WPP CEO Martin Sorrell called out Twitter’s revenue potential – along with the social platform’s positioning amid Google and Facebook’s ad dominance – in an interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey onstage at Dmexco in Germany on Wednesday. “Twitter does not seem to have achieved the prominence Twitter [and the industry] would want,” Sorrell said. […]
The accuracy of Facebook’s reporting is under the microscope again courtesy of Pivotal analyst Brian Wieser and an Australian trade pub called AdNews. In a note to investors on Tuesday, Wieser called attention to Facebook’s claims that it reaches more people than exist within certain age groups, based on US Census data. Wieser was tipped […]
Consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands are threatening steep investment pullbacks if higher standards aren’t met on marketing measurement and transparency. And those Fortune 500 CPGs, including Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Mondelez, Nestlé and Kraft, seem to be holding to their lines in the sand. In the past few weeks, holding companies like IPG, WPP and […]
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by David Jakubowski, director of publisher solutions at Facebook. The benefits of header bidding on the web are well documented: Publishers receive an average increase of 15% to 30% – even as high as 50% […]
The MRC kicked off the second phase of its three-part Facebook audit at the beginning of August: an assessment of the quality of Facebook and Instagram viewability metrics as reported by viewability partners like Moat, Integral Ad Science, comScore and DoubleVerify. Specifically, the MRC is examining if Facebook’s API accurately transmits what’s happening on Facebook […]
LinkedIn is rolling out native video, which will allow users to record and upload video directly to the platform, the company said Tuesday, after a beta test that began earlier this year. The tool will gradually be available to all individual LinkedIn members over the next few weeks. LinkedIn expects to make the tool available […]
Facebook Watch, the social giant’s video hub that went live for select users on Wednesday, already has a roster of digital video launch partners – like Time Inc., Hearst, Brit & Co., Tastemade, Quartz and McClatchy. But Facebook also wants to broker content deals with the likes of big TV companies like Univision, Major League […]
Ever click on an ad by mistake? You and the rest of internet-connected humanity. On Tuesday, Facebook said it’s going to stop counting those errant clicks in its reporting for ads served through Audience Network and start barring publishers from including clickable white space in the background of their native ads. Beginning next week, if […]
While P.F. Chang’s first order of business is stir-fry, it’s also cooking up a fresh data strategy to support its new brand push. As the owner of 212 Asian-themed concept restaurants around the globe, P.F. Chang’s strategy – and its custom-built technology stack – once primarily catered to the dine-in audience. “As takeout and third-party […]
Mobile app install ads are still a multibillion-dollar business for Facebook. But is Facebook taking too much credit? It’s hard to say, because Facebook is what’s known as a self-attributing network, i.e., a walled garden. A self-attributing network is just what it sounds like: a platform that, usually because of its scale, has the power […]
Facebook is pretty much minting money at this point. Despite concerns over ad load maxing out in the news feed, Facebook posted revenue of $9.32 billion for the second quarter, up 45% year over year from $6.43 billion. Mobile ad revenue at $8 billion was responsible for the vast majority of Facebook’s overall revenue in […]
Facebook ads are effective within Facebook, but how good are they within a mixed-media campaign, or when assessed over the entire customer journey? That’s the fundamental paradox of the walled garden: Marketers get great data inside of it, but hardly any outside. But Facebook is trying to shed its reputation for impenetrability. The company has […]
Ask Facebook for access to its data and the official answer is going to be, “Nope.” But under certain circumstances, a limited number of advertisers and agencies are tapping into impression-level Facebook campaign delivery data, AdExchanger has learned. The data-sharing arrangements are euphemistically referred to as “clean rooms.” These clean rooms are safe spaces where […]
Back when real-time auction app Tophatter was founded in 2012, it spent as much as 95% of its user acquisition budget on Facebook. But with a solid user base of around 12 million registered users, it’s been making a concerted effort to mix up its UA strategy. “In the beginning, Facebook was a big gorilla, but […]
Outdoor gear retailer REI is hitting the slopes with personalized local advertising. The brand, working with dynamic creative optimization (DCO) platform Jivox, is running hyperlocal campaigns on social channels informed by weather data, interests and past purchases. In particular, REI has been piloting a new Jivox product that allows brands to add new targeting dimensions […]
For Snap, there are benefits to being a latecomer to ad tech. The app, which entered the programmatic playing field last year when it launched APIs and self-serve tools that allow marketers to place automated buys on its platform, is avoiding many mistakes made by a predecessor that it’s often compared to: Facebook. “Snap has been […]
The duopoly isn’t a duo when it comes to brand safety. The nuances of how their respective platforms operate mean that Facebook and Google face their own particular challenges to ensure brand safety. While the primary risk on YouTube is adjacency – ads appearing within or beside unsavory or questionable content – the personal nature of […]
Facebook made several overtures to openness on Wednesday with tools designed to give advertisers more control over where and how their ads appear across in-stream video on Facebook, Instant Articles and the Audience Network. “Advertisers want separate controls for inside the news feed environment and outside the news feed environment where ads are more deeply […]
Investors are putting Facebook’s feet to the fire about fake news. At the company’s annual shareholder’s meeting on Thursday, investors questioned CEO Mark Zuckerberg about how Facebook is combatting the spread of false news on its platform. Advertisers have become increasingly sensitive to brand safety issues since the YouTube/Google Display Network debacle kicked off in […]
The Atlantic used to have dueling video strategies – one aiming to improve direct monetization onsite and the other to extend its reach and audience offsite. The Atlantic would first monetize video on its flagship site TheAtlantic.com using the Brightcove video player, then push those clips or cuts of them to YouTube. But because off-platform […]
Marketers aren’t all that wound up about Facebook’s recurring ad metric errors. Bugs happen, said Alok Gupta, data science manager at Airbnb, speaking at a measurement event hosted by Facebook on Wednesday. “You’re never going to build a perfect system immediately or ever,” Gupta said. “As long as the bugs or problems are identified quickly, […]
Facebook is ramping up its publisher-centric strategy by testing a self-serve product powering programmatic direct deals called Audience Direct. In its first iteration, Audience Direct helps publishers sell their video inventory, giving them more control over how they structure direct deals and, eventually, how they guarantee delivery against them. “This enables them to create direct […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Intuit CMO Lucas Watson wants to give the financial services software company more name recognition among the Googles, Facebooks and Apples of the world. And he’s well positioned to do so, considering he last served as Google’s VP of global brand solutions and innovations before he joined Intuit last July. “As we start to stitch […]
