Marketers

Mobile ad revenue is on growth hormones. New estimates from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), IAB Europe and IHS Technology clocked global mobile advertising at $19.3 billion in 2013 — nearly doubling 2012’s $10.1 billion (the IAB’s previously reported 2012 figure was $8.9 billion, but IAB has since updated it to reflect actuals instead of estimates and different exchange […]

The Hispanic community is the fastest growing cohort of consumers in the United States and are prominent purchasers of CPGs. Yet many companies view this community as a single demographic when it can be segmented into multiple smaller groups, each with distinct characteristics. But brands like the family-run Goya Foods knew this wasn’t good enough. […]

Like many publishers, The Washington Post’s Kelly Andresen grapples with success metrics for native advertising campaigns. As director of ad innovations and product strategy, she has a front-row seat on her publication’s digital evolution and oversees teams that are dedicated to creating new digital advertising revenue, including native. “When you move into content marketing, it’s […]

There’s a digital ad fraud outbreak – one that gobbles up roughly $14 billion in advertising spend and between 25 and 50% of ad spend per campaign. White Ops CEO and cofounder Michael Tiffany likens the landscape to a cholera outbreak. Bots cause their devastation in a certain corner of the web and move on. White […]

As the line between standard banner ads and content recommendations blurs, the need for quality control will proliferate, experts say. While companies use content as a branding tool, Sacha Xavier, partner and media and innovation director at Neo@Ogilvy questioned whether banners idly generating impressions drive any value. “While these ads have high click rates, are […]

When B. Bonin Bough, the VP of global media and consumer engagement at Mondelēz International, took the stage Tuesday at the Cannes Lions festival, he proclaimed that he couldn’t see a reason why brands wouldn’t go completely programmatic – a sentiment he held even back in 2013. In 2014, Mondelēz set the first stages of […]

In a wide-ranging panel at Cannes, CEOs Dick Costolo (Twitter), Philippe Dauman (Viacom) and Martin Sorrell (WPP) discussed the evolution of rich media consumption on mobile devices and why marketer investment in mobile video does not yet match consumer demand. Sorrell, who opened the panel by stating WPP spends $750 million with Viacom (said Dauman: […]

IZEA, a company that connects social media content creators with brands, recently rolled out a cloud-based “Sponsorship Marketplace” to help advertisers automate content distribution and measurement. IZEA’s network is comprised of over 50,000 registered advertisers and agencies. Some of the company’s agency partners include Mindshare, Starcom, Initiative, Ogilvy and Hill Holliday. Founder and CEO Ted […]

GroupM made waves last week when Ari Bluman, chief digital investment officer for North America, said WPP Group’s media agencies will stop buying impressions in open auctions by the end of 2014. It turns out that’s not quite the case, as Brian Lesser, CEO of WPP’s Xaxis programmatic platform, made clear in public comments Tuesday […]

Penry Price has a long legacy as an advertising exec. He went from Google to Dstillery and, as of eight months ago, assumed the role of VP of marketing solutions at LinkedIn. Compared to his previous roles, Price has a slightly different imperative at LinkedIn. Because of the social network’s audience of 300 million business-minded registrants, […]

The big brands have woken up to programmatic buying, and will not be going back to sleep. The gang of marketers directly controlling their exchange-traded media platforms keeps getting larger. Its membership now includes Kimberly-Clark, Kellogg’s, American Express, Procter & Gamble, Allstate Insurance, 1-800-Flowers and Unilever. Mondelez International is the latest to seize a more […]

Procter & Gamble’s reported push to automate 70-75% of digital ad buys by year’s end underscores the convergence of TV, CPG marketing and programmatic media. “The closer we can tie shopper cart data to media, the stronger we get,” said Jen Mennes, director of media and public relations for Post Foods, during The Advertising Research […]

Consumer product goods (CPG) ad spending is in flux, as shown by the public comments of marketers like Kimberly-Clark and technology shifts such as the matching of offline data with online users to track the effectiveness of digital ads. The impact of this shift may be most visible in the area of digital video. In a […]

CBS Sports SVP and GM Jason Kint will as of May 27 serve as the new CEO of the Online Publishers Association (OPA), a non-profit trade organization representing the interests of premium online publishers like The New York Times, NBCUniversal and the Associated Press. Current OPA president Pam Horan is stepping down after 10 years. […]

Incoming CEO David Yovanno says Marin Software has unfulfilled potential to support execution of display media buys alongside search, and he wants to help it get there. “In search, which represents roughly 50% of total online marketing spend, Marin Software is a leader,” he said. “As the company grows, there’s an opportunity to leverage this […]

The relationship between procurement and marketing has always been dicey, but things may be turning a corner. New survey results previewed Wednesday at Association of National Advertisers (ANA) Advertising Financial Management Conference show that while procurement and marketing professionals may not always see eye to eye, both parties are starting to collaborate better to achieve more […]

Google’s search engine may eventually reward Web sites that use encryption and if it does, advertisers may find themselves cut off from useful data. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, hinted at the recent SMX West conference hosted by Search Engine Watch editor Danny Sullivan that Google is indeed considering revising its search […]

During his three years at Kellogg Company, Bob Arnold became a poster child for programmatic buying at the brand marketer level. Arnold, who recently quit cereal to join Google, presented his rules for programmatic at the Association of National Advertisers’ Media Leadership Conference in Boca Raton, Fla., on Tuesday. His key message: Don’t let complexity […]

Programmatic buying is on marketers’ radar, with new survey data from the Association of National Advertisers  finding strong adoption of platform-driven buying across a range of media types. But familiar barriers continue to hinder adoption, including a lack of understanding about what programmatic is. Thirty-nine percent of respondents to the ANA survey – which was conducted […]

Skullcandy knows that getting consumers to buy multiple designer headphones and earbuds can be a tough sell. After issuing an initial public stock offering at $20 a share in 2011, the Park City, Utah-based company’s stock fell as low as $4.80 last May and hovered at $9.54 on Friday. The company has vowed to turn […]

Digital think tank and research consultancy L2 is looking to corner the market on prestige brand and CPG strategy. A new investment round of $16.5 million from General Catalyst Partners (a HubSpot investor) received Wednesday also underscores the intersection of the management consultancy and digital agency. “The two primary buckets for this investment will be […]

“Marketer’s Note” is a weekly column informing marketers about the rapidly evolving, digital marketing technology ecosystem. It is written by Joanna O’Connell, Director of Research, AdExchanger.   As part of my ongoing look at companies’ migration toward a customer lifecycle management approach (or not, as I must always point out, as this is by no means […]

The world’s biggest advertiser wants more targeting. According to comments made Friday by Chief Financial Officer Jon Moeller, Procter & Gamble (P&G) has seized the audience segmentation opportunities presented by mobile, social and other digital media. Meanwhile the relatively weak targeting of the TV channel has stripped away some of its appeal, he said. “[Digital […]

The proliferation of DVR services, set-top boxes and IPTV services has created a wealth of data marketers can mine. But the process by which one can purchase these targeted, data-driven ads is still in its infancy. For instance, extending programmatic buying concepts to “advanced television” (a custom system that algorithmically optimizes media against an advertiser’s […]

The advertiser imperative is simple: send the right message to the right user at the right time. The growth of the connected car has presented even more opportunities for brands to reach consumers in a context-specific environment and some service providers have risen to the challenge, like online radio company Pandora, which just began rolling […]

Yahoo is mothballing some of the most prominent and widely known parts of its ad tech system, including pioneering real-time bidding platform Right Media and its data management software Genome, executives announced at the company’s CES presentation. And in their place, Yahoo Advertising will serve as the umbrella for a variety of capabilities, with the […]

Pandora’s evolution bodes well for advertisers looking for enhanced targeting opportunities in a multiscreen world. At CES 2014, Pandora and WPP Group media agency Mindshare toured how the online radio service is acclimating to an omnichannel environment, in the process developing enhanced personalization capabilities that both Pandora’s users and advertisers can leverage. At the core […]

Skills in data-driven disciplines are in high demand, and many marketers are picking up the quantitative skills they need on the job. The problem, said John Deighton, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, is that while many marketers obtain quantitative skills as they work, business students, including marketers, are at a disadvantage […]

Enterprise software companies are racing to soak up marketers’ budgets by building out their marketing suites with acquisitions, partnerships and new products. Those players include Adobe, Salesforce.com, Oracle and IBM. As the year comes to a close, here’s a snapshot look at these companies’ marketing stacks and some of the gaps that each company has […]

LinkedIn delved deeper into marketing with its launch Tuesday of Showcase Pages, through which companies can feature specific products within their branded pages. Designed as an extension of LinkedIn’s Company Pages, users that follow Showcase Pages will receive updates on products, events or other content. “We tell marketers, ‘Yes, we’re a professional network, but people […]