Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Do-Not-Track In The Browser
The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft will announce the launch today of its new IE 9 web browser which “will be the first major Web browser to include a do-not-track tool that helps people keep their online habits from being monitored.” The WSJ says that now only Apple and Google do-not-have-plans for a do-not-track tool in their browsers. Mozilla’s is in the development pipeline. The Microsoft version has technical requirements that may preclude it from achieving its original opt-out purpose at launch. Read more. In an interview with AdExchanger.com two weeks ago, Microsoft’s Rik van der Kooi called the do-not-track feature a do-not-call feature. Read it.
Big Ads Self-Serve
Myspace CRO Nada Stirrat talks to PaidContent’s David Kaplan and reveals some of the new sales strategy at the social site including dividing up the sales staff and dedicating them to particular agencies. Not only that, self-service is returning to Myspace but it’s not the Fox Audience Network variety as PC’s Kaplan writes that in addition to shareable, big ads about movies and music, “The company has also begun talking about the Foundry platform, a toolset for marketers and media planners that will let them build their own brand communities on Myspace. As of this month, all Myspace brands have moved their communities to this platform.” Call it… big community ads. Read more.
How About – Consumers Volunteer Data?
Krux Digital published its latest consumer study last week which offered insights on consumer views on online privacy including this concluding thought: “Finally – and most interestingly – an overwhelming number of users stated that they would actually volunteer additional information about themselves if they felt they were getting something valuable in return.” See the video presentation of the results here.
Turn CTO Xuhui Shao returns to ClickZ to offer a think piece on a favorite topic: the algorithm. Shao believes the algo should do three things in real-time: “Intelligently explore inventories for each campaign along behavioral, contextual, and social dimensions; predict the precise values of each ad impression for each campaign;…” And, read #3 here.
More Programmers, Please
MediaPost’s Laurie Sullivan reports that BLiNQ (AdExchanger.com Q&A with CEO Dave Williams) has acquired “a two-man shop — both experts in Ruby on Rails” as companies with programming talent get gobbled up by growing companies in need of, well, programmers. In this case, the programmers will help build a product to “make it easy for agencies and big brands to serve up ads in Facebook.” Read more.
FTC Calls Cookie Foul
Chitika has run afoul of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission according to ClickZ’s Kate Kaye who writes, “The commission settled with the behavioral text ad network, which the FTC claims engaged in deceptive practices and disabled user opt-outs. The FTC alleges that the company’s opt-out cookies were set to expire after 10 days, rendering them useless at that point.”
Read more about the terms of the settlement. ClickZ’s Kaye also looks at the latest self-regulation news here including banning the collection of health insurance-related data.
Brand Wattage
In the latest Millward Brown brand study of most powerful global brands according to something called Value-D ratings – “The rankings are all about perceived value vs. price paid,” writes Ad Age’s Jack Neff. At the top of the global list according to the study was Amazon followed by Colgate, Nokia and Pampers. To find out brands came after the diapers, read here.
You Can’t Buy Twitter Love
A new Covario study claims that Twitter mentions and Twitter sentiment are two different things as Covario CMO and SVP of Products, Craig Macdonald says in the release, “Clearly, the amount of money spent on digital advertising influences the quantity of brand mentions by people who Tweet, raising overall Twitter impressions. Expressions of sentiment, on the other hand, appear to be influenced more by how well the money is used, not the amount.” Read the release. And, download the study (sign-up required).
The Art Of Re-Finding
Ahhhh, behavior. Greg Linden returns to his personal blog and points to a Microsoft Research piece called, “Understanding and Predicting Personal Navigation.” Linden summarizes: “The basic idea is noticing that people tend to use search engines instead of bookmarks, just searching again to re-find what they found in the past. But — and this is the key insight — not everyone uses the same query to bookmark the same page, so, for example, one person might use [lottery] to get to the Michigan lottery, another to get to the Illinois lottery, and only a minority use it to get to the top ranked result, lottery.com.” The outcome is a new opportunity for personalization. Read more. And, download the paper on Microsoft’s site.
The New News And Targeting Ads
According to a new study called “The Project for Excellence In Journalism State of the News Media Report” it’s time for newspapers need to move over and let Google and Facebook cover the news. Broadcasting & Cable says the report concludes that because we all live “in a world of exploding content choices, the future belongs to those who can gauge interest and behavior and target content and ads.” Read the article in B&C. And, see the key findings on Pew’s site.
Shopper Marketing!
It seems to be one of the latest buzz phrases in the e-commerce world: shopper marketing. In fact, one agency called Etailing Solutions has decided to focus entirely on CPG e-commerce. Busy Ad Age writer Jack Neff quotes an Etailing Solutions exec: “”The opportunity for e-commerce in the U.S. is akin to years ago when drugstores started selling grocery products because they wanted to bring people in to increase frequency.” Read more.
