Don Marti

Sun 02 Jun 2013 08:09:38 AM PDT

Advertising and privacy link dump

First of all, go read Bob Hoffman, Ad Contrarian. Samples: Blogger Math Takes On Facebook Where Are The Brands? The Cheats vs The Morons Coca-Cola: Fizzy Goes Fuzzy Online Advertisers Getting Hosed Time To Clean Out The Stables

More links on advertising and privacy...

Mathew Ingram: Guardian kills its Facebook social reader, regains control over its content

TechCrunch's teachable moment: media sites must own the conversation | Dan Gillmor

Bizarre Upper East Side marketing orgy: Small Ads

Terry Heaton's PoMo Blog: TV numbers add up (to a BIG problem) Ads on TV crossed the line of viewer disrespect a long time ago.

George Simpson: I have spent the better part of the last 15 years defending cookie-setting and tracking to help improve advertising. But it is really hard when the prosecution presents the evidence, and it has ad industry fingerprints all over it -- every time. in Suicide By Cookies (via Doc Searls Weblog and Mozilla Privacy Blog)

Joshua Koran: The Real Costs of Cookie-Blocking. This inadvertently centralizes consumer activity to just a few players, which according to privacy advocates would help lead to the very "Big Brother" centralized database of consumer activity that they are trying to prevent.

Measuring Brand Lift With Google Consumer Surveys

How Affiliate Adware Affects Your Revenue

Google Takes the Dark Path, Censors AdBlock Plus on Android (via Anil Dash)

Login should be personal and minimal first, social later. Users don't like social login

Ben Adida: Firefox is the unlocked browser. (Let's hope they get the user agent string fixed, though.)

Why we should all worry about being tracked online | James Ball

Jeff John Roberts: Massive bot network is draining $6 million a month from online ad industry, says report

Jeffrey F. Rayport: Advertising and the Internet of Things.

Daniel Lawton at Knife Depot: How Google Sliced Away Our Knife Ads

Curt Woodward: Newspaper Paywalls: Here's Why They’re Really Doing It.

Rebecca Waber: When Ads Get (Too) Personal. As media — and the advertising seen on it — become more focused on smaller groups of individuals, we see less of the same advertising content as other people do. And that's a potential blow to advertisers for several important reasons:....

The Security Skeptic: Ad Industry Attacks Against Mozilla Reveal Poor Choice of Campaign Role Models. But rather than mounting a campaign that attacks Mozilla directly, IAB/ANA strategy is focused on scaring users by threatening more advertisements.

Richard Stacy: Why social media is a dangerous concept. Social media only really works on the basis of speaking to small groups of people or individuals. It hardly ever gives you the scale or reach we assume is associated with the term media.

Eric Picard: How targeted advertising can be saved. At some point, the browsers are going to unilaterally put an end to this debate about online privacy and advertising tracking. More: Our industry's unethical, indefensible behavior. People are claiming that if we stop the targeting, all the value in this industry will bottom out—that another bubble will burst, and advertising Armageddon will follow. I disagree. I believe a huge amount of value can be generated without marginally ethical behavior. Also: Why consumers think online marketing is creepy and The real reason consumers are creeped out by online ads.

Alan Schulman: Algorithms Don't Feel, People Do. This balance between medium and message has largely been lost, as we seem more seduced by the algorithms — the containers and software solutions for delivering messages to devices — than the evolution or effectiveness of them.

Dax Hamman: Why retargeting is fundamentally broken. Do we not recognize that all that advertising we see in magazines, on TV or hear on the radio is influencing our decisions? And yet under the digital model of last touch, all of that value and influence is simply ignored.

Facebook Knew I Was Gay Before My Family Did

Jack Neff: Nielsen Now Tracks (Almost) Everything You Buy

Why data leakage is hurting our industry

3 things about the privacy debate that don't matter

How a banner ad for H&R; Block appeared on apple.com—without Apple’s OK | Ars Technica

Dan Gillmor says journalists are uninformed about who controls the platforms they publish on

Ken Dreifach: The New NAI Draft Code: What Ad Networks, Platforms and Exchanges Need to Know. The Draft Code “prohibit[s] member companies from using [locally stored objects] for online advertising activities.

Steve Smith: Is 'Do Not Track' And Opt-Out Already Impacting Audience Value And Pricing? The report contends that this increase in the share of users either without cookies or without third-party data is likely a result of enhanced public awareness of do-not-track and opt-out mechanisms. As browsers like Mozilla’s Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer make the do-not-track flag or cookie blocking the default modes,this share is likely to rise.

Tom Hespos contemplates a future without third-party cookies: Could digital survive losing the cookie? Power would begin to shift back toward single sites with large traffic volume. In the absence of third-party cookies, after all, marketers would have to rely solely on data captured by individual sites in order to target ads in any compelling way. More: Why advertisers need to lose some pricing control

Peter Swire: Open Letters To... | How to Prevent the ‘Do Not Track’ Arms Race (via HubSpot's Inbound Marketing Blog). (Really? Adtech firms are going to replace cookies with "even more sophisticated tracking methods"? All that would do is bring smug cookie-blocking users who are now bored with the whole thing back in for another round.)

John Battelle on the return (or did it ever go away?) of click fraud: We’ve Seen This Movie Before…On Traffic of Good Intent. More: When It’s This Easy To Take Someone’s Money…. Also, Publishers, Ad-Tech Firms, Marketers Need to Connect, Build Trust. (Let me get this straight. 1. Adtech system teeming with fraud. 2. ??? 3. Participants in this system should begin trusting one another.)

The Cookie Has Five Years Left Says Merkle's Paul Cimino (via HubSpot's Inbound Marketing Blog)

Mozilla Blog: Mozilla’s new Do Not Track dashboard: Firefox users continue to seek out and enable DNT

David Kaplan: Casale Finds Browsers' 'Do Not Track' Reduced Cookie Values

Alexis C. Madrigal: If It Wasn't the Pregnancy Tests, Why Did Baby Catalogs Start Arriving at Our House?

Mary Hodder and Elizabeth Churchill: Lying and Hiding in the Name of Privacy. A large percentage of individuals employ artful dodges to avoid giving out requested personal information online when they believe at least some of that information is not required. These dodges include hiding personal details, intentionally submitting incorrect data, clicking away from sites or refusing to install phone applications. This suggests most people do not want to reveal more than they have to when all they want is to download apps, watch videos, shop or participate in social networking.

Dan Hon: 2p – The tyranny of digital advertising. Ultimately, digital display advertising is boring and suffers from a glut of oversupply. This is why we have a pseudo holy war going on between the display advertising folk and the native advertising folk: because people ignore interruptive display advertising and pay attention to interesting content.

Steve Sullivan: Prepare to Board the Viewability Train with IAB SafeFrame

Mozilla Blog: Personalization with Respect. Mozilla aspires to enable personalization—the customization of ads, content, recommendations, offers and more — that doesn’t rely on the user being in the dark about who has access to that information, and with whom that information is shared.

Mike Volpe: 10 Horrifying Stats About Display Advertising (via Internet Marketing Blog by WordStream) You are more likely to complete NAVY SEAL training than click a banner ad....About 50% of clicks on mobile ads are accidental.

John Ebbert: IP Targeting May Replace The Cookie, Says AcquireWeb (via Goodway Group Blog)

Eli Goodman: As Digital Ad Effectiveness Measurement Improves, Are Branding Ad Dollars Ready to Follow? (Sure, if the privacy protection is there. Otherwise, online ads carry all the signal of an incoming email spam.)

Joe Mohen: RTB Is the Most Overhyped Technology Ever

Kevin Conroy: The Third-Party Cookie Divide Is Debilitating the Industry

Ken Doctor: The newsonomics of climbing the ad food chain. Publishers describe their digital ad woe with these terms: “price compression,” “bargain-basement ad networks,” and “death of the banner ad.” Each describes a world of hyper-competition in digital advertising — a world of almost infinite ad possibility and unyielding downward pricing pressure. (via Street Fight)