Good intro to what Apple and Google are doing in the privacy space to fend off regulation. TL:DR; "Get ready for more random ads online, higher prices and subscriptions galore. But your privacy concerns may still not fade."Apple kicked this off in 2017 with a new Safari preventing the technology used by marketing companies to follow peop…

A simple cartoon can spark a lot of thinking: what happens after "the “Cookiepocalypse” — when Google Chrome follows up on its promise to cut support for the third-party cookie by 2022"?My preferred answer is: better content marketing? Actually providing value to people, rather than surveilling and stalking them around the web?Others par…

Good history of the digital ad industry, from 3rd-party tracking cookies through to today's data-brokered behavioural advertising profiles:"Digital advertisers have steadily transformed the internet into a surveillance machine from which there is no escape... argue that ... universe of on demand digital content has created a crisis of at…

early adopters are not innovators, but are "willing to experiment... [but] they're not guinea pigs" make them feel they're getting something special, earlythey "are willing to work with your minimum viable product if it solves their problem" Give them something to test. But their reputation is on the line, so prove yo…

A tour of the year from Zuckerberg's original position - that private companies should not be censoring politicians or the news in a democracy - to the most recent U-turn, after a year of exploring options: from continuing to do nothing through to Twitter's position - banning all political ads."field testing revealed that none of th…

Facebook reacted quickly, but it was reaction, not proaction, and therein lies the problem.When I saw and Queued this article, they'd confirmed to FastCompany that "political campaigns would be able to place new ads on Facebook starting November 4" which meant Trump could advertise an election victory before it was confirmed. By the…

Tours election technology from 2008 to 2018 "and beyond".2008: Obama integrated e-mail, cell phones and websites to both convey the candidate’s message and enable his supporters to connect and self-organize - supporting grassroots community. MyBarackObama allowed users to form groups, raise money, organise events, get info on local vote…

Amazing animation setting out the 5 filters - ownership, advertising, the media elite, flak and the common enemy - used by media and power to Manufacture Consent, as set out in Chomsky's eponymous book on mainstream journalism and its role in the mechanics of power

We are asking all businesses ... not advertise on Facebook's services in July.What would you do with $70 billion? We know what Facebook did. They  allowed  incitement  to  violence  against  protesters  fighting  for racial justice... named Breitbart News a “trusted news source” ... turned  a  blind  eye  to  blatant  voter  suppression ...…

Every feature that adtech is bragging on, or working toward? Email spam had it in the 1990s... staying away from spam was the right answer... spam from a high-reputation brand doesn’t look any different from spam that any fly-by-night operation can send...The “new reality,”... is a place where you win based not on how much the audience trusts you,…

for manipulating public opinion... automation and artificial intelligence “can quickly generate traffic and publicity much faster than people.”...If disinformation in 2016 was characterized by Macedonian spammers... Russian trolls... 2020 is shaping up to be the year communications pros for hire provide sophisticated online propaganda operations .…

Mozilla announced a new anti-tracking strategy... make it harder to track users across websites ... on by default for all users... There needs to be a profitable revenue ecosystem on the web... Our third-party cookie restrictions will allow loading of advertising ... will prevent the cookie-based tracking ... a better balance for publishers than…

Scroll gives you special ad-free versions of all your favorite news sites. From cleaner pages to handy reading tools, Scroll lets you experience great content with new focus – and pays publishers more than advertising.

On one hand, consumers have short attention spans, and on the other, studies have shown that longer video can perform better... first consider the goal of the campaign.... Determining performance on marketing-based goals can be a bit complicated to pin down... If site perusal is your goal, short video is best... Why produce a long video when you…

the data crunching company’s approach represents a step change in how analytics can today be used as a tool to generate insights – and to exert influence... While it also used demographic segments to identify groups of voters... Cambridge Analytica also segmented using psychographics... demographics are informational. Psychographics are behaviour…

Which did the ad industry choose?... It tried to ignore technology and automation... when that didn’t work, it bought the machines.... It didn’t invest in research, development, innovation... develop new services, new ways, new formats, new ideas, whole new ways of helping institutions and people relate, connect, and bond... So the broken relatio…

confidential document prepared by Facebook that revealed the company had offered advertisers the opportunity to target 6.4 million younger users, some only 14 years old, during moments of psychological vulnerability... the big fear isn’t just what Facebook knows about its users but whether that knowledge can be weaponized in ways those users canno…

thousands of activists have started to push companies to take a stand on ... “hate news” ... Sleeping Giants ... and their followers have communicated with more than 1,000 companies and nonprofit groups whose ads appeared on Breitbart, and about 400 of those organizations have promised to remove the site from future ad buys... In the old normal,…

We’d love to make it easy for you to get up and running with Facebook Ads. These are the exact steps and lessons we’ve been taking to build up our own paid ads campaigns, and we’ll be keeping this post up-to-date with the latest news and learnings.

This new tool shows users what Facebook determines are their interests... has provided a glance into the deep flaws of Facebook’s interest targeting. Advertisers should be concerned about where their dollars are going... Here are the main flaws I came across:... I would just recommend approaching targeting differently:

publishers are afraid that while the AMP project is nominally open-source, Google is using it to shape how the mobile web works, and in particular, to ensure a steady stream of advertising revenue

The Guardian joins the Financial Times and the Economist in billing ads by time.... have found, unsurprisingly, that ads perform better when people spend more engaged time with them.... click-through rate as an industry benchmark for performance;. However a metric of 0.0 something percent should not be seen as a succes

the Guardian is a great newspaper whose survival should concern us all... Digital revenues, which had been predicted to increase to £100m in the current financial year, are stuck at around £80m, while advertising print revenues have declined by about 20 per cent... Nor could anyone dispute that the Guardian’s website has been highly successful. I…

if he tried to make ads that were beautiful and perfect, it wouldn’t work and his fans would know... his work routinely pulls in millions of views because he’s transparent with his audience... mostly teenage boys know when they’re being peddled a product.

"AMP is not just about news and not just about articles" ... going forward, the focus will be on new creative ad experiences... highly compelling interactive experiences within the format ... this needs to be easy to implement ... seen a lot of organizations with small engineering teams implement this into their homegrown CMSes within a few days…

Instant Articles, meet Instant Ads... an immersive way to reach people without making them leave the social network... when users click a Facebook News Feed ad connected to Canvas, it opens a full-screen, rich media page inside of Facebook rather than forcing users to wait for a mobile website to load... removes constraints that low-power mobile s…

a phone company, Three, is introducing adblocking across its network.... Mobile advertising is still a very small revenue stream for most publishers, but in many cases it is the only one showing any growth...Unless and until this is killed by the European regulators, it threatens to snuff out the lifeline of mobile advertising for digital publishe…

"We put aside existing notions about news apps and imagined what our journalism would be if it lived natively on your iPhone. It wouldn’t be a facsimile of our website. It would be something entirely different, with original writing, new features, and a fresh interface."... The Quartz news app isn't for everybody ... the app is by design unlikely…

we’re seeing early signs that the value of a mobile user is greater than a desktop user... Facebook’s... shift from desktop to mobile has led to much higher engagement and average revenue... exactly the opposite of what everyone predicted. investing millions in rich video experiences... But isn’t a larger screen more immersive than a small mobil…

Ultimately, what publishers and advertisers care about most, however, is how much quality time a person spends with a story. To judge that, publishers are developing newer metrics like “time spent” reading, “scroll depth,” “engagement,” “recirculation,” “shares,” and “percentage of article completed.”