Technology

As enterprise technology companies race to make their respective suites the digital marketer’s platform of choice, building or acquiring to fill product portfolio holes becomes near protocol. Global German software giant SAP, which recorded $5.4 billion in revenue last quarter, is no different – the company’s been active on the commerce (Hybris) and advanced analytics […]

Last year we asked a handful of senior execs at platform companies to answer the question, “What will happen next year in marketing and advertising that hasn’t happened before?” This year we invited some of those contributors to evaluate their earlier forecasts and update them for 2014. The below is from Michael Lazerow, chief marketing […]

Advertising technology company Simpli.fi has raised $16 million in a Series B growth round led by private equity firm Frontier Capital with participation from Contour Venture Partners. Prior to the Series B round, the company had raised $4 million since its founding in 2010, bringing its financing total to $20 million after operating at a […]

Media-buying workflow software provider Mediaocean is opening an “app platform,” designed to streamline and customize the ad sales process across both digital and traditional channels, like broadcast. The Connect Partner Platform is akin to the open APIs that Facebook and Twitter offer to their preferred partners. While the Connect Partner Platform is designed to close […]

You can’t throw a 23-year-old media buyer without hitting a software “cloud.” One of the precocious contenders in this bunch, social-centric SHIFT, has raised $6 million to support an expansion of its Open Marketing Cloud into Europe. The investment, led by DN Capital, brings its total financing to $14 million. The company’s 29-year-old CEO, James […]

Founded in 2004, Cranston, RI-based jewelry brand Alex and Ani scored a spot on Inc. 500’s fastest-growing brands in America list in 2012 and continues to garner a fashion-forward fanbase for its popular charms and bangles. Alex and Ani also has a division, Affinity, that builds corporate partnerships, through which the company sells licensed merchandise […]

The belief that cookies don’t work on handhelds or tablets, requiring an alternative tracking mechanism, oversimplifies the complex problem of mobile tracking. While advertisers cannot use third-party cookies to track mobile users the same way they would a desktop user, cookies can indeed be applied to an extent in a mobile environment. And while many […]

WPP Group’s 24/7 Media – which will soon be absorbed into Xaxis – has acquired 12-year-old semantic ad-tech company Crystal Semantics and its 15 employees from previous owner Ad Pepper Media. London-based Crystal’s technology can be applied a few ways, said Rob Schneider, 24/7 Media’s SVP of corporate strategy and platform development. First, it offers straightforward […]

Just over two months ago, UK-based news outlet The Guardian unveiled the biggest step it has taken after four years of operating in the programmatic space: it opened its own publisher-side “trading desk.” Read the release. Created with help from MediaMath, The Guardian’s trading desk GuardianResponse+ will augment the news company’s existing programmatic tools, including its […]

Location-based technology has come a long way from geofences. As mobile usage grows, location data has become more granular, providing marketers with greater opportunities to fine-tune their messages—but it has also created more complications. Apple, for example, switched on its iBeacon technology on Friday to send customers’ tailored messages depending on their exact location in […]

Both agencies and ad partners draw comparisons between Twitter’s launch on Thursday of retargeting product Tailored Audiences and Facebook Exchange (FBX). Just how technically similar they are remains to be seen, but the industry is buzzing about the ad product’s cross-channel targeting potential. We asked some Tailored Audience partners, media agencies and a beta tester 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 Jeff Green, CEO at The Trade Desk. Mozilla is no longer out alone calling for the end of third-party cookies; others such as Google and Microsoft have joined the fray in […]

After beta-testing retargeting capabilities back in July, Twitter rolled out Tailored Audiences globally Thursday. The offering includes website retargeting along with third-party audience segments, supported by an eclectic crew of ad partners. Advertisers can now “reach users on Twitter who have shown interest in your brand or category even away from Twitter,” wrote Twitter product manager Abhishek […]

Although Amazon has kept fairly quiet about its ad-services pitch to media buyers, analysts believe that marketing services will be a driving force in what sustains and propels the ecommerce giant in the years to come. “Amazon has to push into new areas,” writes David Farnoush, a media analyst for Harmelin Media, in a blog […]

One must forgive Scott Howe, CEO of big data solutions provider Acxiom, for gushing a little. “I’m kinda preaching here but I feel passionate about this, because I’m an agency guy, but I think the days of the silver bullet are done,” he told AdExchanger. He’s referring to advertising and marketing messages that adhere to […]

Back in August, San Francisco-based LiveRamp released GetOnboard, a CRM “data onboarding” software system designed to bridge the gap between marketers’ customer data and their online marketing efforts. By prepping massive amounts of data for every possible marketing service and destination, and by doing it quickly, GetOnboard has been selected by more than 200 customers […]

In 2007, that WPP Group made big waves with its acquisition of display media technology firm 24/7 Media, worth $649 million. By bringing a publisher-facing ad server and network in-house, the holding company had staked out a tech ownership strategy that continues today. Today that premise lives on at WPP, but the 24/7 Media brand does […]

French retargeting firm Criteo announced on Tuesday the launch of a mobile Web tracking solution designed to let marketers deliver targeted ads to consumers across mobile browsers. Criteo’s mobile Web solution (the company has said it is still in the process of developing a branded name for the product) allows marketers to serve personalized ads […]

With mobile accounting for more than 39.7% of all online traffic this Thanksgiving weekend – a 34% increase from Black Friday 2012, according to IBM’s Digital Analytics Benchmark – marketer investment naturally followed that growth curve. The mobile momentum continued Cyber Monday with IBM reporting that smartphones and tablets drove 30% of all online traffic […]

Enterprise software companies are racing to soak up marketers’ budgets by building out their marketing suites with acquisitions, partnerships and new products. Those players include Adobe, Salesforce.com, Oracle and IBM. As the year comes to a close, here’s a snapshot look at these companies’ marketing stacks and some of the gaps that each company has […]

Traffic accidents are more orderly than the backend of most websites. At any given moment, a multitude of information fires off a page — information about who a visitor is, where she came from, her operating system or device profile, which ads are being served up, which videos are being played, etc. This has created […]

The value that Salesforce.com’s solutions bring to marketers, customer experience managers, and sales staff is well-established. But what can Salesforce.com offer for online advertisers? Within the various acquired companies that constitute Salesforce.com’s ExactTarget Marketing Cloud — recently integrated with the Salesforce1 platform — is Social.com. Social.com was made possible when social media commerce company Buddy Media […]

Impression fraud has been a major industry problem for a while, but it’s only lately that buyers, sellers and vendors have sought to quantify and arrest it. Even at a roundtable discussion of more than two dozen online ad executives held by Integral Ad Science on Thursday morning, participants seemed resigned to the idea that […]

Mobile retargeting platform TapCommerce has raised $10.5 million in a Series A round led by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from RRE and Nielsen Ventures and existing investors. While Web-based retargeting historically focused on recent visitors who abandoned an onsite purchase, certain aspects of mobile behavior completely disrupt traditional retargeting practices. For instance, TapCommerce CEO […]

Among the recurring themes Wednesday at Dreamforce in San Francisco was the need to develop customer-centric experiences that are both channel-agnostic and measurable. Online job finder CareerBuilder and CPG giant Unilever were among the major brands that took turns on stage and dished about their digital priorities, best practices and thoughts around their marketing investments. […]

Denise Colella joined sell-side pricing and inventory manager Maxifier two years ago and quickly climbed the ranks from CRO to president before taking on the CEO’s role in October. Colella replaced Anthony Katsur, who held the post for less than a year and is now an advisor for the programmatic direct marketplace iSocket and Involved […]

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer remained relatively unfazed onstage Tuesday at the Dreamforce conference as a pack of protesters disrupted an otherwise smooth Q&A session with Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. Despite the larger-than-life mural of Mayer’s mug and echoing shouts protesting her seat on Walmart’s board of directors, the fireside chat between the two CEOs covered […]

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 […]

After General Motors yanked all its paid media spend from Facebook in mid-2012, GM’s chief marketing officer at the time, Joel Ewanick, suggested in a Wall Street Journal interview that Facebook is simply not a great place to advertise cars. But GM eventually returned and Facebook has since doubled down on the auto category. In […]

Over the past year, MediaMath has just about doubled its staff to 306, as the company works to broaden its identity from being a demand-side platform to being viewed as an end-to-end enterprise solution. The company also created a new role—the “chief commercial officer”—in which it hired former McKinsey & Co. executive Michael Lamb. As […]