Platforms

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 […]

Among the questions facing publishers last year: (1) What should be done about the rise of audience buying?, and (2) How do we make mobile advertising really pay off? Meredith Corp., the publisher of women’s magazines such as Better Homes and Gardens and Family Circle, has been focused on mobile for years, particularly through the […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Dan Grigorovici is CEO at AdMobius. If brands and agencies are ever expected to invest significant dollars in mobile then it’s time for the industry to get serious about measurement. While it’s true that progress […]

As AOL and Yahoo struggle to keep pace with display ad gains from Google, Facebook and Amazon, the portals have placed much of their hopes on lucrative brand campaign-friendly homepage ads. Macquarie analyst Ben Schachter has been charting the progress of the portals’ homepage ad quality and quantity, and it looks like Q4 was a […]

The Saturday before Christmas came in as a top three December shopping day for many retailers, including Best Buy, Toys ‘R’ Us, and Walmart. Below we present final holiday 2012 data from location analytics company Placed, which analyzes in-store visits of consumers who have opted-in to a mobile location measuring app. Placed’s location-based network does […]

Dan Salmon is an equity research analyst at BMO Capital Markets and covers advertising and marketing services. Salmon upgraded Facebook from “Underperform” with a $15 target to “Outperform” and $32 target and explored his outlook in a research note to investors on Monday. You can download it here (PDF). AdExchanger: Where are the ad dollars […]

It’s been nearly a year since ad sales workflow systems provider Mediaocean was given the regulatory green light to form the merger of Mediabank and Donovan Data Systems. While Mediaocean picked up the mantle of both entities’ attempts to bring online media buying methods to traditional TV, Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise tells AdExchanger that the […]

Having “incubated” rich media mobile ads firm Celtra in 2006 while he finished his graduate studies at Babson College, CEO Mihael Mikek has seen the pre-smartphone days when SMS ads were all the rage. Eventually the mobile market began to take off and after grabbing $7 million in funding since 2010, the Boston-based company has […]

AdBrite morphed into an ad exchange platform four years ago after shifting gears from its ad network beginnings, but the company was never recognized for making the full leap. Back in May, its board decided it was time for a change and brought in former Yahoo/Right Media executive Hardeep Bindra to make the evolution complete. […]

Facebook has added retargeting firm Chango to its list of preferred partners for Facebook Exchange, bringing a powerful aggregator of search intent data to the real-time bidding marketplace. The move is notable in that it represents an incursion by Facebook on the “intent currency” of Google (Bing and Yahoo too), after a period of failed […]

Nielsen has for years sought ways to measure the interplay of social media activity and TV viewing. Its new “multi-year” deal with Twitter is a tacit acknowledgement that Nielsen can’t close the media measurement loop on its own. There’s a similar observation to made about this morning’s announcement that Nielsen is buying long-time audience measurement rival, Arbitron, […]

December is an optimistic month for people in media and advertising, as retailers and other brands unleash a final torrent of spending before the period of relative hibernation known as “Q1.” It’s also a month of grand prognostications, when we collectively succumb to the folly of trying to guess what’s next. To supplement your personal […]

While anyone can follow a social media conversation stream through hashtags, social media ad tech provider RadiumOne is now starting to sell targeted ads off of these signifiers in real-time. The idea is to become part of consumers’ conversations as they’re taking off, not after they’ve already “trended” on Twitter or other social platforms. RadiumOne’s […]

AppNexus is an object of some fascination in digital marketing circles, and why not? Led by former rivals from Right Media and DoubleClick Ad Exchange, the privately held company has grown up to become perhaps the only scaled “pure” technology company in the real-time bidding landscape. It provides no managed services, accepts no insertion orders, […]

A quick search on Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developer directory reveals that the number of real-time bidding partners for the Facebook Exchange is 12, three fewer than were announced back in September. What gives? Contrary to appearances, the three missing companies — [x+1], Optimal, and Kenshoo – have not been kicked off of FBX for violating […]

In a panel discussion at Tuesday’s AllFacebook Conference, platform providers offered their insights on Facebook’s Open Graph and what marketers should think about when it comes to their social media plans. Facebook describes “Open Graph” on its developer site as helping “people tell stories about their lives with the apps they use. It provides developers […]

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 […]