Platforms

Major ad platforms like Facebook and Google are soaking up the local and small-business market at an eye-popping rate. And it’s taking business away from smaller platforms like Yelp, whose stock has dropped almost 30% after local advertisers moved spend to Facebook and Google. Facebook, for instance, announced March of last year that it had […]

Promoting reviews and content featuring Brooklinen’s bed sheets drives results for the direct-to-consumer brand. “We’ve struck a nerve with the consumer that does research,” said Justin Lapidus, general manager of Brooklinen. The company has grown by a factor of 10 during the past two years, and it raised $10 million in Series A financing in […]

Snapchat may have disappointed investors in its first-ever earnings disclosure on Wednesday, but agencies aren’t ready to bail just yet. Snap missed the mark on both user and revenue growth as it continued to fend off relentless copycatting from Facebook and Instagram. But because the platform pulls in the highest engagement rates among millennials, it’s […]

Demand-side platforms (DSPs) are putting pressure on supply-side platforms (SSPs) to improve inventory quality and cut out the games that pad the second-price auction. Ad tech insiders have told AdExchanger DSPs are being more aggressive in blocking supply sources until they clean up. The pressure could force the ecosystem to grow up. While DSPs aren’t […]

Snap reported earnings for the first time on Wednesday, and based on the results, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg must be feeling pretty smug. Snap reported Q1 revenue of $150 million, a 286% increase from this time last year but below the expected $158 million. Net losses totaled $2.2 billion. Daily active users (DAUs) for the […]

Facebook’s making it harder for fly-by-night publishers to monetize low-value websites. On Wednesday, Facebook said it’s starting to use artificial intelligence to lay down the law on links that shunt users to websites with too many ads, as well as ads of a “disruptive, malicious and shocking” nature. Frowned-upon ad types include excessively disruptive units […]

While consumers typically don’t convert after their first contact with a brand, many marketers measure as if they do. But specialty retailer Cariloha, which sells bamboo-based apparel and accessories both online and in 50 stores, is taking a different approach. Rather than assigning 100% of the credit for a conversion to the last ad a […]

Despite the wide rollout of its Premium subscription product in April, Pandora is still betting on ads for revenue. Now that Premium has hit the market, Pandora can refocus its efforts and resources on launching new ad products, including programmatic audio, in the back half of the year, said CEO and founder Tim Westergren on […]

Whisper, an app that lets its anonymous users post what’s on their mind, is still going strong after five years – even after other secret-sharing social apps like Yik Yak have closed shop. One reason for its longevity is that it is making money through programmatic advertising. Demand partners include Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, OpenX […]

8 p.m. Katy Perry. That’s all. 7:40 p.m. Google Preferred FTW Google Chief Business Officer Robert Kyncl claimed Google Preferred (translation: Google’s top tier videos) has tripled its number of advertisers. Kyncl credited YouTube for turning publishers like BuzzFeed, Vice and AwesomenessTV into “daily destinations of can’t-miss programming.” Consumers watch over 1 billion of hours […]

Rubicon Project posted another quarter of significant declines as new CEO Michael Barrett attempts to turn around the business. Revenue declined 34% YoY to $46 million in the first quarter. Advertising spend declined 23%, to $191.5 million. Though the revenue slightly beat expectations, the stock slid a few percentage points in after-hours trading. Take rates […]

Facebook is still growing. The company reported on Wednesday that monthly active users are now 1.9 billion, up 17% year-over year – roughly one-fourth of the world’s population – while daily active usage saw an 18% YoY uptick to 1.3 billion. Mobile revenue, as always, is the majority of overall revenue at 85%, up from […]

Criteo welcomed Twitter’s revelation last week that it would stop investing in its retargeting platform TellApart due to direct-response headwinds. Criteo’s CEO said these changes could help its own business. “TellApart was a strong competitor for us in the US, so it was good news for us that they’re winding down that business, and [it] […]

When a public company is having performance issues, it needs an excuse. For Twitter, TellApart is shaping up to be that boogeyman. After barely a mention of TellApart on its earnings calls for several quarters, last week Twitter CFO and COO Anthony Noto implied that the remarketing platform will hurt revenue through the rest of […]

Twitter’s first-ever NewFronts pitch to advertisers: We’re like TV for millennials. But do people really want to tune in to Twitter to watch long-form live-streaming content? Bloomberg, which announced an expanded live-streaming deal with Twitter on Monday, is betting on the fact that consumers are ready. “When we see millions of people go to Twitter […]

OpenSlate, a video analytics platform which provided YouTube brand safety ratings long before YouTube’s most recent brand safety crisis, has raised $7 million from North Base Media to fund product development and international expansion. The company has raised about $15 million in total. OpenSlate is also deepening its talent pool by hiring longtime Triad Retail Media […]

Header bidding has been great for nToggle. The startup uses machine learning to shape the bidstream for buying platforms. Instead of looking at every potential impression, nToggle filters out ones it thinks the DSP is unlikely to bid on, reducing the amount of queries by an average of 90%. Fewer queries to look at translates […]

Alphabet beat its earnings forecast in the first quarter, sending the stock up 5% in after-hours trading. Revenue increased 22% year over year to $24.75 billion. The positive earnings report, however, was overshadowed by investor questions about the YouTube brand safety crisis. Since January, brands and agencies have withdrawn spend, leading Google to improve controls […]

Facebook is lusting after lucrative online travel ad dollars. And on Thursday, Facebook launched its next assault on the travel industry – encroaching further on Google’s turf – with the global rollout of Dynamic Ads for flights. The release will allow airlines and flight advertisers to retarget users across Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network with ads tied […]

Looks like TellApart was a very expensive mistake. On Wednesday, Twitter CFO and COO Anthony Noto called the desktop retargeting platform “a headwind” in which it no longer plans to invest. “We continue to face increasingly negative impacts from products we have discontinued or lowered investment in,” Noto told investors during Twitter’s first-quarter earnings call. […]

LinkedIn on Monday launched its version of a CRM-matching and retargeting tool called Matched Audiences. Matched Audiences encompasses site retargeting and account-based and contact targeting, which lets advertisers upload their CRM files to target specific segments or groups of IDs. Customers have two ways to bring first-party data into LinkedIn. First is through a direct […]

As header bidding grows, ad exchanges are sending more ad impressions per second and DSPs must evaluate more impressions than ever. The massive uptick in volume, which far outpaces programmatic revenue growth, is straining ad tech infrastructure. With more queries to sift through, it costs more to buy the same ads. And as a result, […]

Tom Edwards is different from most of the other people flowing through the halls of the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose at Facebook’s F8 developers conference this week. Because Edwards isn’t a developer. He’s the chief digital officer at marketing services firm Epsilon. “There aren’t a lot of agency folks here,” Edwards said. “I’m […]

Sorry Snapchat, Facebook isn’t going to quit. At Facebook’s F8 developer conference in San Jose on Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg declared that Facebook is all-in on augmented reality. In fact, AR is a cornerstone of Facebook’s 10-year road map. But for AR to really go mainstream, it needs to evolve beyond selfie masks and rainbow vomit […]

When it comes to third-party verification, the big digital platforms like Facebook and Google have reason to rush. They’re working on deadline. Marc Pritchard, P&G’s chief brand officer, has made it clear platforms need to implement Media Ratings Council-accredited third-party viewability measurement by the end of the year or risk losing the CPG giant’s business. […]

Marketing may be a trillion-dollar industry, but its supply chain needs a makeover, says Microsoft’s CMO. “What makes marketing such a unique case is that the labor component is much higher than any other industry,” said CMO Grad Conn. “I think there’s a lot of opportunity to optimize the way we’re working in marketing and […]

More than 4,000 app developers will descend on San Jose, Calif., on April 18 and 19 for Facebook’s F8 conference, where, if you believe the rumor mill, Mark Zuckerberg will regale them with splashy announcements about group chatbots for Messenger and possible hardware offerings from his secretive Building 8 Lab. But at its core, F8 […]

McDonald’s is on a “mass personalization” push to attract more millennials. Even though it markets to national audiences, many of its fast-food restaurants operate as local franchises. Thus, McDonald’s must create content that resonates at a community level in addition to its national assets. To pull off an operation at McDonald’s scale requires unity among […]

After its merger with Starwood, Marriott is doubling down on paid media to drive awareness for some of its new portfolio brands. One ad campaign, “Go Beyond,” which launched this week, commemorates Sheraton Hotels’ 80th year in business. “We are trying a lot of new things in digital including people-based marketing and sequential messaging with […]

While about 80% of engagement with sponsored content on LinkedIn now happens on mobile, marketers had a hard time influencing the final conversion on that channel. So LinkedIn expanded its native ad arsenal on Tuesday by launching lead-gen ads, which aim to reduce friction with lead-gen forms and improve marketers’ mobile conversions. Although it sounds […]