Platforms

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 […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Lung Huang, vice president of digital advertising, global partnerships, at dunnhumby. I moderated a panel last month at D2 Cincinnati, a digital marketing conference focused on customer centricity. The panel, […]

Facebook’s barricade against Google held up a long time, but the wall had to fall: Google wanted the audience, marketers wanted the interoperability and Facebook wanted the demand. As we reported Friday, after giving Google the cold shoulder for more than a year, Facebook has decided to let DoubleClick Bid Manager bring its buying clout […]

Amazon, the ever-silent commerce stalwart, may be next in line to join the Facebook Exchange party, according to AdExchanger sources. Today, Facebook finally granted (long-awaited?) access to Google’s demand-side platform, DoubleClick Bid Manager, to enable DoubleClick advertisers to dish up retargeted ads on the social network through integration to FBX. A number of DSP partners like […]

Oracle has acquired cloud content marketing platform Compendium for an undisclosed sum. Oracle, which bought marketing automation company Eloqua for $871 million last December, has since formalized that deal into the Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud and has plans to improve “top-of-the-funnel” customer engagement with its acquisition of Compendium, according to the company. These moves are […]

Facebook has made steady progress on closing the loop between media spend and consumer transactions, according to Brian Boland, the company’s VP of ads product marketing. “Digital marketers expect accurate reach,” Boland said in a presentation at the DMA 2013 annual summit in Chicago this week. More and more are “expecting proven results. They’re now […]

Retailers are pouring more money into Facebook’s ad products and driving up CPM costs, according to a new report from Nanigans, an ad platform and Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer partner. The report is based on data from more than 100 online and brick-and-mortar retailers over the first nine months of 2013. CPMs of Facebook ads […]

Nearly a year after exiting Yahoo on less-than-amicable terms, Michael Katz, one of the founders of targeting and data provider interclick, is back on the scene with a new startup called mParticle. Billed as a mobile data platform, mParticle has secured a $3 million seed round from Google Ventures, Buddy Media’s Mike Lazerow and digital […]

A year after Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said there was more potential “upside” for the portal’s revenues in search than display, its Q3 performance suggests it will not reverse its declines soon. Among the topline results in Yahoo’s Q3 (read the earnings release): GAAP display revenues fell 7% to $470 million. Last year, this percentage […]

Krishna Subramanian, the chief marketing officer of the mobile marketing agency Velti and co-founder of ad exchange Mobclix, which Velti acquired, has resigned from the troubled agency. In an email, Subramanian writes, “As many of you already know I have moved on from Velti. I am grateful to have co-founded Mobclix and humbled by the part […]

Alibaba Group, the Chinese equivalent of Amazon, has invested $206 million in ShopRunner, a member-only subscription ecommerce platform connecting consumers to hundreds of retail brands (like Toys R Us and Tommy Hilfiger) and a plethora of perks — like free, two-day shipping and express checkout for $79 a year or $8.95 a month. Alibaba, in […]

The retargeted advertising space is becoming highly lucrative, finds retargeting platform AdRoll, which announced today that it had passed a $100 million run rate, up from $50 million last year. The 6-year-old company claims to have more than 10,000 customers across 100 countries and was one of the first platforms to become a Facebook Exchange […]