Mobile commerce will reach new highs on Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year, and retailers are hastily preparing for the onslaught of traffic those devices will bring. Couple that with the fact that there are 26 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, compared to last year’s 32, and retail marketers are working on compressed campaign […]
AOL finally answered the question “What is a programmatic upfront?” by saying it would put its money where its mouth is: starting in 2014, it will make its reserved, guaranteed inventory available through its automated platforms for the first time. The portal lined up an array of advertising partners, noting that five of the six […]
As marketers, ad-buyers and CMOs are increasingly asked to defend their spend, a “consistent data framework” that surpasses the boundaries of channel will be one way to help them win budgetary battles, according to one exec. Josh Herman, VP of partner and product strategy at Acxiom, joined executives from eBay, Datalogix and Nielsen Catalina Solutions […]
Spotify, the ad-supported music streaming service, has barely scratched the surface of its advertising capabilities, but the 7-year-old company is treading carefully. The streaming service is up to more than 24 million active users, a quarter of whom are premium subscribers, and earned $577 million in total revenue last year. Part of the Stockholm-based company’s […]
Google is not the only company working on “cookieless” data technologies. Acxiom is launching a new data-management platform this week that ties in numerous data sources for cross-channel and cross-device ad targeting. Called Audience Operating System (AOS), the offering consists of three “layers.” The first is a data layer that combines Acxiom’s data points from […]
AdExchanger asked industry leader and Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise his “take” on today’s Initial Public Offering (IPO) for real-time ad platform and services company, Rocket Fuel. The IPO netted Rocket Fuel $116 million and valued the company at approximately $1.8 billion at market close (stock quote). Bill Wise: On Rocket Fuel doubling and worth nearly […]
Rocket Fuel is living up to its name in its first hours as a public company. After going public at $29, the high end of its range, the share price more than doubled to $62 by late morning. Since then it has fallen back to $55.50, as of noon EST, a 91% gain. The running […]
Advertising across devices and bridging the gap between online and offline campaigns should be key components of every marketer’s strategy, according to Lisa Utzschneider, Amazon.com’s global VP of sales, who outlined the ecommerce giant’s marketing tactics yesterday at the Dmexco conference. Amazon’s customer strategy is based on three rules: “Start with the customer and work backwards, […]
By Kelly Liyakasa, John Ebbert, and Zach Rodgers It’s a big week for the “programmatic IPO.” Rocket Fuel begins trading publicly tomorrow on NASDAQ under the ticker FUEL. French retargeter Criteo meanwhile has filed its F-1, with detailed information about its financials. Since the performance of these two IPOs could set the tone for ad tech […]
Facebook engineering director Andrew Bosworth informed marketers that “mobile is the ultimate branding device” and that “brands are more important than ever before” as he kicked off day two of the Dmexco conference today in Germany. In his opening keynote, Bosworth drew a comparison between 19th-century travelers, who had very little information about the places […]
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Ari Paparo, SVP, product management at Bazaarvoice. From 2004-2010, Paparo was an executive with Google’s DoubleClick unit. There is a lot of news coverage and blog analysis responding to a USA […]
French retargeting specialist Criteo has been planning its IPO filing for the better part of a year and it’s finally taking the plunge. The company filed an F-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission that details its financial performance and other particulars about its business. The company hopes to raise $190 million from the stock sale, though […]
Rocket Fuel is expected to begin trading this week and has raised the target price for its upcoming IPO to a range of $27 to $29 per share, up from $24 to $27. The late boost may be due to heightened interest from investors in the programmatic ad story — versus the broader ad-tech category. […]
The advertising industry continues to debate privacy issues, including when advertisers may collect information about consumers. Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox browser, has added fuel to the controversy through its experiments with a cookie-blocking patch and a Cookie Clearinghouse—actions that the IAB’s Randall Rothenberg denounced as “arrogant.” Mozilla also announced in a blog post […]
Todd Haskell began his new job as Hearst Magazine Digital’s chief revenue officer less than a month ago, joining the publisher of magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Elle and Good Housekeeping to manage the business side of the 28 related websites and 14 mobile properties. He previously served six years as the group VP of […]
In perhaps the biggest challenge yet to the legitimacy of the Do Not Track standard-making process, the Digital Advertising Alliance is giving up on efforts to build consensus for a browser-based DNT solution for Internet users. The self-regulatory group will also begin its own efforts to initiate a browser-based tracking choice mechanism for Internet users, […]
Fashion retail chain Forever 21 is in the midst of an online marketing remake and mobile is a pillar of its strategy. Gerard Florendo, who joined Forever 21 as manager of online marketing and Web analytics in April, was tasked with deploying up-to-date tools and scaling their respective reach alongside the brand’s new head of […]
Attribution firm Adometry has combined its ad-tagging infrastructure with Tapad’s cross-device ad-targeting technology, the companies said today. Austin, Texas-based Adometry aggregates and analyzes data from multiple advertising streams to help advertisers understand how their ad dollars are performing. Using an algorithm, the company processes data from email marketing campaigns, banner and display ads, social media […]
Is big data “too big” a challenge for marketers? This was a question posed to panelists today at the Financial Times’ Future of Marketing Summit, where a crowd of brand advertisers, agency execs and marketing and ad-tech vendors converged at The Metropolitan Club in New York to talk industry trends. “There’s never too much data […]
In Facebook’s last earnings call, Sheryl Sandberg surprised some by saying the Facebook Exchange “is actually a very small part of our business.” That may be changing, as the company pushes more ad space into its RTB marketplace — and there are signs mobile News Feed inventory is waiting in the programmatic wings. “We believe FBX […]
Leveraging customers’ behavioral data is a crucial component of a mobile campaign, but it continues to be a challenge for most companies. One mistake marketers make is relying on a narrow perspective of their customers, pointed out Martin Lange, executive marketing director of digital strategy and global head of the Mobile@Ogilvy division of Ogilvy and […]
Twitter’s acquisition of mobile supply-side platform MoPub this week could pave the way for more activity and something close to standard business models in the nascent mobile exchange space. Established desktop exchange players like the Rubicon Project and PubMatic, which have expansive networks on the sell side, have struggled to retrofit their existing platforms to […]
Twitter’s acquisition of mobile ad exchange MoPub came within two weeks of its acquisition of social TV analytics Trendrr and the wide release of lead-generation cards. These staccato moves, according to one Twitter Ads API partner company, are exactly what Twitter needs to counter Facebook’s aggressive pipeline of ad products. “They’re doing a nice job […]
Scale continues to be one of the most challenging aspects of native advertising, and a growing number of companies are working to solve it. As advertisers look for solutions, a number of trends are beginning to emerge, according to a new report from the research firm Altimeter Group. “We’re seeing two fundamental ways that the […]
Twitter’s acquisition of mobile ad exchange MoPub adds a new layer to its strategy. In addition to selling native ad units, Twitter will become a seller of standardized mobile ads as well — perhaps with its own user data thrown into the mix. “Buying MoPub reclassifies Twitter beyond a social platform, or even a broadcast […]
Buying MoPub does a few things for Twitter, potentially. It adds $100 million in 2013 revenue to Twitter’s income statement in the months leading up to a probable IPO. It creates an opportunity to monetize Twitter’s valuable data “off-platform” through an internally run mobile exchange. This could work by creating BlueKai-like data segments that would […]
Twitter has acquired MoPub, which provides ad management services to thousands of mobile publishers. The move gives Twitter considerable advertising reach in mobile, including real-time bidding inventory through MoPub’s Marketplace mobile ad exchange. Kevin Weil, Twitter’s VP of Product for Revenue, wrote in a blog post: “The two major trends in the ad world right […]
Critical Mass has lasting expertise in analytics. The digital agency specializes in optimizing websites and other user experiences by placing data at the center. For some clients, such as Nissan, it acts as the measurement hub for all shops in the roster. The agency’s Marketing Science group is led by Shaina Boone, who oversees about 30 […]
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Lauren Moores, vice president of analytics at EveryScreen Media, a Media6Degrees company. Celebrities know they’ve hit the big time when the paparazzi camp out on their lawns and the tabloids […]
Independently owned-and-operated outdoor specialty retailer Rock/Creek has realized early return as one of Twitter’s early beta advertisers. The brand was founded 25 years ago as a Chattanooga-based canoeing company. It operates five standalone stores in addition to an ecommerce platform, but has yet to mobile-optimize its site. Fifty-one percent of retailers cited this very optimization […]
