Platforms

Social media has made a lot of things convenient – birthday greetings, photo sharing, invitations, etc. Wrapp, a Swedish company that offers a “social gifting” app, believes the same should be done for gift cards. Founded in 2011, the company claims 1.3 million registered users and retailers like Nike, Victoria’s Secret and H&M. AdExchanger caught up with […]

Facebook unveiled features to help developers enhance their apps at its Mobile Developer Conference in New York City today. Among the changes are features designed to ease concerns about data sharing. Noting that users can be wary of giving third-party apps access to their profile data via Facebook login, the company now enables brands to […]

Facebook is rolling out Cost Per Action (CPA) bidding through its Ads API, the first time it has departed from CPM- and CPC-based ad pricing. The move is yet another attempt by Facebook to capture the performance marketing spend (see also: FBX retargeting, offline data matching, App Install ads) that continues to be the main […]

“I hear people say I can buy premium video content wherever I want. Then at the other end, I hear people say there’s not enough. And they say that they can’t even buy data on top of it, because the minute you apply data to premium, the cake becomes smaller and smaller. This is why […]

At Ad Age’s Digital Summit, Rebecca Van Dyck, head of consumer marketing at Facebook, informed the audience that she hopes her company makes “a few more big mistakes because we learn faster from them.” Van Dyck was referring to Mark Zuckerberg’s decision last year to undo the social giant’s previous efforts to embrace HTML5 apps […]

Yahoo has reported it’s Q1 2013 results. Get the release here.  And, the earnings call slides (PDF). Display “Highlights” from the release: GAAP display revenue was $455 million for the first quarter of 2013, an 11 percent decrease compared to $511 million for the first quarter of 2012. Display revenue ex-TAC was $402 million for […]

2012 was another banner year for the online advertising space, with revenues up 15% over 2011. Mobile and digital video led much of that growth. Mobile ad spend grew 111% compared to 2011, the second year of triple-digit growth,  accounting for 9% of total internet advertising revenue at $3.4 billion. Digital video revenue increased 29% […]

How Twitter will enter into the programmatic ad business remains a mystery to many.  During the past few months, rumors have swirled over some sort of Twitter ad exchange to be launched. How that will happen is unclear. Nevertheless, various strategic directions seem possible as Twitter tries to siphon growing programmatic media ad spend.  The […]

On paper, the combination of Henrique de Castro, Yahoo’s chief operating officer, Brian Silver, the former Travel Ad Network CEO who became Yahoo’s VP of ad platforms over a year ago, and AOL Networks CEO Ned Brody — who just resigned from that post — as head of ad sales for Yahoo North America, sounds perfect. […]

Brian O’Kelley wants you to know he’s serious about mobile. On the same day IDC reported Q1 PC sales plummeted 13.9% as consumer usage shifted dramatically to tablet and smartphone devices, the CEO of AppNexus told attendees at the company’s San Francisco summit that the company is going “all in” with its mobile strategy. O’Kelley […]

Nearly a year after launching a collaboration and productivity platform for marketers, Shift unveiled its Open Marketing Cloud, a suite of social promotions, media buying, community management, and analytics applications available through partnerships with 12 tech companies. The Open Marketing Cloud brings together apps from the following firms: Aggregate Knowledge (media intelligence platform), Convertro (conversion-tracking), Curalate (Pinterest […]

For the past year, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has emphasized the company’s position as a programmatic player, discussing the importance of its “tech stack” and building up its year-old demand-side platform AdLearn. The company hopes to complete the circle around its automated ad services with the launch of its long-promised supply side platform, dubbed simply […]

Marketing technology company Syncapse learned first-hand how to work with large companies to integrate digital and social elements into their businesses, by working with RIM Blackberry as its first major client. With a team of about 70 people, the company became skilled at what would work for large enterprise companies when it comes to social […]

Last week X+1 secured a new $17 million debt facility with Ares Capital, a cash reservoir the demand-side platform plans to tap for two acquisitions this quarter (one social, one mobile). A global expansion will follow in the second half of the year, including a possible outpost in Brazil, according to CEO John Nardone. By […]

“Workflow” is not the sexiest of topics, even in the realm of digital advertising. But as the process of buying, planning and tracking digital ad buys gets more complex, both agencies and software companies are taking a more serious look at what can and should be automated. Several months ago, Mediaocean, which was the product […]

Tablet usage is on the rise but retailers have yet to catch up, shows a new report by research company L2. As more people spend time on tablets—which L2 categorizes as a separate device from a PC or mobile device—retailers need to adopt a distinct strategy for engaging shoppers on their tablets. “Tablets have been […]

Facebook’s first deep hardware integration is a custom version of the Android operating system, packaged on a new HTC smartphone called “HTC First.” “We didn’t want to build our own phone or an OS,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the press conference at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters. “We want to provide the best experience for […]

One question that’s unlikely to be addressed during today’s Facebook press conference has to do with the possible data tracking implications of a phone deeply integrated with Facebook’s core features. But given Facebook’s mobile ubiquity (More than 680 million people use Facebook on mobile devices every month) and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s focus on the mobile […]

Before taking the reins at DoubleVerify six months ago, Wayne Gattinella spent ten years at the helm of WebMD. When he signed up for that job, the consumer health publisher was three years old and had collapsed to some extent, like most web content providers in that era. Since then it has largely reversed course. Revenues for […]

The number of display ad tech companies “of size” has risen sharply in recent years as mammoths like Google and Adobe are joined by hulking no-longer-startups such as BlueKai, Rocket Fuel, Collective, and AOL’s Ad.com, among others. Demand-side platform Turn should certainly be included on this list. The profitable company employs 250 and works with […]

Facebook will surface News Feed inventory in its six-month-old exchange, creating more visibility and engagement for retargeted ad placements on the site. Facebook Exchange previously was restricted to ads in the right rail, where response rates are a fraction of what advertisers get in the News Feed. The company’s decision to make them biddable in […]

After debuting its Media Metrix Multi-Platform in beta in November, comScore opened the offering to all US clients and released the top 50 web properties for February 2013, based on data from both desktop and mobile visitors. While the top multi-platform properties overall were similar to the top desktop properties, there were several companies that […]

App developers and publishers who have yet to stop using unique device identifiers (UDIDs) now have a cut-off date. Apple informed app developers yesterday that it will soon ban any apps or updates to existing apps that include UDIDs, a component of analytics systems that publishers and developers have been using to track apps and […]

“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 Phil Gross, Director of Product Management at Visual IQ. With Facebook’s purchase of Atlas, all eyes are on social media measurement. Twitter provides an interesting challenge with respect to measurement, as there […]

Even though it is widely used, customers would be hard-pressed to find vendors who agree with the label “marketing automation,” according to Jon Miller, VP of marketing content and strategy at marketing automation software provider Marketo. Marketing automation is “one of those terms that nobody really seems to love but at the same time it’s […]

Information Builders, a 38-year-old business intelligence and analytics provider that serves customers like Ford, Mastercard, Lockheed Martin, and Verizon, is setting its sights on the CMO. The New York City-based company yesterday launched its WebFocus Social Media Analytics platform, designed to provide insight into customer sentiment on social networks. “We were originally very IT-driven but […]

Berlin-based Rocket Internet incubates e-commerce startups in markets outside the US, running them first as closely held businesses and then encouraging greater autonomy of operations and marketing in advance of a potential sale. As such the company is a big proponent of retargeting and was an early adopter of Facebook’s ad exchange. The company leaped […]

The old thinking: social media channels like Facebook and Twitter will be the death knell of traditional publishers. The new thinking: they need each other desperately. And just maybe, they can actually generate a worthwhile amount of ad dollars and audience engagement through mutual benefit. That was the consensus at the opening panel of the […]

Oreo’s humorous tweet referring the temporary power outage at the Super Dome in New Orleans that halted the Super Bowl action between the ultimately victorious Baltimore Ravens over the San Francisco 49ners was hailed as the marketing play of the game. Oreo’s message that “you can still dunk in the dark” caught fire on Twitter, […]

Digital ad management provider DG is pouring the disparate technologies and products it has bought and built over the last few years into a single receptacle called “VideoFusion.” While having a clearer marketing message is the over-arching reason for the “brand unification,” the company also wants to emphasize its proposition to be the connective tissue […]