Starbucks opens up loyalty programme to Spotify in new first

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Starbucks is, for the first time, opening up its loyalty programme to a third party in a new deal with Spotify that will also allow staff to influence the music playlists played instore.

The partnership means that Spotify users will have the opportunity to earn Stars as Currency for the My Starbucks Rewards loyalty programme. 

From Autumn of this year the partnership will be rolled out in a phased introduction, firstly into Starbucks US...

20 May 2015 | Advertising

App Annie’s latest purchase to create most thorough insight into smartphone users yet

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App Annie has today bought Mobidia in a deal it says will provide the most thorough insight into the two billion smartphone users worldwide yet.

The combination of App Annie’s mobile app intelligence platform and Mobidia’s mobile measurement expertise will allow for the expansion of App Annie’s Usage Intelligence data platform since it will now combine the industry’s two largest datasets into one. Initially launched as a closed...

6 May 2015 | Advertising

Marketing technology industry set for explosive revenue gains

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Companies investing in marketing technology will continue to raise their budgets, with global vendor revenue forecasted to touch $32.2 billion by 2018.

The projections, part of an IDC webinar on the marketing software revolution, reveal a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.4% and total spend of $130 billion across the five-year stretch between 2014 and 2015.

Customer relationship management software is a sizable growth sector of...

26 January 2015 | Advertising

Marketing sector braced for increased M&A activity in 2015

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) among marketing services, media and related technology companies is set to gather pace in 2015 after what has been a buoyant 2014 for the industry.

A survey by advisement company AdMedia Partners revealed that there have been year-on-year increases across the board for M&A. There was a 10% rise in respondents who made acquisitions along with a 4% growth in both mergers and companies being acquired by a strategic buyer.

AdMedia polled...

16 December 2014 | Mergers and acquisitions

Yahoo bulks up on video after $640 million Brightroll acquisition

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Programmatic video ad platform Brightroll has been purchased by Yahoo in a $640 million cash deal.

News of the acquisition broke on Yahoo’s Tumblr account where CEO Marissa Meyer talked up the deal by describing video advertising as the next evolution in display marketing technology.

“Video is display 2.0,” she said. “It’s what brand advertisers love. It’s a format that elegantly and easily transitions...

12 November 2014 | Advertising

Why Apple bought Beats for the consumers’ brains, not their headphones

“Algorithms can’t do the job alone,” Jimmy Iovine, ex-CEO of Beats and newly minted Apple executive, said when talking about how the alchemical arithmetic that determine Google’s search results, Facebook’s newsfeed, and the ads served along with them, works to a point but getting any better needs the consumer’s active involvement.

Marketers of all ilks - but especially those in the mobile and online space - would be wise to heed Iovine’s...

8 June 2014 | Advertising Technology

Facebook buys WhatsApp: The experts’ verdicts

Last night Facebook announced its intention to buy messaging provider WhatsApp for a deal totalling $19bn (£11.4bn), becoming the social network’s costliest acquisition to date.

The deal comprises an original $16bn, one quarter of which is cash and the remainder in Facebook shares, alongside another $3bn in restricted stock units granted to WhatsApp’s founders and employees.

With over 450 million WhatsApp users globally, 70% of which are active on any given...

20 February 2014 | Campaigns

Is Coupons.com really worth $1bn?

It may have never posted a profit in its 15 year history, but that fact isn't stopping Coupons.com from filing a $100m IPO.

Describing itself in the SEC filing as “a leading digital promotion platform that connects great brands and retailers with consumers”, the coupons company that Steven Boal founded in 1998 plans to use the funds it raises from the IPO for working capital and for potential acquisitions.

In the past year it bought Yub, “the world's first...

5 February 2014 | Campaigns

Emailvision is dead, long live SmartFocus: Cloud marketer changes brand name

Emailvision, the cloud-based marketing platform and CRM provider, is now SmartFocus after the company changed its name effective this morning.

“Our new site reflects our new identity and helps our customers and prospects understand how we can help them deliver real-time personalized marketing to all of their customers,” the revamped company website explains.

Why the change? Put simply, the previous name didn’t offer enough insight into what the company was...

8 October 2013 | Advertising Technology

Why Twitter’s IPO announcement has come at a perfect time

It’s been a long time in the works, but Twitter has finally announced that it is to float on the stock market as it prepares its IPO.

As is the way of these things, the news was announced in a tweet from the microblogging platform, whose intention to float comes just over a year after fellow social network Facebook went public.

Twitter wrote last night: “We’ve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This tweet does not constitute an...

13 September 2013 | Branding