More than music: How Spotify, Apple & Amazon promote their streaming platforms with display ads

Remember the days when listening to your favorite artist meant buying a record or CD? While vinyl album sales are on a strong upward trajectory, it’s fair to say we’re living in the digital music age. Streaming overtook physical sales and downloads for the first time in 2018, and it’s hard to see that trend reversing any time soon. Which is music to the ears of the streaming industry, with 91 percent of US internet users listening via some...

Phil Norris

Programmatic Advertising - 6 min read

The battle of Tax Day: Analyzing TurboTax, H&R Block and TaxAct’s display ad strategies

Tax Day wouldn’t rank too highly on most people’s lists of favorite dates. But for the tax software industry, it’s like Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day, and Black Friday all rolled into one. Per CivicScience, 39 percent of Americans in 2024 prepared (or planned to prepare) their taxes using tax software, with 23 percent using a free tool and 16 percent choosing a paid platform. Intuit TurboTax is comfortably the most popular tax tool, but there are a bunch of...

Phil Norris

Programmatic Advertising - 6 min read

Netflix vs Amazon: The display ad battle for our streaming bucks

In a world where 95 percent of Americans pay for more than one streaming service, it’s hard to remember a time when we weren’t all hooked on video-on-demand (VoD). But it hasn’t always been this way. Netflix may not have been the world’s first streaming company, but it was certainly the platform that brought the business model to the mass market. Yet for the first decade of its existence, the company didn’t even do streaming — it was a...

Phil Norris

Programmatic Advertising - 6 min read

Inside Samsung’s $150M+ display ad strategy: Can it overtake Apple?

Founded in 1938, Samsung is a South Korean conglomerate with affiliates selling everything from life insurance to engineering services to oil tankers. But, from a B2C perspective, the company is best known for appliances and other electronics products. It’s the world’s second-biggest smartphone manufacturer, with a market share of 16.3 percent as of Q4 2023… Source: Statista …and it’s also a major player in countless other consumer electronics niches, including smart TVs, refrigerators, and laptops. With global revenues north...

Phil Norris

Programmatic Advertising - 6 min read

2023’s top-spending display advertisers: Who they are & what they did

Digital advertising showed no signs of slowing in 2023, with global spending reaching an estimated $423.3 billion — accounting for approximately $3 in every $5 spent on ads worldwide. But who’s spending all that money, and how are they spending it? To answer those questions, we analyzed exclusive Adbeat data to identify the 10 biggest display advertisers in the US in 2023, representing a combined $4.6 billion+ of spending on video, direct, programmatic, and native ads throughout the year....

Phil Norris

Programmatic Advertising - 6 min read

There’s new money in town: How PayPal is using their $20.4M ad spend to attract and convert more customers.

Launched in 1998 as Continuity by Ken Howery, Luke Nosek, Max Levchin, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, Paypal is an online payments system that works as an electronic alternative to conventional transaction methods like money orders and checks. Over the years, the company has operated worldwide as a payment processor for commercial users including online vendors and auction platforms, who benefit from one-click transactions, and seller protection in exchange for a nominal fee. After PayPal’s IPO was listed at...

Surbhi Dhawan

Programmatic Advertising - 9 min read