Platforms

AOL has been promising a bigger effort on the programmatic side of the business all year and the company is ending 2012 with an acquisition that’s intended to both reflect and build on that focus. The company being acquired is Buysight, a retargeting and retail lead gen specialist. The four-year-old company will be folded into […]

Demand side platform MediaMath has scooped up Tap.Me and its roughly 11 employees for an undisclosed sum. The deal brings MediaMath a far more robust mobile and video ad serving capability than it had previously, according to CEO Joe Zawadzki. Tap.Me was previously focused on in-game ads (AdExchanger 2011 Q&A). But as sometimes happens in […]

Adelphic Mobile is one of a handful of companies trying to address the problem of poor audience segmentation in mobile. It hopes to get there faster with the help of a $10 million investment led by Google Ventures. The money is earmarked largely for marketing and other go-to-market spending. “We’ve been pretty heads down, working […]

Mobile advertising is on the rise and, looking at reports from the third quarter 2012, the use of mobile real-time bidding by buyers and publishers is also growing. Market intelligence firm IDC predicts that mobile advertising will reach $8 billion globally in 2012, jumping to $14.2 billion by 2014. Looking just at the U.S., market […]

AOL’s display performance is in comeback mode, but growth is lopsided. The company’s Q3 earnings presented a clear demonstration of the strength of third party network, which includes the flagship ad unit Advertising.com, as revenues jumped 18 percent over the same period in 2011. At the same time, revenue from AOL’s owned & operated sites […]

AudienceScience has shuttered its publisher network business to focus completely on marketing technology. The move is yet another sign of weak demand for traditional ad networks, as buyers steadily migrate budgets to exchange-traded media bought through DSPs. President Mike Peralta tells AdExchanger, “The transition has been in the works for 12 to 18 months. Across […]

Triggit, a demand side platform that has lately repositioned itself as a Facebook Exchange specialist, has raised a $7.4 million Series B round from existing investors. Spark Capital and Foundry Group participated, as did the company’s recently added CRO Chris Zaharias. CEO Zach Coelius tells AdExchanger, “We’ve focused every bit of our development and resources […]

With the launch of an Ads API access yesterday, LinkedIn joined a very small club of social companies that allow developers of outside platforms to customize and sell into their paid media products. The club shrinks further if you count only household names. Of the roughly 8 social companies with ad APIs, Facebook is the […]

Traditional branding exercises often focus on questions that can seem a little silly. What color is your brand? What shape? Percolate founder Noah Brier says his company sprang in part from the realization that “What does your brand consume?” also needs to be part of that equation. The company, which has been compared to Buddy […]

Facebook’s menu of ad types is growing longer all the time. And as the company continually tests new formats, it’s getting harder to keep track of all of them. Below is AdExchanger’s attempt to provide a snapshot of all relevant and current paid media products the company has on offer, along with a few that […]

The Black Friday holiday shopping tradition has been turned on its head, thanks to social media and Facebook. While retailers continue to encourage customers to rise before the sun on the day after Thanksgiving, they are adding ever more Facebook deals and apps, as well as mobile tools, that can be used throughout Thanksgiving week. […]

“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 Eric Picard, CEO at Rare Crowds. I’ve been designing, prototyping and deploying new ad formats in digital advertising for more than 15 years. I started one of the first rich […]

Facebook said on Friday it’s bringing back the conversion pixel to its online advertisers by the end of the month, after abandoning it in 2010. Editor’s note: Up until now, there appeared to be exceptions made for some large advertisers who were using third-party ad tracking on Facebook – likely due to the size of […]

Just ahead of Black Friday — the day after Thanksgiving and the official start of the holiday shopping season — Facebook is broadening its e-commerce platform, Facebook Gifts, to include a wide range of big name retailers and digital content companies. The social network presented the announcement at a press conference at FAO Schwarz, the […]

Last month’s ad spending tally from the Interactive Advertising Bureau was another “record-breaker,” as marketers lavished $17 billion on web ads between January and the end of June 2012. Display revenues in the first half totaled almost $5.6 billion, up 4 percent from $5.3 billion in the first half of 2011. So everything should be […]

Facebook’s Exchange is in full swing outside the U.S. Speaking at the AppNexus Summit in New York this week, Facebook VP global partnerships Blake Chandlee noted FBX buyers can now access audiences in the Asia-Pacific region and in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. A spokesperson later confirmed the expansion and said Facebook is actively […]

While AOL’s Q3 growth was surely a welcome sign to patient investors, the fact that it has continued to come from its third party network and search ad deal with Google could be a long term problem. During a call with analysts, CEO Tim Armstrong acknowledged several times that the “traditional” display model of ad […]

Chris Golec is CEO of Demandbase, which positions itself as a real-time targeting and personalization platform for B2B marketing. Golec recently spoke to AdExchanger about his company’s new ad platform, known as “Demandbase Company Targeted Advertising.” Read the release. AdExchanger: How did you get to the advertising “moment” at Demandbase? CHRIS GOLEC: For most B2B […]

“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 Brian Kaminski, President US of iProspect. In the battle for digital advertising dollars, Google is the established leader and Facebook is the scrappy newcomer. While Google offers an expansive […]

Ian Lowe is CEO of AdSlot, formerly Webfirm Group Limited, based in Australia. Recently, his company launched the AdSlot platform in North America and Europe. According to the release, AdSlot was created by the founders of Hitwise, Andrew Barlow and Adrian Giles, and Adslot Publisher is “a direct sales platform” that currently includes several properties […]

With $8 million in new venture funding in his company’s pocket, one might think that the next step for publisher ad tech and marketplace firm isocket is to hire legions of sales and marketing folks. Not so, says isocket CEO John Ramey. It’s more about the technology challenge as he told AdExchanger: “We’re trying to […]

The burning issues affecting digital advertising these days can be boiled down to handful of recurring themes: ad effectiveness and verification; “Do Not Track” and relevance; and whether social media extends a publisher’s content distribution — or merely fragments it. Given that video is a highly engaging form of media and easily trackable (via completion […]

Having built one of the early ad servers at Matchlogic, TruEffect CEO Ron Hill and his core team have deep experience in ad tech.  Among the fruits of those ad serving days were patents that Hill says have become the backbone of his company’s first-party advertising technology today. To be clear, TruEffect isn’t a young […]

The fearsome and punishing effects from Hurricane Sandy along the east coast the past few days has contributed to a series of record-breaking events across The Weather Company’s cable and digital properties. In particular, The Weather Channel’s parent company tells AdExchanger  that on Friday, the amount of ad dollars coming in from programmatic channels exceeded […]

Speak the name iProspect and what’s the first thing that comes to mind? If you were around during the first wave of online marketing, the answer is certainly “search.” The agency was one of the first independent search marketing agencies to go global with offices in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere before its 2004 acquisition by […]

Back in 2008, Perfect Audience‘s Brad Flora started a Chicago-specific social news website called Windy Citizen. Though the audience grew, the ad revenue lagged which led to an investigation by Flora into the world of dynamic creative optimization (DCO). Soon, with a little help from tech incubator Y Combinator among others, his growing startup created […]

GraphEffect “has it all” on the Facebook platform. Or almost. The company holds three of Facebook’s four badges (Ads, Pages, Insights) and was recently named one of Facebook’s 12 Strategic Preferred Marketing Developers. But its positioning is unique relative to a number of other marketing platforms playing in the Facebook ecosystem. Through its Shift collaboration […]

In addressing Yahoo analysts and investors publicly for the first time during Monday’s Q3 earnings call, CEO Marissa Mayer indicated she would continue a strategy employed during her years at Google: primarily purchases in the “double-digit millions,” rarely exceeding $100 million. Mayer didn’t mention companies  that have been the subject of recent rumor, namely mobile […]

An hour after producing a Q3 earnings report that exceeded Wall St. analysts’ expectations, Facebook CEO and chairman Mark Zuckerberg came out swinging against doubts about the social network’s mobile footing. “I want to dispel this myth we can’t make money on mobile,” Zuckerberg said in prepared remarks. “The reason is, we haven’t really tried […]

“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 Kyle Barber, SVP Global Performance Lead at McCann Worldgroup. Wouldn’t it be great if there were one simple metric that neatly measured the effectiveness of all social media advertising and […]