. And in their place, Yahoo Advertising will serve as the umbrella for a variety of capabilities, with the […]

Pandora’s evolution bodes well for advertisers looking for enhanced targeting opportunities in a multiscreen world. At CES 2014, Pandora and WPP Group media agency Mindshare toured how the online radio service is acclimating to an omnichannel environment, in the process developing enhanced personalization capabilities that both Pandora’s users and advertisers can leverage. At the core […]

Online business directory company YP announced Monday its acquisition of mobile ad firm Sense Networks for an undisclosed sum. Sense Networks offers location and behavioral-based ad targeting capabilities. Sense Networks analyzes data sets such as the latitudinal and longitudinal information in ad requests from mobile apps to help advertisers target mobile users. Its offerings include […]

Although China’s mobile users represent the world’s largest smartphone market (research firm IDC predicts China’s smartphone shipments will exceed 450 million in 2014), numerous challenges constrain non-Asian advertisers’ ability to get a foothold. Still, there’s recourse for advertisers looking to break into the Chinese market, largely in the form of partnerships. Chinese mobile advertising is […]

Driving continued mobile app engagement is a continuing challenge for businesses — and the stakes continue to rise. Mobile app downloads will reach 102 billion in 2013, up from 64 billion in 2012, according to a September report from Gartner. The research firm also said that in-app purchases will account for 48% of app store […]

Twitter’s Wednesday release of conversion tracking is the company’s latest direct-response push. Beta advertisers, including retailer Alex and Ani, food-delivery and takeout service GrubHub Seamless and political agency Targeted Victory, used the tool to measure ROI on Twitter ad campaigns. Targeted Victory initiated CPA campaigns to meet a target number of “sign-ups” for a National […]

Facebook’s acquisition Tuesday of sports-centric social analytics and real-time trending platform SportStream signifies it’s not letting up in its tête-à-tête with Twitter. “Twitter has natural advantages in the social TV space,” commented Martin Kihn, a research director at Gartner. “It’s the go-to platform for real-time event-driven conversation, facilitated by hashtags. … On the other hand, […]

Pushing hyperlocal mobile advertisements is becoming increasingly viable for businesses as tech giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter, as well as startups, enter the space. One such hyperlocal ad startup is Thinknear, which was acquired by GPS solutions provider Telenav for $22.5 million last year. AdExchanger spoke with Thinknear CEO Eli Portnoy about the evolution […]

Social advertising has become table stakes for multiplatform marketers. On the vendor side, the emerging leaders providing social-ad technologies share a few key commonalities to meet that demand, according to an inaugural Forrester Wave: Social Advertising Platforms report released Tuesday. In a series of interviews with 21 digital marketers, Forrester Research found the average amount […]

It took the better part of a year, but Facebook has overcome its internal angst about “motion” in the News Feed with the debut of cross-channel, auto-play video ads. The offering (officially in beta) instantly creates the largest digital video buy ever, with potential daily reach covering nearly half the U.S. population. Mindshare purchased the […]

Yahoo is making an unspecified portion of its reserved inventory available to demand-side platforms (DSPs), months after display rivals like AOL pledged to put its guaranteed placements on exchanges. Read the release. When Yahoo acquired ad exchange pioneer Right Media six years ago for $680 million, the portal was seen as taking steps far beyond […]

Two announcements last week underscored the importance of email as a means for bridging the gap between online and offline customer data. The first was the acquisition of Rapleaf, a provider of email marketing personalization solutions, by email data services provider TowerData. And Facebook announced it was adding a feature within Custom Audiences that links offline […]

As enterprise technology companies race to make their respective suites the digital marketer’s platform of choice, building or acquiring to fill product portfolio holes becomes near protocol. Global German software giant SAP, which recorded $5.4 billion in revenue last quarter, is no different – the company’s been active on the commerce (Hybris) and advanced analytics […]

By Judith Aquino and Zach Rodgers Twitter unveiled a native ad offering for app publishers on Thursday, courtesy of its MoPub mobile exchange subsidiary. Read the blog post. While not new, the idea of “programmatic” native ads in mobile  raises some interesting possibilities, agency execs told AdExchanger. Most of those possibilities hinge on Twitter’s willingness […]

When Pinterest debuted “Place Pins” in late November to a select group of beta brands, luxury hotel company Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts was among the first businesses on board. The program, which gives consumers a way to geo-pin their interests to make their pins “more actionable in real life,” is a feature Pinterest provides, […]

Video advertising platform Tremor Video announced Tuesday that it had hired 10 engineers from the recently shuttered mobile ad exchange Mobclix. The former Mobclix team will work on the development of Tremor’s programmatic buying solutions for brand advertisers. Tremor Video was eager to hire its engineers for their experience in mobile and programmatic solutions, said […]

Since its IPO in September – in which its share price more than doubled from $29 to $62 – media buying platform provider Rocket Fuel has pretty much shot the moon. In November, during its premier quarterly earnings disclosure, it reported top-line revenue growth of 132% and customer expansion from 406 in Q3 2012 to […]

You can’t throw a 23-year-old media buyer without hitting a software “cloud.” One of the precocious contenders in this bunch, social-centric SHIFT, has raised $6 million to support an expansion of its Open Marketing Cloud into Europe. The investment, led by DN Capital, brings its total financing to $14 million. The company’s 29-year-old CEO, James […]

The belief that cookies don’t work on handhelds or tablets, requiring an alternative tracking mechanism, oversimplifies the complex problem of mobile tracking. While advertisers cannot use third-party cookies to track mobile users the same way they would a desktop user, cookies can indeed be applied to an extent in a mobile environment. And while many […]

Location-based technology has come a long way from geofences. As mobile usage grows, location data has become more granular, providing marketers with greater opportunities to fine-tune their messages—but it has also created more complications. Apple, for example, switched on its iBeacon technology on Friday to send customers’ tailored messages depending on their exact location in […]

Both agencies and ad partners draw comparisons between Twitter’s launch on Thursday of retargeting product Tailored Audiences and Facebook Exchange (FBX). Just how technically similar they are remains to be seen, but the industry is buzzing about the ad product’s cross-channel targeting potential. We asked some Tailored Audience partners, media agencies and a beta tester to […]

Retargeting advertisements across mobile apps is quickly becoming a critical component of app developers who want to not only drive app installs but also move to the next step: driving continued app engagement among current users. “We’re spending a lot of money getting users to download our app and it wouldn’t make sense to stop […]

After beta-testing retargeting capabilities back in July, Twitter rolled out Tailored Audiences globally Thursday. The offering includes website retargeting along with third-party audience segments, supported by an eclectic crew of ad partners. Advertisers can now “reach users on Twitter who have shown interest in your brand or category even away from Twitter,” wrote Twitter product manager Abhishek […]