Advertising

Less than a month before NBC’s latest multichannel Summer Olympics exercise from London, it remains anyone’s guess how these games, with thousands of coverage hours spread across more NBC Universal-owned channels, will turn out in viewership. What you can conclude at this point, and we’ll do so in parlance of scoring a baseball game, is Continue Reading →

Facebook is launching a new type of mobile advertising that targets consumers based on the apps they use, pushing the limits of how companies track what people do on their phones. The social network is tracking the apps that people use through its popular Facebook Connect feature, which lets users log into millions of websites Continue Reading →

And so, the Facebook v. Yahoo! courtroom tussle has come to an end. The two Silicon Valley giants have agreed to a legal truce and cross-licensed a bit of each other’s IP, meaning that’s one less legal donnybrook we have to worry about upsetting consumer sensibilities. Not only have the two settled their differences over Continue Reading →

Microsoft Corp admitted its largest acquisition in the Internet sector was effectively worthless and wiped out any profit for the last quarter, as it announced a $6.2 billion charge to write down the value of an online advertising agency it bought five years ago. The announcement came as a surprise, but did not shock investors, Continue Reading →

(Content originally published on KellerFay.) Everyone is talking about the massive amount of money that will be spent on advertising during this presidential election.  But a recent article in the New York Times illustrates that advertising alone will not win the campaign, and that organized, person-to-person persuasion remains critically important. Entitled, “Obama Campaign Banks On High-Tech Ground Game to Continue Reading →

So there should be a welcome for a big piece of research into piracy sites and how they are funded. This study was undertaken by the security firm Detica on behalf of two organisations which might not seem natural bedfellows, Google and PRS for Music, which represents songwriters. And what it shows is exactly what Continue Reading →

Complicating its efforts to accelerate advertising revenue, Facebook has agreed to make it clear to users that when they click to like a product on Facebook, their names and photos can be used to plug the product. They will also be given a chance to decline the opportunity to be unpaid endorsers. The changes are Continue Reading →

Most professional marketers know that it is rarely a good idea to use yourself as a focus group of one. While it is possible that your personal tastes and passions may be a perfect match for some segment of your target audience, it is very unlikely that it is a perfect match for your entire Continue Reading →

If Don Draper were alive, the fictional hero of “Mad Men” would be in Cannes this week for the annual Cannes Lions Festival. This is the world’s largest party (ahem… “festival”) for the advertising industry. So what if the European Union is teetering on the verge of collapse? “Faisons la fete,” everybody… let’s party! Explosive Continue Reading →

It is our task, both in science and in society at large, is to prove the conventional wisdom wrong and to make our unpredictable dreams come true. –Freeman Dyson, theoretical physicist For thirty years I have been at war with myself. In these years, we have owned media, sold it and alternately owned a marketing Continue Reading →