Platforms

FTD Companies, parent company of online floral delivery brands ProFlowers and Interflora, wants to get back to the basics of brand marketing. “Our company, like many brands, has been obsessed with directly attributable, perfectly measured marketing for the last five years,” said Jeff Severts, CMO of FTD Companies, who previously served as CMO of Ulta […]

Paris-based app retargeting platform Adikteev – think Criteo for apps – snagged $12 million in Series B on Tuesday. The company plans to spend it on research and development and on expanding its 100-person headcount with around 40 new engineer hires over the next month. The round, which brings Adikteev’s total funding to $14.2 million since it […]

There’s no point eating up engineering resources to build technology that can be provided out of the box, Lomit Patel, VP of growth at IMVU, said at the Mobile Growth Summit in San Francisco last week. Although most mobile growth marketers would rather build than buy, nearly every app relies on a constellation of third-party […]

Publishers, prepare yourselves for another Facebook organic reach reality check. Starting Monday, Facebook will finally begin measuring organic page reach the same way it measures paid ad reach: based on viewable impressions. This is only a reporting change and unrelated to how organic distribution works on Facebook. Facebook started alerting publishers in early February, but […]

The New York Times is making good on its goal to rev digital subscription revenue, but not at the expense of its other key growth driver: digital advertising. The Times’ total subscription revenue surpassed $1 billion in 2017 as the company added 157,000 net new, digital-only subscriptions in Q4, it announced during its Q4 earnings […]

A budding sense of optimism around Twitter was substantiated Thursday when the social platform announced its first-ever quarter of profitability and a return to revenue growth. Twitter saw 2% year-over-year revenue growth with a total of $732 million in the final quarter of 2017, after a string of revenue declines last year. Twitter averaged 330 […]

Pixability, a platform that originated as a tool for identifying high-performing YouTube channels, is putting its money where its mouth is. The company will refund advertisers for views that run on YouTube inventory that is not brand-safe or fails to meet an advertiser’s agreed-upon brand safety terms, either through cash or TV-like “make-goods.” Although Pixability […]

Google will turn on its built-in Chrome ad blocker on Feb. 15, meaning ad tech companies must hustle to get their products in compliance as publishers fear lost revenue. Beginning that day, Chrome will begin auto-blocking ad formats that obstruct access to content. Chrome has more than 62% of the mobile browser market share and […]

Snap finally snapped out of its earnings slump on Tuesday as it beat analyst expectations for both revenue and daily active user growth. Revenue in 2017 reached $825 million, a 104% increase from the year before, while 2017 Q4 revenue grew 72% to roughly $286 million, topping analysts’ quarterly estimates of $253 million. “Our business […]

Champagne brand Moët & Chandon wanted its “Love Unconventional” campaign, running Valentine’s Day through Mother’s Day, to drive engagement with elements of gameplay. While the campaign will be heavy on digital video and influencer content across Facebook and Instagram, its more immersive elements are more endemic to Snapchat’s platform, said Christine Ngo, marketing director and […]

Alphabet posted revenues of $32.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2017, up 24% compared to the same period last year. The earnings showed a spike in traffic acquisition costs [TAC] as Google paid more to publishers in its Google Network Members’ properties revenue segment. The segment also includes revenue from Google’s DoubleClick Bid Manager, […]

Pandora said Wednesday it would shift resources and savings by investing in ad tech. The music streaming platform, which has fallen behind competitors in developing programmatic advertising solutions for buyers, said it will redeploy staff to build ad tech and mar tech and expand into non-music content. Pandora declined to comment further. Read the release. […]

Traffic is down at Facebook. It’s a new look for the platform, which has done almost nothing but grow quarter over quarter and year over year. Changes to Facebook’s news feed algorithm deprioritizing viral video in Q4 reduced time spent on the platform by around 50 million hours a day. Daily active users in the […]

Twitter is a company that always seems on the verge of flight. The potential is there, but the question remains: Will the platform ever be able to fulfill it? Instability in Twitter’s C-suite doesn’t help. On Tuesday, COO Anthony Noto – second in command to Jack Dorsey – became the most recent top Twitter exec to fly […]

When Facebook updates Ads Manager or tests a new ad placement, agencies – and even their account reps – are sometimes the last to know. In some cases, new features are enabled by default without any overt communication from Facebook, which can be “par for the course,” said Anita Walsh, director of social strategy at Horizon […]

When Facebook said it would change its news feed algorithm to prioritize users’ families’ and friends’ posts, advertisers worried it would also affect how paid placements are bought and sold. Would this reduce the amount of available inventory? Would it drive up costs? Facebook’s VP of global marketing solutions, Carolyn Everson, sought to assuage the […]

Adobe and AppNexus plan to give marketers supply-chain transparency from the DSP to the SSP by partnering on a pilot program. Adobe Advertising Cloud will reveal all fees taken by the DSP, including the platform fee and any add-ons, as well as AppNexus’ bill to the publisher, which will help marketers track media dollars through […]

Spotify was an early mover in programmatic audio, and it’s taking that momentum into 2018. “Marketers are moving so much money to programmatic. We’ve seen that channel explode,” said Brian Benedik, global head of ads monetization at Spotify. “We’ve seen brands [come to Spotify] that have never invested in audio because we’ve made it programmatic-enabled.” […]

In-app header bidding is coming to MoPub. On Tuesday, the Twitter-owned mobile ad exchange started testing an advanced bidding solution to replace the app ads waterfall with a unified auction. Roughly a dozen publishers are testing the solution. The closed alpha test does not have a set end date. Until now, advertisers could buy MoPub […]

Product and marketing go hand in hand at OkCupid. There’s a dotted line between user engagement, platform tweaks and the deployment of marketing dollars to reach specific types of users, mainly on social channels like Facebook, Instagram and Snap, said OkCupid CMO Melissa Hobley. “Our product truth is that we create experiences based on depth, […]

Mark Zuckerberg expects people to spend less time in the news feed once Facebook throttles the organic reach of publisher content. That change will lead to less inventory at higher prices, said James Douglas, SVP and executive director of social media at IPG-owned Society Agency. After Facebook announced plans Thursday to deprioritize public content from […]

When a company as large as SAP doubles down on digital, the executive org chart must change. For the last six months, the enterprise software company has had two primary CMOs: one who is responsible for brand and media and another who focuses on demand generation, life cycle marketing and bottom-line revenue. But they work […]

Demand-side platforms (DSPs) make money by taking a percentage of the media buys that flow through their technology – and from lots of other hidden extras they charge for. Interviews with more than a dozen sources reveal that even as marketers make progress in understanding what they’re paying for, nontransparent fees abound in the DSP […]

Two years ago, lift tests weren’t something OLX Group even talked about. Today, lift tests, which measure the incrementality of a marketing channel or advertising tactic, are in heavy rotation at the Argentinian web company, which owns and operates 17 classified apps and sites around the world, including Craigslist competitor Letgo in the US. Performance […]

Searching and not being able to find the perfect GIF to embed within a chat is the definition of a first-world problem. But it’s a real pain point, and something Emogi, which uses predictive technology to suggest contextually relevant emoji, stickers and GIFs within conversations, is able to solve for brands that want to get […]

Brand safety and transparency were top-of-the-agenda items for advertisers in 2017. But if this was the year of faux pas, mea culpas and the start of a move toward better controls, 2018 will be about buckling down. “The billions of ad dollars pulled off platforms in 2017 was a clarion wake-up call,” said Bill Marino, […]

Twitter is gunning to become publishers’ platform partner of choice, and it’s leveraging live video as a way to capture content – and dollars – currently flowing to the duopoly. This week, Bloomberg debuted its 24/7 global news network TicToc on Twitter after reaching nearly 8 million people during Bloomberg TV’s live stream of three […]

Is enabling age targeting for online recruitment ads a form of discrimination? Facebook, called out by ProPublica and The New York Times on Wednesday for the practice, says no. “Used responsibly, age-based targeting for employment purposes is an accepted industry practice and for good reason,” Rob Goldman, Facebook’s VP of ads, responded in a blog […]

Campbell’s Soup wants to help solve the daily “dinner dilemma” – that period between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. when people figure out what’s for dinner. And who better qualified to brainstorm novel dinner recipes than IBM Watson? Last winter, Campbell’s Soup tested Watson Ads to dynamically recommend recipes in its ads, using the Chef […]

Rubicon’s CEO Michael Barrett will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference on January 17 – 18, 2018 at the Grand Hyatt New York.  Rubicon Project is in the midst of a risky move – one that CEO Michael Barrett thought he could avoid when he joined nine months ago. Because of customer outcry, the company stopped charging […]