SlideShare Gets Display; Revealing Facebook Likes

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SlideShare Gets a Makeover

After snapping up the content sharing platform SlideShare for $119 million last year, LinkedIn today unveiled its new SlideShare Content Ads. “Similar to display ads, Content Ads reach a targeted audience of professionals on LinkedIn. However, they differ in that they enable our members to engage with your content without ever leaving the LinkedIn experience,” writes LinkedIn monetization product manager Aviad Pinkovezky in a blog post. Read the rest.

Revealing Facebook Likes

If you want to uncover someone’s political affiliations, intelligence level, sexual orientation, emotional stability, and other personal traits, just analyze that person’s Facebook likes, reports CNN’s Heather Kelly. In a “believe it or not” piece, Kelly looks at a new University of Cambridge study that claims it is possible to uncover a slew of private traits by running a person’s Facebook likes through a predictive model. “Facebook likes have a meaning that we can use to understand the psychology behind what people do,” David Stillwell, a co-author of the study, tells Kelly. Read the Cambridge Research study here.

Mozilla Impact

On MediaPost, stealth startup dude Aaron Doades paints a bleak picture regarding the impact of Firefox changes to its third-party cookie tracking. He writes, “Advertisers will stop showing ads to Firefox users simply because those users don’t perform as well as others. Media targeted to Firefox users will underperform drastically, since audience targeting and attribution modeling will no longer work, and publishers will find themselves with a lot of inventory that they cannot clear due to no one bidding on Firefox users.” And, he has other scenarios. Read more.

Step Aside, TV Buyers

About 15 years ago, the media departments at ad holding companies moved from being back office clerks to operating units in their own right. Now, as Adweek’s Mike Shields reports, the digital buyers are now starting to take the lead over the TV executives. Although no one is expecting real-time bidding for TV ad inventory, the general approach digital media buyers and planners are imbued with are starting to make their presence felt in other ways. “Most of the work in digital media is done after a plan starts,” said David Cohen, Universal McCann’s chief media officer. “So we’re trying to bring some of that thinking to TV, for example, along with concepts like machine-to-machine buying. One thing you notice is that it’s a somewhat foreign concept [in TV] to buy audience over content.” Read more.

Programmatic And Pubs

In an Upstream Group blog post for the seller crowd, Doug Weaver looks toward the “programmatic” gods and (figuratively) raises his hands to say, “Bury thyself!” He thinks there are two main issues that publishers need to get their arms around rather than “programmatic”: “automated process reform (APR) and dynamic pricing policy (DPP).” Read about them.

Mobile Ad Deception

An update to the FTC’s guidelines for online ad disclosure may help marketers avoid allegations of deceptive advertising in the mobile/social age. The macro take-away: a small screen size is no excuse to slack. “Advertisers using space-constrained ads, such as on some social media platforms, must still provide disclosures necessary to prevent an ad from being deceptive,” says the press release.

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