Technology

With Amazon’s August rollout of Collections, the commerce giant appeared to go head-to-head with Pinterest on an offering affording merchants a direct link to products consumers “like, want and recommend.” Now, Japanese ecommerce company Rakuten appears to be working on its own image-centric platform following its $100 million investment in Pinterest last year. Yesterday’s launch […]

Mobile commerce will reach new highs on Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year, and retailers are hastily preparing for the onslaught of traffic those devices will bring. Couple that with the fact that there are 26 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, compared to last year’s 32, and retail marketers are working on compressed campaign […]

As marketers, ad-buyers and CMOs are increasingly asked to defend their spend, a “consistent data framework” that surpasses the boundaries of channel will be one way to help them win budgetary battles, according to one exec. Josh Herman, VP of partner and product strategy at Acxiom, joined executives from eBay, Datalogix and Nielsen Catalina Solutions […]

AdExchanger asked industry leader and Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise his “take” on today’s Initial Public Offering (IPO) for real-time ad platform and services company, Rocket Fuel. The IPO netted Rocket Fuel $116 million and valued the company at approximately $1.8 billion at market close (stock quote). Bill Wise: On Rocket Fuel doubling and worth nearly […]

Rocket Fuel is living up to its name in its first hours as a public company. After going public at $29, the high end of its range, the share price more than doubled to $62 by late morning. Since then it has fallen back to $55.50, as of noon EST, a 91% gain. The running […]

Advertising across devices and bridging the gap between online and offline campaigns should be key components of every marketer’s strategy, according to Lisa Utzschneider, Amazon.com’s global VP of sales, who outlined the ecommerce giant’s marketing tactics yesterday at the Dmexco conference. Amazon’s customer strategy is based on three rules: “Start with the customer and work backwards, […]

By Kelly Liyakasa, John Ebbert, and Zach Rodgers It’s a big week for the “programmatic IPO.” Rocket Fuel begins trading publicly tomorrow on NASDAQ under the ticker FUEL. French retargeter Criteo meanwhile has filed its F-1, with detailed information about its financials. Since the performance of these two IPOs could set the tone for ad tech […]

This year’s Dmexco conference in Cologne, Germany, has drawn roughly 26,000 attendees, vendors and other visitors. Yesterday they streamed into the standing-room-only Congress Hall to listen to a panel with Criteo President Greg Coleman, Aegis Media Americas CEO Nigel Morris and Google’s managing director of media platforms for northern and central Europe, Damian Lawlor. Rounding […]

Mobile ad network Millennial Media announced late yesterday afternoon that it has teamed up with the real-time bidding platform provider AppNexus to create a new mobile ad exchange that the companies are calling the Millennial Media Exchange. Through the partnership, AppNexus’ clients will receive access to Millennial’s sales inventory and its Jumptap buying platform. It […]

French retargeting specialist Criteo has been planning its IPO filing for the better part of a year and it’s finally taking the plunge. The company filed an F-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission that details its financial performance and other particulars about its business. The company hopes to raise $190 million from the stock sale, though […]

Todd Haskell began his new job as Hearst Magazine Digital’s chief revenue officer less than a month ago, joining the publisher of magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Elle and Good Housekeeping to manage the business side of the 28 related websites and 14 mobile properties. He previously served six years as the group VP of […]

“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 Ramsey McGrory, CEO at AddThis. The formula used to be simple: In order to drive a transaction, you needed a combination of compelling creative and a clear message delivered […]

The major reorg that retiring Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer engineered two months ago  is resulting in the end of its portal MSN producing original content. As detailed by Romenesko, MSN freelancers were told in a mass email that their services would no longer be needed and that the budget for original content was “zero” for […]

Is big data “too big” a challenge for marketers? This was a question posed to panelists today at the Financial Times’ Future of Marketing Summit, where a crowd of brand advertisers, agency execs and marketing and ad-tech vendors converged at The Metropolitan Club in New York to talk industry trends. “There’s never too much data […]

IBM’s launch today of a 100-partner-strong Digital Marketing Network will secure access to a slew of ad-related platforms for IBM Digital Marketing Optimization users. Certified digital marketing partners include a number of DMPs, DSPs and search marketing providers like BlueKai, Criteo, Turn, Marin Software, DoubleClick Search and x+1. This appears to be a move on […]

Twitter’s acquisition of mobile supply-side platform MoPub this week could pave the way for more activity and something close to standard business models in the nascent mobile exchange space. Established desktop exchange players like the Rubicon Project and PubMatic, which have expansive networks on the sell side, have struggled to retrofit their existing platforms to […]

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 […]