Platforms

The ripple effects of Google’s decisions dominated AdExchanger’s top story list in 2021.

Keeping Track Third-party trackers were hosed by GDPR, right?  Perhaps not.  A University of Oxford study found that third-party trackers in Google Play and Apple iOS apps remain relatively unchanged. “The same handful of third-party tracking companies have similar prevalence and prominence,” according to the Internet Policy Review journal. The number of apps with zero […]

Check Your Priors Advertisers usually look for in-market or interested customers – but sometimes people need a push, not just a nudge.  Two psychology studies identify tactics that could work for particular goals or advertisers, writes Marketing Week.  In one study, Stanford researchers gave homeowners a lesson on driver safety and asked them to put up […]

TextNow, a free text, voice and video calling app, is on track to hit $100 million in revenue this year, up from $62 million in 2020. The company is profitable. Fun fact, most of that revenue comes from advertising, says Ken Willner, the company’s chief growth officer.

That’s A Wrapped If you were on Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat or TikTok last week, you probably saw the Spotify Wrapped feature, an annual breakdown of each user’s most listened to songs and programs for the year. That roundup is then shared on social media, with captions like, “Spotify thinks I need therapy.”  Every year, Spotify […]

The middle of the mediation market is disappearing quickly, leaving mobile app developers with tough decisions to make, writes InMobi’s Kunal Nagpal. Control, neutrality, and transparency – the most important aspects for publishers – are being ceded without recourse. What does this all mean for mobile app developers?

Smash-And-Grab Ecommerce Retailers are petitioning Congress and attorneys general to strengthen laws targeting online marketplaces that sell stolen goods. CVS CEO Karen Lynch told CNBC that a spree of smash-and-grab robberies in the US has been fueled by such marketplaces, because it’s so easy to anonymously resell products without repercussions.  Sellers would still keep their […]

Banner ads? More like background noise. Social display has become an attractive option for publishers trying to get around banner blindness, and there are now multiple startups on the market that help brands repurpose their social creative to run across the open web. Growth in the sector is catching the attention of investment firms. On […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Meiry Vaknin, VP of partnerships at YouAppi. After this exclusive first look for subscribers, the story will be published in full on AdExchanger.com tomorrow. The mobile gaming market is set to grow 4.4% in 2021 to […]

Media.Monks, S4 Capital’s content, data and media arm, is going big on Salesforce. On Wednesday, Media.Monks merged with Maverick Digital, a 50-person Salesforce consulting and implementation firm with a presence in North America and India. The deal price was not disclosed. Maverick Digital, whose clients include UFC Gym, Mercy Health and the Chicago Blackhawks hockey […]

Will Meta “GIF Up” GIPHY? Facebook parent company Meta is in the hot seat again. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK’s competition watchdog, has called on Meta to offload Giphy, the GIF search engine and content animation service it acquired in May 2020, citing multiple anti-competition concerns in a press release. The CMA […]

Ocean Spray is using a version of the vigorous measurement approach that the Food and Drug Administration uses to test medicines and vaccines, including the COVID-19 vaccine. The method, called randomized control trial (RCT) measurement, isn’t a new concept. (Fun fact: Apparently, the first randomized control trial took place in Nuremberg, Germany in 1835, as […]

Snap is bringing more machine learning into the media buying process on its platform. Although the release is not directly related to signal loss due to Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework, the move should help attract performance advertisers to the app. On Tuesday, Snap said advertisers can now buy multiple ad format types within a single ad […]

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

Whose Free Lunch? Amazon may rebrand IMDb TV, its free ad-supported streaming service, because employees fear the clunky name is a drag on sign-ups, The Information reports. The waffling between IMDb TV, Freedive or some variation of Free TV is amusing. But perhaps the most interesting morsel comes at the very end. “While the business […]

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

The Power Player ID When Google said earlier this year that it wouldn’t support email-based identifiers, it also made a concession to publishers called publisher-provided IDs (PPIDs). Now, PPIDs – which are primarily based on emails collected by publishers – will be available to Google DV360 advertisers. That’s a big advantage for DV360, but Google […]

“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 Abhishek Shrivastava, senior director of product at LinkedIn. Recently, I’ve heard from many in the marketing community that they feel a sense of unease.  Consumer privacy is changing the game, […]

Screen Dreams Has social media outgrown the phone? YouTube may be the biggest player in streaming TV, but other social platforms are eager to follow, spurred on by ecommerce dollars. Late last week, Pinterest announced Pinterest TV, a content app that can be downloaded to Apple or Android TV systems. It’s a natural next step […]

The business practices of both Facebook and Google came to light in unflattering ways over the past week. Last Friday, a judge unsealed the 173-page antitrust complaint against Google – and there was a lot of interesting info underneath those black squares. Many of the details allege that Google manipulated the auction to ensure market share […]

Hitting For The Cycle 2021 is an off-year, in terms of the four-year election cycle. But political advertising is scorching – and politicians have a few specific demands for digital. For one, the idea of “forced video” exposure is critical, said Megan Clasen, a partner at the political ads shop Gambit Strategies, in a Q&A […]

Spot Me Some Change Spotify reported quarterly revenues of $2.9 billion, with about $375 million of that coming from its free, ad-supported tier. That’s a nice 75% year-over-year jump for Spotify’s advertising business. The company expects to clear $1 billion in ad revenue at the close of 2021, which will mark the first time it’s […]

Like a good marketer, insurance brand State Farm is looking to reach people where they are – and, increasingly, that’s in games. Gaming is an effective way to get in front of younger audiences, of course. But it’s also about tapping into the enthusiasm that players have for games and gaming-related experiences, said Patty Morris, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Slow Burn Amid a continuous onslaught of negative headlines, Facebook reported slower revenue growth on Monday as a result of, yep, Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework. And Facebook warned that the road ahead will remain rocky. Facebook’s Q3 revenue grew 35% to $29.01 billion, missing expectations […]

Shortchanging YouTube? Are advertisers caught up in the CTV hype? Mike Shields thinks so. In a recent Substack post, he suggests advertisers ditch the various CTV walled gardens and head over to YouTube instead. There are thousands of streaming services, but YouTube and Netflix still corner about 47% of the market and haven’t lost share […]

On Friday, a New York judge unsealed most of the Texas-led antitrust lawsuit against Google – and the devil is in the unredacted details. According to the judge, P. Kevin Castel, Google’s argument that the filing needed to be redacted for privacy reasons didn’t hold water. The multistate suit alleges anticompetitive ad tech policies and […]

Rewarded video is a staple of mobile game monetization. So why isn’t rewarded audio a thing? That’s the question Amit Monheit, now the CEO and founder of in-game audio ad startup Odeeo, started asking himself last year after losing his job at a Tel Aviv-based audio content discovery platform during the height of the pandemic. […]

Party Like It’s 95 Google Chrome 95, the latest browser version, was released from beta on Wednesday. It won’t make marketers quake in their boots, but this is the first version of Chrome that will allow people to opt in to a reduced user-agent string, which is the data passed to a site operator regarding […]

Wait, Wait … Addressable Linear?  AMC Networks announced a partnership with The Trade Desk and Magnite to run addressable ads on linear TV. “This is a huge development, for us and for the entire industry, unlocking the value of linear inventory,” said Evan Adlman, SVP of advanced advertising and digital partnerships at AMC Networks. AMC […]

Snowflake, the cloud data services company, launched a Media Cloud on Tuesday, bringing together customers and businesses with specific needs related to media and advertising. The new Media Cloud is a suite of data products and integrations for services such as measurement and attribution, identity resolution, profile enrichment and advertising activations. Experian’s identity data and […]