If you’ve ever interacted with a chatbot and felt like there was just something missing, the founders of a new startup called Conversive think they know the missing element — face-to-face interaction. And that, essentially, is what they’re trying to enable with their technology. Conversive customers can create a character (animated or recorded human) to represent them, place… Read More
Category: Advertising Tech
Twitter’s $99 monthly subscription ad program launches into public beta
Twitter unveiled in its Q3 earnings report that it had been testing a new, self-serve advertising subscription aimed at small businesses. That service, known as Twitter Promote Mode, is officially launching today with the goal of letting small businesses and personal brands more easily run ad campaigns on Twitter’s platform by automating them, for the price of $99 per month. As… Read More
Promote helps any online marketplace get into the ad business
The latest company to emerge from startup accelerator Expa Labs is focused on helping online marketplaces make money from advertising. Promote founder and CEO Siddharth Vora used to lead the engineering team for advertising products at StumbleUpon. (StumbleUpon’s founder Garrett Camp went on to start Expa, which runs Expa Labs.) Vora said he became convinced that with their user data… Read More
Instagram pushes more influencers to adopt its new format for sponsored posts
Instagram is moving forward with the rollout of its branded content tool, which allows celebrities and other popular users to identify posts that are paid for by advertisers. The company first introduced the tool in June, then made it available t…
View More Instagram pushes more influencers to adopt its new format for sponsored postsPhotoslurp bags $870k for its ‘shop the look’ UGC marketing platform
Bootstrapping Barcelona-based visual commerce startup Photoslurp has taken its first external funding: Announcing €750,000 (~$870k) in pre-Series A financing, led by Spanish VC Inveready Technology Investment Group, with participation from Bankinter VC, Caixa Capital Risc and ICF. Read More
Sources: Snap has acquired Metamarkets for less than $100M to step up its ad tech play
As Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, gears up to report its quarterly earnings next week, it looks like the company is making some moves to beef up its primary business line, advertising. TechCrunch has learned that the company has acquired Metamarkets, an ad tech startup that provides programmatic ad data-related services to marketers, such as a data dashboard to measure how campaigns… Read More
DoubleDutch CEO Bryan Parker is out after a couple of months
Live engagement marketing platform DoubleDutch has replaced CEO Bryan Parker, who was appointed from COO to CEO just two months ago, TechCrunch has learned. Lawrence Coburn, founder of DoubleDutch, has since been reinstated as CEO. DoubleDutch’s board made the decision to replace Parker with Coburn today, according to a source familiar with the situation. Parker first joined the… Read More
‘Digital experience’ company Instart Logic raises $30M for global expansion
Instart Logic has raised $30 million in Series E funding. The company describes its technology as a “digital experience platform.” If that sounds vague, it’s partly because Instart Logic actually has a broad range of products, covering everything from performance optimization, image optimization, application firewall and its own content delivery network. Founder and CEO… Read More
Trump and Clinton spent $81M on US election Facebook ads, Russian agency $46K
Russian information troll farm the Internert Research Agency spent just 0.05% as much on Facebook ads as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s campaigns combined in the run up to the 2016 US presidential election. Clinton and Trump spent $81 million, while the IRA spent $46,000. Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch revealed these figures today during the Senate Intelligence… Read More
Shoppable video startup Cinematique has a new CEO and $1.4M in new funding
Cinematique has a new CEO — investor and entrepreneur Paul Dawalibi. The startup describes its product as enabling “touchable video.” In other words, when you’re watching a Cinematique-powered video, you can tap or click on different items to save them and learn more later, and in some cases buy the featured product. Dawalibi (whose long résumé includes a stint as VC… Read More
In their first Russia hearing, tech giants try to placate Congress (with mixed results)
On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee kicked off the first of three hearings this week examining the relationship between social media and Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The hearings mark the first time that lawmakers will hear testimony from Google, Facebook and Twitter around how their platforms were and are manipulated as part of Russian political… Read More
Congress grills Facebook, Twitter, Google on shells hiding election meddlers
How can Internet giants know that innocent-seeming US companies aren’t actually shell vehicles for malicious foreign actors to buy ads to interfere with elections? The short answer is they can’t, and that drew questioning from a congressional probe today into Facebook, Twitter, and Google being used to manipulate the 2016 presidential election. The hearing saw Facebook’s… Read More