Platforms

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 […]

Facebook is already an important player in the attribution space, partly by virtue of its ability to do multi-device impression analysis, linking ads served on mobile and desktop to conversions that happen off-site and increasingly, offline. It has no need for cookies, the stock-in-trade of most attribution platforms, since all impressions tie back to Facebook’s […]

The debate around multi-channel attribution is perhaps the essential marketing problem of this decade. Can you really optimize ad spend on a cross-channel basis, and at the impression level? Not yet. Will you be able to? A lot of smart money says yes, but it’s going to be a long and bumpy ride. The most […]

Less than six months since Google decided to merge its paid Product Listing Ads and its “free” shopping-related results into a single paid image-ad format, about 35% of commercial searches now show PLAs in the results, up from 29% in Oct, says Jefferies & Co.’s analyst Brian Pitz. As Google Shopping now essentially requires retailers […]

“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 Bob Walczak, VP Mobile at PubMatic. Do we split print media into magazine and newspaper? No, and in the same way, there is no reason to split digital into […]

Twitter has added nine members to the “Certified Products” partner program it created last year, bringing the total number to 21. The program is still missing an “Ads” badge that would allow designated vendors to bring new sources of demand to Twitter’s Promoted Products. For now, partners are still grouped into the original three categories: […]

A little more than a year after making its first mobile-centric acquisition, sweepstakes content company ePrize has made its third purchase in the smartphone marketing arena with text marketing specialist Mozes. In an interview, ePrizes CEO Matt Wise told AdExchanger that the company is currently looking at several other potential prospects in the mobile space […]

It’s been less than 24 hours since Facebook announced its foray into search – known as Graph Search. Though Facebook has initially focused on positioning the product for the consumer, AdExchanger reached out to a selection of executives in the ad ecosystem and asked their thoughts on the implications for advertisers. Click below or scroll […]

Two years into their existing partnership, ad holding company Interpublic Group is making an unspecified investment in Kiip, a company that promises to connect marketers and consumers through the use of “unexpected” targeted rewards to mobile app users and gamers. Apart from help in continuing to build the San Francisco startup, Kiip co-founder and CEO […]

With the Beta launch of Graph Search today, Facebook aims to let users search through all their friends’ data in one place — rather than having to hop from profile to profile, page to page. CEO Mark Zuckerberg describes the initiative as a third pillar alongside its other core social products, Newsfeed and Timeline. “Graph […]

Moontoast has snagged a $5 million Series B round to support its social advertising product, which aims to remove barriers to engagement on Facebook with richer interaction capabilities. The three-year-old company, based in Nashville and Boston, will use the money to further develop Moontoast’s Social Activation Engine, and to hire up in biz dev, sales […]

In 2013, expect to see more ad tech companies provide some automation of guaranteed sales. Among the entities working on that idea is Legolas Media, which just hired digital sell-side veteran Jonathon Shaevitz as its new CEO. Shaevitz joins Legolas from sell-side pricing and inventory manager Maxifier, where as CEO over the past two years, […]

Earlier this week, Thrillist Media Group, publisher of a young men’s local lifestyle guide network and e-commerce app, brought in digital ad sales vet Todd Anderman as the company’s president of sales, marketing and operations. Most recently the chief media and revenue officer of mobile ad targeter Jumptap, Anderman spent much of the past decade […]

“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 Rob Leathern, CEO of social advertising platform Optim.al.  Like many in our industry, I have a love/hate relationship with advertising. Even though I’m an ad technology entrepreneur, I actively […]

Even as mobile real-time bidding gets more attention, the obstacles currently in its path will continue to prove challenging, says Brian Monahan, managing partner of IPG’s Magna Global. The media shop’s research unit just unveiled its twice-annual Media Economy Report, which details the promise and the problems of mobile advertising. As Monahan pointed out in […]