Platforms

Spring has nearly sprung, and it seems Facebook is ready to get the clutter out. The company today rolled out organized, parallel newsfeeds geared to various user information needs. CEO Mark Zuckerberg and several members of his team showed off the new, more visually dynamic newsfeeds at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters this morning. The quick […]

Adam Bain, president of global revenue for Twitter, took some jabs at Facebook and explained his marketing vision for Twitter at the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit on Wednesday afternoon. Federated Media CEO John Battelle led the Q&A. After sharing the latest news from Twitter — that the social network now has more than 200 million active […]

Cox Digital Solutions, which houses the white label vertical ad network and ad serving business formerly known as Adify, will no longer offer platform services to outside media companies, the company has told clients. In a letter sent last month to customers, obtained by AdExchanger, Andy Levi director, Publisher Operations at CDS, as part of […]

Google properties dominated the top mobile websites in terms of market share of visits during the week ending February 23, 2013, according to Experian Marketing Services. Experian introduced Hitwise Mobile at the beginning of March, a new offering that will provide data on mobile internet activity, including weekly website rankings from mobile devices, share of […]

This week computer hardware and software marketer HP became the first company on LinkedIn to attract a million followers. HP believes the service can work as an advertising medium, as much as it can a customer relationship management or public relationship channel. “Our one million followers are connected to over 42 million people on LinkedIn, […]

Facebook has confirmed its agreement to buy Atlas from Microsoft, paving the way for a more robust demand-side offering from the company. In an interview with AdExchanger, Ads Product Director Gokul Rajaram said the primary aim is to help advertisers compare their Facebook ads with all online, and eventually offline, placements. An ad network is not […]

In his first high profile appearance since jumping from Google to Yahoo, Henrique De Castro, the portal’s COO, took the stage on the second and final day of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Annual Leadership Meeting to showcase the company’s vision under his fellow ex-Googler, CEO Marissa Mayer. The content vision, as demonstrated by the new […]

Tribune Digital, the interactive arm of the newspaper and broadcasting company, expects mobile traffic on its 36 WAP sites and 60 apps to exceed the PC-based usage it gets this year across its 50 websites. But the question facing it and other publishers looking to nudge ad spending to more closely match users’ smartphone and […]

Twitter rolled out its long anticipated ads API program today, after a development process that began in earnest in the middle of last year. The APIs — one for Promoted Accounts, another for Promoted Tweets – are likely to lower barriers to demand for its paid media products, and to entice third parties to bring […]

77Agency, one of Facebook’s Strategic Preferred Marketing Developers, has been around for ten years and covers a wide range of digital media services. Founded in 2003, the London-based agency has more than 120 employees worldwide and offices in Milan, Riga, Amsterdam, Madrid, New York, and Sydney. “We like to define ourselves as a media marketing […]

What do you do if you have real-time bidding software that’s non-core to your business, but could still be an asset to young ad companies faced with building their own bidders from scratch? You take it open source. That’s what Montreal-based Datacratic has done with the release of a new RTBkit framework, available at RTBkit.org. […]

Publishers, marketers and agency executives are still talking about native advertising, whether it’s to say it’s hype, hope, old wine in a new bottle, or some combination.  We spoke with interactive shop veteran Adam Kleinberg, CEO of San Francisco’s Traction, about the headaches and opportunities associated with native ads and whether this model can stand […]

Video promoter startup Virool has raised a $6 million first round to help it quickly expand internationally and fulfill co-founder and CEO Alex Debelov’s plan to become the “Google AdWords” of video. “We grew from 200 to over 30,000 advertisers in 8 months ,and are going to release our own viral video that 1 million […]

With over 260 companies in its Preferred Marketing Developer program, Facebook has its hands full managing partners. Yesterday, in an apparent attempt to simplify the program while also extracting more revenue from it, Facebook announced significant changes to how it handles badge requests. (AdExchanger story) The main things to know: (a) New partners will be […]

Facebook is changing the rules for admittance to its PMD badge program to focus more tightly on paid media. In an email to prospective PMD partners published on Business Insider, it tells applicants they’ll need to prove their knowledge of its ad products and their ability to “influence your clients on media spend.” Facebook has […]

Google, AppNexus, and PubMatic are all talking up the convergence of guaranteed and non-guaranteed media. The first solutions designed to address this convergence were private exchanges, embraced by many sellers but fewer on the buy side. Now the companies are moving forward on the next wave of features. Among the favored approaches is so-called “holistic […]

AOL’s mix of challenges and improvements to its ad business was clearly represented in its Q4 earnings last Friday. U.S. display revenues slipped 3%, dampening AOL’s triumphal announcement that companywide revenues returned to the plus side after eight long years. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong surveyed the company’s Q4 earnings in an interview on Friday, conceding […]

AOL’s Q4 results had a number of positives, not least of which was a return to overall revenue growth for the first time in eight long years. And yet, Q4 saw the company’s display ad dollars slip further, with numbers in that segment flat globally and down 3% in the U.S. Read the release. For […]

DataXu has raised a $27 million round, a hefty chunk though somewhat less than other recent investments in similarly mature display ad tech companies. (AppNexus secured $75 million last month, Rocket Fuel took $50 million in June). Thomvest Venture Capital led the round and gains a board seat, while current investors Atlas Venture, Flybridge Capital […]

This week Facebook added Lookalike targeting to the pile of low-hanging fruit it has plucked in the data-driven ads space. The offering is closely tied to Custom Audiences, the CRM matching program that allows a brand to find existing customers and prospects by identifying Facebook users through an (anonymized) email address or phone number. Facebook’s […]

Just days before AOL reports its heavily scrutinized Q4 earnings, the company has rebranded the unit housing its Advertising.com flagship as AOL Networks. The purpose is to streamline AOL’s message to agencies, advertisers, marketers, publishers and investors and convey that the company is a programmatic player, not a vestigial ad network with a farrago of […]

Facebook continues to be the most popular social networking site in the US, but users are more likely to take a break from the site or spend less timing using it, according to new data from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. In its December 2012 survey, Pew found that 67% of […]

Mobile and video are the fastest growing segments of display – eMarketer has video’s growth rates rising 46.5% for 2012, while it says smartphone based ad spending will jump 180% this year to top $4 billion. And yet, aside from Google/YouTube, Facebook, and Hulu, there are very few sites that can truly make the claim […]

Glow Digital Media, one of Facebook’s Strategic Preferred Marketing Developers (SPMD), raised $1.3 million in its first round of funding. Founded in London in 2009, the company supports direct response advertisers on their Facebook campaigns, and mostly works with clients in Europe, though 25% are based in North America. “Up until December 2012, we were […]

Facebook made solid progress on generating ad revenue, especially through growing use of its less than five-month-old Facebook Exchange and its aggressive focus on mobile advertising. At the same time, Facebook’s desire to spread itself and its products as widely and quickly as possible, particularly in developing countries, resulted in huge expenses — costs were […]

Though it’s early days for Facebook Graph Search, some believe the offering has potential to redefine marketing on the Facebook platform. Shoutlet CEO Jason Weaver is one of those. “From Page Likes to Check-ins, we will start to see these social actions carry more value for brands since they give different heft in the ranking […]

AdBrite has shut down its exchange, and says it is close to selling off its other assets: namely, its B2B Marketplace directory and the intellectual property and engineering operations that power the core exchange product. In essence, this means that adBrite as it has been known — since evolving from an ad network — will […]

Although the major internet ad players – e.g., Pandora, Spotify, Last.fm – all swear by their direct sales, Xaxis, WPP’s audience buying unit, is looking to leverage audio ads as a way to get more brand campaign ad dollars within its programmatic system. “The appeal [of internet radio audio ads] is that we want to […]

No AppNexus insiders will take money off the table as the RTB pure play soaks up a new $75 million investment led by Technology Crossover Ventures. Instead, funds from the series D round will be pumped into the company in the form of new features, marketplace quality improvements, and employee development. CEO Brian O’Kelley wrote […]

SmartWool, a company that sells hiking and outdoor clothing made from merino wool, knows its customers and fans like the outdoors and being on the go. It made sense, then, for the brand to focus on mobile social outreach — and it has seen promising results. “We felt mobile was critical,” said Molly Cuffe, senior […]