There are billions of mobile gamers in this world – mostly adult women with serious spending power – but advertisers are still lagging. It’s time for brands to catch up with gaming audiences, says Gabrielle Heyman, Zynga’s head of global brand sales and partnerships.
Ask advertisers, not Meta, how best to use Meta’s ad platform; holdcos and big brands are pressuring Big Tech to self-regulate; and how data-driven animal husbandry is impacting marketing.
On Tuesday, mobile video ad platform LoopMe bought mobile monetization platform Chartboost from mobile game publisher Zynga. That’s a lot of mobile. But with more scale and direct connections to app publishers, said LoopMe CEO Stephen Upstone, “more brand dollars are going to move into the app environment.”
In today’s newsletter: Why Apple’s SKAdNetwork 4.0 is a bust; advertisers are irked by Google’s optimization-driven demand for different creative formats; The Trade Desk releases a baffling list of top 100 publishers.
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The AI A/B Google Ads industry liaison Ginny Marvin was called out during a recent Q&A session hosted on an SEO-focused Discord server. SEO folks had spotted instances where Google clearly A/B tested different ad copy options without a brand’s awareness or approval, Search […]
Mobile game developer Zynga closed its acquisition of ASO provider Storemaven on Monday. Zynga, which declined to share the terms of the deal, is acquiring all of Storemaven’s IP and technology, and it will add Storemaven’s staff of 50 to its current headcount of 2,900. Storemaven founder and CEO Gad Maor will continue to lead the Storemaven team.
Ad tech companies are buying gaming companies, and gaming companies, like Zynga, are buying ad tech. In May, Zynga, maker of FarmVille and Words With Friends, spent $250 million to acquire in-app monetization platform Chartboost. But don’t call Zynga a “content fortress,” says Scott Koenigsberg, Zynga’s chief product officer.
2021 brought unprecedented consolidation across ad tech. But there’s one particularly striking mini trend that’s emerging: Gaming studios are merging with ad tech platforms, writes Mike Peralta, VP and GM of Marketing Solutions, a division of T-Mobile USA.
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. News It Or Lose It Influencer journalism is a dangerous trend, according to Jessica Lessin, editor-in-chief of The Information. “Long term,” Lessin writes, “the current obsession with treating journalists like influencers isn’t healthy for journalism.” For one, so-called “elite reporters” generally don’t abide by […]
Despite Apple’s ATT curveball, Zynga is having its best revenue and audience growth year since the company was founded in 2007. The social game developer, whose titles include Words With Friends and the FarmVille franchise, grew its advertising business 99% year-over-year in the third quarter to $134 million. Total quarterly revenue was $705 million, a […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. iOS’s Junk, Android’s Treasure Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework is making it unprofitable to acquire new customers – and Zynga’s earnings offered a proof point for the change’s impact on the mobile game company’s business. “The adoption of Apple’s privacy changes resulted in a higher cost […]
Zynga is buying in-app growth and mobile monetization platform Chartboost for $250 million. It’s an excellent exit for a company that’s only raised $21 million since its $2 million Series A in 2011. The deal, expected to close in the third quarter, was announced on Wednesday on Zynga’s Q1 earnings call, during which the company […]
Zynga might be in the market to buy some ad tech. The online and mobile gaming developer, which posted record Q4 earnings on Wednesday, fueled by an all-time best revenue and bookings quarter for Words With Friends, is in the midst of building its own ad network to expand its addressable market. Revenue for the […]
Hypercasual dominated the mobile gaming charts even before the pandemic. Installs of hypercasual games, characterized by extremely lightweight, free-to-play mobile titles, more than doubled between December 2019 and March of this year, according to joint research from Adjust and Unity. Once lockdowns started, the growth accelerated, with play sessions up by 72% in March. But […]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Mobile Video In TV’s Clothing YouTube may struggle to win TV buyers, who see the app as a mobile- and desktop-first platform. Time spent streaming YouTube on TV sets is up 80% year over year, and the platform is bidding for TV ad dollars […]
Both Words With Friends and Zynga Poker are more than 10 years old. But players who left long ago have been returning to the titles organically in recent weeks thanks to shelter in place. And new users are coming on board too. The uptick, which only really started in earnest during the last two weeks […]
Zynga has made 100% of its direct-sold inventory available for purchase programmatically, courtesy of Rubicon Project’s guaranteed orders capability. Buyers can access all of the premium Zynga ad formats, including “sponsored play” and “gamified units,” exclusively through Rubicon Project, a process that took months to set up. The deal offers important upsides for both Zynga […]
There was a time around 2009 when you couldn’t talk about Zynga without also talking about Facebook. Back then, FarmVille, CityVille and CafeWorld were beyond ubiquitous. But Facebook wasn’t mentioned once on Tuesday during Zynga’s third-quarter earnings call. That’s partially because Facebook’s users are increasingly mobile, with 1.39 billion monthly actives out of 1.55 billion […]
However one feels about the merits of FarmVille, it’s undeniable that the game’s creators know a thing or two about app monetization. To that end, Red Hot Labs – a game dev startup founded by the team that created back-in-the-day blockbusters FarmVille and CityVille – released Toro on Wednesday, a new tool aimed at helping […]
After debuting its Media Metrix Multi-Platform in beta in November, comScore opened the offering to all US clients and released the top 50 web properties for February 2013, based on data from both desktop and mobile visitors. While the top multi-platform properties overall were similar to the top desktop properties, there were several companies that […]
