Yahoo to Offer Media Links from the Wall Street Journal reports Yahoo will create a similar tool to Facebook connect for their media publishers, web developers and other websites to integrate with. Yahoo would not comment on the new system, but the purpose behind it is to help Yahoo better track users around the web, […]
Imagine this: You’re driving across town to catch a concert by a new artist that friends have been talking about for weeks. Only you’re not really driving. The car is driving itself. And you’re actually paying as much attention to the video screen on your car’s dashboard as anything. You’ve already bought the singer’s latest […]
While advertising on social media makes sense for advertisers, the owners of ‘free’ sites like Twitter and Facebook still need to make money. Ad banners have been the answer for many social media sites for a long time. However, banner blindness has created a large problem for advertisers since they are paying for impressions, but […]
A Consumer Watchdog group is airing a cartoon that is named “do not track me.” The video depicts Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt as seducing children to come get their “free ice cream.” Then the cartoon version of Eric Schmidt talks about how nothing is really free and how Google gives away things in exchange of […]
Google’s internal debates over privacy and how to monetize the mountains of data it has about its users — including whether to monetize it at all — are detailed today by the Wall Street Journal. The lengthy article examines a confidential, seven-page “vision statement” that made the rounds at Google as far back as 2008. […]
On Monday when Apple released its iOS 4 software update it changed its terms and privacy policy. One of the provisions of the new privacy terms — though few typically read them — concerns location monitoring and sharing in the background. Here’s what it now says about location: To provide location-based services on Apple products, […]
Last March Google initiated a trial of what it calls “remarketing” for display and text ads throughout its content network. Today it’s opening up the option for all AdWords advertisers. To be clear this is not “search retargeting” and doesn’t involve any Google.com query data. The benefit of this is being able to reach consumers, […]
Postscript: See this article, FAQ: What We Know So Far About Google TV, for more information about the announcement of Google TV. According to the Wall Street Journal, Google is testing a new TV programming search service with Dish Network: The service—which runs on TV set-top boxes using elements of Google’s Android operating system—allows users […]
Google scheduled a privacy discussion for reporters and bloggers at its San Francisco offices a couple of weeks ago. The timing turned out to be unexpectedly ironic. The idea was to “walk through a short presentation about [Google’s] guiding principles for privacy, how we use data and some of our comprehensive privacy efforts over the […]
Aggressive marketers have been infiltrating competitors’ camps since long before Odysseus sought covert entrance to Troy by way of the fabled Trojan horse. Search and social media marketing tools elevated competitive intelligence to the level of industrial espionage, in the hands of the unscrupulous. That said, somewhere to the left of that ethical line in […]
The Google AdWords blog announced new targeting and ad features for the mobile search ad product. The first feature allows you to specify the device type and carrier you would like to target your ads to. The device type options include iPhone/iPod Touch, Android and Palm WebOS. The current carriers targeting is Canada or Unites […]
Google is doing some very interesting things in TV and video advertising these days. Not long ago it licensed Nielsen’s PRIZM audience segmentation data for enhanced audience targeting through TVAds. Google also recently introduced “skippable” pre-roll ads on YouTube. The idea is to find willing audiences and make advertisers (potentially) only pay when someone watches […]
Get ready marketers: a credible new report with sweeping implications from the University of Pennsylvania and UC Berkeley is likely to be the nail in the coffin of self regulation of online advertising. Specifically I’m talking about behavioral targeting, which largely concerns online display advertising but does marginally touch search at Yahoo and Google. The […]
Google’s TV Ads platform is getting some help from a company called Visible World, which offers demographic and geotargeted advertising across different media types. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal this morning: Google Inc. is teaming up with Visible World Inc., a well-known New York technology company that uses software to create […]
The NY Times offers a broad article about Google’s efforts to define, explain and clarify its place in the market in the face of increasing anti-trust scrutiny (Google Makes a Case That It Isn’t So Big). There are currently three Justice Department investigations pending that involve Google, concerning its Book Search settlement, overlapping directors with […]
Across the TV industry there are various efforts going on to bring more targeting into TV advertising. The readers of this blog know about Google’s TV advertising initiative. But SpotRunner and various others (e.g. Project Canoe) have been working to bring “addressable advertising,” the kind of targeting that exists online (demographic, geo, even behavioral), to […]
AT&T which has publicly advocated on behalf of relatively stringent rules and opt-in requirements around behavioral targeting (BT) appears to have been working with BT firm Audience Science (formerly Revenue Science). Wendy Davis at MediaPost has written two related stories on the issue. Here’s her summary of the apparent contradiction between AT&T’s public position and […]
Yahoo has added several enhanced targeting features to its search marketing advertising solution. The features include enhanced geo-targeting, ad scheduling, demographic targeting, and added bid adjustments based on those targeting features. In addition, Yahoo has improved the content match technology to make the ads more relevant to the publisher’s content. The new features are available […]
Call it the “Cuban Missile Crisis” of online advertising: consumers and publishers are increasingly at odds over online ad targeting and behavioral targeting (BT) in particular. While that may be a hyperbolic characterization, the majority of US internet users appear uncomfortable with online tracking and targeting at a time when publishers and search engines are […]
Tim Cohn noticed that YouTube search results are displaying AdWords ads. In fact, he noticed that his client, who specifically opted out of the Google content network, had his ads showing for YouTube search results. No, these are not the new YouTube Sponsored Videos feature, they are ads that are part of the Google Search […]
The Center for Digital Democracy and U.S. Public Interest Research Group, the same groups that initiated the FTC’s investigation into “behavioral advertising” online, have “amended their complaint” with the FTC to extend to mobile advertising. According to the 50+ page document filed yesterday: Right before the commission’s eyes, many of the same consumer data collection, […]
Google has announced new mobile advertising options to target the iPhone, G1, and other mobile devices with full HTML web browsers. Advertisers can now create separate campaigns that are targeted specifically toward mobile searchers with smart phones. You can write mobile-specific ads and get performance data separate from your other AdWords campaigns.
Yahoo has announced that they will begin giving their users the ability to opt-out of customized advertising on Yahoo.com. The feature will be added to the Yahoo privacy center by the end of August. This is an expansion of Yahoo’s opt-out program for third-party networks. This was done in response to the inquiry by the […]
Privacy has re-emerged as one of the most pressing and complex issues for everyone online, including search engines, after a sustained period of relative calm. However, the rise of behavioral targeting, domestic spying/wiretapping by the Bush administration, attempts by states to regulate privacy, and more aggressive moves by Europeans to protect consumers have created conflicting […]
Saul Hansell from the New York Times reported on an interesting discovery that uncovered that Google may look at more than just your previous query to tailor the ads you see on the search page. Now, Google may look back several past queries to tailor your search ads. Yes, this is a major difference – […]
Privacy is dead, get used to it. In the effort to rescue display advertising from its historically dismal performance and so-called “banner blindness,” behavioral targeting (BT) was born a few years ago with Tacoda. It has both increased in popularity and infamy since that time. Consumers prefer more “relevant” ads but they also dislike being […]
The rumor was that Microsoft had been interested in buying Spot Runner, which provides a range of targeting capabilities to cable TV advertising (as well as online). But instead the company has purchased Navic. Navic does many things but basically enables more targeted and, in some cases, interactive advertising on cable TV. It also enables […]
Google and the other major search engines have all been criticized in both the US and Europe over privacy issues and consumer data retention. More generally, there’s an intensifying debate about behavioral ad targeting and privacy occurring on both sides of the Atlantic. The European authorities have been considerably more aggressive, however, in demanding action […]
Microsoft has added its input to that of a host of other stakeholders in the growing debate over consumer privacy, online ad targeting, and potential US (and local) government regulation. (Here’s a related WSJ story on search engine efforts to block a proposed anti-tracking law in the New York state legislature.) In a filing today […]
Google, Yahoo Keep User Data Too Long, EU Group Says from Bloomberg reports that 27 EU nations privacy officials unanimously are supporting a new proposal that may require search companies to delete search data before six months. The proposal, Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, requires “valid justification” to store any search data, and says […]
On Friday, Google announced they launched demographic bidding to every advertiser in the AdWords program. In short, demographic bidding allows advertisers to show their ads to specific age groups and genders. They did a beta launch of this earlier this year, where they dropped using comScore data for their own. The problem is, I, as […]
Today Google announced that you can demographically target ads showing up on its contextual network as part of a new beta test. But back in 2006, Google rolled out what seems to be exactly the same feature.
I can imagine two possible consumer reactions to MediaCart, a smart shopping cart that offers video displays, personalized services, and targeted advertising to shoppers in retail stores: amazement or horror. Microsoft has teamed up with MediaCart to offer in-store ad targeting that is both behavioral and takes the concept of “location-based services” to the store […]
If US Congressman Joe Barton never got an answer to his many questions about Google Privacy (which I thought wasted time asking for stuff an intern could locate), perhaps he’ll be happy watching some of Google’s latest videos released that cover some very specific privacy issues on a product-by-product basis. They join some other video […]
Google Operating System discusses the integration of Google Profiles into most Google services and products and the unification of disparate profiles into a single master profile. Whether and how this might ultimately be integrated with Google’s newly reinvigorated social network, Orkut, is unclear. Although they are much less extensive, Profiles may turn out to be […]
MySpace To Announce Self-Serve Hyper Targeted Advertising Network from TechCrunch reports MySpace is announcing a new ad platform today at adTech. The new ad platform will enable advertisers to target ads to users based on geography, demographics, and user interests. The ad platform seems to be named SelfServe HyperTargeting and will be launched to a […]
BuzzLogic started out offering analytics to identify the blogs that were having the greatest influence on particular topics or “conversations” online. Now the company is moving into the online advertising space. In a new product extension, BuzzLogic is enabling advertisers to target text or display ads on any blog within the Google AdSense network.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Google is attending and sending high-profile representatives to speak at the US FTC’s “town hall” meeting, which starts today, on “behavioral advertising.” The broad phenomenon of behavioral targeting will be under scrutiny as privacy and consumer advocates presumably point out the risks of the practice. On the rewards side will be Google and other Internet […]
AOL Will Let Consumers Opt Out of Targeted Ads from the Wall Street Journal reports that AOL will announce today a new tool that will enable AOL users to opt out of targeted or personalized ads. (NOTE: The AOL announcement is now live). AOL has behavioral ad technology that stores consumer’s preferences and then tailors […]