Rakuten

Programmatic enemies make better friends in the AI era; social video projected to outgrow CTV this year; and apps are integrating into chatbots, but where are the users?

The two longest-standing names in the affiliate and partnership marketing category, Rakuten and Impact.com, have decided to stop fighting each other and will instead fight together. 

TvScientific really wants digital marketers (and their wallets) to open up to the idea of CTV as a performance channel. So, the CTV ad platform unveiled a cost-per-outcome model to emphasize its confidence in CTV ads leading to conversions.

As Mark Zuckerberg has said, the metaverse is still years away. So, for the near term, Meta’s opportunity is in messaging.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Paying For News Google will license news content from publishers to populate its Google Assistant app and Android phones – so users can swipe from the homescreen to see news updates. The product will launch later this year with news companies from Germany, Brazil […]

Rakuten owns an assortment of consumer media properties: Viber is a WhatsApp-like chat app. Viki is similar to YouTube, only exclusively focused on Asian content with 50 million users. And Rakuten TV offers streaming TV. Until recently, each of these assets had its own sales team and unique tech setup, but that’s changing. But Rakuten […]

RTB whiz Neal Richter is the new CTO at Rakuten Marketing, the marketing solutions subsidiary of Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten. Richter, who serves as a technical adviser to a number of ad tech startups, including Metamarkets and nToggle, joins the company after more than seven years with Rubicon Project, most recently as CTO. At Rakuten, […]

Jet.com has been quietly pitching publishers on changes to its payment structure related to affiliate commissions. The message is clear: Work with Jet and it’s prepared to pay you for the privilege. Affiliate bucks often go to the more established players like Amazon or eBay. But in order to incentivize publishers to send traffic its […]

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 […]

Marketers are known for demanding ROI and previous results before they embrace new strategies, but they’re going all-in on the assumption that mobile will be a far more prosperous channel this year than in previous holiday seasons. Industry analysts like eMarketer project a strong holiday for retailers, with mobile commerce expected to grow 32.2% over […]

Just as device manufacturers want to be Apple, ecommerce shops want to be Amazon and social networks look up to Facebook, China-based WeChat is the chat application others seek to emulate. Yes, WeChat, a free app with 600 million monthly active users (100 million fewer than Facebook Messenger), enables chatting, but it’s also a platform […]

Rakuten Marketing is gunning to be a full-funnel ad stack. Acquisition has been front and center in the Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten’s strategy, with investments in search, affiliate, display, mobile and attribution on the marketing services side. But there are different integration requirements since some of Rakuten’s acquired assets are consumer-facing while others are not. “It’s complex […]

While many brick-and-mortar retailers grapple with bringing their businesses online, cosmetics brand e.l.f. did things in reverse. After 11 years in ecommerce, e.l.f. (that stands for Eyes Lips Face) is now expanding its offline footprint, said Megan O’Connor, VP of digital and ecommerce at e.l.f Cosmetics. In the past year, e.l.f. has opened three flagship […]

Michael Jaconi, CEO of freshly funded mobile commerce startup Button, sees untapped opportunity in the app economy. Specifically, he’s tailoring Button’s Deep-Link Commerce Platform as a utility to help encourage ongoing app usage rather than a one-time app install ad. Uber is among the company’s customers. With a new $12 million Series A round in […]

Considering two of the usual pure-play suspects in Forrester’s Cross-Channel Attribution Wave (Convertro and Adometry) were snapped up by AOL and Google on the very same day in May, its latest release Friday had all kinds of new implications – media neutrality and a platform mentality among them. The report, authored by Forrester analyst Tina […]

Rakuten Marketing, the online marketing subsidiary of Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten, renamed its business units on Tuesday to signify its omnichannel aspirations. Rakuten Marketing is part of a hybrid clique of companies scurrying to unite digital marketing and commerce data services – competitors like eBay, IBM and the newly public Alibaba – round out the […]

There’s a run on multitouch attribution vendors, and UK-based DC Storm – acquired by Rakuten, the companies announced Thursday– is the latest to get swept up in the excitement. Merger mania kicked off some months ago, when top-three attribution vendor Visual IQ was rumored to have hired a banker to shop itself around. The company put […]

Japanese Internet and ecommerce company Rakuten, which has steadily built its Rakuten Marketing business through acquisition, has hired Jessica Joines as CMO and debuted an attribution tool called “Cadence.” “Cadence is the product that links all of our media channel services together,” commented Joines. “It’s a single point of entry and our clients can see […]

With Amazon’s August rollout of Collections, the commerce giant appeared to go head-to-head with Pinterest on an offering affording merchants a direct link to products consumers “like, want and recommend.” Now, Japanese ecommerce company Rakuten appears to be working on its own image-centric platform following its $100 million investment in Pinterest last year. Yesterday’s launch […]

Slice Technologies, a Silicon Valley-based startup that bills itself as the “best way to track and organize your online shopping,” has raised $23 million in Series B funding led by Japanese ecommerce company Rakuten, Russia Partners and NPD Group. Slice’s existing investors, which include Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, DCM and Lightspeed Venture Partners, […]

Rakuten – owner of affiliate giant Linkshare and the Mediaforge retargeting platform — is determined to grab a wider share of digital marketing spend. The Japanese ecommerce player has agreed to buy PopShops, a Seattle-based provider of pipes for live product-data feeds. PopShops is primarily used by affiliate publishers as a means to obtain up-to-the-minute […]

It would be generous to say the attribution puzzle is half-solved. A quarter or an eighth solved is more like it. But the direction is clear. Advertisers are getting better at allocating conversion credit to brand interactions up and down the funnel. Platform companies are helping them, but their efforts can sometimes seem clumsy, calling […]