Advertising: Behavioral
Search Engine News: Turn On, Log in, Opt Out - The Politics of Online Targeting
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Written By Noah Mallin | August 11, 2008 | Share This
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With Yahoo’s very public and Google’s characteristically more sly announcements that they are going to an “opt out” model for targeted ads, the continued legislative scrutiny of the search advertising and marketing industry ought to be addressed. During these dog days of summer it’s not surprising to find the political class in Washington DC casting about for an issue or to two to ride on home with and give the appearance of having done some actual work.
Behavioral Targeting: It’s Time for Industry Standards of Practice — Lack of Clear Guidelines Attracting Fear, Loathing and Worse — Politicians
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Written By Noah Mallin | July 29, 2008 | Share This
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SearchViews dealt with behavioral targeting a few weeks ago but the tide of bad publicity has now well and truly rolled in. There’s nothing like an election year to bring on the misplaced outrage – in this case towards behavioral marketing and targeting online. What’s even worse is that one numskull company has helped to paint everyone else with a broad brush. But first…
Cast your mind back to 1985 (if indeed you were sentient back then), admittedly not an election year but a fertile time for boogiemen (pun semi-intended). Future first lady-elect Tipper Gore forms the PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center) after daughter Karenna was confused and shamed by the Prince song “Darling Nikki.” Cue full dress congressional hearings featuring testimony from that most unlikely of trios: John Denver, Frank Zappa, and Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider. The PMRC accused rock music of being lascivious, dangerous, even Satanic. (Incidentally their list of the worst offenders -the so-called Filthy 15 - makes a pretty great mix.) I think it’s safe to say that the youth of 1985 did not grow up to be wholesale Satan worshippers and that every generation’s music sounds a bit edgy to the one that preceded it. The politicians (and their wives) did get a lot of nice juicy headlines out of their hearings though.
Weekly Search Roundup: This Week’s Search News Crushed in a Glass with a Splish-Splash of Vermouth
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Written By Noah Mallin | July 11, 2008 | Share This
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What are all us search marketers going to be discussing this weekend at our garden parties, club luaus, and intimate yacht rides? Probably Hellboy 2 but here are a few of the other topics that will be touched upon between canapés and badminton.
Scrabble Scrambles to Squash Scrabulous – Still Needs a “u” to Spell Squash
Hasbro, the makers of Scrabble, have been making an unhappy sound since earlier in the year over top Facebook app Scrabulous. Some bright corporate bulbs realized that merely squashing the Scrabble-aping app would lead to some unhappy Facebookers and that perhaps they ought to have the official Scrabble ® app ready to roll. Pretty sneaky sis. In related news, I’m working on my own Facebook app called Connect 5-bulous. You know where to find me, Milton Bradley.
Search on the Beach: Summer Search, Social Media, and SEO Books, Your Official SearchViews Reading List
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Written By Noah Mallin | July 10, 2008 | Share This
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Ah, Summer. Here in
Either way, books and the beach go together like Amy Winehouse and liver damage, so we thought it would be fun to put together a little search industry reading list for your Summer pleasure. The idea originally came about when Reprise Media Managing Partner Peter Hershberg was on Business Wire’s recent Social Media panel and was asked to recommend a few books.
Social Media: LinkedIn Proves the Power of Three-Way Action
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 19, 2008 | Share This
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One of the great things about social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace is the ability to see what your old buddies are up to without actually having to talk to them. Hey, that guy who wore a skirt and mascara in college is a corporate lawyer now!
On the other hand, sometimes you want to do more than just accumulate “friends”, you actually want to network and do some online schmoozing. LinkedIn, which has been described back-handedly as “social media for grownups” and has been all over the news this week, is a site that focuses on career connections with a clean low-widget design and a plethora of helpful tools. This has helped them to become the number 4 site for social networking on the net according to Nielsen. Even more phenomenal is their 146% year-over-year growth, making them the fastest growing social network in the U.S…. check da chart:
Universal Search: Clueless! – ISP’s act like AP, Greed for Money Upfront will lead to a Kick in the Rear
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 17, 2008 | Share This
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The recent kerfuffle involving bloggers and the AP fired some interesting connections in my neural net. The attempt to levy a tax on bloggers for the right (nay the privilege!) of linking to the AP’s content smells a lot like the recent attempt of a few internet service providers to charge extra to high-bandwidth users.
The common thread between these two hair-brained schemes is an attempt to force old-school ideas about economics onto the new world of the internet. The irony is that the Internet at its best is probably the closest human beings have come to the perfect marketplace envisioned by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.
In Smith’s ideal marketplace, all buyers and sellers have access to the same information and equal access to the marketplace, allowing prices to find their natural/optimal level. In a broad way that has been mostly true online whether we are talking about the cost of advertising a product or the product itself. In fact, the auction-based search model is about as close as you’re gonna get.
Best Practices: Online Marketing Voyeurs and the Consumer Exhibitionists Who Want to Be Watched
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 9, 2008 | Share This
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Cast your minds back to the primordial past – you know, ten years ago when the ‘net was poised to deliver the most personalized user experience imaginable with targeted, relevant advertising at every new page. What happened?
I’ll admit the teeth thing was close to home but my lips are actually quite large. Lip plumping is a very low priority for me. As for moving and storage, I’m not going anywhere or planning on storing anything.
(more…)
SEM: Spying Scientists Stumble on Site Stickiness Standards
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 5, 2008 | Share This
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Traditional Media Companies Lag in Web Tracking
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | March 10, 2008 | Share This
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A story published in the New York Times today uses comScore data to describe how companies track Internet users for the purposes of online behavioral ad targeting. ComScore noted the online data-collection potential of 15 media companies like Yahoo and Conde Nast - namely, looking at searches, display ads, videos, and page views along with the number of ads each company can display on its network.
According to the Times, Yahoo’s huge network of sites means the company collects 110 billion “data events” (a zip code or a search query, for example) each month, or 811 pieces of information for each user. In contrast, older media companies with a web presence have far less data. Conde Nast’s websites, for instance, only collect 34 data events per user each month, and the New York Times website’s number is 45.
Below is a breakdown of some of the companies comScore looked at. Note that MySpace beats eBay and is neck-and-neck with AOL. The Times/comScore data is here, along with a little more background.
Note, also, that the comScore data leaves out a couple of very important points of potential data collection. From the NYT’s Bits blog:
There are other ways these companies obtain data that comScore was unable to capture. The two largest ways left out here are ad-serving data (from the likes of Microsoft’s Atlas and Google’s desired partner DoubleClick) and user-volunteered data. By the latter, I mean the information that users enter when they register for sites or e-mail accounts as well as all the juicy details they post on social networking pages.
It’s certain this information could significantly change the chart above, particularly when it comes to social networks. But perhaps bigger than the struggle to wrangle all this data is making people feel okay about their private information being used this way. In another piece, the Bits blog shows that AOL finds an emissary for ad targeting in… a cute penguin cartoon character.
Facebook Status: Mark Zuckerberg is Sorry About Beacon
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | December 6, 2007 | Share This
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Yesterday, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg publicly apologized about the social network’s poorly implemented, privacy-invading Beacon ad program, which broadcast users’ off-Facebook activity in news feeds and caused an ensuing ruckus among geeks and privacy advocates. From Zuckerberg’s blog post statement:
Facebook has succeeded so far in part because it gives people control over what and how they share information. This is what makes Facebook a good utility, and in order to be a good feature, Beacon also needs to do the same. People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don’t want to use it.
This has been the philosophy behind our recent changes. Last week we changed Beacon to be an opt-in system, and today we’re releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely. You can find it here. If you select that you don’t want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won’t store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.
Facebook has, as of yesterday, allowed users to turn off Beacon entirely, but what’s fascinating about this apology is that the word “advertising” does not appear once in the entire blog post. By framing Beacon just as an information-sharing feature, Zuckerberg is sidestepping one of the most offensive parts of Beacon - that its sole purpose is actually utilizing Facebook’s massive user base to market to each other via what are implied pseudo-recommendations.
As marketing genius Seth Godin noted on his blog several months ago, “The result of Google and the prevalence of search means that people are far more forgiving of things that need to be sought out, and less patient than ever with selfish marketers that insist on showing up in your face.” Though Facebook isn’t search, I think the same principles of “permission marketing” apply when personal information is involved.
But after all the (justified) kicking and screaming over Beacon, it’s comical and a great example of both the site’s reach/influence and maybe also the blog world’s childishness that a very simple move by Facebook this morning - allowing Facebook messages to be read in users’ regular email inbox, no longer requiring a click-through to the site - has the blogosphere in a great mood again.