So there you are, social media evangelist for Starhub. You found something cool, like keyboard teacups, and decide to share it with your fans as part of an engagement post.
And truth be told, the cups really are cool and cute and geeky. No way this is going to get any negative feedback.
Bam! Trolled.
Social media… its a hard knock life.
BBH APAC teamed up with the Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics (HOME) to create a campaign educating PMEBs on the plight and situation of the thousands of women trafficked into Asia for the sex trade.
They brilliantly went into LinkedIN to create a profile to spread awareness of the plight of these women.
Its targeted, ambient, and could totally go viral, given how the network works to connect you with the people you know.
More needs to be done to shed light on the situation, and to learn about how we can strive to end or at least mitigate human trafficking.
Unfortunately, the profile created at LinkedIN has been temporarily restricted. But you can still view the profile below and visit trickedin to find out more.
Privacy advocates these days are bringing out their pickets and baying for the blood of tech companies employing the use of cookies to track and better target audiences so that marketers can get a better ROI against their advertising spends.
Many people see the phrase tracking cookies, and immediately put up this brick wall and instantly shut down their laptops with a 10-inch stick for fear that physical contact will somehow enable that cookie to track them into real life.
A lot of people don’t even know what is being tracked before jumping on the bandwagon and going on about privacy.
LOOK. Whatever cookies track, we don’t know WHO you are. All we know is that browser A has recently been on to a lot of travel sites, accesses techcrunch, mashable and slashfilm daily, so we are going to make assumptions that the person using browser A is a techie who loves movies and may be contemplating some travel. That’s all.
Sidi Bouzid Tracking the Trackers:
You may have seen a Ted Talk by Gary Kovacs about this cookie technology, and in the video he paints a picture of how companies like these are stalking him and his family, akin to a bunch of predators circling his child as she goes to school.
Come on.
I think he should know better, coming from a tech background himself.
No personally identifiable data is being collected.
He also spoke of a software to track the trackers called collusion. I installed it and surfed around for a day, collecting data on my trackers, and what I found didn’t alarm me.
In fact, a lot of these so-called “trackers” are essential web tools to enable us be better connected. So let’s see what these trackers really are.
Chicureo Abajo Trackers
So I left collusion on, and went about my daily business. When I logged off at the end of the day, this was what I saw:
Whoa
Looks intimidating. Let’s take a look when we filter into Techcrunch, one of the more popular tech sites that people go to.
What!
What! That’s a lot of trackers tracking my visit to techcrunch! But when you take a closer look at each, and understand their usage, its not all that scary.
Facebook, Linkedin, Google and Twitter are on there because some scripts would have to be in place so you can tweet, like and +1 each article that you share with your friends.
Google Analytics is on there so techcrunch can see where their visitors are coming from.
WordPress is there cos duh! that’s the blogging platform they are using.
Adtechus is an adserver that serves you the ads you see on the site.
All these different sites have codes on Techcrunch because they are required to perform a certain task.
Some of them are “tracking” you only for the reason that you can share these articles when you want to, at the click of a button, instead of copying and pasting the link and then emailing them to your list of friends, like we used to do.
So please, don’t fan the flames of paranoia any further than its already gone.
Pro (advertising) Choice
Yesterday, Frédéric Filloux of The Guardian wrote an article on behaviorial advertising via tracking of audience, and he had this to say:
Your online behavior – queries you send, ads you click on – draws your marketing profile, enabling brands to deluge you with “targeted” ads. A shoe freak will be swamped by shoemakers ads, someone who intends to buy a car will be targeted by automakers and dealers.
I say what’s wrong with showing you car ads if you ARE indeed in the consideration phase of purchasing a car?
A webpage is going to have a certain number of ads no matter where you surf. Would you rather they show you an ad of a car you may or may not like, or they show you an ad for a sanitary pad brand when you are a man?
Now, how many of you have experienced this? You’ve been planning a holiday trip to somewhere, and have been looking up tripadvisor and other travel sites for holiday ideas, and suddenly, on a daily basis, you’re being bombarded with banner ads offering airfares, accommodation and day trips?
Coincidence? Nope.
You’re actually being targeted by very smart ads, using data collected from your surfing habits over the past X days.
People are generally divided into 2 camps on this:
1) WTF?! They are watching my every move on the internet?!?!? No fucking way! Respect privacy blah blah Big Brother watching blah blah How can I surf porn in peace blah blah
2) Wow, does that mean I’ll get more relevant ads in future showing me what i’m actually looking out for? Great! Bring it!
The way we used to (and a lot are still doing it this way) buy media is that we’ll purchase a chunk of impressions on Yahoo or MSN or Google, and hope that of these 1,000,000 impressions bought, we’ll hit some of the people who will buy into the ad and convert.
Most times, we’ll add on some targeting filters like news, technology or entertainment category. But these are still purchases off the content and on sites.
There’s still too much wastage and uncertainty.
Real Time Buying/Bidding (RTB)
The current darling of display technology lies in RTB. The ability to assess, in real time, whether this “person” seeing this page, is who we’re targeting at, and whether he’s a possible fit, and if so, to show him the ad.
And we do this on an impression by impression level, and its done via an “auction” where different advertisers “bid” for the right to show their ad to this “person”.
For example, if you’ve been to sites like sgcarmart or searched for car brands in the last month, we assume you’re in the consideration phase for buying a car, and can serve you an ad for a car advertiser.
If you’ve recently bought an air ticket and hotel accommodation, we can assume you’re planning for a trip, and we can show you an ad for travel insurance.
In a nutshell, RTB is able to target and show you ads that are relevant to your current needs, and increase chances of you clicking and converting.
Higher efficiency, lowered wastage, better returns on investment. That’s the RTB proposition.
RTB has been around for a few years, but it has been ramping up on growth over the past 12 months, especially in APAC. So marketers, I suggest getting to know RTB on a deeper level, or at least set up a decent budget to trial and see the results for yourself.
Privacy concerns
Of course, there are upsides and downsides to every emerging technology. In order for us to serve you better and more relevant ads, we first need to know more about “you”.
That being said, no personable identifiable information is ever released, or tracked.
What’s being tracked are your cookies, and what we track from cookies are simply sites you been to, content you have been consuming, search terms you’ve been keying.
With this data, we then extrapolate and build an audience behavioral pool, and make certain assumptions based on those information.
For instance, this cookie visits sites like flowerpod, motherhood, parenting sites and constantly searches for Kim Kardashian, Survivor winner, Ivanka Trump and Desperate housewives.
We then make certain assumptions that this cookie belongs to a woman who’s probably married, and enjoys reality shows and is or could be thinking of having a kid. We then serve ads based on what this “cookie” may need in her life, like baby clothes, women’s fashion brands or DVD sets of certain shows.
I’ll talk about how users are being tracked online in the next post.
Whenever I see articles like this, it makes me mad. Just because digital is measurable in more or less real time by the impression, doesn’t mean we need to guarantee the view of every impression before we get paid.
The article states that up to 30% of paid ads online are never seen because they occur below the fold (where users need to scroll down before being exposed to the banner).
As such, advertisers are demanding make-good impressions or not paying the full price for number of impressions booked.
If they are buying CPM, and publishers can prove that the impressions are indeed delivered, there should be no dispute.
If, one day, we have a report that says toilet flushing activity increased by 30% during commercial breaks, are advertisers going to the broadcaster and say they want to pay less because their precious TVCs were not seen by up to 30% of people who took toilet breaks? What about the other 10% who went to raid the fridge for an icy scoop of Chubby Hubby?
Why not only pay for each person who looks up to a billboard while crossing the street?
These measurement inefficiencies are everywhere, but why is digital solely taking on the bricks?
Digital advertising is already one of the most affordable in the marketing mix, and still they circle, like vultures, preying for compensation as we provide transparency.
There’s bound to be wastage in any marketing effort. Let’s all put our heads together and think of how best to engage and convert the 70% who has been exposed to the message instead.
Pissed off.
This video for Google Glasses plays out like the origins story of The Terminator, before he got reprogrammed for death and destruction.
Just an ordinary day, in the life of T-101.
Watch.
But seriously, how many times have we had to check in a few times to get the location right? How many times have we had to say the command before Siri (or Google voice or Microsoft speaks or Kindle knows) can register it?
The smooth operations this video demonstrated is at best a fluke, or the result of many long tedious hours of editing. Would love to see the “making of”, if you know what I mean.
Seriously, FML
… in her underwear.
what do u mean nobody plays tennis in their underwear?
Because it is oh-so-comfortable and not at all awkward for any normal human being.
I approve.
Is that a wrap? I need to go pee.
i'm bringin sexy tennis back!
If video’s your thing, check out the tvc below:
If you’re interested in getting a pair for your next tennis game, check out under.me.