If you’ve ever seen an online meme or a viral image (and these days who hasn’t?), chances are you either viewed it through the photo-sharing service Imgur (pronounced “imager”), or it was uploaded there first. Founded in 2009 by then-Ohio University computer science student Alan Schaaf, Imgur has seen its financial support structure evolve from […]
Since Russ Fradin initiated Dynamic Signal following the $300 million acquisition of his previous startup, Adify by Cox Enterprises (which Cox has since shuttered), he has transitioned away from paid media and helps brands tap customers’ social media influence. The idea behind Dynamic Signal is to simplify the process by which passionate customers can advocate brands […]
As brand marketers demand increasingly sophisticated tools to quantify the value of social media campaigns and improve performance, social analytics provider Socialbakers finds itself reaping the benefits. Headquartered in Prague with offices in New York, London and other cities, Socialbakers’s client roster includes Samsung, LVMH, Discovery and Disney. It acquired two thousand clients within a […]
A new report from Neustar’s Aggregate Knowledge notes the strong performance of advertising in social channels in terms of reach (58% better than exchanges) and the ability to deliver more high-quality buyers than ad portals, networks and exchanges. According to Aggregate Knowledge President Rob Gatto, this portends a shift in the role of social advertising […]
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 […]
In its year of existence Facebook’s ad exchange has earned a reputation as an ATM machine for Facebook, and even something of a savior during the company’s rocky post-IPO period. But comments by COO Sheryl Sandberg throw that image into some doubt. During yesterday’s earnings call, she noted, “FBX is actually a very small part […]
JetBlue, the New York-based airline servicing 78 cities with more than 800 flights per day, stands as one of the first and only carriers to institute a Customer Bill of Rights. In line with that theme is JetBlue’s social media strategy, which initially began as a means of engagement to connect with flyers on Facebook […]
For luxury retail brand Stuart Weitzman, Facebook ad buys are a pertinent part of its strategic process for brick-and-mortar store rollout. By combining offline data, such as in-store sales reports, with online performance data, the company has made headway in gauging international audience preferences to ignite interest regionally. “Stuart Weitzman is expanding globally at a […]
Facebook may be the world’s largest social network, but regional social sites are carving out their own followings — and companies are taking note. In a reflection of the rising influence of Chinese and Russian social networks, Salesforce.com is adding integrations into the Chinese microblogging sites Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, as well as VKontakte, […]
In its latest move to simplify its ad products, Facebook is upgrading its Ads Manager Reports with more data and reporting features. Among the changes: It will now provide reach and frequency metrics that can be segmented by age, gender and country. “By giving these kinds of demographic insights, marketers will be able to look […]
Twitter has shown aggressiveness over the past few months in developing its advertising business, and this morning’s global data-sharing deal with WPP Group represents another significant advancement. Read the release. The relationship is through WPP’s Data Alliance, which includes the holding company’s media buying and planning umbrella GroupM, the analytics provider Kantar and digital creative […]
Certified Twitter partner Mass Relevance is a “social experience platform,” according to founder and CEO Sam Decker; it works not only with Twitter but also Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and more to incorporate real-time social content into brands’ and advertisers’ owned and paid media strategies. “We started the company working with Twitter primarily, and we signed […]
Email and search continue to drive the most referrals to ecommerce sites, according to Q1 2013 data from website optimization company Monetate. But word-of-mouth through social media does influence purchases, despite a lack of last-click attribution for the channel. After analyzing more than 500 million online shopping experiences, the Ecommerce Quarterly report found conversion rates […]
Social data analytics provider ShareThis is allowing Publicis-owned Starcom MediaVest Group to embed the company’s Social Quality Index rankings in its advertiser dashboard. In essence, the SQI is an indicator of the volume of social sharing and clicks across all of ShareThis’s 2.4 million publishers, who are mostly smaller, long-tail players but also include major […]
Salesforce.com introduced today a new addition to its Marketing Cloud – Social.com, which allows marketers to apply their CRM and social listening data to their social ad campaigns. Creating targeted ads, marketers frequently run into the “silo issue” of being unable to connect their various customer data sources, noted Gordon Evans, VP of marketing at Salesforce.com. […]
Facebook unveiled features to help developers enhance their apps at its Mobile Developer Conference in New York City today. Among the changes are features designed to ease concerns about data sharing. Noting that users can be wary of giving third-party apps access to their profile data via Facebook login, the company now enables brands to […]
Nearly a year after launching a collaboration and productivity platform for marketers, Shift unveiled its Open Marketing Cloud, a suite of social promotions, media buying, community management, and analytics applications available through partnerships with 12 tech companies. The Open Marketing Cloud brings together apps from the following firms: Aggregate Knowledge (media intelligence platform), Convertro (conversion-tracking), Curalate (Pinterest […]
Facebook’s first deep hardware integration is a custom version of the Android operating system, packaged on a new HTC smartphone called “HTC First.” “We didn’t want to build our own phone or an OS,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the press conference at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters. “We want to provide the best experience for […]
One question that’s unlikely to be addressed during today’s Facebook press conference has to do with the possible data tracking implications of a phone deeply integrated with Facebook’s core features. But given Facebook’s mobile ubiquity (More than 680 million people use Facebook on mobile devices every month) and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s focus on the mobile […]
Information Builders, a 38-year-old business intelligence and analytics provider that serves customers like Ford, Mastercard, Lockheed Martin, and Verizon, is setting its sights on the CMO. The New York City-based company yesterday launched its WebFocus Social Media Analytics platform, designed to provide insight into customer sentiment on social networks. “We were originally very IT-driven but […]
Following its string of social media acquisitions, Oracle has pulled all its social capabilities into one product, allowing marketers to create and publish content, listen to and engage customers, and analyze interactions from a single interface. Unveiled at the South by Southwest conference, Oracle’s Social Relationship Management (SRM) product ties together capabilities gained when the […]
Publishers, marketers and agency executives are still talking about native advertising, whether it’s to say it’s hype, hope, old wine in a new bottle, or some combination. We spoke with interactive shop veteran Adam Kleinberg, CEO of San Francisco’s Traction, about the headaches and opportunities associated with native ads and whether this model can stand […]
The burning issues affecting digital advertising these days can be boiled down to handful of recurring themes: ad effectiveness and verification; “Do Not Track” and relevance; and whether social media extends a publisher’s content distribution — or merely fragments it. Given that video is a highly engaging form of media and easily trackable (via completion […]
“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 Pete Sheinbaum, CEO of LinkSmart, which provides text-linking optimization solutions for web publishers. Millions of people are now pinning, tweeting, re-tweeting, hashtagging, liking, sharing, and commenting throughout the day. While […]
AddThis, the social sharing tools and analytics provider formerly known as Clearspring, is trying to solve a problem that has long plagued the business of using online data – how to incorporate information from the physical world consumers mainly inhabit alongside their digital characteristics, profiles and behaviors. In its bid to address those digital data […]
When building a technology platform, self-service isn’t always the Holy Grail it seems to be – at least initially, as Spruce Media founder and CEO Rob Jewell discovered. A couple of years ago, his company was an early Facebook Ads API partner, and after seeing Kenshoo and Marin Software take a self‑service approach to channels […]
Several months after Adobe acquired media buying services and platform company Efficient Frontier (and Context Optional, the Facebook ad optimizer it arrived with), the company has unveiled its full slate of ad analytics for earned media in the form of Adobe Social. Adobe Social promises to track every campaign and determine whether commenting and other […]
Yesterday, “Facebook Performance Advertising” company, Nanigans, announced the hiring of former Yahoo! sales executive Marc Grabowski as it’s Chief Operating Officer. Given his sales and marketing responsibilities, Nanigans appears to be looking to grow its “feet on the street” and revenues as well as leverage Grabowski’s experience in the data-driven display world. See the release. […]
Demand Media’s Q2 earnings beat Wall St.’s expectations last week, as the content aggregator (don’t call them a “content farm,” okay?) and owner of eHow, Livestrong and Cracked posted its first, albeit slight, profit since issuing its IPO over a year ago. The company has attributed much of its growth to social media, something that traditional […]
“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Nikhil Sethi, who is co-founder/CEO Adaptly. In the world of social media and social networks, native advertising models are taking over. Anything I can do as a consumer – […]
