The Body Shop is tapping into mobile wallet as more than just a way to pay. The cosmetics and skin care retailer will use mobile wallet to raise awareness and generate engagement for a campaign launched Wednesday as part of an effort to lobby the United Nations against product testing on animals. The brand hopes […]
When fans visit the newly built Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, they immediately face an entranceway deliberately stacked with visuals: a giant falcon statue, a halo-shaped video scoreboard and a view of the city skyline. The first thing many do is take a photo and blast it across social media. And as they do, stadium staff […]
Marketers, forget virtual reality (VR) for now. VR and augmented reality (AR) often get lumped together, but AR is the consumer-facing technology that’s taking center stage. At a special event on Tuesday, Apple unveiled an assortment of new hardware and software, including iPhone 8, souped-up Apple TV, the next generation of Apple Watch and a […]
Teen apparel brand Hollister is drumming up engagement with game-based ad units that are holding players’ attention for nearly a minute at a time, on average. That’s 30 to 45 seconds longer than the average TV ad, said Vincent Obermeier, president and co-founder of TreSensa, an app monetization platform that helps develop and distribute interactive […]
Location-based apps are getting an unexpected reprieve from Apple’s blue bar mandate, an overlay at the top of the phone screen designed to tell users how and when apps are using their location data. In the fifth beta of iOS 11 (the mobile operating system is set to ship Sept. 13), Apple reversed course on […]
MoPub is getting very cozy with its viewability vendors. On Thursday, the Twitter-owned mobile ad exchange released the latest version of its SDK, bundled with viewability support from Integral Ad Science and Moat. MoPub’s SDK is integrated with just shy of 50,000 apps. As the buy side bangs the drum on independent verification and uniform […]
Where a person goes can be used as a solid signal of intent, but that signal gets stronger and more predictive when location is combined with shopper marketing data. Although the insights aren’t always intuitive, they’re always useful, said Kim Riedell, a Digilant vet and SVP of Advantage Media, the media-buying arm of Advantage Solutions, […]
Buffalo Wild Wings is leveraging interactive mobile video to extend its TV advertising efforts – and give consumers a chance to play with their food. The casual dining and sports bar chain worked with mobile video ad company AdColony to develop a game-like video ad experience featuring “Foodoo,” a voodoo doll with carrots for its […]
Ad tech isn’t the investment free-for-all it used to be, but that doesn’t mean the category is dead. True, some types of ad tech have lost their luster. In April, the ad tech investment firm Luma Partners, for the first time since it started doing Lumascapes five years ago, registered fewer new DSPs, SSPs and […]
The growth and product teams at delivery service app Postmates count on the same types of data to do their respective jobs: in-app behavior data, engagement data, location data and campaign data. All those data points, however, have to flow seamlessly for Postmates to balance the needs of its users, merchant partners and 65,000 couriers […]
The NBA’s Sacramento Kings are entering the second season in the Golden 1 Center, the centerpiece of the team’s new data-driven fan experience. “We tend to think of the stadium as a platform,” said Ryan Montoya, CTO of the Kings organization. “Everything plugs into an operating system, and the data can be shared throughout the […]
Jebbit has a fresh approach to data collection: Ask the consumer to participate. The Boston-based startup, which announced a $6.8 million Series A on Wednesday, is helping enterprise brands and professional sports teams get consumers to proactively share their first-party data. The round was led by Manifest Investment Partners, with pinch-hitting from several strategic ad […]
Mobile app install ads are still a multibillion-dollar business for Facebook. But is Facebook taking too much credit? It’s hard to say, because Facebook is what’s known as a self-attributing network, i.e., a walled garden. A self-attributing network is just what it sounds like: a platform that, usually because of its scale, has the power […]
Mobile data exchange adsquare is proposing an alternative method to cross-device matching: starting with device IDs rather than cookies as the core identifier. On Tuesday, adsquare introduced mobile cross-device capabilities into its exchange through partnerships with Tapad, Drawbridge and Adbrain. Crosswise is coming soon. Rather than building mobile audiences based on cookies, the industry’s de […]
Facebook is on a slow and steady quest to make Messenger as sticky as possible on the road to achieving its mission of becoming the WeChat of the West. “We see Messenger as an app to help people run their lives,” said Kemal El Moujahid, lead product manager for Messenger and M, Facebook’s virtual assistant. […]
Facebook is pretty much minting money at this point. Despite concerns over ad load maxing out in the news feed, Facebook posted revenue of $9.32 billion for the second quarter, up 45% year over year from $6.43 billion. Mobile ad revenue at $8 billion was responsible for the vast majority of Facebook’s overall revenue in […]
Brands want high-quality mobile inventory – but they don’t have a standard way to define it, they can’t effectively measure it and there’s no easy way to find it at scale. Which is why mobile ad tech company Sabio Mobile, whose clients include Toyota, Wells Fargo, McDonald’s, Viacom and Lowe’s, released a validated publisher tool […]
Apple sits on a trove of first-party customer data through its App Store, everything from credit card information to time-stamped app downloads tied to specific device IDs. Yet there are inconsistencies between the install counts and engagement metrics developers see in Apple’s UI and what they’re told by their third-party measurement partners – and that’s “not […]
Uber’s rider-focused ad spend has increased twentyfold in the last year and a half. “The onus that puts on us to be really clever in our targeting and thoughtful is incredibly high,” said Kellyn Kenny, Uber’s VP of marketing, speaking at Tune’s Postback conference in Seattle on Thursday. Although user acquisition is still a top […]
Facebook ads are effective within Facebook, but how good are they within a mixed-media campaign, or when assessed over the entire customer journey? That’s the fundamental paradox of the walled garden: Marketers get great data inside of it, but hardly any outside. But Facebook is trying to shed its reputation for impenetrability. The company has […]
Location policy changes for Apple’s iOS 11 update coming in September and Android O, which is still in developer preview, will alter the way consumers dole out location data and have ripple effects for mobile marketing. The most consequential new policy will be on iPhones and iPads, where a blue bar at the top of […]
Back when real-time auction app Tophatter was founded in 2012, it spent as much as 95% of its user acquisition budget on Facebook. But with a solid user base of around 12 million registered users, it’s been making a concerted effort to mix up its UA strategy. “In the beginning, Facebook was a big gorilla, but […]
The mobile data platform Segment on Thursday announced a $64 million Series C round led by the Y Combinator Continuity Fund, an investment arm dedicated to the incubator’s alumni, and GV, Google’s venture capital group. The investment brings Segment’s overall funding to $109 million. Its previous investors supported this round as well. The money will […]
Advertisers and agencies will soon be able to buy ads on the Facebook Messenger home screen – but they lack the necessary levers to optimize performance or customize creative. “We’re recommending to our teams to be aware of the opportunity, but we’re really waiting for the inventory to be unbundled,” said Kieley Taylor, senior partner and […]
While mobile app advertising is in dire need of standards, that prospect is easier said than done. Confusion and wrongheadedness in the industry is rife, even among user acquisition specialists. “Ask a room full of UA managers to explain how mobile tracking works and I think most won’t be able to explain the whole process,” […]
Episode, a choose-your-own-adventure storytelling app, is choosing a road to revenue centered on the user experience first. Monetization is delicately balanced with the demands of UX for the interactive app, which allows users to immerse themselves in fictional narratives. “But there is a lot of revenue to be made if we can get people engaged,” […]
MoPub, Twitter’s mobile ad exchange, is looking to get stickier with the buy side. On Thursday, after five months of beta testing, it launched a solution that aims to help marketers aggregate inventory types based on performance and to target them programmatically. Advertisers that want a lot of installs, for example, can take advantage of […]
The mobile ad industry is a fragmented mess of ad networks. Singapore-based mobile game publisher IGG (I Got Games), which has about 17 million monthly active users globally and spends multiple millions on performance-based user acquisition (UA) every month, works with 100 different networks at any given time. “It’s labor-intensive,” said Mark Zhang, IGG’s SVP […]
Singular and Apsalar are consolidating, and they’ve got their collective head in the marketing cloud. On Tuesday, the duo announced that they will become one and marry their respective technologies – Singular’s mobile marketing analytics tech and Apsalar’s mobile attribution and DMP offering – to take on the likes of Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce on the mobile […]
The best-laid plans of app developers are often belied by the actions of actual users. When Guy Tal, CEO of Bel Media Group, an Israeli app publisher with around 100 gaming, social and utility applications, soft-launched Tinder-like Android dating app WeMeet, he and his team assumed users would be easily attracted to the service because […]
