It’s high time for publishers to start transacting on time. That’s the idea behind Parsec, a time-based advertising platform that was released in beta by mobile ad company Sled Mobile on Wednesday. Rather than selling on a cost-per-impression basis, Sled will start to charge by CPS – cost per second. For the moment, Parsec deals will […]
Cosmetic brand EMMA New York is finding customers to seed its sampling program in the most unlikely of places – a gamified trivia app. Founded in 2012, EMMA, which sells luxury makeup products in the US and China, recently started running campaigns on gameit, which came out of beta in early May. Rather than doling out […]
There have been several changes at Medialets in the three months since WPP snapped up the mobile ad platform. It’s got a new chief exec – COO Richy Glassberg took over as CEO from Eric Litman, who remains involved in the company as chairman – and it’s doubling down on its Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditations. Medialets, which received […]
When it comes to native, Zalora cares about context. The Singapore-based online fashion retailer, whose app has been downloaded more than 5 million times since 2014, has been working with German mobile marketing company glispa to integrate native placements into its app experience. Glispa, which started life as a user-acquisition and engagement network, has been plugging […]
Mobile monetization platform Supersonic is looking to help developers get more flexibility around rewarded video with an ad placement-testing tool, which came out of beta on Tuesday. The feature, part of Supersonic’s video mediation SDK, allows developers to test where in their app to serve video that rewards people for watching, and what specific offers […]
AOL is giving its multitouch attribution system, Convertro, a little extra juice by adding contextual data that measures the impact of ZIP code-level weather data within marketing mix models. Other forthcoming additions to Convertro will include conditions around the local and national economy and gas prices. Convertro claimed, even before it was acquired, that it […]
If mobile and video are the twin engines driving ad tech, then AOL’s rumored $300 million to $350 million acquisition of Millennial Media would put the pedal to the metal. The potential deal, first reported by AOL-owned TechCrunch on Thursday, comes just a few weeks after the official close of Verizon’s $4.4 billion purchase of […]
Viewability vendors mostly speak the same language – but they don’t always provide brands and publishers with the same results. It’s a major pain point and one that the Media Rating Council (MRC) has been attempting to tackle in a three-part series of reconciliation tests, which began back in 2013, to understand why there are […]
As if cross-device wasn’t complicated enough, there’s another wrinkle to consider – shared apps. That’s one of the problems mobile analytics company Kochava is looking to tackle with Wednesday’s launch of Audience Attribution, a toolset aimed at identifying incremental attribution lift at the household level. Existing Kochava customer Priceline and others, including a well-known subscription […]
Advertisers are starting to wrap their minds around the wrist. Frankfurt, Germany-based ING-DiBa – a digital-only offshoot of ING bank targeted at millennial consumers – has been working with mobile supply-side platform PubNative to test custom formats for the Apple Watch, which the SSP made generally available Wednesday. But ING-DiBa is still squarely in the […]
The No. 1 criticism leveled at mobile data-management platforms (mDMPs): Who needs another silo? But that’s not stopping a growing number of ad tech companies from unveiling mDMPs as they move to meet the demands of marketers looking to activate their mobile data. Although several players have been on the scene for a while now – both […]
Driving foot traffic is retail vet Julie Bernard’s passion. “That’s what converts the casual window shopper into a loyal customer,” said Bernard, who took the reins as CMO of location-based mobile ad platform Verve Mobile on Monday after more than seven years at Macy’s in several exec roles, most recently as SVP of customer strategy, […]
Location isn’t all that relevant without context. That’s the thinking at Sense360, a startup co-founded by Thinknear vet Eli Portnoy to help apps tap into sensor data derived from smartphones. Sense360, which landed $2.8 million in seed funding in January, opened up its platform to general availability on Tuesday after roughly six months in closed […]
IPG’s MAGNA GLOBAL and Publicis Groupe’s ZenithOptimedia released global advertising forecasts Monday, both noting that, in very distinct ways, mobile propels the world’s advertising industry. MAGNA predicted mobile will go from 30% of all digital advertising to 55% by 2019, with a 53% increase this year – crossing the symbolic $50 billion mark. ZenithOptimedia similarly […]
Undertone is consolidating around creative. The programmatic ad network acquired Buenos Aires-based rich media startup Sparkflow on Thursday as part of a move to integrate data-driven creative capabilities into Undertone’s overall tech stack, which it calls Virtuoso. The deal was on the smaller side, clocking in at “less than $20 million,” said Corey Ferengul, CEO […]
As of Tuesday, Pandora has made all its smartphone and tablet display inventory available for programmatic buying. The announcement expands on its programmatic display business, which has been generally available since January, and formally takes Pandora’s mobile programmatic solution out of beta. The solution first surfaced in March and has since been trialed by a […]
Cheetah Mobile is changing its spots. Known more as an app publisher than an ad tech player, the Beijing-based mobile media company launched its own global ad platform on Monday. It’s part of Cheetah’s grand plan to become “one of the top five mobile ad vendors in the world,” said Cheetah Mobile CTO and co-founder […]
Steve Jobs’ notorious open letter “Thoughts on Flash,” published in 2010, was considered the final nail in the coffin for its status as the go-to software for web and mobile development. But like the Internet’s most powerful zombie, Flash has continued to play a prominent role for developers and ad builders. HTML5, the solution listed […]
GameStop isn’t playing around when it comes to omnichannel, and here’s why. Roughly 60% of GameStop’s customers first engage with the video game retailer online. Of that number, 26% show up at one of its more than 6,600 brick-and-mortar stores within 48 hours and make a purchase. About 40% of its traffic comes from mobile. […]
Mobile native isn’t just about look, it’s also about feel – and there’s nothing more native to the mobile experience than a tap. “Brands and users are looking for an alternative to web banners squished into mobile,” said James Cooper, head of creative at New York City-based digital ads startup Betaworks, which announced Tuesday that it […]
Apple’s stance on data collection: “We honestly just don’t want to know,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s SVP of software engineering, to roughly 5,000 app developers at the tech giant’s Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday. “We don’t mine your email, your photos or your contacts in the cloud to learn things,” Federighi said. “All of this is done […]
Travel is a tricky category. It’s generally one of the top things people want to spend their money on – but it’s also not something most people get to do on a regular basis, said Sam Shank, CEO and co-founder of last-minute hotel booking app HotelTonight. “In theory, people can use an app like GrubHub to […]
Television has the GRP. Mobile deserves the same. That’s the thinking at comScore. Starting Wednesday, the measurement company will make mobile ad reporting for apps and mobile web generally available within its validated Campaign Essentials (vCE) product. ComScore had done custom delivery of mobile measurement in the past on a client-by-client basis. That same data […]
There’s something fishy going on in China. According to mobile attribution company Apsalar, for every valid in-app purchase (IAP) made in China, there are 273 fraudulent ones. But China isn’t the only place with IAP problems. Taiwan sees 54 fake in-app purchases for every valid one, while Saudi Arabia clocks in at 24.6 and Israel […]
A series of developments over the past week have given rise to a narrative that mobile ad blocking represents a large new threat to publisher revenues. Two mobile ad-blocking products had their debut: one from category leader Eyeo, which produces the Adblock Plus (ABP) software, and another from Shine, an Israeli company with a cybersecurity […]
App developers will inherit the Earth – and Google wants a piece of that. That’s why advertising was high on the agenda for the first time on day one of Google’s I/O developer conference in San Francisco on Thursday. Although Android’s market share is massive – according to IDC, Android has 78% of the market, versus Apple’s […]
App marketing platform AppLift has made a move to strengthen its stack with the acquisition of Singapore-based mobile DSP Bidstalk. Terms of the deal, revealed Thursday, were not disclosed. AppLift’s technology centers on user acquisition and lifetime value (LTV) optimization for its roughly 500 clients, among them Match.com, King, Zynga, Glu Mobile and Indian fashion […]
Hearst Magazines UK was looking for a way to take its mobile strategy from out of the box to outside the box. “We definitely had a history of 320 x 50 mobile banners,” admitted Rob Wilkin, head of commercial product at Hearst UK, which is home to 26 titles including Cosmopolitan, ELLE, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, […]
That might be the look on your face when you hear that emoji are a highly promising new advertising tool. But it’s true. As Andreessen Horowitz partner Benedict Evans recently mused in a blog post: “The potential to turn messaging into a platform is the Trojan horse that drives a lot of the excitement in […]
Developing game apps is a hard knock life – because once the development is done, the monetization work begins. “Game developers have specific needs,” said Chung-Man Tam, chief product officer at mobile game discovery platform Chartboost, which launched a collection of tools on Thursday aimed at helping devs take better advantage of their first-party data. Two […]
