Advertising

In today’s increasingly complex and fragmented marketing landscape, a growing number of consumers navigate via both online and offline channels – as well as across devices – on their journey to a purchase or other conversion. While this shift has made it easier for consumers to engage with brands, it has made it extremely difficult for Continue Reading →

Snapchat has earned the favor of the coveted teen demographic, but can it turn engagement into money? The Wall Street Journal reports that the startup is in talks to launch Snapchat Discovery, a service that would partner with media companies and brands to serve video content and ads. Sources told the paper that Snapchat is Continue Reading →

Twitter is back in experimental mode, but its latest test is annoying people. A sizable number of users are seeing tweets favorited by others in their timeline, just like retweets. They are also getting notifications when others follow someone new. This was first brought to my attention a couple of weeks ago, but Twitter appears Continue Reading →

Ethan Zuckerman is sorry. Zuckerman, who leads the Center for Civic Media at MIT, says he didn’t realize what he was bringing into the world when he wrote the code for the first pop-up ad more than 20 years ago.  He tells the story of how it happened in an exquisite essay about how the Continue Reading →

Industry publications predict growing budgets dedicated to programmatic, which will consume larger percentages of brands’ total digital spending across various company sizes, verticals and countries. In spite of this, there still exists ambiguity about how these types of media-buying systems work. That, coupled with the instantaneous nature of real-time bidding decisions and the anonymity of Continue Reading →

Eighty-seven percent of brands and agencies plan to spend at least 50% more on programmatic buys of desktop display, mobile and video advertising in the next six months, according to a survey conducted by AOL Platforms of executives at 25 advertisers, 96 agencies and 56 publishers. Display’s growth is driven by access to premium formats Continue Reading →

Twitter announced on Tuesday it will begin beta testing a new feature called “Promoted Video,” which is aimed at brands looking to upload and distribute their videos to the Twitter network. The feature, which expands upon the Twitter Amplify program, was previously revealed during Twitter’s recent earnings announcement, when new CFO Anthony Noto teased the Continue Reading →

Ask anyone who uses Twitter what their biggest gripe about the service is, and the answer may very well be DMs. Direct Messages (DMs, aka private messages between users) are a part of Twitter that ‘power’ users have been hooked on since before WhatsApp, WeChat, Line and other billion dollar-valued mobile messaging apps even existed. Continue Reading →

Twitter has announced that its Promoted Tweets ad platform has been revamped to allow businesses to better specify the type of campaign they want to run across the social network. From Thursday, small-to-medium size businesses (SMBs) and Twitter API partners can access objective-based ad campaign options in beta, thereby allowing brands to create campaigns that Continue Reading →

In its latest effort to boost advertising by small businesses, Google said its YouTube unit had acquired Directr, a mobile-video app used by small businesses to create marketing videos. No purchase price was disclosed. Directr offers a mobile app for Apple’s iOS platform that makes it easy for small businesses to shoot, edit and upload Continue Reading →