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
“Wow, that was a cool ad” is not something I say often. But I was recently browsing Wookiepedia, a Star Wars Wikia site, and when I clicked an external link it popped up a half-screen interstitial for 15 seconds before redirecting me to my destination. Instead of cluttering its site with more ads, Wookiepedia let me bounce around internally for free, but “charged” me to… → Read More
Mobile ad startup Drawbridge offers technology that helps identify when multiple devices are being used by a single user — something that’s pretty appealing to advertisers, but could also have significant privacy implications. Drawbridge is announcing today that it’s partnering with privacy management company TRUSTe so that people who see Drawbridge-served ads can opt out of the targeting.
We… → Read More
I’m happy to announce that I’ll be discussing the latest trends in digital advertising with representatives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter at the end of April during TechCrunch Disrupt in New York.
My goal for the panel is to give attendees from both Madison Avenue and the startup world an overview of the latest products and opportunities from the major online ad platforms. We’ll talk about… → Read More
With a new feature called Slingshot, marketing tech startup SteelHouse wants advertisers to look beyond the click.
President and CEO Mark Douglas told me that he’s trying to tackle the problem of “viewthroughs” — people who see an ad and, even though they don’t click on it, are prompted to visit the advertiser’s website. → Read More
Dan Porter, who led Draw Something-maker OMGPOP into its $180 million acquisition by Zynga, is leaving the company just a year after the deal closed. His departure comes just on the eve of Draw Something 2′s launch, which is supposed to be the big follow-up to the original and is already live in Sweden. “Developing and launching games is a team effort, and we’re proud of the great work… → Read More
A group of MIT students created an app at a PennApps Hackathon that can do amazing things, connecting multiple iOS devices into a single, interactive screen. The app itself, which doesn’t require any kind of jailbreaking or special access and is currently available in the App Store for free, is impressive enough, but Mosaic has much bigger plans: They’ve also created an SDK to let other developers… → Read More
The market for social marketing startups is getting some natural uplift as advertising money continues to shift online and marketers experiment with alternatives to traditional ad formats that don’t make enough of a mark in the digital space. One such startup, Collective Bias, has just closed a $10.5m Series A to expand its blogger-powered social marketing model internationally. → Read More
Percolate, a startup that helps clients create and share content, is taking a big step in what co-founder James Gross calls the company’s “visual strategy.”
Obviously, images are a big part of what businesses want to share on social media. And they could do that sharing through Percolate already, but the service didn’t include many significant features to make the process easier. That’s… → Read More
Nuance, a company known for its voice technology, is getting into the advertising business.
It’s launching a new product called Voice Ads, which brings Nuance capabilities to mobile advertising. These are ads that you can actually have a (limited) conversation with, potentially creating a much more interactive and fun advertising experience — which is particularly challenging for mobile… → Read More
Video ad distribution company Jun Group has launched a new, wholly-owned subsidiary called HyprMX, offering mediation tools for mobile publishers and developers manage video ads from multiple sources.
HyprMX CEO Corey Weiner said that Jun Group runs its ads through hundreds of publishers, and it found that some of those publishers needed more help managing their inventory: “They’re just not in… → Read More
Facebook just announced some improvements to the mobile app install ads that it launched last fall, allowing app developers to target their ads with more nuance.
These ads run in Facebook’s news feed, and when clicked on, they open up the download page in the Apple App Store and Google Play marketplace. The company says that by using these ads, Poshmark has seen a 3x increase in ROI compared to… → Read More
Mobile advertising network InMobi today took one more step in its bid to be a one-stop shop for developers’ app marketing needs, in the process taking advantage of the massive fragmentation that exists on the Android platform. It has launched App Publish, a distribution platform specifically for Android apps, which lets developers push their free, paid, or freemium apps to many different Android… → Read More
Last year Facebook tested out and then launched Facebook Exchange ads in its right-hand column, a way for advertisers to market themselves to users based on those users’ online browsing habits, using a cookie-based real-time bidding platform. Those ads have proven to be some of Facebook’s strongest performing ad units, so now it’s taking them a step further, with an alpha test to extend FBX ads… → Read More
Yelp is announcing a new feature intended to highlight and quantify the value that the listing and review site provides for small businesses.
A company spokesperson told me the feature is important for two reasons. First, it helps business owners understand the impact that Yelp is already having on their revenue. Second, it gives them a baseline from which to judge the success of their… → Read More
Perhaps poor marketing is holding back Wii U sales for Nintendo. As Spike TV’s GTTV host Geoff Keighley noted on Twitter, a new campaign from Nintendo is using flyers to show just how awesome the Wii U is.
Except, instead of going after console rivals Nintendo decided to aim its attack at its own, older-generation console the Wii. To be fair, the Wii is probably the strongest competitor to the… → Read More
Shazam, the erstwhile exclusively music discovery app that has expanded into TV as a companion app letting users ‘tag’ TV shows (and ads) to get quick access to a plethora of related content, has today named a new chief product officer — poaching Daniel Danker from the BBC to lead “the product expansion of the Shazam service”. → Read More
Forrester has put out a new digital marketing report, off the back of a survey of more than 58,000 online consumers, looking at how brands can better sell themselves and create content that flies in the digital age. The poll shows trust in online banner ads in the doldrums but social media marketing doesn’t fare much better. → Read More
Vidyard, a Y Combinator alumnus and enterprise startup that sells a video marketing platform with embedded analytics tools to businesses to help them track and monetise video content, has closed a $6 million Series A led by Canada’s OMERS Ventures. Existing investors iNovia Capital and SoftTech VC also participated, along with a personal investment from Eloqua’s Jill Rowley. → Read More
When Y Combinator-incubated Perfect Audience launched last year, its stated goal was to make it easy for small advertisers (startups, small agencies, and others) to run retargeted ads on Facebook. Turns out, however, that there’s been much broader interest in the startup’s tools, with customers including enterprise companies and larger agencies. According to CEO and co-founder Brad Flora, it’s… → Read More
Human Demand, a mobile ad startup which launched last summer targeting the long tail of app developers, has since expanded its focus to brands, and is today announcing having raised an additional $900,000 in new funding. Some of that new investment is founder money, while the others leading the round include the DEV fund and ARC Angel Fund. → Read More
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