Platforms

With digital marketing budgets expected to rise this year, customer relationship management (CRM) software vendors are ramping up their pursuit of paid media budgets. “Marketing is perhaps the hottest area in the customer-facing realm right now, and it is evident the place has multiple holes to fill and many approaches to take,” observed Paul Greenberg, […]

Facebook’s mobile ad growth was the big story in Q1, as ads served to handheld devices grew to 30% of all advertising revenue. Read the earnings release, or check out these highlights on the ad side: Total ad revenue grew 43% to $1.25 billion Mobile accounted for roughly 30% all Facebook ad dollars in Q1, […]

At first, the joke was when mobile will finally “arrive.” And now the joke may be “I wish mobile had stayed away,” as publishers report increased traffic for mobile (hooray!) but decreased ad revenues (ouch!) in comparison to its PC-based facsimile. Of course, there’s no turning back, as report after report signals the consumer’s move […]

For all the glitz and glamour that surrounded Aol’s Newfronts programming preview on Tuesday, perhaps the most relevant news for advertisers came at the end of the showcase with a mention of the unsexiest of topics: back-office operations designed to support the thousands of hours of digital video, along with analytics. Following appearances by actors […]

A year after Twitter opened its self-serve Twitter Advertising system to businesses on an “invite-only” basis, the microblog’s Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts products will be open to anyone in the US. Read the release. This news was mentioned as Kevin Weil, Senior Director of Product for Revenue at Twitter, participated on a panel with […]

Yahoo executives talked a lot about “new” ad formats and video-centric programming during its Newfront presentation, but a vague familiarity persisted until the very end of COO Henrique De Castro’s presentation, when he made a promise to media buyers: give us a small yet sizable portion of your TV ad spending and we’ll guarantee satisfaction. […]

It’s been over a year since publisher, ad server and ad exchange OpenX bought publisher ad tech services provider LiftDNA (AdExchanger story). And as often happens in these cases, the founder of the acquired company is exiting. Vadim Telyatnikov, who founded LiftDNA in 2009, told associates in an email memo obtained by AdExchanger that he is […]

Experian Marketing Services has integrated technology gained from last year’s acquisition of Conversen with its CheetahMail platform. Referred to simply as “Experian Marketing Services’ cross-channel marketing platform,” the new offering lets marketers coordinate customer interactions across email, mobile, social, web, display, and print advertising campaigns, using testing and rules-based segmentation capabilities. For instance, a customer who made a […]

No company has seized the Facebook data opportunity as well as Datalogix. Facebook and Datalogix have worked together since 2011, when they began linking Facebook ad impressions to in-store purchases. Later, Facebook tapped Datalogix as the first partner in its Custom Audiences CRM and offline data-matching program. Acxiom, Epsilon and BlueKai were later added. Datalogix […]

Social data analytics provider ShareThis is allowing Publicis-owned Starcom MediaVest Group to embed the company’s Social Quality Index rankings in its advertiser dashboard. In essence, the SQI is an indicator of the volume of social sharing and clicks across all of ShareThis’s 2.4 million publishers, who are mostly smaller, long-tail players but also include major […]

“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 Chris Tuleya, Vice President of eDR at Underscore Marketing. Smartphone ownership has skyrocketed in the last three years, with nearly half of the US population now using smartphones. The […]

Salesforce.com introduced today a new addition to its Marketing Cloud – Social.com, which allows marketers to apply their CRM and social listening data to their social ad campaigns. Creating targeted ads, marketers frequently run into the “silo issue” of being unable to connect their various customer data sources, noted Gordon Evans, VP of marketing at Salesforce.com. […]

Facebook may be pouring on the revenue afterburners while reducing the precision of self-serve ad targeting in the news feed. Or, if you’re Facebook, the latest changes are all about making it simpler for the advertising long tail. As many of you may know, AdExchanger reaches out through your Facebook news feed by posting links to […]

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 […]