Platforms

After completing his first full quarter as CEO of performance marketing company Criteo, Eric Eichmann seems confident. Criteo had “very strong top-line growth,” Eichmann told AdExchanger ahead of the company’s Q1 earnings call on Wednesday. Revenue was up 41% year-over-year to $162 million at constant currency minus traffic acquisition costs and that performance was consistent across […]

Mobile marketing automation platform Appboy is on a quest to steal some market share from the CRM incumbents with $20 million in Series C financing led by Battery Ventures. The round, announced Wednesday, brings the New York City-based company’s total funding to $45.5 million since 2011. Appboy plans to use the cash to keep on […]

Rubicon Project enjoyed a strong first quarter, growing overall advertising revenue by 26% year over year, while its cut of the revenue swelled even more. Non-GAAP net revenue reached $63.6 million, a 71% year-over-year increase. That’s largely because Rubicon Project acquired the DSP Chango a year ago to form its Buyer Cloud, causing take rates […]

Pinterest’s rumored acqui-hire of deep-linking startup URX is a go. On Tuesday, Pinterest announced that it’s bringing the San Francisco-based URX team into the fold, but not its technology. URX, which started as a deep linking provider before becoming a mobile retargeting platform, will work with its customers to sunset its advertising product. As of […]

Like most app developers, SGN – whose games have been downloaded more than 700 million times – is looking for long-term love. But in the casual gaming space, retention rates usually leave something to be desired. Only about one-third of users relaunch an app within 24 hours of the original install, according to Appsflyer. After […]

Snapchat’s 10 billion daily video views can’t be wrong. At least, that’s publishers’ logic as they push vertical video. Hearst, for instance, rolled out a vertical video unit last month that it sells via direct deals with advertisers, and on Monday, outstream video company Virool launched a vertical video format called Vertical Reveal, which exchange partner […]

Like every marketing cloud, Oracle’s was built through acquisition. The tech giant has devoted more than $3 billion to construct a suite that includes campaign management or marketing automation from Responsys and Eloqua, data management solutions from BlueKai and Datalogix, omnichannel commerce through Maxymiser and online ad targeting tools like AddThis – among many others. […]

As a matter of course, tech talent flows between companies in Silicon Valley – there are former eBay employees at Facebook, ex-Yahoo execs at Uber, prior Google people at Snapchat – but Twitter seems to be particularly susceptible to departures. “The Twitter diaspora has been very sad for the company,” said Mike Ng, who left his […]

Pandora’s Q1 2016 call on Thursday revealed that programmatic sales of display inventory drove increased sell-through rates. In an earnings release, Pandora claimed the buying method is “starting to contribute meaningfully” to advertising revenue per 1,000 ad-supported listener hours, which grew 19% year over year to $45.47, and take pressure off ad loads. Pandora made […]

When it last reported its quarterly earnings, LinkedIn revealed to the world that it would sunset Lead Accelerator, the B2B lead-nurturing product it inherited from the $175 million Bizo acquisition. The remnants would be fed into its Sponsored Content offering – which has developed into a major growth area. Sponsored Content has continued to benefit […]

LiveRail, once a dominant video supply side platform and ad server focused solely on publishers, is now a shell of its former self. It’s been nearly two years since Facebook bought the company for $400 million-plus, and in the last six to nine months it has shut down major pieces of it and transferred some […]

The steady growth of AppNexus’ advertiser-facing business in recent years has led to a jump in employees. Out of AppNexus’s roughly 1,050 total headcount, about 318 now serve the buy side, developing and supporting the company’s demand-side platform product. Of those employees, about 97 are engineers, 19 are product managers, 74 are in sales and a […]

Judging by the billions of dollars spent on World Cup advertising alone, the game of soccer commands a maniacal fan and brand following. Global soccer video platform KICK, which launched as early YouTube multichannel network “KICKTV” in 2012, wants to capitalize on that craze with an eye toward reaching millennial soccer fans with cross-platform video. […]

Facebook’s growth led to a strong first quarter and stock that shot upward post-earnings. Facebook’s Q1 2016 revenue grew 57% year over year to $5.4 billion, compared to $3.5 billion the same time last year. Advertising comprised $5.2 billion of that revenue. Of that ad revenue, 82% came from mobile, compared to 73% in Q1 2015. Meanwhile, monthly […]

To grow its readership, Engadget focused on quality and relevance. The tactic – simple to imagine but hard to execute – has paid off: The AOL-owned site posted 13.6 million unique visitors in January during the Consumer Electronics Show, according to comScore. That’s its highest-traffic month ever and nearly double the number of visitors compared […]

There’s nothing investors want to see more from Twitter than monthly active user (MAU) growth. It’s been the recurring theme every quarter since former CEO Dick Costolo flew the coop in June. The needle moved minutely this past quarter. Twitter told investors on Tuesday that its monthly active user base increased from 305 million last […]

Turner-owned Bleacher Report is going all-in on social platforms because the chance to set roots in social broadcasting before ESPN does, whether or not reliable platform monetization is a mirage, is too tempting to ignore. Bleacher Report’s future success will “key off our ability to leverage the social graph,” said Rich Calacci, Bleacher Report’s CRO […]

It’s been an odd presidential campaign, and this oddness has extended to the realm of political advertising. Here are three things to look out for as the primary season gives way to the general election. Is there enough TV inventory? There’s just too much money to push down the throat of linear TV, and it’s […]

Digital holds a 29.3% share of all media investment in the United States, up from 28% last quarter, according to GroupM’s annual Interaction 2016 report, which aggregates insights from the agency’s digital advertising activities and was released on Monday. GroupM focused its findings around four core issues related to the growth of mobile: the difficulty […]

Greek-yogurt brand Chobani stays competitive with larger CPG companies by constantly testing. One of these tactics includes marketing-effectiveness studies, such as a recent research initiative with Yahoo and Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS) to prove search ads drove in-store sales. “If you’re an ecommerce brand, you can measure that sale directly,” said Jessica Lauria, senior director […]

Will Google’s grand plans for TV, evidenced by its launch of DoubleClick Dynamic Ad Insertion on Wednesday, be successful? Google’s move into dynamic ad serving across live, linear and on-demand programming marks a critical shift in the search giant’s strategy, which some industry insiders say was necessary to meet future business objectives. “Google will not […]

Acorns is an app that allows users to invest spare change left over from daily purchases in the stock market. Now it’s making an investment of its own with the creation of a digital magazine called Grow aimed at millennials. “We’re looking to satisfy a hunger our users have for financial content,” said Jeff Cruttenden, […]

Dutch cross-device data vendor Screen6 has been flying under the radar and avoided the Nielsen verification route like its well-known competition. Last year, Tapad (recently acquired by Norwegian telco Telenor) and Drawbridge had the accuracy of their device graphs evaluated by Nielsen, coming in at 91.2% and 97.3%, respectively. Screen6 CEO and co-founder David de […]

Almost every game developer uses rewarded video to monetize because it’s lucrative – but there’s also a lot not to like about it. “A 30-second video ad just isn’t that engaging, and there’s no reason for users not to put their phone down when the video’s playing and just wait for it to end,” said Tayber […]

While publishers combatting the rise of ad blocking can select from a growing number of vendors who address the issue, many of the available solutions are largely the same. One group of offerings is designed to change user behavior. There are generally four methods: asking users to turn off ad blockers, blocking content when ad […]

Publisher network and ad tech firm Sovrn bought UK-based viewability company OnScroll Wednesday for an undisclosed amount of cash and stock. Sovrn plans to deploy the technology across the 80,000 publishers in its network, according to CEO Walter Knapp. OnScroll creates highly viewable ad units for publishers by analyzing user behavior patterns. So if a […]

Yahoo reported earnings on Tuesday. Details are below – but that’s hardly what people care about now. The real question is: Who’s going to buy it? Verizon’s the clear frontrunner, but there also a few upstarts. One such is a joint investment group that includes big names like former Yahoo interim CEO Ross Levinsohn and […]

Facebook invited three new third-party ad verification partners into its inner sanctum on Tuesday – further evidence that what the buy side demands, the buy side gets. Integral Ad Science, comScore and Nielsen will now be able to verify viewability and attention metrics for display and video ads on Facebook, including mobile web and in-app. […]

YouTube is starting to measure the offline sales lift for consumers exposed to its viewable video ad format TrueView. Through a tool called DLX ROI Sales Lift for YouTube, developed in partnership with the Oracle Data Cloud, Google is telling CPG advertisers that its video ads not only have brand impact, but that they drive […]

More than a quarter of programmatic decisions are made by agencies for their advertisers – up from 20% since September. The revelation was presented by Mark Mahaney, managing director at RBC Capital Markets, at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC I.O conference in San Francisco on Thursday. The figures, which surprised Mahaney, show agencies make 27% of those decisions […]