LinkedIn's Bot Problems; The Year Of Data

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

Social Bots Link-In

Bots don’t just haunt display advertising, they’re creating problems for social sites too, forcing LinkedIn to take legal action, according to GigaOM. The company’s competitors use the bots to scrape information from user profiles, but there it’s not clear what risk this behavior might be to users. “We’re a members-first organization and we feel we have a responsibility to protect the control that our members have over the information they put on LinkedIn,” the company said in an email. Read more.

The Data Year

The 2014 predictions continue rolling in, and James Moore, CRO of Simpli.fi, foresees 2014 being the year data increases in value to marketers. His arguments center around the increasing RTB inventory, cross-device targeting capabilities and the move toward unstructured data. In his opinion, programmatic is going to allow marketers and advertisers to unlock the full potential of their audience data. Read more.

The P Word

The advertising industry is full of jargon and acronyms, but one that especially bothers Doug Weaver, founder and CEO of Upstream Group, is “partner.” In a post on his blog he points out that it seems the industry is self conscious about using terms like “seller,” “vendor” and “supplier” to describe relationships, and would rather use a blanket term like “partner.” Read the post. Another P word, blanket term, favorite: “platform.”

Ad Rules

The Weather Channel broke some rules and put an auto-play longer than 10 seconds on Twitter through Amplify, according to Adweek. Twitter hasn’t yet commented about whether it will pull the ad. Facebook has been experimenting with autoplay ads in user’s news feeds that are 15 seconds long. Read more.

You’re Hired