Salesforce.com is expanding its social ad offerings today with a new product called Salesforce Social.com.
Thanks to its acquisition last year of Buddy Media, Salesforce already runs social ad campaigns for a number of major ad companies like GroupM and Omnicom. But today it’s breaking out its ad product into a separate entity that’s distinct from Buddy Media’s social publishing capabilities. → Read More
Do you target kids with cheap ads or more expensive adults? Nanigans has just raised a $5.85 million “Series A.1″ from Avalon Ventures to build SaaS technology that predicts which audiences earn advertisers more money. With revenue up 6x in 18 months, Nanigans hopes to keep up with Facebook’s progress by pouring its funding into R&D. It’s already discovered a surprising trick to supercharging… → Read More
Skimlinks, the platform which effectively gives publishers control over affiliate links and content monetization, has completed a growth financing round led by Greycroft Partners. Joining the round are Japan-based angel investors, Hiro Maeda and Ryota Matsuzaki, as well as Forum Foundry, a Texas-based network of blog and forum communities. The amount raised was undisclosed. Existing investors also… → Read More
Biomimicry is an engineering field that takes cues from nature to help solve and address human problems, and Google today launched a new website at its Google Green initiative that highlights some of the ways nature’s engineers can inspire and guide human behavior. The site uses gorgeous National Geographic images along with brief descriptions of how the natural antecedent relates to the human… → Read More
Mobile advertising firm Velti has released its monthly report on advertising impressions across its network. The iPad is far and away the leader when it comes to the tablet market, and is gradually chipping away share from the iPhone in terms of overall dominance among mobile ads. The iPad mini remains a much smaller factor, but is growing steadily, and on the Android side it’s pretty much… → Read More
During the conference call discussing Google’s latest earnings report, executives were asked about how mobile will affect the company’s business — both the general usage of search, as well as Google’s revenue and profits from advertising.
CEO Larry Page responded that he “always” gets asked about how the popularity of mobile apps affects Google search, but he’s “not super-concerned” about it. → Read More
Hello Social is a new Toronto-based startup launching today, with the aim of improving the amount of useful data captured from online social media marketing campaigns. The startup, co-founded by design professional Dominik Dryja and technical lead Barek Nowotarski, provides tools for companies looking to run campaigns like contests on platforms like Facebook, or via their own web properties, and… → Read More
Opera has just put out its latest State of Mobile Advertising report for Q1 2013 and its findings put the iPhone back on top for “impression volume” (i.e. generating the most traffic to mobile ads), regaining its lead over Android. iOS also maintains its top position for monetisation compared to the other mobile platforms. → Read More
Nielsen-owned Vizu is releasing its 2013 Online Advertising Performance Outlook today, and the results suggest that despite concerns about measurement and return on investment, marketers plan to increase their online spending on brand advertising, and to spend more in emerging areas like mobile and social.
The blog post outlining the findings describes 2013 as the “year of brand advertising.”… → Read More
With the Era of Over-sharing and the Social Fire Hose upon us, the heft and value of privacy is changing — and, for better or worse, many argue that it’s diminishing. Perturbed by the access many companies (inconspicuously) have to our browsing history, former Googler Brian Kennish developed a Chrome Extension to address the browser privacy issue. Facebook Connect, as it was called then, disabled… → Read More
Earlier today, Twitter announced that it will allow advertisers to target their promoted content based on the keywords in a tweet. I had a brief conversation with Senior Director of Revenue Products Kevin Weil who laid out Twitter’s perspective on the announcement’s significance.
“People always say that you are what you tweet,” Weil said. (Always?) At the same time, he noted that the content of… → Read More
Online display advertising has been a murky business — who is actually viewing all those ads, and do those ads make a difference to them? Quantcast has been quietly trying to solve this problem since 2006, and now it’s starting to break out.
I’m hearing from a reliable industry source that it has been EBITDA-profitable for a couple years and reached a $100 million revenue run-rate six months… → Read More
Twitter today took the latest step in its bid to build up its advertising business, which some estimate could reach $1 billion in revenues this year: it has introduced keyword targeting to the platform. This means that brands and others can now plan and serve ads to users based on specific words in users’ tweets. Twitter says the service is rolling out across all of its ad network, mobile and… → Read More
Research firm Forrester has put out a new report exploring best practices for developers trying to get their apps noticed. Its findings include that word of mouth and social discovery play a key role in new apps finding loyal users, at least in Europe. The research also underlines the dominant role that mainline app stores continue to play in app discovery on the iOS and Android platforms. → Read More
When Google wanted to get into the game of selling social ads across all platforms, it decided to acquire Wildfire, a company that had the market on lockdown. Since the acquisition last July, little has changed as far as what Wildfire offered, how it offered it and there was little to no impact for current customers. Today, the Wildfire team has announced that its first major shift is upon us… → Read More
Yahoo just released its earnings report for the first quarter of 2013, with better-than-expected (non-GAAP) earnings per share of 38 cents. Revenue (excluding traffic acquisition costs) was flat compared to last year, at $1.07 billion.
Analysts has predicted that the company would report revenue of $1.1 billion and 24 cents EPS. Wall Street normally evaluates Yahoo on an ex-TAC basis —… → Read More
BlueKai and Information Resources, Inc. just announced a partnership that will enable consumer packaged goods manufacturers to access IRI’s offline shopping data through BlueKai and use it to target ads.
This is the first time BlueKai has built a product for CPG advertisers and their agencies/ad buyers, the company said. BlueKai’s senior director of business development Jeffrey Teng told me… → Read More
The Internet Advertising Bureau just released its full-year report for 2012, showing that digital ad revenue set a new record of $36.6 billion, up 15 percent from 2011.
Mobile was the fastest-growing category, though it still accounts for a relatively small part (9 percent) of overall revenue. Mobile ad revenue totaled $3.4 billion, compared to 2011 when it grew 149 percent to $1.6 billion. → Read More
The growth in smartphone usage — supported by ever-faster mobile network speeds — is also giving rise to a much more competitive landscape among carriers, handset makers and other phone retailers targeting consumers on the hunt for new devices. Google today is releasing a report it compiled in partnership with Compete to show how that is playing out in one market in particular, the U.S. It shows… → Read More
Finnish startup Nosto has closed a $2.8 million seed round, including debt and grants, with backing from Open Ocean Capital, SanomaVentures and a number of undisclosed angel investors. The startup is building an online marketing SaaS targeting SMEs who want to amp up the power of their online stores with minimal effort and no up front cost. → Read More
A new report from online advertising company Turn suggests that costs for display advertising, video ads, and other rich media are rising, while those for mobile and social ads have fallen. The report also looks at a category of consumer that advertisers are spending heavily to reach — a group that Turn calls the “digital elite.” The report is based on activity on Turn’s ad-buying and… → Read More
Just 3 percent of small business ad spend goes online right now, but that’s going to change, and Facebook wants to become these merchants’ channel of choice. There are already 2 billion connections between people and small businesses on Facebook, and their Pages get 645 million views and 13 million comments a week, Facebook announced today. The challenge for Facebook is now educating moms and… → Read More
Sticky, a startup using eye-tracking technology to measure ad effectiveness, has raised $3 million in new funding.
The company is a rebranding of EyeTrackShop, a webcam-based eyetracking service which spun out of Tobii Technologies. The big selling point is the ability to determine not just whether an ad was served and rendered on a consumer’s screen, but whether they actually saw it. → Read More
Foursquare, the social, location-based check-in app that has been pivoting into becoming a more of platform for local search, has finally closed its Series D round of funding. Foursquare tells TechCrunch that it is $41 million, led by Silver Lake Partners in the form of a multi-year loan from the Silver Lake Waterman growth debt fund; and convertible debt from existing investors Andreessen… → Read More
Facebook today is taking another step ahead in its ad targeting strategy, which serves users advertising based on their location and online purchasing and browsing histories. The social network is launching partner categories: some 500 “unique groups”, with more to come, which are descriptors (one example: “buyers of children’s cereals”) that match up with relevant people among Facebook’s 1… → Read More
Adobe has released its Digital Video Benchmark for the U.S. for 2012, wherein the Digital Index team shows what it learned monitoring video performance throughout the year across digital platforms. The study compiles data from Adobe Marketing Cloud customers, scoring viewing habits and also monitoring ad performance. 2012 saw a massive increase in mobile viewership, according to Adobe’s numbers… → Read More
Circl a new startup helping businesses run online promotions using social media and email marketing, is launching today with already over 1,000 customers who have signed up for the platform, over 100 of which who have since gone live. Although there are plenty of competitors in this general space, what makes Circl interesting is the way it ties into mobile in order to track the success of various… → Read More
App analytics and advertising firm Flurry today announced the launch of Flurry Marketplace, its own RTB Exchange for mobile applications, which allows advertisers to bid on available ad impressions in real time. This sort of programmatic buying, already popular on the web, is just now coming into its own on mobile, and Flurry’s entrance into this space is notable because of the size of the data… → Read More
Online ad company Adknowledge just announced that it has acquired SocialWeekend Labs, a startup that built tools for developers to promote their apps, and also built its own Facebook and mobile apps (such as Birthdays+ and Photos+).
It sounds Adknowledge is most interested in the startup’s developer tools, as well its team — the company says it plans to integrate those tools into its own… → Read More
Digital advertising company OpenX announced today that it’s launching a new service called Revenue Intelligence, allowing online publishers to calculate and increase the amount of ad revenue that each piece of content is earning.
Last fall, OpenX acquired JumpTime, which provided a similar service. OpenX’s new Revenue Intelligence team is being led by JumpTime co-founder Anke Audenaert, and the… → Read More
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