Platforms

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer remained relatively unfazed onstage Tuesday at the Dreamforce conference as a pack of protesters disrupted an otherwise smooth Q&A session with Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. Despite the larger-than-life mural of Mayer’s mug and echoing shouts protesting her seat on Walmart’s board of directors, the fireside chat between the two CEOs covered […]

A new report from Neustar’s Aggregate Knowledge notes the strong performance of advertising in social channels in terms of reach (58% better than exchanges) and the ability to deliver more high-quality buyers than ad portals, networks and exchanges. According to Aggregate Knowledge President Rob Gatto, this portends a shift in the role of social advertising […]

LinkedIn delved deeper into marketing with its launch Tuesday of Showcase Pages, through which companies can feature specific products within their branded pages. Designed as an extension of LinkedIn’s Company Pages, users that follow Showcase Pages will receive updates on products, events or other content. “We tell marketers, ‘Yes, we’re a professional network, but people […]

After General Motors yanked all its paid media spend from Facebook in mid-2012, GM’s chief marketing officer at the time, Joel Ewanick, suggested in a Wall Street Journal interview that Facebook is simply not a great place to advertise cars. But GM eventually returned and Facebook has since doubled down on the auto category. In […]

There’s still money to be made in Facebook’s vendor ecosystem. Ampush, a preferred marketing developer that supports data-driven advertising focused on Facebook’s News Feed, says its 2013 media revenue will grow to $70 million, up from $15 million last year. Headcount has more than doubled since December 2012, to 90. Ampush is an example of […]

As throngs of conference-goers flocked to downtown San Francisco for this week’s Dreamforce show, enterprise platform company Salesforce.com posted its Q3 earnings, citing 36% growth year-over-year to $1.08 billion in revenue. Of that total, $81 million was attributed to the Salesforce.com ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, according to Salesforce.com CFO Graham Smith, a figure that was “stronger” […]

Dallas-based marketing technology startup HipLogiq has raised $7 million in Series B funding, led by Hadron Global Partners. It will use the money to bolster sales and marketing staff. This latest cash injection follows a $5 million Series A round last May, also led by Hadron. While the Series A round was largely applied to […]

While location-based ad delivery was once limited strictly to geofencing, the ability to combine device identifiers, geographic coordinates, and customer history data has added sophistication to location targeting. PlaceIQ is one of the latest companies attempting to introduce more value into location advertising via two product roll-outs last Friday. PIQ Analytics and PreVisit are designed […]

Latin America marks great opportunity for media buyers and brands looking to monetize and scale their reach in emerging markets. In Mexico alone, eMarketer estimates total media ad spend was $5.2 billion in 2012. Yet understanding the cultural nuances of each Latin American country is as important as the financial and operational intricacies of the […]

In its first earnings disclosure since going public, French retargeter Criteo cited vertical expansion beyond its heritage of retail and travel retargeting client base. CEO Jean-Baptiste “JB” Rudelle noted “major” US client wins in the financial and auto verticals helped the company post revenue growth of 57.8%, increasing from 72.1 million euros in the third […]

One of the first items nixed from Adobe Campaign management – once known as Neolane, the French cross-channel marketing automation platform Adobe bought for $600 million this summer and rolled into the sixth leg of the Marketing Cloud – was a standard pricing model. Beginning Jan. 20, Adobe Campaign will be licensed to user-companies through […]

A week before an estimated 120,000 take to the streets of San Francisco for cloud-computing stalwart Salesforce.com’s annual Dreamforce conference, a key question is how the company will position the Salesforce.com ExactTarget Marketing Cloud – which CEO Marc Benioff has billed as his next billion-dollar business. The show is an opportunity for Salesforce.com to demonstrate […]

The next time you see a video advertisement on Yahoo, it will most likely be tied to search data and other information that Yahoo has about you through a new partnership with Starcom USA. Yahoo and Starcom have struck a deal to deliver video ads across Yahoo’s properties that are targeted at viewers based on […]

After going public, Twitter saw its stock price nearly double in early trading to a $45.10 high during the early morning hours of day one on the New York Stock Exchange. Twitter sold 70 million shares to raise $1.82 billion with a market cap of $18 billion through the IPO. As trading began, that valuation […]

If you made it to AppNexus’ New York Summit on Wednesday, you might have come away feeling that the programmatic frontier has been largely colonized — at least as pertains to traditional display — and the remaining work to be done is along the lines of tree clearing and swamp draining. VC investment has slowed […]

It’s been a big year for mobile ad exchange MoPub. The 3-year-old company opened new offices in London, Singapore and New York, reached a revenue run rate of $100 million and was acquired by Twitter. In its first New York City conference today, CEO Jim Payne sat down with talk show host Charlie Rose (who […]

AOL’s comeback story under CEO Tim Armstrong over the past four years has at times looked improbable, with highs and lows along the way. Its quarterly performance has often been mixed: As one area of its display advertising stream looked strong, other parts have lagged. Its usually strong third-party network business had been looking weaker […]

It’s good news/bad news for the Twitter IPO today. The company has raised its price range to $23-$25 per share, suggesting strong demand. It also faces an intellectual property infringement claim from IBM — relating in part to ad technology. To address the upside first: At the upper end of its new range Twitter would […]

This year’s third quarter was marked by a lot of activity in the mobile ad space — several startups specializing in ad targeting, optimization, distribution and other services were snapped up, such as MoPub, JumpTap, Ad-X and EveryScreen Media. Marketers also continued to explore programmatic buying in mobile and saw Apple’s new iOS 7 drive […]

Last week was a busy one for photocentric platform Pinterest, which unveiled both related pins and a data agreement with Getty Images. The Getty deal looks good for brands and Pinterest’s 70 million users, experts said. On the one hand, it looks like “a quality-control mechanism, which is likely aimed at supporting monetization while maintaining […]

Up to now, performance marketer Adknowledge’s AdParlor platform has served agencies and advertisers solely on Facebook, but it will now extend its work as the newest Twitter API partner. The company joins SocialCode, Voxsup, Kenshoo, Adaptly and other social-media marketing technology providers who have made the leap from Facebook to Twitter. While similarities exist between […]

Facebook reported its third quarter financials today, which included continuing growth in ad revenue, particularly its mobile ads. The company pulled in $2 billion in total revenue for the third quarter, a 60% increase from $1.3 billion in Q3 2012. Its ad revenue was $1.8 billion, a 66% increase from the same quarter last year. […]

A lot has been said lately about Twitter’s reach in terms of its monthly active users, but its ability to collect data through plugins like social sharing buttons has gone widely unmentioned. Many websites today include “buttons” on their pages that allow visitors to share content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social networks by […]

Most Facebook observers would be hard-pressed to find “negatives” in the evolution of the company’s ad products over the past year. Performance continues to improve, as detailed in a new report from Adobe. Mobile monetization is proceeding apace. And it has executed on programmatic selling, through its Facebook Exchange, Custom Audiences database match program and Partner […]

It has been a year of big changes for marketers experimenting with social ad campaigns. New data suggests platform- and purpose-specific campaigns are driving distinct return on investment. Take Facebook, for instance. Because of changes to the News Feed and increased targeting capabilities through the Facebook Exchange, click-through rates were up 275% year-over-year, according to […]

Amazon fielded two inquiries from analysts about advertising services on today’s Q3 earnings call, but CFO Tom Szkutak wasn’t biting. Brian Pitz, managing director at Jefferies & Co., asked Szkutak about domestic ecommerce trends, as well as the growth of Amazon Web Services and Advertising Services. (The company reports the groups together in an “other” […]

TV is still the king of media, but the social “back channel” is now an indispensable part of its ambience. No surprise then that advertisers are hungry for media vehicles that bridge the two. A number of companies are positioned to feed that appetite, but Twitter is the frontrunner. Its Amplify program lets broadcasters sell […]

Microsoft has added a new unique identifier to Windows 8.1 to help app developers better monetize their apps, the company said today. “Specifically, in Windows 8.1 we include a unique identifier that can be used to improve the quality and relevance of advertisements displayed within Windows Store apps while providing other services such as analytics […]

Facebook is taking aim at small and medium-sized businesses with the latest update to its Custom Audiences database-matching program. In addition to the current setup, advertisers will be able to use Custom Audiences in a simplified way through the Ads Create tool. “To use Custom Audiences, advertisers had to use Power Editor or have access […]

In August, Amazon opened its longstanding Amazon Associates Web affiliate program to mobile developers looking to monetize in-app purchases. Using the Amazon Mobile Associates API, game and app developers could earn up to 6% in advertising fees on all Amazon product purchases they helped facilitate. And Amazon Appstore Developer Select launched in early October for […]