Technology

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 […]

When Neustar, a company whose telecommunications infrastructure routes calls and texts across North America, purchased data-management platform (DMP) provider Aggregate Knowledge (AK) last October for $119 million in cash, analysts and industry insiders wondered – as they do with every acquisition – what the integrated solution would look like. For Neustar’s SVP of Marketing Services […]

AppNexus has laid off half its 44 part-time auditors as the company looks to streamline its operations in that area. The auditing department is responsible for hundreds of thousands of creative executions and pieces of inventory that run through AppNexus’ system. The team was constructed of a mix of full- and part-time auditors and contractors […]

Facebook CPM-based ad prices jumped more than 400% in Q4 2013, according to some 240 billion impressions analyzed in Adobe’s Q4 2013 Social Media Intelligence Report. However the holiday season delivered “warning signs” for Facebook in the form of tepid growth in the visits and revenue it’s driving to retail sites, relative to some of […]

Whether one defines Amazon as a technology company, a retailer or both, what marketers should really be paying attention to is the company’s growing position as a media company and how they can better play ball with the platform, insiders say. “Who can get a better CPM rate lower in the funnel than Google?” said […]

Yoyi Media, one of the major DSPs in China, will launch a data management platform called Data Bank for clients in early 2014, according to CEO Roy Zhou. “If you want a good result, regardless if you’re a direct response client or a branding client, you need to have very good data,” Zhou told AdExchanger. […]

The first Forrester Wave on lead-to-revenue management (L2RM) automation solutions released Tuesday singled out Oracle’s Eloqua and the still independent Marketo as marketplace leaders catering to large enterprises. As defined by Forrester, L2RM is essentially B2B marketing automation. Additionally, Act-On and Salesfusion were champions among solutions designed for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The report […]

Criteo, a French provider of retargeting solutions, announced Thursday that it has released the beta version of an in-app ad product that includes a deep-linking feature. In-app ads are becoming increasingly necessary as mobile users spend more time on apps instead of a mobile browser, said Criteo’s chief product officer, Jonathan Wolf. “Users spend 80% […]

Brad Rencher, SVP and GM of the digital marketing business unit at Adobe Systems, oversees the six-product-strong Adobe Marketing Cloud, which crossed the $1 billion mark in business for fiscal year 2013. Onstage at Industry Preview 2014, Rencher said that ad tech, marketing and enterprise technology are “becoming one and the same.” It’s certainly reflective […]

A data-management platform (DMP) panel held Wednesday at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview 2014 revealed the philosophical differences held by four major DMP providers in terms of how the technology should best be implemented and used. The panelists – CEOs Scott Howe of Acxiom, Omar Tawakol of BlueKai, Bill Demas of Turn and John Nardone of [x+1] […]

The ability to connect consumers across devices represents a small but increasingly viable portion of marketers’ campaign strategies. During day one of AdExchanger’s Industry Preview 2014, several CEOs and marketing execs commented on the growing use of cross-device recognition technology as a marketing tool. According to AOL CEO Bob Lord, 45% of his clients’ display […]

Ad exchange operator PulsePoint is trying to find a middle ground between private exchanges, which often require more scale than smaller publishers can manage, and real-time bidding (RTB) platforms, which tend to attract more performance marketers than brand campaigns. In its quest, PulsePoint began its partnership late last year with demand-side platform (DSP) MediaMath to […]

“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 Tom Manvydas, vice president of advertising strategy and solutions at Experian Marketing Services. Many marketers believe that programmatic media-buying platforms will optimize their ad campaigns but, in reality, nothing could […]

Data-management platform (DMP) Lotame rolled out Wednesday its Mobile DMP suite to help businesses collect and manage audience data from mobile devices. The product, which can be added to Lotame’s current DMP offering or used as a standalone product, includes several features designed to help companies monetize their mobile inventory and engage with consumers on mobile […]

The proliferation of DVR services, set-top boxes and IPTV services has created a wealth of data marketers can mine. But the process by which one can purchase these targeted, data-driven ads is still in its infancy. For instance, extending programmatic buying concepts to “advanced television” (a custom system that algorithmically optimizes media against an advertiser’s […]

“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 Richard Sobel, senior director of account management and platform solutions at PubMatic. There are very few industry conversations I’ve had over the past year that perplex me more than the […]

Although 53% of retail marketers now list mobile as their top strategic priority, there is still a disconnect between plans and actual investment, according to a Shop.org and Forrester Research evaluation of 75 brands. Based on data highlighted during the “First Look: 2014 Outlook for Digital Retail” track session at the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) Big Show in […]

Rob Brosnan, a Forrester Research analyst covering customer intelligence and interactive marketing, has secured a new post as SVP of strategy for marketing technology company StrongView. One of the remaining independent marketing-automation platforms, StrongView recently rebranded from the name “StrongMail,” a move company CEO Bill Wagner said is representative of cross-channel buyer needs in today’s […]

As we first reported in November, digital marketing software firm Turn has reeled in a new Series E investment. The $80 million raise was distributed among eight venture capital firms and brings Turn’s total funding to about $138 million to date. (For comparison, direct competitor MediaMath has raised a mere $24.4 million, according to CrunchBase). […]

The advertiser imperative is simple: send the right message to the right user at the right time. The growth of the connected car has presented even more opportunities for brands to reach consumers in a context-specific environment and some service providers have risen to the challenge, like online radio company Pandora, which just began rolling […]

Alibaba Group’s $206 million stake in US startup ShopRunner this fall foreshadowed the Chinese commerce giant’s interests in cross-country expansion. With a looming IPO expected this year and reports of a possible Nasdaq or NYSE listing, all eyes are on the company’s monetization moves. Often referred to as “the Amazon of China,” Alibaba owns close […]

“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 Russell Glass, CEO at Bizo. Real-time bidding (RTB) emerged in the last few years as a new approach to buying and selling online display advertising in real time. The promise of RTB was, […]

When discussing the advances of programmatic media buying outside the US, the stock answer the past few years has been, “It’s catching up.” But at some point in 2013, the investment that marketers, agencies and ad-tech companies have made in Europe and Asia began to appear more concrete and significant. Some companies, like New York-based […]

Speaking in New York today, far from the frenzied CES crowd in Las Vegas, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff heralded what he perceives as a shift from an “anonymous, B2C world to one of one-to-one marketing where the consumer has opted in.” Benioff told a gathering of partners, customers, media and analysts on Wednesday that Salesforce.com’s […]

Thrillist Media Group, the digital men’s lifestyle company dishing up everything from visual case studies on alcohol composition to foolproof ways to fight angst on red-eye flights, is banking business growth on branded content. Owner of myriad media and commerce properties that include JackThreads.com, a members-only men’s shopping site; Supercompressor, a newly launched Pinterest-esque buyer’s […]

As new apps continue to flood the market, it has become harder for app developers to acquire new users, forcing developers and marketers to think beyond installs to drive more revenue. Apple said on Tuesday that App Store customers spent more than $10 billion in 2013 and that it has paid developers $15 billion to […]

Evidon wants to better monetize the data waterfall pouring from its network of 20 million Ghostery users, and will look to new Chief Operating Officer Emily Riley to help it pull that off. Riley, a longtime Forrester analyst who spent the last year driving Audience Science’s pivot from an ad network into a data intelligence […]

Oracle’s deal to acquire Responsys comes with a key question: What will Oracle’s future hold for digital advertisers? When Oracle snapped up Eloqua for $810 million last December, a chain reaction of subsequent purchases followed, from Salesforce.com’s acquisition of ExactTarget to Adobe’s Neolane buy mere months later. As competitors rush to build or acquire digital […]

Although China’s mobile users represent the world’s largest smartphone market (research firm IDC predicts China’s smartphone shipments will exceed 450 million in 2014), numerous challenges constrain non-Asian advertisers’ ability to get a foothold. Still, there’s recourse for advertisers looking to break into the Chinese market, largely in the form of partnerships. Chinese mobile advertising is […]

While publishers generally concede that brand advertisers will pay higher CPMs for “in-view” ads, there’s less acceptance around the different tools, like Nielsen’s Online Campaign Ratings or comScore’s Validated Campaign Ratings (vCE), designed to determine viewability. The big problem is that the viewability solutions have so far tended to focus on the advertisers, leaving publishers […]