Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Facebook Inc. has spent the better part of a year telling its users, Congress and the readers of this paper that we’re in charge of our personal data and the ads we see. The network has streamlined its privacy settings, shared more details about how data is used and highlighted how its ad controls work. If we take advantage of all these privacy controls, it shouldn’t still feel as…
As a number of major brands, including Disney, Nestle, McDonald’s, AT&T and Epic Games, are pulling their ads from YouTube due to its latest brand-safety “crisis,” media buyers are largely reacting with a collective shrug. In a poll conducted by Digiday Research on Thursday, Feb. 21, only 14 percent of 100 buyers said they expect…
“Data is the new oil” is one of those deceptively simple mantras for the modern world. Whether in The New York Times, The Economist, or WIRED, the wildcatting nature of oil exploration, plus the extractive exploitation of a trapped asset, seems like an apt metaphor for the boom in monetized data. Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm)…
[if (mso)|(IE)]> [if (mso)|(IE)]> It’s me again — Mr. Sunshine — with more wretched news about the rotting carcass of our once adequate industry. 1. Digital GangstersWe begin in Jolly Ol’ England where a committee of Parliament denounced Facebook and its leadership as “digital gangsters.” According to The New York Times… “…After 18 months investigating Facebook and…
Millions of smartphone users confess their most intimate secrets to apps, including when they want to work on their belly fat or the price of the house they checked out last weekend. Other apps know users’ body weight, blood pressure, menstrual cycles or pregnancy status. Unbeknown to most people, in many cases that data is…
It’s 8 on a Wednesday morning in January, and David Carroll’s Brooklyn apartment, a sunny, wood-beamed beauty converted from an old sandpaper factory, is buzzing. His 10-year-old daughter, dressed in polka-dot pants, dips out the front door and off to school, Jansport backpack slung over her shoulders. His 5-year-old son darts into the living room…
Subscribe: iTunes | Google Play | Stitcher | Anchor For many, digital media’s ills are down to broken ad tech and the system propping it up. Adam Zucker-Scharff, director of ad tech at the Washington Post, says it’s more complicated than simply fixing the plumbing: Advertisers are going to have to work at making ad…
Google’s AdMob launched playable ads for their gaming partners last May, and Facebook launched them in August. In both cases, the ads were mostly used by game developers, but playable ads have potential for other industries. “It’s leveraging the fact that users like to play games,” said Ari Brandt, executive vice president of strategic development…
Our phones’ GPS and location capabilities are a key part of what make them magical — enabling them to speed our commutes, hail rides, and find the devices when we lose them. These capabilities are also ground zero for the looming fight over defining the boundaries of privacy and acceptable uses of our personal information….
Three months ago, four ad tech vendors flagged that they had identified fake consent strings. Consent strings are generated by a publisher’s consent management platform and passed back to all that publisher’s digital ad partners to show which impressions have user consent for personalized advertising, and which don’t. It seems the issue hasn’t gone away. For…