Twitter's Advertising Apps; Advertising Cookies And Privacy

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More App Ads

The rumors around new Twitter app ad products continue to percolate as The Wall Street Journal reports on an imminent launch. Yoree Koh writes, “[Twitter] will debut 15 types of new ad products and improved ways to target users over the next six months, according to people familiar with the company’s plans.” Read about ’em (subscription). Meanwhile, a new report from Resolution Media says Twitter ads are more effective if you’re measuring click-through rate in comparison to Facebook, but they lack FB’s scale. Download it here.

Purely Passively

A new study by researchers at Princeton University looks at the use of advertising cookies and privacy risks. Dillon Reisman, who spearheads the project as part of his senior thesis, introduces the paper in a blog post: “Over the past three months we’ve learnt that NSA uses third-party tracking cookies for surveillance. These cookies, provided by a third-party advertising or analytics network (…), are ubiquitous on the web, and tag users’ browsers with unique pseudonymous IDs. In a new paper, we study just how big a privacy problem this is. We quantify what an observer can learn about a user’s web traffic by purely passively eavesdropping on the network, and arrive at surprising answers.” Get the paper (PDF).

Big Data, Big Problems

A recent study conducted by the World Federation of Advertisers highlights the five major challenges of big data for marketers. The biggest challenge is simply managing the sheer volume of data being generated. Other challenges include practically deploying insight, pinpointing expert analysts to manage the data, unreadiness to properly take advantage of what big data can do and improving understanding of ROI. Despite these challenges, 88% of marketers said big data was crucial for current and future business strategizing. Read more at Marketing Interactive.

New World Advertorials

Talking Points Memo has signed up Pharma and with it comes Pharma-written native ads, in turn reviving the moralistic debate on native advertising. If native ads are too successful, are they deceiving readers? Writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, Ryan Chittum argues, “Native ads are just advertorials by another name, and advertorials have long been published by news organizations of the highest standards, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker. Those ‘special advertising sections’ are the native ads of print, and they’ve been there for decades.” Read on.

Mozilla Machinations

From his personal blog, Mozilla VP of Content Services Darren Herman issues a battle cry to fellow employees in the wake of Brendan Eich’s exit from the company as CEO. He begins, “I’m sitting in my hotel room in San Francisco having bought a one-way ticket here late this past Wednesday night. Why did I come out with no end in sight? I bought a ticket because we were in the midst of a crisis and wanted to be closer to our senior leadership team and board.” Read more.

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