Madeline Stone says, “In celebration of its 20th birthday, Amazon has declared July 15 “Amazon Prime Day,” a day of shopping that will have “more deals than Black Friday,” the company announced in a press release Monday. Starting at midnight on July 15, Prime members can shop from thousands of deals “starting as often as every ten minutes.” The savings will be available to Prime members in the U.S., U.K., Spain, Japan, Italy, Germany, France, Canada, and Australia. Shoppers who have not yet signed up for Prime but want to take advantage of the day’s... [...]

Lara O’Reilly says, “Pinterest, the visual social network where users “pin” images or links to virtual boards, only recently began offering advertising on the site. Its slowly, slowly approach to revenue generation hasn’t deterred investor interest: Its latest round of funding valued the company at $11 billion.Now Pinterest has delivered the latest sign that it is likely to start making a boatload of money from advertisers very soon. On Monday at MIT’s Emtech Digital conference, Pinterest’s head of partnerships Tim Kendall unveiled a new product called... [...]

Jillian D’onfro says, “Pinterest just announced a whole new suite of updates and improvementsto its advertising product, Promoted Pins, that it plans to roll out this summer. Among the new offerings are “cinematic pins” which are videos that only move when the user scrolls, different ways for advertisers to target users (like by interests, personas, or life stages), and several new pricing options. Instead of just choosing to pay for views or clicks on their Promoted Pins, advertisers can now choose to pay with a “cost-per-engagement” (CPE) model or a “cost-per-action”... [...]

Jillian D’onfro says, “As more brands move their money to mobile advertising, Facebook has continued to shine above the rest of the market. The company drove one-third of all US digital ad growth for the fifth straight quarter in Q1, Morgan Stanley analysts write in a note, and Facebook’s business is accelerating while overall ad growth in the market is slowing. “Facebook – with its still-low pricing, industry leading reach and cross-platform targeting – is the main beneficiary and driver of the continued movement of ad dollars onto mobile,” Morgan Stanley... [...]

Lara O’Reilly says, “The digital advertising sector is a complex one. It has been a rocky few months for the ad tech sector.The overall value of public ad tech company stocks fell 12% in the first quarter, according to tech investment bank LUMA Partners. Of those companies who underwent the high-profile IPO process, many – such as Tremor Video, Rocket Fuel, and Millennial Media – while growing revenue, also notched up huge multi-million dollar net losses in the last financial year ($23.5 million, $64 million, and $149 million, respectively.) The sector has been fraught... [...]

Lara O’Reilly says, “Twitter is a champion of free speech – its former UK general manager once described the social network as “the free speech wing of the free speech party” – and it has only very recently started removing extreme violent content, and launched a crackdown on abuse on its network. Porn is still prevalent on Twitter, however. And that’s a problem for advertisers. Nielsen, television and digital measurement company, was forced to halt one of its paid-for Promoted Tweets campaigns this week after its ads were served against profile pages... [...]

Lara O’Reilly says, “Many people don’t even know Amazon has an advertising business. It sells ads across Amazon.com and Amazon-owned sites like IMDB.com. It also sells mobile ads across its Kindle e-book range and Kindle Fire tablet, and it has an ad platform which extends Amazon ads to other websites. Speaking at The Financial Times’ FT Digital Media conference in London on Tuesday, Amazon Media Group’s vice president of global advertising sales Seth Dallaire revealed a novel way the company is using Kindle to sell ads for advertisers that don’t sell their... [...]

Lara O’Reilly says, “Facebook has filed a fascinating patent that suggests it has considered building a mega ad exchange that harnesses its social data to serve ads and, interestingly, content (like paid-for news articles or videos from brands, otherwise known as native advertising) on sites beyond the social network’s own platform. The patent application, published Thursday, details an ad exchange that combines an advertiser’s data with Facebook’s own social graph to find users that match a given profile (say, a woman, in her 30s, who has recently bought a pair of... [...]

Lara O’Reilly says, “Rubicon Project, the programmatic advertising company that went public last ear, acquired Toronto-based search and ad regargeting companyChango on Tuesday for approximately $122 million in cash and stock (but primarily stock). Toronto-based Chango specializes in “intent marketing,” mixinginformation from search queries with behavioral, contextual (the kind of content a web user is consuming), and advertiser data to allow brands to better target their ads. As AdExchanger points out, Chango gives Rubicon Project (which originally started out as a supply-side-platform... [...]

Lara O’Reilly says, “Amazon’s advertising platform may only account for a small proportion of the global digital ad market – a scant 0.75% in terms of revenue share according to eMarketer – but the e-commerce giant has ambitions to make advertising across the web a better experience for consumers. Amazon has three advertising areas: Across its own sites, across its mobile devices such as the Kindle and Fire tablet, and the Amazon ad platform which extends Amazon ads to other websites. Speaking to Business Insider at Advertising Week Europe in London, Amazon Media... [...]