Facebook's Home Phone; Native Pitfalls

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Home Invasion

Om Malik sees a privacy menace in Facebook’s ‘Home’ phone integration (AdExchanger story). He argues Facebook will know our home location, shopping habits, and travel routes. “Facebook is going to use all this data — not to improve our lives – but to target better marketing and advertising messages at us.” Given Facebook’s historical privacy stance (that it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission), the “Facebook Phone” could be a concern. More.

Get Showroomed? Make Showroom-Ade

Best Buy has fought back against the showrooming trend with better merchandising, according to a Janney Capital Markets analyst. “Showrooming is now a positive, not a problem,” David Strasser is quoted as saying in a MarketWatch piece. He points to plans for 1,400 in-store “Samsung Experience Shops.” Getting people interacting with the phones and capturing email addresses may generate lower-funnel opportunities. More.

Native Pitfalls

MediaShift’s Alex Kantrowitz questions whether BuzzFeed’s new native ad network will be able to avoid the problems that have plagued traditional ad networks: “One question participating publishers might ask themselves is why they are helping BuzzFeed profit from sponsored posts instead of selling them on their own sites,” Kantrowitz writes. More.

Jumptap RTB Update

Last fall mobile ad network Jumptap entered the mobile RTB game. Now its bidding platform accounts for 50% of ad requests. “Building a real-time bidder at scale with audience data integration is a huge undertaking,” Chief Product Officer Adam Soroca said in an email to AdExchanger. The company says RTB bumped its reach to 171 million US mobile users and 269 million people globally.

VTR vs. CTR

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Daily Roundup

Daily News Roundup

The Collusion Boogeyman; Can Performance AI Resist Rage Bait?

View-through rates matter more than click-through rates, claims online ad company SteelHouse. The company introduced a new campaign measurement and sequencing tool (Slingshot) to its multichannel marketing platform. “There’s an overriding belief…that only clicks count, but we’ve seen from our client’s Slingshot campaigns that view-throughs actually result in more sales and higher conversions,” said Steelhouse CEO and president Mark Douglas in a statement. Read the release.

Real Ad, Fake Product

April Fool’s Day is a distant memory, but IAC’s CollegeHumor used the occasion to feature video from American Eagle Outfitters. The video showed actual shoppers being ambushed by sales folks peddling spray-on skinny jeans — and that was the fake part. “We started to realize that we had a unique offering,” CollegeHumor CEO Paul Greenberg told Adweek’s Mike Shields. “So we re-orged the team a few years ago. We used to have actual editors brainstorm for RFPs. We realized that wasn’t going to scale. So we hired two comedy writers and put them in our ads sales group.” Read more.

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