Platforms

Regulation Nation The Federal Trade Commission is in negotiations on a settlement deal with Facebook that would install a federally-approved privacy official at the highest ranks of the company and launch an independent privacy oversight committee. CEO Mark Zuckerberg would be responsible for enforcing privacy at the company, and Facebook will still have to pay […]

“Today, we’re going to talk about building a privacy-focused social platform,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared, with only a mild sense of irony, as he kicked off the F8 developer conference in San Jose on Tuesday morning. One would be forgiven for wondering if Facebook is even capable of such a pivot, and Zuckerberg recognized […]

Brands are being tough on platforms, pulling advertising dollars after brand safety fiascoes and thinking critically about appearing adjacent to unpredictable content that can expose them to brand-safety risks. Yet Reddit, which languished with minimal advertising for years in part due to those brand-safety concerns, is thriving. Revenue grew by a factor of three in […]

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

Facebook set aside $3 billion for a potential FTC fine, the company revealed Wednesday when it announced its first quarter earnings. Facebook estimates the fine, which stems from its privacy practices, could range from $3 billion to $5 billion. “We are focused on building out our privacy-focused vision for the future of social networking and […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Remember Oath? Verizon Media Group, the company formerly known as Oath, is shrinking as the telco shifts its focus and most of its resources to 5G. The media group, which is made up of Verizon’s acquisition and merger of AOL and Yahoo, saw revenues […]

Snap is seeing a nice bump from performance advertisers. The platform said Tuesday that its revenues from direct-response buyers doubled over the past year, although it did not break out a figure. Total revenue grew 39% year over year to $320 million, beating analyst expectations of $307 million. Snap’s success with performance advertisers is driven […]

Twitter is angling for its sliver of the performance advertising pie dominated by Facebook and Google. A top priority for the Twitter revenue team this year is to work on enhancing its Mobile App Promotion product, the company’s answer to app install ads. The opportunity is ripe, CFO Ned Segal told investors during an earnings […]

While most DSPs let marketers increase or decrease bids based on factors like time of day, Beeswax is upgrading that idea with a product that lets buyers optimize bids based on up to 40 factors from the bid requests. Bid Models, which graduated from beta Wednesday, uses multivariate bidding algorithms to help marketers find “pockets” […]

Traditionally, a company like TIBCO, which sells integration and analytics software, thrives on events and field sales, where company reps can explain its products in person. But client buying habits have changed, even in the world of complex B2B solutions. “We heard from customers that they were spending more time online learning about products before […]

Snap teased an audience extension product called Snapchat Audience Network in early April, but the offering is still being baked and the beta likely won’t open until some point this summer. So, advertisers have to wait to find out how targeting will work outside of the Snapchat platform, what data will be available and what […]

Agencies have a “can’t live with it, can’t live without it” relationship with Facebook. The world’s second-largest ad platform, which reaches roughly 2.4 billion people, is a must-buy for brands. But a stream of issues around brand safety, misinformation and election integrity have made Facebook a precarious place for a brand to expose itself. Facebook’s […]

Waze is navigating toward programmatic. The traffic and navigation app owned by Google said Wednesday it has made its Zero-speed Takeover ad unit available programmatically in Display & Video 360 (formerly known as DoubleClick Bid Manager). The unit shows up as a banner ad at the bottom of the screen when a driver stops their […]

Google is doing more to help companies connect, manage, secure and analyze ever-growing amounts of data. At its Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco, the company unveiled a raft of announcements over the last two days (the event officially runs April 9-11), including new open-source integrations, more AI capabilities and product-development partnerships with large […]

Story updated to include a comment from Snap. Snapchat is on track to lose US users for the first time this year, according to eMarketer, thanks in part to continued aftershocks from its disastrous 2018 redesign. And Snap’s loss could be Instagram’s gain. Monthly users are set to decrease 2.8% year over year at Snapchat […]

Sens. Mark Warner, D-VA, and Deb Fischer, R-NE, introduced a bipartisan bill on Tuesday that would prohibit large internet companies like Google and Facebook from using deceptive design practices known as “dark patterns” that subtly manipulate users into sharing their personal data. Click here to read the bill in full. Dark patterns enable companies to […]

IBM is bowing out of mar tech and offloading its marketing cloud assets – for the second time. Competition from the other scaled marketing players was fierce and Big Blue’s heart hasn’t been in it for a while. Last week, IBM entered into a definitive agreement to sell its marketing platform and commerce software to private […]

Pinterest’s valuation in its amended S-1 released today is lower than the $12 billion it was gunning for last year. With price per share ranging from $15 to $17, Pinterest is valued between $10 billion and $11.3 billion. Could this lower-than-expected valuation indicate skepticism about Pinterest’s core business? Elgin Thompson, managing director of Digital Capital […]

Facebook is trying to make it easier for people to get information about the ads running on its platform. Ad transparency – political ad transparency, in particular – has been a top priority at Facebook since it became clear that bad actors were running amok in the leadup to the 2016 presidential election. Starting Thursday, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Network To Get Work A+E is taking a two-pronged approach with its new TV measurement products. A campaign reporting feature called P1 is meant to onboard smaller businesses and direct-to-consumer startups, which hunger for attribution data and want to test TV with relatively low […]

Reddit’s advertising revenue is a speck on the duopoly’s windshield, but it’s growing fast, albeit from a small base. The company’s US net ad revenue is set to hit $119 million this year, up from $76.9 million in 2018, giving Reddit a 0.1% share of the US digital ad market, according to an eMarketer forecast […]

Pinterest filing its S-1 late last week makes it the last of the social media walled gardens to go public. The OG Facebook might still be in a class of its own, but Pinterest bears comparison to Snap, which filed its S-1 in 2017, and Twitter, which filed a lifetime ago in 2013. Notably, while […]

LinkedIn is rolling out lookalike audiences following a beta testing period that began late last year, the company said Wednesday. Advertisers could already create matched audiences – basically, LinkedIn’s answer to custom audiences – built from a list of target contacts or accounts. The addition of lookalike audiences is a good look for a platform […]

Although Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter are getting more expensive, they remain the go-to places for brand-building campaigns. That’s the approach being taken by Skullcandy, the maker of headphones and audio devices, as it looks to grow from its action sports roots to a broader audience, according to CMO Jessica Klodnicki, who was hired in […]

How much ad revenue does Facebook lose out on when its platforms go on the fritz? More than you probably make in a year … or 50. On Thursday and Friday, Facebook experienced what was reportedly the longest partial global outage in the company’s history. For around 14 hours, some users had trouble accessing or […]

Google’s move to create unified, first-price auctions for publishers using Google Ad Manager doesn’t just change the auction type. It impacts pricing, header bidding, publisher floors and how publishers see AdWords demand. Under the new rules, all exchanges will bid for an impression at the same time, and Google will lose the “last look” it […]

Mark Zuckerberg penned a lengthy post last week laying out Facebook’s vision for a “privacy-focused” future – but it’s not going to change Facebook’s business model. Although Zuckerberg expends a lot of ink on the importance of data security and protecting messaging with end-to-end encryption, he doesn’t mention the interest and user-related data that powers Facebook’s […]

There are only around 2.5 million weddings in the United States every year – yet more than 30 million people are planning a wedding on Pinterest at any given time. “That means there’s a lot of planning being done long before a wedding ever happens,” said Jon Kaplan, who joined Pinterest in 2016 as global head […]

Big Tech can’t catch a break in DC … actually, scratch that. If Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, is elected to the White House in 2020, she’s got a plan to break up Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple. And her proposal specifically targets Google’s ad platform business. On Friday, the Democratic presidential candidate laid out how her […]

Branded content is a priority for Instagram in 2019 – but measurement is seriously lacking. “That’s one of the things I wish you guys would work on,” said Edlynne Laryea, director for global Neutrogena digital transformation and sustainability, speaking at an Instagram media event Tuesday. Although Instagram claims that 68% of its users choose to interact […]