Platforms

Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are still riding above the fray. For all the talk about Facebook’s new Wall Street masters, about its inevitable kowtowing to advertisers, about its bummer of an IPO and its withering stock price, the overall impression made by its first earnings call (story) was  of a company largely indifferent to […]

Facebook disclosed Q2 ad revenues of $992 million in its first quarterly earnings report, with cash from ads making up 84% of its total haul. Revenue growth was 28% year over year, a deceleration from Q1 when revenue grew 45%. Facebook is darn close to the billion user mark, with Monthly Active Users at 955 […]

CPX Interactive was founded and long run as a traditional ad network business, but it wants to be known for multi-channel advertising — a la ValueClick. So it’s breaking out its channel offerings into branded divisions, starting with mobile and affiliate ads. Its new mobile network, Moversa, is three months old but already contributes 5% […]

In Q2, as it has for the past year, AOL’s third party network revenue rose by double digits, while U.S. display dollars remained flat. Read the earnings release. During the earnings call with investors, who once again saw their low expectations exceeded by AOL’s performance, CEO Tim Armstrong batted back questions about the advertising challenge […]

As Facebook hosts its first quarterly earnings call tomorrow after market close, investors will be looking at a range of health indicators. Among them are user engagement (daily, monthly), monetization of mobile, and ad pricing. The bar is lower than might have been expected pre-IPO, with some analysts forecasting decelerated growth in Q2  — owing partly […]

“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 Sacha Xavier, Partner, Media & Innovation Director for Neo@Ogilvy. The mobile media space is as exciting as it is daunting. As a digital media director, it seems there are more […]

One particular area of hope for Yahoo has been its acquisition of data management platform interclick, for which it paid $270 million November 2011. But the financial boost it provided was deemed “disappointing” by CFO Tim Morse  during the company’s Q2 earnings call last week. AdExchanger spoke with Peter Foster, Genome’s GM, on the integration of Yahoo’s data […]

Upcast Social is a London-based marketing firm specializing in managing Facebook campaigns. It was one of the early companies to be certified as a preferred marketing developer (PMD) for the Facebook Ads API. AdExchanger spoke with CEO Jim Brigden and Client Services Director Josh Wallin. AdExchanger: What’s the origin story for Upcast Social? JB: Upcast […]

Having originally conceived the idea while at vertical ad network Adify (which he sold to Cox in 2008 for a healthy $300 million), CEO Russ Fradin has not lost any steam in his own personal startup engine – let alone his passion for his latest startup, Dynamic Signal. Fradin explains that brand clients want to […]

When it comes to attribution modeling on the Facebook platform, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Last week, Adometry became the first pure play attribution vendor to get certified under Facebook’s ad tracking requirements (AdExchanger story). But not all of its competitors see approval of their ad tags as an important step […]

Social analytics provider 33across just raised $13.1 million as part of a “growth round,” designed to help the New York-based company build up its technology offerings and marketing team. Read the release. We sat down with CEO Eric Wheeler to discuss the details of those plans and to take a look at how the company […]

WPP-owned Mindshare has a lot of love for its digital ad partners, but it’s tough love — especially on the first date. For one client, new ad networks, data providers, and other platforms must prove their worth within a week of testing. “Every test partner for this client has seven days to perform, and if […]

Facebook is gradually opening up to third party ad vendors, including ad tracking companies. Its list of certified tracking partners includes Atlas, Mediamind and Pointroll. Until today, none of them was exclusively focused on the burgeoning niche of attribution management. That changes with the certification of pure play Adometry’s tags for the Facebook platform. Customers […]

Yahoo followed yesterday’s big news that Google product veteran Marissa Mayer was its new CEO with a Q2 earnings report consisting of small, barely-better-than-flat revenue and profit gains.  Read the release. Display revenue  was $473 million (excluding traffic acquisition costs), representing a 1 percent increase over Q2 2011. To put that number in context, in […]

Late last week Facebook released Premium Ad inventory to its self-serve and Ads API channels. By doing so, it intends to relieve the burden of selling these ad types solely from its direct sales force and make them more widely available. But the eventual impact of the move could be more complicated. For instance, from […]

Having lost its display dominance last year to Google and Facebook, Yahoo has turned to high-profile Google veteran Marissa Mayer to help reverse the company’s decline. Read the release. In making the choice, Yahoo has decided to replace widely respected digital ad sales veteran Ross Levinsohn, who had been serving as CEO on an interim […]

Having come a long way from its mobile video days, Waltham, Massachussetts-based Nexage appears ready for the next stage of its real-time bidding (RTB), mobile ad exchange strategy given the recent round of investment led by telecom SingTel’s venture group, SingTel Innov8. Though Nexage CEO Ernie Cormier cautions the investment is financial versus strategic and […]

“Social Exchange” is a column focused on the evolving roles of social media in online advertising. Ed Kats is president of MediaWhiz, a performance marketing and integrated digital media agency. MediaWhiz is part of the Hyper Marketing Inc. network.  Some marketers love to bash Facebook ads. We saw it in the immediate aftermath of General […]

The steady collection of extreme tech skills over at real-time ad platform and app marketplace AppNexus is creating a growing opportunity around services. The company is actively recruiting for an AppNexus Global Services unit, according to a company website, including NYC and London “open positions” from its job board. Call it a high tech agency or […]

The U.K. is rapidly catching up to the U.S. in programmatic media, with DSPs servicing about 30 percent of GroupM’s display ad spend this year compared with 20 percent in 2011. WPP’s global media arm issued its measured ad spending report for the country this week (press release), and while the overall picture is stagnant, […]

Facebook has lately hinted at a more open approach to its ad platforms, and agencies are buoyant about the prospect of managing their Facebook buys alongside display, search, and other channels. But it’s early days. The Facebook Exchange is evidence of this open attitude, as is the porting of Facebook ad buys onto Zynga’s owned […]

“Now Serving Mobile” is a column focused on the audience-buying opportunity in mobile advertising. Julie Preis is SVP of product management at Mocean Mobile. If you are a developer working on a new mobile app, you have two types of software development kits (SDKs) available to you for connecting to ad buyers: bundled and unbundled. […]

The ad sector’s creative apparatus has a good deal of work cut out before it wraps its head around data to the extent media and digital agencies have. But to hear some tell it, analytics – or “insights” as many prefer – has begun to permeate campaign ideation. In Cannes last week, AdExchanger talked with […]

WPP Group just scored a win at the intersection of social and programmatic display. Facebook has confirmed to AdExchanger that it added the holding company’s Xaxis audience buying unit to its list of approved real-time bidding partners for the new Facebook Exchange. Xaxis is the only one of Facebook’s RTB partners to hail from within […]

Carolyn Everson is the Facebook exec most directly responsible for positioning the company’s ad products to marketers. Today at the Cannes Lions festival, she’ll help unveil a new Creative Council (announcement), which will help establish the road map for the company’s creative formats. Everson took a moment yesterday to talk with AdExchanger about Facebook’s evolving […]

“Ad Agents” is a column written by the agency-side of the digital media community. Christy Belden is VP Media+Marketing at LeapFrog Interactive, a digital marketing agency. We live in a myriad of systems, which interact and work with another on a continuous basis. A great example of this is ants. Ants have the ability to […]

After being banned from buying Yahoo! owned & operated inventory in early November, it appears that retargeters are being allowed to return to Right Media Exchange (RMX) and taste Yahoo!’s (by all accounts) high-performing display media. Let’s go to the AdExchanger diagram so you can see how the retargeting magic is happening. This will assume […]

Michael Scissons is founder and CEO of Syncapse, a Toronto-based, social performance management platform. Last week, Scissons’ company acquired Clickable, a social and search ad platform based in New York City. According to the release, “Clickable’s social and search advertising management functionality will become a key addition to Syncapse’s suite, which includes social media publishing, […]

A couple of weeks ago, Google announced its new Doubleclick Digital Marketing platform which further integrates DoubleClick ad products and begins to offer the promise of efficient cross-channel buying across media channels such as display and search. Many in the industry, particularly privately, see an inevitability in Google corralling much of the data-driven, display ad […]

A story reported here yesterday was missing some key nuances in how the Facebook Exchange will work. The below is our clarification and correction based on new information shared by Facebook and its DSP partners. Sources told AdExchanger yesterday, and Facebook confirmed at the time, that frequency capping would not be possible through the new […]