Technology

Digital ad veteran Brian McAndrews has been named chairman, president and CEO of streaming music service  Pandora. He replaced Joe Kennedy, who announced his intention to retire in March. (Read the release.) McAndrews built one of the first digital agency networks at aQuantive, where beginning in 1999 he began rolling up firms including Razorfish, Avenue […]

Despite the recent flurry of mobile acquisitions, marketers are still somewhat in the dark when it comes to defining objectives for their mobile campaigns and deploying analytics tools to help them measure cross-channel reach, one study suggests. In a survey of agencies, vendors and 228 marketing professionals, the study by Forrester Research determined that 37% […]

Twitter’s acquisition of mobile ad exchange MoPub came within two weeks of its acquisition of social TV analytics Trendrr and the wide release of lead-generation cards. These staccato moves, according to one Twitter Ads API partner company, are exactly what Twitter needs to counter Facebook’s aggressive pipeline of ad products. “They’re doing a nice job […]

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 […]

Buying MoPub does a few things for Twitter, potentially. It adds $100 million in 2013 revenue to Twitter’s income statement in the months leading up to a probable IPO. It creates an opportunity to monetize Twitter’s valuable data “off-platform” through an internally run mobile exchange. This could work by creating BlueKai-like data segments that would […]

Real-time ad platform Rocket Fuel amended its S-1 Registration statement (see it) to go public and revealed how much it will raise and how much it will be worth should all go according to plan. The answer according to NASDAQ: “$102 million by offering 4.0 million shares at a price range of $24 to $27. […]

Under two separate deals that took place this week, Microsoft, Nokia, Verizon and Vodafone took steps that speak to the companies’ expectations for the smartphone market and the telecom industry as a whole. Microsoft’s decision to acquire Nokia’s devices and services division could help it shore up its place in the smartphone ecosystem while Verizon […]

With mobile commerce forecasted to hit $25 billion by year’s end, according to comScore, digital agencies are naturally fielding more questions about device strategy. Or, in the case of Razorfish, “context strategy.” Jason Goldberg, VP of strategy for multichannel commerce & content at Razorfish and member of the board of directors for Shop.org, touched on […]

Tapping into second-screen viewing and related search habits is the new black. Facebook confirmed Friday it is testing “trending topics” in the news feed after rolling out a hashtags feature, according to The Wall Street Journal. Apple and, especially, Twitter have made notable moves in the space. But, for all of the interest, the fact […]

Founded six years ago by three former Yahoo engineers, social commerce community portal Polyvore has amassed 80 million product boards or “sets” since inception. To date, the company has raised more than $22 million in funding from Benchmark Capital and others, and now feeds 7.5 billion product impressions per month to brand and retail clients […]

LiveRamp, a company that takes offline marketing data and matches it with online advertising, continues to find ways to blend in customer relationship management into the digital mix. The company is releasing a CRM data onboarding software product, called GetOnboard, that helps tie online and offline, as well as CRM and advertising, more closely together. […]

To Qubit, a London-based company founded by four former Googlers, proper optimization of Web technology deployments plays a critical role in the effectiveness of commerce experiences and online advertising. A range of publishers like the BBC and retail brands like Pandora rely on Qubit’s enterprise tag management product Opentag for digital marketing and other forms […]

Close to a year after Google evolved its product search to a paid model under the auspices of Google Shopping, new data suggests the imagecentric ads are strongly outperforming standard text ads in retail advertising. According to Marin Software‘s sampling of global advertisers and agencies that spend more than $100,000 on paid search per month, […]

“Native advertising” is a projection of publisher desires to revamp traditional print advertorials. Advertisers, too, like the idea of doing something unique that dovetails with editorial content and looks good across devices without requiring three creative versions. But scalability remains an issue. Ad-tech provider Appssavvy is one of several players looking for ways to combine the […]

It’s been six months since botnets entered the advertising lexicon in a big way, thanks to research and publicity efforts by self-styled fraud fighters and firms that specialize in detecting nonhuman traffic. March stories in Adweek, AdExchanger and other publications shined a spotlight on the pervasiveness of nonhuman Internet traffic and its threat to the value […]

Google’s launch Tuesday of Data-Driven Attribution for Google Analytics Premium users left some questions on the table, including how pertinent offline data would be to the product, where “earned” media fits into the mix and what implications there are for “non-Google” marketers and the entire attribution ecosystem. Forrester Research, which released a Forrester Wave Report […]

Today’s DMPs clearly stand out from each other and from other parts of the digital marketing landscape, according to the Forrester Wave DMP Q3 2013 report. Forrester Principal Analyst Joanna O’Connell profiled seven players that are pushing the envelope. More than as a result of competition from each other, the increasing use of mobile devices – and […]

Marketers are looking for better methods to assign value across the entire customer journey and Google appears to be answering the call. Today, building on its Multichannel Funnels and Attribution Model Comparison tools for Google Analytics, Google has rolled out Data-Driven Attribution globally for Google Analytics Premium customers. Bill Kee, product manager for attribution at […]

It’s a frenzied IPO season in the ad tech space. Despite the tepid reaction of investors to public offerings by Tremor and YuMe, companies like Rocket Fuel aren’t showing signs of cold feet. True, it helps to have a set of impressive financials, which Rocket Fuel submitted to the SEC last week. The Redwood City, […]

Google is ramping up its focus on online gaming by bringing its video ad-skipping tool TrueView to the space. In doing so, Google is making good on a promise Susan Wojcicki, SVP of advertising, made back in February at the IAB Annual Meeting to expand the use of TrueView, which the company sees as a […]

Groupon’s launch today of a global affiliate marketing Groupon Partner Network (GPN) illustrates the company’s plans to own a lion’s share of the local ad market. It also puts more distance between Groupon and its daily deals heritage. The Partner Network is part of Groupon’s goal “to provide a comprehensive, effective and large-scale marketing platform for […]

It all comes down to who owns the digital identity and the addressability that follows. Late this spring when Amazon launched the Login with Amazon service, it gave access to 200 million-plus active Amazon users to app developers and site owners. “Login with Amazon is the latest offering in an array of services that make […]

A new Google patent for a wearable “gaze tracking” technology (US patent #8,510,166) has fantastical implications for how advertising could evolve in a world full of head-mounted interfaces such as, oh, Google Glass. The possibilities include far-out concepts such as billboard viewability reporting and “pay-per-gaze” billing for ads. In its patent claim, Google describes a […]

“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 Jay Seideman, US director of the targeting and exchange team at Microsoft. At the end of every year, publishers enjoy many wild debates about budgeting, forecasting and sales compensation. […]

Following its spring acquisition of recommendations engine Avail, ecommerce personalization and shopping media company RichRelevance has acquired the assets of data analytics startup Precog, for an undisclosed sum. Founded by former Amazon exec David Selinger in 2006, San Francisco-based RichRelevance currently has close to 200 customers including Walmart, Target and Marks & Spencer. Precog CEO […]

The evolution of commerce has made data the new “MVP” of retail marketing. A common theme at this week’s eTail East conference in Philadelphia, a gathering of 1,150 retail minds, was delivering personalized offers at scale. To do so, marketers are looking for ways to harness data across a range of sources ranging from loyalty marketing […]

David Karnstedt, a veteran of digital media who led and then sold Efficient Frontier to Adobe, has left the company for unspecified “opportunities.” Adobe confirmed Karnstedt is no longer SVP and GM for media and advertising solutions, a position he has held since the 2012 acquisition of search and display ad-management platform Efficient Frontier, where […]

While the US is generally considered the leader when it comes to advances in online advertising, Europe’s varied broadcast industry could point the way for what will happen on these shores in the area of programmatic television, according to a report by Forrester analyst Jim Nail. “TV has never been as central to the marketing […]

Quirky arts-and-crafts catalog company Oriental Trading Co. has been in business for 80-some years. Begun as Japanese immigrant Harry Watanabe’s church-and-carnival sales operation, it has since weathered a 2010 bankruptcy and made its way through multiple hands and advisers before being acquired by billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway last fall. More recently, it acquired toy […]

YuMe’s stock price at the end of its first trading day remained at $9 – exactly where it was when the video ad tech company’s shares were priced the night before. While the opening price was less than the $12 to $14 the Redwood City, CA-based company had aimed for when it filed its initial […]