SmartNews

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Heads Will Roll CEO Kirk McDonald is out at GroupM North America, Insider reports. WPP’s revenue growth tumbled in the US this year, which the company blamed on tech clients curtailing their ad spend. GroupM North America has fared particularly poorly, putting GroupM, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The ‘Post-Social’ Web The writing is on the wall: Big Tech is breaking up with news, and the traffic publishers used to rely on from search and social media isn’t coming back any time soon. Last week, Google cut about 40 positions from […]

SmartNews uses the first-party data it gathers from its users to create more intelligent content recommendations and serve more relevant ads. It’s also investing in its own ad stack so it can activate its first-party data by creating contextual audience segments that it can sell programmatically on the open web and as part of its new direct sales offering.

When Japan-based SmartNews raised its most recent funding round – $28 million in August – the company’s valuation hit $1.1 billion. It’s an eye-popping appraisal for a news discovery app. There aren’t many ad-supported unicorns galloping around the digital news biz these days. SmartNews has raised just over $116 million since 2013. The app, founded in Tokyo […]

Uber, Postmates, Yelp, SmartNews and other nongaming apps are scooping up growth marketing talent from the mobile gaming world – and the reasons make perfect sense. App publishers are spending more on performance marketing, and those running user acquisition at gaming companies are some of the most data-driven mobile marketers in the biz. “Gaming professionals have […]