Twitter’s TV Ad Targeting product is now generally available to U.S. advertisers after a beta release this May, the company announced in a blog post today. “The results of the beta test reveal that the impact of using Twitter in combination with TV advertising is significantly greater than that of using TV advertising alone,” wrote […]
After six months in beta, LinkedIn unveiled its “Sponsored Updates” feature for marketers with budgets of all sizes, and mindful of balancing current trends around programmatic, native advertising and content marketing. Alison L. Engel, LinkedIn’s senior director of global marketing, acknowledged that those terms sum up the latest evolution of the professional social network’s advertising […]
Facebook may be the world’s largest social network, but regional social sites are carving out their own followings — and companies are taking note. In a reflection of the rising influence of Chinese and Russian social networks, Salesforce.com is adding integrations into the Chinese microblogging sites Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, as well as VKontakte, […]
Twitter is getting serious about programmatic. Its recent moves – and reported moves – have included lead capture forms in the Twitter stream, CRM matching, and website retargeting. The latter two seem to follow directly in Facebook’s footstep. “It’s one area where they seem to be following Facebook’s lead,” comments David Berkowitz, chief marketing officer […]
Facebook’s Exchange is big business. Just how big can be hard to pin down, since Facebook breaks out neither revenue nor volume for its retargeting business. That leaves us grasping at occasional straws dropped by the 17 qualified FBX vendors. For example, late last year AppNexus indicated Facebook was exposing somewhere around 7 billion daily […]
Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer and newly inducted Twitter Ads API partner Voxsup is applying data science to social media to help brands smartly segment audiences. The company is VivaKi’s preferred partner for social insights and Facebook ad-buys, working alongside partner The Echo System. Drawing on algorithms developed at Northwestern University by CEO Alok Choudhary, the […]
Pinterest is starting to move toward a clear advertising model, as shown by last month’s hiring of Facebook’s global PMD head, John Yi, to run its marketing developer partnerships. The company has rolled out analytics and “Rich Pins” features geared to brands, and is believed to have a marketing API program in the works. Rather than […]
Gokul Rajaram, the fast-talking architect of Facebook’s ad products for the past couple years, has left to oversee product engineering at Square, where he’ll drive software development for the company’s Square Register point-of-sale software, among other products. At Facebook, Rajaram led a rapid iteration of the company’s ad platform, including the development of Facebook Exchange, […]
In its latest move to simplify its ad products, Facebook is upgrading its Ads Manager Reports with more data and reporting features. Among the changes: It will now provide reach and frequency metrics that can be segmented by age, gender and country. “By giving these kinds of demographic insights, marketers will be able to look […]
Facebook has made so many embellishments to its ad monetization machine in the past year that communicating it all to clients has become a big chore. This week in Cannes, the company participated in a “Creativity at Scale” panel and convened its 18-member Client Council to discuss its embrace of hashtags, its recent decision to […]
Annalect Group, the digital and analytics division of Omnicom Media Group, will use Salesforce.com’s Marketing Cloud to support the social marketing offerings across Omnicom’s agencies, according to the companies. Omnicom already uses various Salesforce.com products such as Radian6 and Social.com. Today’s news highlights the company’s efforts to further “bundle” its work with the cloud software […]
Facebook ad platform Blinq Media has made some big changes since Gannett bought it last year for an estimated $92 million. Among those changes is a potentially powerful tie-in with ShopLocal, the dominant player in digital ad circulars and Blinq’s corporate sibling at Gannett. The idea is to convince ShopLocal’s existing customers (national retail giants […]
Following the news that Facebook will be reducing its ad formats by half and redesigning Sponsored Stories, Salesforce.com has released a report on the performance rates of various Facebook ad types that marketers use through its platform, Social.com. Based on data collected from Social.com between January and March of this year, the study measured the […]
Last week, when Facebook signaled plans to sharply reduce the number of discrete ad formats it offers, no one criticized the move. And why should they? After Facebook’s early frenzied experiments in advertising, it’s a natural step to assess what performs best, lose the rest and restructure the whole ad offering around advertiser objectives rather […]
Facebook is preparing to slash the number of ad formats it sells from 27 today to less than half that by Q4. On the chopping block are online-only Offer ads, Questions ads and standalone Sponsored Stories placements. Going forward, Facebook will structure and optimize ad buys based on “six or seven” marketer objectives, distributing messages […]
Certified Twitter partner Mass Relevance is a “social experience platform,” according to founder and CEO Sam Decker; it works not only with Twitter but also Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and more to incorporate real-time social content into brands’ and advertisers’ owned and paid media strategies. “We started the company working with Twitter primarily, and we signed […]
Yahoo’s planned acquisition of Tumblr brings it “coolness,” young demos and mobile eyeballs, says the blogosphere. The deal, reported at $1.1 billion, is Yahoo’s Instagram – even with aging Flickr already aboard. Okay, fine. From here, this acquisition may also be a new, strategic move into “identity.” Yahoo Mail used to be the portal’s identity magnet, but product development neglect and […]
Facebook has raised the velvet rope to let more of its real-time bidding partners into the News Feed, and by many accounts the response rates are stunning. But some technical and ad quality issues still need to be ironed out. Beta partner TellApart says click-through rates for Facebook Exchange ads in the News Feed are […]
A collaboration between Condé Nast and social images aggregator Chute has led the startup to create its first advertising product, designed to use consumers’ photos as backgrounds for marketers’ messages. Chute Ads will make their first appearance on Condé Nast Traveler‘s site next month with an as-yet-unidentified marketer. While neither Condé Nast executives nor Chute […]
Well, that was fast. Six weeks after making some News Feed ad inventory biddable to Facebook Exchange advertisers on a trial basis, Facebook is expanding the amount of that precious paid media space that it will expose to RTB demand. The News Feed trial was initially open to just three of Facebook’s 17 FBX partners. […]
Social ads company Kinetic Social has raised $8 million in a round that includes both equity-based cash and an expanded debt facility. Kinetic will use the money to ramp up its social ad optimization technology, which works across social media platforms including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Cincinnati-based Blue Chip Venture Company provided the equity piece […]
Facebook’s mobile ad growth was the big story in Q1, as ads served to handheld devices grew to 30% of all advertising revenue. Read the earnings release, or check out these highlights on the ad side: Total ad revenue grew 43% to $1.25 billion Mobile accounted for roughly 30% all Facebook ad dollars in Q1, […]
Salesforce.com introduced today a new addition to its Marketing Cloud – Social.com, which allows marketers to apply their CRM and social listening data to their social ad campaigns. Creating targeted ads, marketers frequently run into the “silo issue” of being unable to connect their various customer data sources, noted Gordon Evans, VP of marketing at Salesforce.com. […]
Facebook may be pouring on the revenue afterburners while reducing the precision of self-serve ad targeting in the news feed. Or, if you’re Facebook, the latest changes are all about making it simpler for the advertising long tail. As many of you may know, AdExchanger reaches out through your Facebook news feed by posting links to […]
Facebook unveiled features to help developers enhance their apps at its Mobile Developer Conference in New York City today. Among the changes are features designed to ease concerns about data sharing. Noting that users can be wary of giving third-party apps access to their profile data via Facebook login, the company now enables brands to […]
Facebook is rolling out Cost Per Action (CPA) bidding through its Ads API, the first time it has departed from CPM- and CPC-based ad pricing. The move is yet another attempt by Facebook to capture the performance marketing spend (see also: FBX retargeting, offline data matching, App Install ads) that continues to be the main […]
How Twitter will enter into the programmatic ad business remains a mystery to many. During the past few months, rumors have swirled over some sort of Twitter ad exchange to be launched. How that will happen is unclear. Nevertheless, various strategic directions seem possible as Twitter tries to siphon growing programmatic media ad spend. The […]
After Foursquare and its CEO Dennis Crowley struggled for several months to cobble together this week’s whopping $41 million funding round, the social check-in service is still getting heat over whether it will be able to draw revenue and maintain its high $800 million valuation. While emails to Foursquare went unanswered about how it might […]
Nearly a year after launching a collaboration and productivity platform for marketers, Shift unveiled its Open Marketing Cloud, a suite of social promotions, media buying, community management, and analytics applications available through partnerships with 12 tech companies. The Open Marketing Cloud brings together apps from the following firms: Aggregate Knowledge (media intelligence platform), Convertro (conversion-tracking), Curalate (Pinterest […]
Facebook’s first deep hardware integration is a custom version of the Android operating system, packaged on a new HTC smartphone called “HTC First.” “We didn’t want to build our own phone or an OS,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the press conference at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters. “We want to provide the best experience for […]
