Video advertising company Innovid has acquired another advertising startup, Taykey. We’ve written about Taykey as a tool that companies can use to target their ads based on the topics that their desired audience is interested in. Innovid says that by combining Taykey’s analysis with its own data about video engagement, it can show advertisers how targeting relevant content affects… Read More
Category: Advertising Tech
Facebook prototypes Messenger Broadcast for businesses
Facebook may soon be ready to squeeze more money out of its 1.3 billion user chat app. The company has internally developed “Messenger Broadcast”, a self-serve mass-messaging interface that lets businesses send marketing messages to users. Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s testing the feature internally, but hadn’t trialed it to the public or with businesses as… Read More
YouTube faces brand freeze over ads and obscene comments on videos of kids
YouTube is firefighting another child safety content moderation scandal which has led several major brands to suspend advertising on its platform. Read More
Meredith to buy Time with help from the Koch brothers, but says they won’t have any influence
It’s official—Meredith Corporation will buy Time Inc. in an all-cash transaction valued at $2.8 billion. Meredith said today it agreed to pay $18.50 per share for all outstanding shares of Time Inc. As reported earlier this month by the New York Times, the deal, which is slated to close in the first quarter of next year, includes equity financing from the billionaire Koch brothers,… Read More
Makers or breakers?
The weight of problems being demonstrably attached to heavily used tech services has acquired such a gravitational and political pull that it’s becoming harder and harder for these businesses to sidestep wider societal responsibilities. Read More
Snapchat seeks salvation in long-form and “hands-on” AR ads
Snap Inc’s stock tanked after missing revenue expectations by $30 million last quarter, so Snapchat is looking to win over businesses with immersive new ads formats. This week it introduced two new forms of ads: Promoted Stories which string together multiple Snaps into a longer-form slideshows openable from a tile on the Stories page that’s shown to everyone in a given country,… Read More
AppLovin scraps acquisition and takes debt financing instead
The story of AppLovin‘s acquisition has taken another turn. We first reported that the mobile ad startup was in acquisition talks in August of last year, and the announcement came a month later: AppLovin would sell a majority stake Chinese private equity firm Orient Hontai Capital. Today, however, CEO Adam Foroughi revealed that the deal is (sort of) off. Instead of an outright… Read More
With Dabbl, you can earn gift cards for interacting with ads
Dabbl is giving users a straightforward reason to interact with ads — the ads earn them money in the form of gift cards. For example, when I signed up for Dabbl this morning, I was presented with a menu of several different campaigns. The first one that I chose was from Oreo, where I answered a bunch of questions about how I feel and what I know about Oreo products. The whole thing… Read More
Airbnb acquires ad tech startup AdBasis
It looks like accessibility isn’t the only thing that Airbnb wants to upgrade on its platform. On the same day that Airbnb announced that it acquired Accomable, an “Airbnb for disabled travellers”, it has emerged that it’s also made another small acquisition. Airbnb has acquired adtech startup AdBasis, which had built a platform and dashboard for ad testing and… Read More
Latest round of Verizon layoffs at Oath affects <4% of staff globally
Verizon has initiated another round of layoffs as a result of its acquisition of Yahoo and subsequent combining of the company with its existing business property AOL to form a new division — called Oath. Read More
With $70M from Alphabet, United Masters replaces record labels
The records labels are obsolete. They haven’t kept up as music evolved from selling CDs to streaming songs to promote concert tickets and merchandise. Labels were meant to help artists generate albums, fame, and money. But now anyone can record themselves and no will “buy” it. So today that requires being a technology company, combining analytics with hyper-targeted advertising. Read More
I watched 1,000 hours of YouTube Kids’ content and this is what happened…
What do you get if you endlessly recombine Spiderman and the Joker with Elsa from Frozen and lashings of product placement for junk food brands like McDonalds? Read More
View More I watched 1,000 hours of YouTube Kids’ content and this is what happened…