Platforms

Aside from the big news that AOL was acquiring video-ad marketplace Adap.tv to further its programmatic goals, the portal reported its Q2 earnings, which showed continued strides on its display business. While the single-digit gains made during the period may not seem too exciting, they do compare favorably with the recent earnings from Yahoo and […]

AOL has agreed to buy video-ad company Adap.tv in a deal that will add another arrow to the programmatic quiver, with products facing both the buy and sell side. Adap.tv is one of a handful of mature companies, alongside YuMe, Tremor Video and TubeMogul, that are seizing the digital video opportunity. Its revenue growth has […]

Based on a survey of more than 5,000 people in Canada, France, Germany, the UK and the US, Forrester Research predicts 905 million people, up from 15 million in 2010, will be using tablets by 2017. Tablets, write Forrester analysts JP Gownder and Michael O’Grady, have “exceeded the status of mass market to become what […]

If there was any doubt of Twitter’s impact on TV ratings and viral viewership, new findings from Nielsen may help dispel it. Nielsen, which recently ran time series analysis of 221 broadcast prime-time episodes through Nielsen SocialGuide, found that Live TV ratings played a statistically significant role in related tweets for 48% of the episodes. […]

Voltari, a public mobile marketing and data analytics firm backed by Icahn Enterprises, is the latest reincarnation of a company that started off providing software and content for mobile devices in 2001. The New York City-based company recently expanded its operations in Canada and is eyeing opportunities in the UK. AdExchanger spoke with Voltari CEO […]

Yahoo bought back old talent in the form of Amit Kumar with the acquisition of e-commerce startup Lexity, which he founded four years ago. A former engineer and head of product management for Yahoo Search, Kumar graduated to display ads startup Dapper.net, which was snapped up by Yahoo three years ago for $55 million and […]

Since LinkedIn launched its heavily dissected LinkedIn Endorsements product last September, two billion endorsements have been made to date. LinkedIn, which reported 37% year-over-year growth in membership in Q2, now has 238 million members and generated $364 million in revenue in the second quarter. The company is also flirting with an API to enable programmatic […]

Today, Pinterest introduced “price-watching,” a way for consumers to receive email notifications when the price drops on an item they pinned. Price alerts mark the “first additional application of rich pin data that we’ve seen and I think there will be others,” said Danny Maloney, cofounder and CEO of Pinterest marketing and analytics firm PinLeague. […]

Akin to an infant reaching its “Terrible Two’s,” designer flash sale site Fab.com has changed a lot in the period following its second year. The good? The ecommerce company, founded in 2011, inked $150 million in Series-D financing from Atomico, Andreessen Horowitz, Tencent, ITOCHU and others, bringing its running tally to $310 million in less […]

In its year of existence Facebook’s ad exchange has earned a reputation as an ATM machine for Facebook, and even something of a savior during the company’s rocky post-IPO period. But comments by COO Sheryl Sandberg throw that image into some doubt. During yesterday’s earnings call, she noted, “FBX is actually a very small part […]

Video is a big part of AOL’s new plans to stage a “programmatic upfront” in the fall (AdExchanger story) and content discovery and distribution platform Taboola is likely to be a big part of that effort. The two companies signed a deal late last month that starts with AOL posts adding Taboola’s “recommendation matrix” of […]

With the rise of the hashtag à la Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter and, now, Facebook, the question is, how can the classification utility be used to make sense of data from a cross-channel attribution perspective? Take Pinfluencer, one of the early-ins on Pinterest analytics. Newly rebranded as Piqora, the platform has grown beyond its standard Pinterest Marketing […]

Facebook reported Q2 earnings after business close today, and its ad revenue picture is rosy, especially from a mobile standpoint. Revenue from ads grew 61% year over year to $1.6 billion, of which mobile contributed 41%, or $656 million.  That’s a striking increase from Q1, when mobile contributed 30% of total ad revenue. During the quarter […]

Barely two months after promoting its video content among the various other digital NewFront presentations, AOL is now planning a “Programmatic Upfront” for September. As we reported earlier today, CEO Tim Armstrong wants to position AOL as the antidote to the long chain of ad technology vendors that serve as the pipes connecting marketers’ online […]

Flexing his salesmanship skills, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong announced to a group of reporters last night in New York City that his company would undertake its “first ever Programmatic Upfront event” on September 23, which is to coincide with the beginning of Advertising Week festivities in New York. Seated to Armstrong’s left during the announcement […]

JetBlue, the New York-based airline servicing 78 cities with more than 800 flights per day, stands as one of the first and only carriers to institute a Customer Bill of Rights. In line with that theme is JetBlue’s social media strategy, which initially began as a means of engagement to connect with flyers on Facebook […]

Twitter’s TV Ad Targeting product is now generally available to U.S. advertisers after a beta release this May, the company announced in a blog post today. “The results of the beta test reveal that the impact of using Twitter in combination with TV advertising is significantly greater than that of using TV advertising alone,” wrote […]

After six months in beta, LinkedIn unveiled its “Sponsored Updates” feature for marketers with budgets of all sizes, and mindful of balancing current trends around programmatic, native advertising and content marketing. Alison L. Engel, LinkedIn’s senior director of global marketing, acknowledged that those terms sum up the latest evolution of the professional social network’s advertising […]

In the second quarter of 2013, marketers maintained the momentum from the end of Q1. In AdExchanger’s Q2 mobile roundup, mobile ad networks and companies saw that rich media and in-app ads continued to drive expansion in the mobile RTB space. Mobile ad exchange MoPub saw advertisers continuing to adopt programmatic buying at increasing rates. […]

When it comes to variability between desktop and mobile advertising on Facebook, new data from Adobe suggests context and content matter in native ad placement. Desktop newsfeed ads yielded a 14% greater click-through rate than right-hand side ads, according to a recently published study that looked at an aggregate of customer data for cross-channel ad […]

The growing demand for personalized, “real-time marketing” (think: the doings of Oreo and its digital agency 360i that resulted in “Dunk in the Dark” during the Super Bowl), is one of the forces underpinning the push toward unifying the “human” and “technological” elements of the programmatic equation. AOL’s earlier announcement of a new strategic partnership […]

As mobile use continues to grow, so do the stakes for capturing and leveraging that data. The two-year-old mobile-ad network AirPush is betting on its data assets and tools to serve advertisers and expects to reach $130 million in revenue this year. AdExchanger spoke with AirPush CEO Asher Delug about his company’s new mobile Demand-Side […]

Bob Lord is leaving his twin posts as Global CEO of Razorfish and CEO of Publicis Groupe’s Digital Technologies Division to take on the role of CEO of AOL Networks, a post that has been vacant since April when former head Ned Brody exited in April for Yahoo, pending his non-compete. However, Lord, who joined […]

Yahoo’s move to acquire mobile-ad targeter and data-management software provider AdMovate follows on the heels of a busy mobile acquisition week with Criteo acquiring AD-X Tracking; Media6Degrees picking up EveryScreen Media and [X+1] buying mobile marketing firm WDA. All four acquisitions point to an increasing urgency among marketers to optimize their mobile campaigns and find […]

Following Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s vague comments during Tuesday’s Q2 earnings call promising to increase investments in the company’s ad-tech offerings, the portal has done something concrete by acquiring mobile-ad targeter and data-management software provider AdMovate. Barely a year old and, up until now, operating in stealth mode, AdMovate describes its purpose as delivering “personalized, […]

For luxury retail brand Stuart Weitzman, Facebook ad buys are a pertinent part of its strategic process for brick-and-mortar store rollout. By combining offline data, such as in-store sales reports, with online performance data, the company has made headway in gauging international audience preferences to ignite interest regionally. “Stuart Weitzman is expanding globally at a […]

Retail marketers are focusing most of their digital marketing efforts on paid search and email, according to new findings from Forrester Research and Shop.org’s joint State of Retailing Online 2013: Marketing and Merchandising report, released today. Mobile optimization, unsurprisingly, is another area of interest as more commerce companies look to the mobile device as a vessel […]

Yahoo today reported a 1% decline in ex-TAC revenue year-over-year of $1,071 million in the second quarter. See the release. And get the earnings slides (PDF). For earnings number lovers, Yahoo came in at Wall Street’s projected numbers: “GAAP net earnings per diluted share was $0.30 in the second quarter of 2013, compared to $0.18 in […]

It’s been covered before, but the evolution of telecom carriers’ privacy policies are worth another look as cookie tracking constituencies clash. It’s a notice sent to Verizon Wireless users (I am one) about information that is made available to the “Verizon family of companies for marketing purposes.” Potential targeting attributes are “type, quantity, destination, technical […]

“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 David Walsh, SVP of media at Integrate. In the 2010 film “The Social Network,” Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin asks Sean Parker to settle an argument between him and Mark […]