Walgreens is pursuing digital in a “deliberate and strategic way,” according to its CEO. “Sometimes I feel like a B-52 bomber where I’m clearing a path to a 112-year-old brick-and-mortar business,” Greg Wasson confessed to a packed room of retail brands and marketers today at the Shop.org summit in Chicago. “Digital wasn’t something Walgreens was […]
Adaptly is one of a handful of ad-tech companies serving as a preferred partner to both Facebook and Twitter, but it doesn’t see its induction into the latter’s API program as an extension. Although Twitter’s strategy has similarities to what Facebook did last year — including a retargeting exchange — Adaptly CEO Nikhil Sethi noted […]
California Gov. Jerry Brown set a precedent for privacy rights last week when he signed into law Assembly Bill 370. Under the bill, which amended a section of the California Business and Professions Code, websites that collect personally identifiable information (PII) about California residents must provide a privacy policy that identifies the type of PIIs […]
Designer apparel brand Tory Burch now sees 44% of its site traffic stemming from smartphones and tablets with more than 28% of sales attributed to mobile devices. During a keynote presentation this morning at the National Retail Federation’s Shop.org summit, Miki Berardelli, Tory Burch’s CMO, told an audience in the mid-thousands here in Chicago that […]
Did you notice? Experian just bought a cross-device ad tracking — ahem — fraud-prevention vendor. The credit-reporting and marketing giant laid out $324 million to nab 41st Parameter, a security and fraud-detection business that guards against unauthorized purchases, among other things. Importantly, 41st Parameter also runs an ad-tracking brand, AdTruth, that hawks the same basic […]
Keeping up with tech-savvy consumers who demand personalized experiences is a challenge for publishers and advertisers alike. Like other companies, health information provider WebMD realized it needed to revamp its advertising strategy with a greater focus on mobile devices and customizable features. Earlier this month, the company launched a new version of its app that […]
Notice how the cover-up of scandal is often worse than the original misdeed? The same is true when it comes to the appearance of a conflict of interest – if it looks like a conflict, you’ve got a conflict. That’s ultimately what led Starcom MediaVest Group CEO Laura Desmond to resign from the board of […]
“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 Eric Picard, CEO at Rare Crowds. There has been a quiet shift in the digital ad ecosystem over the past few years, although it isn’t clear to many people working […]
Automation Is Coming. In panel after panel at New York’s Advertising Week, publishers and agencies heaped hate on ad selling inefficiencies and delivered eulogies for their mutual adversary, the insertion order. The big questions: Which players will be first to seize the automation grail? And how long will it take? The holding company trading desks […]
Depending on who you ask, Rocket Fuel’s stunning IPO is either a new dawn for programmatic media investment or a scary bubble indicator. In either case, it clearly went better than the company and investors planned. For comparison, we looked at how its nearly $2 billion market cap stacks up against other big companies in […]
If I were to pick one person who could distill for today’s marketer the rapidly innovating, marketing technology ecosystem, the selection would be simple enough. Who knew I’d someday have the good fortune to work with that person, too? I am excited to announce that Joanna O’Connell has joined AdExchanger as our Director of Research. […]
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 […]
