Snapchat is peceived as a vital tool for engaging with youth and millennials but marketers face challenges in attempting to measure the results of their work with influencers.Unlike other social networks, Snapchat offers little in the way of performance metrics and what there is, is not publicly available. Marketers are reduced to relying on influencers taking a screenshot of their personal analytics page in order to understand how many people have seen a video. "You can have millions of dollars paid out in these campaigns, and they're basically being run on screenshots and text messages between C-level executives and …

More news on the AppNexus debacle. The Drum reports that the company has claimed that a crackdown on invalid traffic on its platform helped kick off a record increase in the price advertisers are willing to pay for quality inventory during the last quarter, with a separate initiative from the ad tech platform seeing view through rates rocket by 77%. The findings are in its latest Digital Advertising Index, which also documents the period when the ad tech outfit launched its AppNexus IQ scheme that saw it ditch traffic that it deemed invalid, thus limiting the amount available …

In AdExchanger's Data-Driven Thinking column, Tom Triscari, CEO of Labmatik takes a fascinating look at walled garden trends, analyzing four eras of walled gardens in terms of bargaining power and the two main forces driving growth. "It became apparent that innovation and investment ebb and flow from one era to the next. Advertisers with data prowess will maintain bargaining power in a walled garden world." Triscari argues that unlike topics like ad blocking, header bidding, viewability, transparency and tech taxes, walled gardens "are cyclical with profound long-term implications". He maintains that all walled gardens must eventually come down but in …

Digiday reported that the vast majority of brands plan to bring their programmatic video trading in-house, if they haven’t already, an AOL report on the state of the European video marketplace revealed. Just under a half of brands surveyed said they had moved some of their programmatic video buying capabilities in-house, with another 47 percent of brands saying they plan to do so in the next 12 months.

Google is offering programmatic ads for native content and mobile video publishers, working with its DoubleClick clients like eBay. Such publishers can make native ad units available for programmatic demand on Google's open-auction and private marketplaces. The feature is now available in apps and will be available within a few months for cross-screen native ads. "There's no question that the rise of mobile has reshaped the consumer journey from dedicated online sessions to hundreds of micro-moments where they turn to the nearest device to answer a need in the moment," Google's director of product management Jonathan Bellack wrote in a …

VentureBeat has a take on Apple's ad-blocking strategy. With Apple promoting ad blocking with its iOS9 release, and with the whole online advertising ecosystem running counter to Apple’s best interests from a revenue perspective, it seems Apple is determined to funnel as much content as possible through native apps such as iTunes versus the mobile Web. The company’s primary claim is that native channels make for a better user experience, but that’s not all they do; they also mean more money for Apple through revenue sharing. If publishers move valuable content into native apps, then they have to share subscription …

EE, the UK's biggest mobile operator, has entered the ad blocking debate with the mobile giant’s chief executive Olaf Swantee revealing that it has kicked off an “internal strategic review" on how to give its 27 million customers control over the type and number of ads they receive. Speaking to The Sunday Telegraph newspaper, Swantee said: “We think it’s important that, over time, customers start to be offered more choice and control over the level and intensity of ads on mobile. ...For EE, this is not about ad blocking, but about starting an important debate around customer choice, controls and …

Everyone should be concerned with the effect of ad blocking on political campaigns, argued Matt De­Luca, VP-of di­git­al strategy at digital political agency En­gage, in a National Journal article earlier this month. Candidates might make plans to reach prospective voters online, the thinking goes, only to be automatically stiff-armed by ad blockers. o be sure, ad blocking affects political campaigns and advocacy groups as much as any other advertiser. ... But, as Kate Kaye argues, "let's remember a few things before we start …

Consumers now spend more than 50% of their digital screen time on mobile devices, yet you couldn’t tell by looking at the industry’s revenue figures. In 2014, desktop advertising was a $37 billion business in the U.S., while mobile generated about a third of that, according to the IAB. Reasons abound for the gap. Smaller screens make it hard to squeeze in a lot of ads. The ad industry is more comfortable buying desktop ads. However, perhaps the biggest factor holding mobile ad spending back is the industry’s relatively slow response to programmatic buying on mobile.The lack of a standard …

ITV has become the first broadcaster to offer brands the chance to sync their TV spots with online ads under a new partnership with programmatic ad platform RadiumOne. The move is designed to extend reach to include people who may be watching the TV programme but start multi-screening during the ad break or those who fit the target group of the TV ad but were not watching TV in the first place, but are currently online.