Mobile

The year of mobile, the decade of mobile, the year of data – none of the monikers matter if the right measurement isn’t in place. “Clients are still looking for ROI and to connect the dots,” said Jeff Hinz, managing partner and US digital director at Mediacom, speaking at the Mobile Media Summit on Monday during […]

Most commerce players are going omnichannel. Myntra is going only channel. The Indian fashion e-tailer became an “app-tailer” on May 15, when it officially pulled the plug on its desktop site. Myntra, which is owned by Flipkart – India’s answer to Amazon – had already shut down its m.dot site in February. For Myntra’s customers, browser-based […]

It’s time for the next can of worms: mobile viewability. And the mobile ad vendors are already on the scene. Less than two weeks after the Media Rating Council (MRC) issued its long-awaited interim guidance on mobile viewability measurement, three separate mobile media sellers – Millennial Media, 33Across and JUICE Mobile – have announced their intention to offer a 100% […]

Acquisitions and earnings – Sizmek likes to multitask. On Thursday, the company announced its Q1 2015 results and its intention to buy mobile DSP StrikeAd for $11.7 million. Excluding StrikeAd, revenue from mobile formats, in other words HTML5-related revenue, was up 103% YoY in Q1 2015, while in-stream video revenue increased 10% in the same timeframe. […]

Mobile is big and video is big – and putting the two together presents a gargantuan advertising opportunity that Verizon will be primed to capture if it closes on AOL. “Verizon has been trying to figure out how to grab a bigger share of the ad tech pie, so the move makes sense strategically on […]

App store discovery isn’t like finding a needle in a haystack. It’s more like finding a needle in a mountain of other needles. “It’s a challenge that’s always existed in the mobile space,” said Dave Bell, founder of Gummicube, a mobile analytics company that specializes in app store optimization (ASO). “It’s frustrating for developers, obviously, […]

Mobile app analytics company App Annie is beefing up its Usage Intelligence product with the acquisition of mobile measurement firm Mobidia. Although terms of the deal, unveiled Wednesday, were not disclosed, App Annie CEO Bertrand Schmitt told AdExchanger it was a mixture of cash and equity. Mobidia will help App Annie developer and publishers “build a […]

Despite a revenue dip in Q1 2015, it appears that Millennial Media is beginning to make good on its turnaround story. Although Millennial saw its year-over-year revenues fall off from $72.6 million to $63.2 million in Q1 – revenue was also down quarter over quarter, from $86.4 in Q4 – the mobile ad tech platform beat […]

Specs and standards aren’t that sexy, but industry experts say the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s recent video addendum to rich media standard MRAID could be one of the keys to unlocking more programmatic mobile video dollars. MRAID is a mobile standard, used by many publishers and app developers, to render and serve mobile rich media programmatically. […]

Personalization was a problem for Malltip. The app, which aggregates publicly available information on coupons, sales, maps and directories from more than 1,800 malls and national retailers across the US, quickly realized that “a lot of our users were dropping off because the content we were delivering just wasn’t particularly relevant to them,” said Wai […]

Boston-based in-store beacon company Swirl revealed its $18 million Series C round on Thursday. Led by Twitter Ventures, Hearst Ventures and SoftBank Capital, with participation from Longworth Venture Partners, this latest capital injection brings Swirl’s total funding to $32 million. It’s evidence that beacon technology is reaching maturity, said Hilmi Ozguc, CEO and founder of […]

Pangia Games doesn’t have money to waste. What app developer does? Monetization and user acquisition are tricky for anyone – although it certainly helps to have extra cash to throw at the problem. But the smaller devs out there, like Pangia, need to get creative. “We’re a team of two,” said Nick Barbato, managing partner at […]

Berlin-based mobile ad platform Fyber (formerly SponsorPay) wants to become what it calls a full-stack “specialized supply-side platform.” “Specialized” refers to its focus on the world of freemium apps, said Janis Zech, CRO and co-founder of Fyber, which announced its acquisition of German ad tech company Falk Realtime on Wednesday for €10.75 million, which translates to […]

Acxiom vet Nada Stirratt is looking to spread the good word about location-based advertising in her new role as CEO of Verve Mobile, announced Monday. “The last few years have been about Angry Birds and app downloads, but now the market is finally talking about reaching consumers in particular locations,” said Stirratt, who comes to […]

Placed “isn’t looking for one-off deals – we’re looking for scale,” company CEO David Shim told AdExchanger. The location analytics player, which uses an opt-in mobile panel to track offline behavior, announced a flurry of partnerships on Tuesday, including with cross-device solution provider Drawbridge, app monetization platform TapJoy, digital out-of-home company Vistar Media and demand-side platforms […]

Utility, clarity and simplicity are the three main ingredients in the new Epicurious Smart Timer app for the Apple Watch, announced Monday.  Apple is scheduled to release the Apple Watch on April 24. The Epicurious Smart Timer was designed to be paired with the Condé Nast-owned food site’s existing iOS app. Users can activate the […]

On April 21, Google will begin instituting a change to its mobile search algorithm that will take a site’s mobile-friendliness into account when ranking results. Indexed apps will also start showing up among organic search results. The update applies to mobile search only. In somewhat un-Google-like fashion, Google, which normally makes its search algorithm changes […]

The ad tech funding scene is getting a little unfriendly – but that doesn’t seem to be a problem for the video guys. On Thursday, Altitude Digital announced a $30 million cash injection from financial tech firm FastPay, bringing the video SSP’s total funding to $45 million. The Denver-based company has direct relationships with 500 […]

Partner, build or buy? WPP Group has decided on the last in the case of Medialets. The global holding company said Wednesday it will acquire the mobile ad platform as a wholly owned subsidiary. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Clients across the breadth of WPP’s holdings will have the option to use Medialets’ tech. Medialets CEO […]

Banners weren’t cutting it for Vaibhav Gupta, CEO and founder of Bidstalk, a Singapore-based company that provides a white-label mobile and video DSP platform for advertisers and publishers. But the alternative – native – presented its own attendant complications. “Marketers are ready to experiment with newer mobile-focused ad formats, but such traffic is still limited,” Gupta said. […]

“im really upset that I have not yet gotten any Girl Scout cookies because I can’t find those freaking Girl Scouts anywhere” Tweets like that make it pretty clear that Girl Scout cookies don’t have an awareness problem. Tweets like that also make it clear that cookie lovers often have trouble finding the Thin Mints, […]

Calling all advertisers who want to target based on where people have visited: Foursquare is expanding its location targeting from its 55 million users to anyone with a smartphone. On Tuesday, it launched a programmatic ad platform called Pinpoint, designed to leverage the location data from its partner app ecosystem. While Foursquare previously let advertisers […]

Spanish-language TV network Univisión sees more than 70% of its digital audiences come in through mobile. “That’s more than some social platforms out there. We’re quickly experiencing a mobile evolution,” said the company’s SVP of digital sales, Josh Cella. “Our clients are asking for additional targeting, and we know where we need to be.” That’s […]

MoPub was helping app developers monetize before it was cool. That’s part of what gives Twitter’s mobile exchange its street cred, said Janae McDonough, senior director of exchange at Twitter, who joined MoPub the year before Twitter acquired it in 2013. “We created this opportunity for app developers four years before anybody was thinking about […]

Oil changes are not slushies. Even the most passionate car enthusiast isn’t going to buy motor oil more than two or three times a year – and that’s a challenge for a motor oil brand like Shell-owned Pennzoil, especially on the mobile front. It’s a matter of figuring out what your consumers are looking for and […]

Papa Murphy’s isn’t biting off more than it can chew when it comes to mobile. The Washington state-based pizza company, which operates 1,400 franchises and corporate-owned stores across the central and western United States, is starting to ramp up its mobile experimentation through a new relationship with mobile messaging and CRM platform Waterfall, announced Thursday. […]

Kids – they love apps, they’re highly engaged, they’ve got no money and you’re not allowed to collect their data. But targeting and mobile monetization aren’t an impossible dream for kid content developers and publishers, said Dylan Collins, CEO of SuperAwesome, a UK-based ad network specifically designed with COPPA compliance in mind. On Wednesday, the 2-year-old […]

“Limited opportunities for creativity” – 44% of marketers surveyed by the IAB and research firm Ovum cite it as one of the key challenges they face when it comes to mobile advertising. That may be the perception, but it’s not the reality, as Showtime demonstrated at the IAB’s Mobile Marketplace conference in New York City on Monday. […]

Publicis Groupe media shop ZenithOptimedia revealed Monday it’s hooking up with mobile data platform NinthDecimal to try and get a handle on offline attribution. Connecting online spend, mobile in particular, to offline purchases, is what keeps agencies up at night. It’s also what keeps advertisers from spending as much as they should on mobile, said […]

Retargeting and mobile. They’re not exactly peanut butter and jelly just yet, but AdRoll has plans. For the last 18 months, AdRoll, which began in 2008 focused exclusively on desktop retargeting, has been working to make its tech more relevant to advertisers looking for cross-screen opportunities. Case in point: the mobile app developer community. “[They’re] interested […]