Social data analytics company 4C Insights has raised $5 million in Series B funding from Jump Capital. 4C originated last fall when ecommerce ad-tech company The Echo System merged with Twitter Ads API partner and Facebook PMD Voxsup, founded by Northwestern University Professor Alok Choudhary. 4C currently employs between 30-40 people, but expects to grow […]
Fred McIntyre, CEO of social marketing platform Awe.sm, has noticed that while the present-day patterns of media consumption are exciting, they also pose challenges to the DNA of cost planning for publishers and marketers. “If you look at media consumption across most categories in television, radio, online and social, they’re going up in each category,” […]
Facebook’s acquisition Tuesday of sports-centric social analytics and real-time trending platform SportStream signifies it’s not letting up in its tête-à-tête with Twitter. “Twitter has natural advantages in the social TV space,” commented Martin Kihn, a research director at Gartner. “It’s the go-to platform for real-time event-driven conversation, facilitated by hashtags. … On the other hand, […]
Social advertising has become table stakes for multiplatform marketers. On the vendor side, the emerging leaders providing social-ad technologies share a few key commonalities to meet that demand, according to an inaugural Forrester Wave: Social Advertising Platforms report released Tuesday. In a series of interviews with 21 digital marketers, Forrester Research found the average amount […]
It took the better part of a year, but Facebook has overcome its internal angst about “motion” in the News Feed with the debut of cross-channel, auto-play video ads. The offering (officially in beta) instantly creates the largest digital video buy ever, with potential daily reach covering nearly half the U.S. population. Mindshare purchased the […]
Two announcements last week underscored the importance of email as a means for bridging the gap between online and offline customer data. The first was the acquisition of Rapleaf, a provider of email marketing personalization solutions, by email data services provider TowerData. And Facebook announced it was adding a feature within Custom Audiences that links offline […]
When Pinterest debuted “Place Pins” in late November to a select group of beta brands, luxury hotel company Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts was among the first businesses on board. The program, which gives consumers a way to geo-pin their interests to make their pins “more actionable in real life,” is a feature Pinterest provides, […]
You can’t throw a 23-year-old media buyer without hitting a software “cloud.” One of the precocious contenders in this bunch, social-centric SHIFT, has raised $6 million to support an expansion of its Open Marketing Cloud into Europe. The investment, led by DN Capital, brings its total financing to $14 million. The company’s 29-year-old CEO, James […]
According to Merkle, Facebook’s Custom Audiences program and its related lookalike modeling tools lead the pack when it comes to customer prospecting. Merkle bills itself as a CRM agency, so the company knows a thing or two about database matching online. Paul Steketee, head of paid social and emerging media, said match rates on Facebook […]
After General Motors yanked all its paid media spend from Facebook in mid-2012, GM’s chief marketing officer at the time, Joel Ewanick, suggested in a Wall Street Journal interview that Facebook is simply not a great place to advertise cars. But GM eventually returned and Facebook has since doubled down on the auto category. In […]
There’s still money to be made in Facebook’s vendor ecosystem. Ampush, a preferred marketing developer that supports data-driven advertising focused on Facebook’s News Feed, says its 2013 media revenue will grow to $70 million, up from $15 million last year. Headcount has more than doubled since December 2012, to 90. Ampush is an example of […]
Facebook reported its third quarter financials today, which included continuing growth in ad revenue, particularly its mobile ads. The company pulled in $2 billion in total revenue for the third quarter, a 60% increase from $1.3 billion in Q3 2012. Its ad revenue was $1.8 billion, a 66% increase from the same quarter last year. […]
A lot has been said lately about Twitter’s reach in terms of its monthly active users, but its ability to collect data through plugins like social sharing buttons has gone widely unmentioned. Many websites today include “buttons” on their pages that allow visitors to share content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social networks by […]
Most Facebook observers would be hard-pressed to find “negatives” in the evolution of the company’s ad products over the past year. Performance continues to improve, as detailed in a new report from Adobe. Mobile monetization is proceeding apace. And it has executed on programmatic selling, through its Facebook Exchange, Custom Audiences database match program and Partner […]
It has been a year of big changes for marketers experimenting with social ad campaigns. New data suggests platform- and purpose-specific campaigns are driving distinct return on investment. Take Facebook, for instance. Because of changes to the News Feed and increased targeting capabilities through the Facebook Exchange, click-through rates were up 275% year-over-year, according to […]
Amazon fielded two inquiries from analysts about advertising services on today’s Q3 earnings call, but CFO Tom Szkutak wasn’t biting. Brian Pitz, managing director at Jefferies & Co., asked Szkutak about domestic ecommerce trends, as well as the growth of Amazon Web Services and Advertising Services. (The company reports the groups together in an “other” […]
TV is still the king of media, but the social “back channel” is now an indispensable part of its ambience. No surprise then that advertisers are hungry for media vehicles that bridge the two. A number of companies are positioned to feed that appetite, but Twitter is the frontrunner. Its Amplify program lets broadcasters sell […]
Facebook is taking aim at small and medium-sized businesses with the latest update to its Custom Audiences database-matching program. In addition to the current setup, advertisers will be able to use Custom Audiences in a simplified way through the Ads Create tool. “To use Custom Audiences, advertisers had to use Power Editor or have access […]
Facebook’s barricade against Google held up a long time, but the wall had to fall: Google wanted the audience, marketers wanted the interoperability and Facebook wanted the demand. As we reported Friday, after giving Google the cold shoulder for more than a year, Facebook has decided to let DoubleClick Bid Manager bring its buying clout […]
Amazon, the ever-silent commerce stalwart, may be next in line to join the Facebook Exchange party, according to AdExchanger sources. Today, Facebook finally granted (long-awaited?) access to Google’s demand-side platform, DoubleClick Bid Manager, to enable DoubleClick advertisers to dish up retargeted ads on the social network through integration to FBX. A number of DSP partners like […]
Facebook has made steady progress on closing the loop between media spend and consumer transactions, according to Brian Boland, the company’s VP of ads product marketing. “Digital marketers expect accurate reach,” Boland said in a presentation at the DMA 2013 annual summit in Chicago this week. More and more are “expecting proven results. They’re now […]
Retailers are pouring more money into Facebook’s ad products and driving up CPM costs, according to a new report from Nanigans, an ad platform and Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer partner. The report is based on data from more than 100 online and brick-and-mortar retailers over the first nine months of 2013. CPMs of Facebook ads […]
The retargeted advertising space is becoming highly lucrative, finds retargeting platform AdRoll, which announced today that it had passed a $100 million run rate, up from $50 million last year. The 6-year-old company claims to have more than 10,000 customers across 100 countries and was one of the first platforms to become a Facebook Exchange […]
In a summer interview, Facebook’s head of vertical measurement, Fred Leach, described the company’s measurement products and its partnership with Datalogix. In the below follow-up Q&A, Leach digs deeper into the company’s work on mobile measurement, attribution and the CPG category. AdExchanger: What are you working on in terms of mobile measurement? FRED LEACH: There are a couple ways […]
There’s a bright future for agencies in being effective purveyors of first-party data, said Brian Krick, the newest head of North American search and biddable for digital agency Essence. But, he said, they have to be willing to have tough conversations and break down barriers. Weaning channel-specific marketers off artificially inflated CPAs that don’t reflect true incremental revenue […]
However much click tracking, psychographic surveying, and big data analysis marketers do, few have a solid understanding of how their customers engage with social marketing content — or how those customers’ behavior differs between commercial and non-commercial interactions. To address the knowledge gap, Forrester Research has come up with a “Social Technographics Score,” a model […]
In-app ad supply keeps growing as people spend more time with their devices. Last year 80% of time spent on a smartphones and tablets took place in apps, versus a mobile website, according to comScore. Of course mobile developers remain a prime source of demand in the in-app ad space. There are more than 1.5 […]
Facebook is once again experimenting with a mobile ad network that would place ads on non-Facebook mobile apps and sites based on the social network’s data, the company confirmed. Business Insider first reported the news. “We’re currently running a second test to show Facebook ads off Facebook in mobile apps and on mobile sites. Our […]
Advertisers that push paid media with organic content on Facebook are driving measurably higher results than singular social efforts, one report has found. But the success of a campaign can vary greatly by post type. According to new ShopIgniter data released in August, “The 2013 Social Rich Media Benchmark Report” reveals more retailers and brands […]
A “significant jump” in the number of advertisers tapping into programmatic platforms – 39% of advertisers now take advantage of these technologies – indicates interest is on the upswing on the buy side. According to the Online Advertisers Survey Report 2013 by digital marketing research company Econsultancy in partnership with Rubicon Project, the number of […]
