Direct-to-consumer is one of the most evolving, talked-about, and exciting trends in business at the moment, spanning sectors from fashion and apparel, to insurance and finance. In this Q&A, Julian Stiefel, co-CEO & founder, Tourlane, a leading online travel agency, explains how his business is differentiating from traditional brands, the company’s acquisition strategy, and how they are building loyalty. Tell us how your product differs from more traditional legacy brands in your sector? The difference to other pure booking platforms is [...]

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When Uber launched a new subscription service earlier this month, it joined a long list of digital brands that have sought to drive long-term loyalty using a subscription model. Whilst ‘Uber Ride Pass‘ is currently only being trialled in five U.S. cities and won’t be reaching UK shores anytime soon, Alex Hamilton (pictured below), head of innovation, Isobar, feels that it’s a telling glimpse into a future where brands own a particular category or sub-category and lock customers in through [...]

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Reality Clash is an in-development mobile AR shooter that integrates blockchain, cryptocurrencies, dynamic in-game advertising, and geo-mapping technology into the gameplay experience it offers. Yes… there are a lot of tech buzzwords in that opening line. We’d only need to throw in AI and VR and it might seem like a parody of contemporary marketing parlance. But in truth, there’s often a meaningful reality hidden somewhere behind the hype of headline-grabbing tech trends. And it just so happens that Reality Clash [...]

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This week UK monetisation outfit Admix revealed that it had secured an impressive USD$2.1m (£1.63m) in funding to further develop its AR and VR advertising platform. As reported by Tech.EU, Admix was only founded in 2017, with a focus on allowing developers to place advertisements programatically that sit contextually inside content. A simple, hypothetical example would a be a VR game set in a sprawling city. Admix’s platform could allow a developer to assure that programmatic ads appeared only as billboards on [...]

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You don’t need to be a devoted games industry observer to have noticed something of the recent rise of eSports. Organised competitive gaming has been around along time, of course. eSports’ nascent form was forged in the earliest arcade gaming tournaments in the 1970s, where players competed to win a patch declaring their prowess; presumably to be sewn onto an oversized distressed denim jacket. By the 1990s the notion of a ‘pro-gamer’ making money from prize winnings was established, but even then [...]

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The future is bright; the future is ad tech. Ahead of taking the stage at ATS London on Monday, 10 September, where he will join a panel to discuss why the future is independent ad tech, Ari Lewine (pictured below), co-founder and CSO, TripleLift, gives his take on the future of ad tech. ExchangeWire: There’s been a lot of negativity around ad tech over the past 12 months, but what aspects can we be positive about? Ari Lewine: I’m optimistic about the future of [...]

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Data science has increasingly been at the forefront of developments in advertising and marketing technology; and with very good reason. In the video space, data science is a crucial element for ensuring brand objectives are met against billions of data signals. In this piece for ExchangeWire, Dr Jon Morra, vice president, data science, Zefr, details the three components of data science in delivering those objectives for brands advertising on YouTube. We believe that advertisers and brands should be able to place [...]

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Following a lively on-stage discussion about the new era in the convergence of ad tech and martech at ATS Singapore in June, ExchangeWire speaks with panelists Yiorgos Hadjiandrea, head of media buying solutions, Southeast Asia, Google; and Jess O’Reilly, regional sales director, marketing cloud, Asia, Salesforce (both pictured below) about why the quest for customer centricity is one of the major driving factors of this convergence. ExchangeWire: What do we mean by ‘customer-centric’ marketing? Yiorgos Hadjiandrea, Google: Customer-centric marketing means putting [...]

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In July 2018, the IAB Tech Lab released the technical specifications of the latest iteration of the OpenRTB protocol, version 3.0, built upon the framework released in September 2017. Previous versions have included major updates to support native, video, audio, and header bidding, to name a few, but OpenRTB 3.0 will represent an evolution of the protocol. Writing for ExchangeWire, Pranay Damji, consultant, The Programmatic Advisory, provides an overview of what OpenRTB 3.0 is and what it aims to achieve. According [...]

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ExchangeWire rounds up some of the biggest stories in the European digital advertising space. In this week’s edition: UK Q1 2018 Ad Spend Beats Forecast; Partnership Between FreeWheel & Integral Ad Science; New Footfall Tracking Capabilities by mediasmart; Cedato Introduces Contextual Lookalike Targeting; and Tapjoy & Winclap Partner. UK Q1 2018 Ad Spend Beats Forecast The first quarter of 2018 has been the strongest first quarter, in terms of ad spend in the UK, for three years. According to the latest Advertising Association/WARC [...]

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