Ciaran O'Kane
CEO
Articles by Ciaran
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Why Telcos Are Going to Smash the Google/Facebook Ad Duopoly
The Yahoo saga is finally over. After the most protracted sales process of recent times, Verizon acquired Yahoo’s core assets (content properties, email, search, and an assortment of ad technology) for nearly USD$5bn (£3.8bn). It is likely that Mayer will disappear into the sunset with a considerable payoff – and Verizon has, at last, added a critical piece to its overall offering, which will help it take on the growing Google/Facebook hegemony.
From my high-level perspective, this is a fantastic deal. Verizon will scale, adding several [...]
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King: Testing New Reward Video Ad Format to Monetise 400+ Million Users
King is rumoured to be launching a media business later this year to help build revenue around its incredibly sticky global audience of 463 million monthly active users.
The gaming giant has already made a number of key hires in the new part of the business – most notably Lucia Mastromauro, poached from Google, to be King’s UK MD.
King needs to steer away from interruptive advertising, as it has been proven that this negatively affects in-app purchases. The game-playing experience is [...]
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Why Mobile Is Primed For Ad Tech Innovation – And That Emoji Ad Network
It’s the mobile industry’s big week – when thousands of opinion formers, C-level execs, and journalists from the mobile industry flock to Barcelona to discuss all things mobile for a full week.
Amid the blizzard of hardware launches and high-level keynotes from industry leaders (Zuckerberg is keynoting again!), ad tech will again play its bit part at the show – occupying the fringes instead of rightly being prime time.
Despite its ‘minor’ role at MWC, ad tech is playing a vital part [...]
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Marketing Tech Bellwether Posts Decent Q4 As Potential Suitors Line Up
Marketing technology remains the hot area for digital marketing right now – with increased M&A and investment in the space. Marketo is the public market bellweather for the martech space, given its complete focus on automated marketing. It posted its Q1 earnings late last night much in line with Wall Street estimates, sending the stock higher in after hours trading.
Highlights of fourth quarter of 2015:
– Revenue for the quarter was $58.30 million, an increase of 37.6% on a year-over-year basis – [...]
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Yahoo Cuts 15% of Staff in Anaemic Fourth Quarter
Yahoo’s big news to Wall Street, in its Q4 earnings, was the announcement that it is cutting 15% of its workforce; and looking to reduce costs by USD$400m (£277.6m) by the end of the year. Its Q4 results were in line with Wall Street analysts’ expectations. The company posted fourth-quarter earnings of USD$1.27bn (£881.5m) in revenue; but reported a full year loss of USD$4.44bn (£3.05bn) due to a goodwill impairment – mostly coming from the write-down of the lame duck [...]
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Telenor Acquires Tapad For USD$360M As Telco Ad Tech Stack Race Continues
Telenor, a leading telco in APAC and Europe, has acquired Tapad for USD$360m (£252m). Tapad is a leading device graph company.
The device graph is the hottest point solution in ad tech right now, with continued M&A speculation around remaining players in this space like Drawbridge, Screen6 and AdBrain.
What’s the rationale behind this deal? The thinking from Telenor is simple: to monetise hundreds of millions of its existing [...]
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80% Of Facebook's USD$5bn Quarterly Ad Revenue Comes From Mobile
Facebook strengthened its position as the leader in mobile display after delivering a strong Q4. The company announced in earnings that it is now making over USD$5bn (£3.49bn) in digital advertising revenue. Eighty percent of that is now coming from mobile.
Financial Highlights for 2015
– Revenue for the full year 2015 was USD$17.93bn (£12.53bn), an increase of 44% year-over-year – Income from operations for the full year 2015 was USD$6.23bn (£4.35bn) – Net income for the full year 2015 was USD$3.69bn (£2.58bn) – [...]
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Could You Excuse Me? My Fridge Is Talking to Me.
It is CES week, and everything in your home is becoming ‘smart’. You have intelligent washing machines, telling you when your washing is done. You have cerebral thermometers, adjusting heat to your preferred selection via an app on your phone. And you now have fridges that inform when you have run out of your favourite cheddar cheese.
These IoT advances might appear a little faddish, but for programmatic [...]
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Why the Existential Crisis of Ad Tech is Overblown
This is not a prediction piece. It is not even a listicle of half-baked predictions – cleverly disguised as a post – based on either some patchy M&A conversations I overheard in a bar, or my ‘expert’ insight.
I am not going to tell you who will acquire whom because, like everyone else in this space, I have no idea. There are enough of those speculative pieces floating around, popping up on the trade sites and clogging up my LinkedIn newsfeed.
No, this [...]
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'Ad Tech Personality of the Year' Shortlist Announced
With ATS London (now sold-out) just a matter of days away, we are announcing our short list for our first ‘Ad Tech Personality of the Year’ award.
This prestigious prize will be awarded at the end of our sixth ATS London, this coming Monday, 14 September.
It will be decided on the day by attendees via our event app. We have had many nominations for the award, but only four deserving candidates made the short list.
Using a patented ‘black box’ [...]
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