Platforms

Enterprise software provider Oracle moved further into targeted advertising by acquiring BlueKai, a third-party data provider and data management platform (DMP). Analysts and vendors differ however, on the mobile advertising implications behind the acquisition. Bluekai’s technology will be combined with Oracle’s Responsys application, which is geared toward B2C marketing campaigns, as well as Eloqua, which […]

Millennial Media is at a crossroads. With a new CEO and recent acquisition, the Baltimore company has made several moves to strengthen its position in the mobile advertising space and speculation over its next move is growing among industry insiders. Last month, Millennial tapped ad tech veteran Michael Barrett to replace founding CEO Paul Palmieri, […]

Tremor Video’s fourth-quarter financials, reported Thursday, included a continuous rise in mobile ad revenue and a reduction of its demo pricing-related losses. The company’s total revenue for 2013 rose 25.3% to $131.8 million year-over-year. Its in-stream revenue was $128.3 million, a 28.7% increase from the same period in 2012. It reported a net loss of […]

Facebook will acquire mobile messaging service WhatsApp in a deal worth $16 billion – $4 billion in cash and approximately $12 billion in Facebook shares. Factoring in an additional $3 billion employee stock grant that will vest over four years, the deal value is more than 10% of Facebook’s approximately $173 billion market cap, and makes the $1 billion […]

For a mobile ad startup, getting kicked off Facebook’s platform is pretty much the worst-case scenario. As reported by AdExchanger last week, this nightmare recently became reality for two companies, HasOffers and Kontagent, who were found to have violated data collection policies and were removed from Facebook’s mobile measurement partner (MMP) program. The rejection of […]

Many app developers and ad tech vendors received a jolt recently when Apple began rejecting some apps that retrieve a user’s Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) without serving an ad. Apple’s decision was especially surprising, since the device manufacturer had allowed that activity for nearly two years. Regardless of Apple’s motivations for this change (the company did […]

Professional social platform LinkedIn is cooking up a number of paid product extensions, at the base of which is its nearly 300 million-member-strong social graph and a quickly growing content operation. At LinkedIn’s FinanceConnect in New York Thursday, an event that drew roughly 200 marketers, financial professionals, customers and partners to the Time Warner Center […]

Facebook has cut two partners from its mobile ad measurement program for failing to honor its policies around data retention and disclosure, AdExchanger has learned. The companies, HasOffers and Kontagent, violated their agreements with Facebook, including holding onto data longer than their contracts allowed and failing to require their advertisers  — app developers — to […]

FreeWheel, a technology and services company cofounded seven years ago by Jonathan Heller, Doug Knopper and Diane Yu, helps media companies like NBCUniversal and Viacom connect TV buyers with premium digital video inventory. It also worked with Amazon to help power video ad content for the ecommerce giant. Knopper, who also serves as FreeWheel’s co-CEO, […]

It’s a tumultuous time for the usually staid ad-tech subsector of sell-side platforms (SSPs). As The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday (registration required), PubMatic will chase direct competitor Rubicon Project into the public markets, seeking a valuation of more than $1 billion. Additionally, PubMatic has replaced its top marketer, Larry Harris, with Razorfish and […]

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) kicked off day one of the Annual Leadership Meeting (ALM) by rallying advertisers to raise the bar on marketing. To do this, however, marketers and advertisers need to be more vigilant around traffic fraud. Additionally, they must also realize that consumer attention spans, especially in mobile, are short. Holding Agencies […]

Location-based marketing technology company MomentFeed is betting big on the hyper-local search and marketing movement. Founded in 2010, the Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) company has raised $3 million in seed funding and recently closed a $6 million Series A round. According to its chairman and CEO Robert Blatt, MomentFeed is “the first company to […]

The advertising industry has been wrestling with what exactly constitutes ad viewability. Trade organizations like the the Media Rating Council (MRC), among others, are working to develop and refine guidelines on this issue. The MRC in particular has approved several viewability measurement solutions. Only a handful of vendors have been approved so far, such as […]

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said 2013 delivered the “best results we’ve had in a decade.” Although the company reported 13% overall growth in revenue year-over-year in the fourth quarter, growing from $599 million to $679 million, AOL noted net and operating profitability was affected by a “pre-tax restructuring” that cost it $13.2 million. This was […]

Google’s shift of ads and commerce chief Susan Wojcicki Wednesday to SVP of YouTube, which has 20.5% stake in the US video ad market, and which eMarketer estimated had $5.6 billion in gross ad revenue last year, comes at a critical time for the online video platform. With Wojcicki’s appointment, Salar Kamangar, SVP of YouTube […]

Twitter’s first quarter as a public company was hot and cold. Ad performance was the hot part. Q4 2013 ad revenue on the Twitter platform grew 121% to $220 million, of which mobile advertising accounted for more than 75%. The MoPub mobile ad exchange, acquired during the quarter, delivered $8 million in revenue. Audience trends […]

Rubicon Project’s Tuesday IPO filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was a widely anticipated moment of financial transparency for the sell-side platform (SSP), but it wasn’t the first programmatic player to initiate a public offering. Rocket Fuel and Criteo both went public last fall, creating an interesting point of comparison for Rubicon […]

Komli Media, a digital media technology provider in the Asia-Pacific market, has launched a Remarketing Demand Side Platform (DSP) geared to enterprise clients. The goal is to help digital marketers convert site visitors into customers using custom tools that blend the advantages of both remarketing and DSP services into a single platform. “DSPs have typically […]

Yahoo and mobile ad-serving platform Mocean Mobile jointly announced Tuesday the launch of the Mocean Mobile Marketplace. Mocean Mobile brings mobile inventory from publishers such as Nokia and Univision to Yahoo’s Ad Exchange. Publishers in return can access Yahoo’s ad-targeting capabilities and other services. The Mocean-Yahoo partnership comes one week after Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer […]

Mobile app developers rarely use traditional paid media to advertise their products. That might change, according to the mobile advertising firm Motility Ads, which is helping app publishers like King.com, Wooga and SGN create TV commercials to promote their games and drive downloads. AdExchanger spoke with VP of business development Josh Rinsky about the company’s […]

Although Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer emphasized the importance of mobile advertising to the company’s growth during Tuesday’s earnings call, she acknowledged that Yahoo’s mobile ad revenue has yet to become a significant portion of the company’s total revenue, which could greatly hamper the company’s future profits. The company’s mobile revenue “is still not material,” Mayer […]

In Q4 2013, Facebook for the first time derived more than half of its ad revenue from impressions served to mobile devices. Mobile ad revenues were $1.2 billion, 53 percent of the overall $2.3 billion in ad revenue it garnered for the period, the company reported Wednesday. It’s a significant milestone for the company, which has long […]

During Yahoo’s Q4 2013 earnings call Wednesday, CEO Marissa Mayer said the company intended to focus next year on mobile, social, video and native, and explained why former COO Henrique de Castro will not be replaced. Display advertising, excluding traffic acquisition costs, was $491 million, down 6% compared to $520 million for Q4 of 2012. […]

If you’ve ever seen an online meme or a viral image (and these days who hasn’t?), chances are you either viewed it through the photo-sharing service Imgur (pronounced “imager”), or it was uploaded there first. Founded in 2009 by then-Ohio University computer science student Alan Schaaf, Imgur has seen its financial support structure evolve from […]

Facebook CPM-based ad prices jumped more than 400% in Q4 2013, according to some 240 billion impressions analyzed in Adobe’s Q4 2013 Social Media Intelligence Report. However the holiday season delivered “warning signs” for Facebook in the form of tepid growth in the visits and revenue it’s driving to retail sites, relative to some of […]

Michael Barrett, the former CRO of Yahoo and CEO of AdMeld, which was acquired by Google in 2011, has joined Millennial Media as its new CEO.  Co-founder and CEO Paul Palmieri will depart and join venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates. In the press release (see it), Michael Barrett said: “I am honored and thrilled […]

Yoyi Media, one of the major DSPs in China, will launch a data management platform called Data Bank for clients in early 2014, according to CEO Roy Zhou. “If you want a good result, regardless if you’re a direct response client or a branding client, you need to have very good data,” Zhou told AdExchanger. […]

Facebook has added another weapon in its mobile ad quiver, announcing Wednesday in a blog post that it is testing a mobile ad network with a group of advertisers and publishers that uses Facebook’s targeting capabilities to place ads in third-party apps. Brad Smallwood, VP of measurements and insights, declined to provide additional information about […]

Since Russ Fradin initiated Dynamic Signal following the $300 million acquisition of his previous startup, Adify by Cox Enterprises (which Cox has since shuttered), he has transitioned away from paid media and helps brands tap customers’ social media influence. The idea behind Dynamic Signal is to simplify the process by which passionate customers can advocate brands […]

Social data analytics company 4C Insights has raised $5 million in Series B funding from Jump Capital. 4C originated last fall when ecommerce ad-tech company The Echo System merged with Twitter Ads API partner and Facebook PMD Voxsup, founded by Northwestern University Professor Alok Choudhary. 4C currently employs between 30-40 people, but expects to grow […]