The Fake Traffic Schemes That Are Rotting the Internet

Marketers thought the Web would allow perfectly targeted ads.Hasn’t worked out that way.   Ron Amram has been in the brand marketing business for about 20 years. In the 2000s he was media director for Sprint’s prepaid cellular group, mainly figuring out where the carrier should spend its ad dollars—print, outdoor, digital, or broadcast. TV was…

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‘It was always a problematic child’: What went wrong for Sizmek – Digiday

Ad tech has had another casualty. The news of Sizmek’s bankruptcy filing has shaken digital ad executives, who regarded the company’s ad server business as an important contender to Google’s. But the company’s vision of becoming a fully integrated buy-side tech stack was built on a crumbling foundation, according to ad tech sources. What didn’t help…

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How Facebook could target ads in age of encryption

Mark Zuckerberg is planning to merge the messaging services of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram into one encrypted system Hannah Murphy in San Francisco March 27, 2019 Print this page Mark Zuckerberg believes the future of social networking lies in private messaging. His convictions are so strong that he plans to merge the messaging services of…

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Washington Post goes beyond cookie-based ad targeting with FeedBuilder – Business Insider

Cookie-based ad targeting that doesn’t work in a mobile-dominant world is being replaced by people-based advertising. The Washington Post is trying to get ahead of the trend with a new ad product, FeedBuilder, that creates multiple versions of an ad and then contextually targets them to people based on what they’re reading. The tech favors…

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Why It Still Feels Like Facebook Is Tracking You, Even After All the Privacy Measures – WSJ

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…

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‘It’s the human cost’: Buyers shrug at YouTube’s latest brand crisis – Digiday

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…

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GANGSTERS, PIRATES, AND PEDOPHILES

[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…

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