Marin Software, a company that helps advertisers manage large online ad campaigns, has raised $30 million in a new round of funding.
Founded in 2006, Marin initially offered tools to manage search advertising campaigns, but it has expanded into display, mobile, and social media campaigns, and the company now bills itself as “the world’s leading online advertising management platform.” Marin says it doubled its customer base in the last year and now works with more than 1,500 advertisers and advertising agencies, who use the company’s services to manage $3.5 billion in annualized ad spending. → Read More
As part of its 2012 US Digital Future in Focus whitepaper, comScore looked at the online ad landscape and found a mix of old and new names. The report includes a list of the top 10 display advertisers in the United States (all of this data is US-only), as measured by impressions. As in previous years, AT&T topped the list, but there’s a newcomer — Google, which delivered 40.4 billion ads for products like Chrome, Google Offers, and Google+.
Large brand advertising on the Internet is growing in general, comScore says. To quantify that, it measured the number of advertisers delivering at least 1 billion impressions per quarter. There were 145 advertisers in that league during the final quarter of 2011, up 38 percent from the same period in 2010. → Read More
Startup SoftKinetic just announced a new kind of advertising, one that combines its gesture-control technology with Intel’s video analytics.
The goal is for people to walk up to a digital display equipped with SoftKinetic’s 3D camera and move their arms (or the rest of their body) to interact with the display, similar to Microsoft Kinect. Then, as you’re moving, Intel’s AIM technology can identify your age and gender, which is crucial information for advertisers — and also useful for personalizing the content to each viewer. → Read More
A month after its expansion to Android, Chartboost, the newly launched (already profitable) direct deals mobile ad marketplace for game developers is expanding to Asia. Starting today, the company is rolling out localized versions in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
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Independent mobile ad network InMobi has released its Mobile Market 2011 Review report today, finding significant growth in mobile advertising over the past year, with global smartphone impressions up by 488%. The company also saw 251% growth in mobile impressions on its network, which includes tablet devices and smartphones combined.
Tablet impressions alone grew by an incredible 771% year-over-year, up to 1.2 billion. And the market is growing still, led by, of course, Apple’s iPad. → Read More
San Francisco-based 4Mads is a new, angel-funded startup in the adtech space which allows SMB’s and local brands the ability to create both online and mobile rich media ads. The service, which has been in private testing for the past year, just went live this week with the launch of its one-stop shop and easy to use, drag-and-drop tools.
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Today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Samsung launched its advertising platform, Samsung AdHub, for Samsung Smart TVs. With the new service, publishers and brands will be able to deliver video, 3D, and interactive advertisements to the living room through the Samsung Smart TV interface.
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Adzerk, the ad-serving technology startup which raised $650K in seed funding this July, is launching its next phase, called adOS. The new platform is intended as an evolution of its current product, and is offering improved ad-serving code plus a marketplace where publishers can find third-party apps to install. Yep – it’s an app store for ad tech. → Read More
Twitter unveiled a major redesign today which will be rolling out slowly. We’ve covered some of the main aspects already such as the new timeline and discover features, as well as how Twitter is trying to become more mainstream and accessible.
One major change for brands, however, is new brand pages. Not everyone can see what these look like yet, so I’ve pasted some screenshots here from @AmericanExpress, @generalelectric, @JetBlue, and @@McDonalds. The two big changes are a new banner just below the profile information that stretches across the page and the ability to pin a tweet at the top of each brand’s stream. This will give brands a more distinctive presence on Twitter, and should roll out more widely in the first quarter of 2012. → Read More
Chartboost, the newly launched (already profitable) direct deals marketplace for mobile game developers is today announcing its expansion to Android. The company provides free ad-serving technology for direct deals and cross-promotions via its Chartboost SDK, allowing publishers to retain 100% of the revenue share on their direct deals. Meanwhile, the company’s opt-in ad network offers revenue sharing with publishers to help fill unsold inventory.
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The Justice Dept. finally gave the greenlight today to Google’s proposed $400 million acquisition of AdMeld. The deal was announced in June, and the review took almost six months. The government will not impose any major restrictions on the deal, which is now free to close in the next few days.
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Washington, D.C.-based video indexing and discovery startup Veenome has raised $500, 000 in seed funding from Ecosystem Ventures (investors in Tube Mogul and Facebook), plus private angel investors from Google, Dingman Center Angels, as well as Chegg founder Aayush Phumhra and the founder of WebMetrics Tim Drees.
The company uses proprietary automated video recognition technology to scan video clips for products, brands and objects which can be tagged and indexed. → Read More
As Erick wrote in September, over the course of the last year, Fotopedia has been hard at work at trying to reinvent the photo book for the iPad. To date, the so-called “Wikipedia for photos” has launched seven apps, two of which have been in partnership with National Geographic, and has racked up 5.2 million downloads since August of last year.
In September, as part of turning its attention to creating more magazine-like experiences, it launched the Fotopedia Magazine on Flipboard, which highlights five photo essays each day of the week from the company’s impressive bullpen of high-end photographers. And, today, Fotopedia is launching its eighth app and, in turn, is embarking on a new initiative that aims to leverage its photographic talent to begin creating branded experiences in magazine form, combining advertising with “premium content”. → Read More
Here’s some good news for web video publishers and producers. Online video advertising budgets are expected to jump sharply in 2012. Brand advertisers who purchased online video ads this year are projected to spend 47 percent more next year. These numbers were released this morning in the second annual “Video State of the Industry Survey” by Adap.tv and Digiday.
For advertisers that didn’t purchase any video ads so far this year, 84% say they will include digital video in their campaigns in Q4 2011 or 2012.
Advertisers say they are most likely to shift spending away from display and print ads to fund the increased online video spending. While some have feared online video might start replacing TV ad spending, the report claims television ad budgets, especially for cable, are safe for now. A majority of advertisers say online video ads are a direct compliment to TV, not a replacement for TV ads. → Read More
The new direct-deals mobile advertising marketplace Chartboost is announcing today that it has raised $2 million in Series A funding, after having just launched at the beginning of the October. Investors in this rounded included TransLink Capital, SK Telecom Ventures and XG Ventures, the latter a former investor in Tapulous before its Disney acquisition. → Read More
Mobile advertising startup AppRedeem has just launched App Trailers, a new product that rewards you for viewing videos about mobile apps. The service, available here from the iTunes App Store, doesn’t use the same model as typical incentivized install programs do today. Instead, users are given points for watching a trailer, then are provided with the option to download the app at the end of the video. Only if a users taps “yes” is the advertiser charged.
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New direct-deal advertising marketplace Chartboost launches today, allowing mobile game developers to use cross-promotion techniques to increase the size of their game’s user base, and therefore, its revenues. The company was created by former Tapulous employees, Maria Alegre, now Chartboost CEO, and Sean Fannan, CTO.
After Disney’s acquisition of Tapulous, the Chartboost founders decided to help start a platform to give other game publishers the same ability to maximize their distribution power, something that they felt was Tapulous’ most valuable asset. → Read More
Back in May, we reported that Facebook now accounts for one out of three ad impressions in the U.S., and that, really, no other web property in the U.S. comes close (Yahoo was second with 10 percent). That means that Facebook served approximately 340 billion ads in the first quarter. It’s probably not a surprise, then, that advertising makes up for about 89 percent of the social network’s total revenues, which are estimated at about $1.6 billion for the first six months of 2011.
Today, on Citi’s third quarter search marketing trends call, the panelists discussed the current landscape of search advertising, among other things that Google is maintaining its dominant market share in advertising spend on search, at 80 to 81 percent of total spend. While the panelists said that they’re not seeing much demand for social search ad targeting, there is obviously a ton of interest in marketing on Facebook. → Read More
Facebook has teamed up with the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in an effort it claims will help grow American small businesses and create jobs. Starting in January 2012, Facebook will give businesses up to $10 million in free Facebook advertising in the form of ad credits. The goal is to provide 200,000 businesses in the U.S. with a $50 boost.
Meanwhile, Facebook, NFIB and the U.S. Chamber will provide businesses with webinars, collateral, case studies and tips educating business owners on how reach new customers on Facebook. → Read More
Mobile ad optimization platform Smaato, Inc. released the results of its latest mobile advertising report today, for Q2 2011. The findings include a look at mobile ad adoption, fill rates and the overall effect on mobile ad network performance.
Smaato’s Mobile Metric Report, based on over 80 million ad requests and over 60 connected ad networks across 230 countries, found that ad inventory was increasing at a faster rate than budgets, leading to a decline in advertising fill rates.
It also found that Windows Phone led iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Symbian in click-through rates both in the U.S. and worldwide. → Read More
