Washington policy makers, long concerned about how marketers use consumers’ personal data to their guide sales pitches on the Internet, have stepped up scrutiny of the increasingly sophisticated ad-targeting techniques used in other media, ranging from mobile phones to TV commercials to the ads consumers get in their mail boxes.
Kraft Foods, Greyhound Lines and Capital One Financial have bought some strange ads on the Internet lately. What’s so strange about them is that they’re invisible.
by Andrew LaVallee, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
The Federal Trade Commission is planning three public discussions, starting in December, devoted to technology and consumer privacy.
According to the FTC, the roundtables will address topics such as social networking, cloud computing, online advertising and mobile marketing, the goal being “to determine how best to protect consumer privacy while supporting beneficial uses of the information and technological innovation.”
by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Fancy new smart phones and laptops may generate more buzz, but the desktop PC remains the workhorse of the office. Bosses who outfit staffers with mobile devices, however, may be able to wring more work out of them, according to a new Forrester study.
by Michael Learmonth, Senior Editor, Advertising Age
Gawker Media impresario Nick Denton, one of the more vocal Cassandras of media collapse last fall, got a surprise this spring when things turned out to be, well, not so bad.
by Daniel Terdiman, Editor, Geek Gestalt, CNet News.com
For many fans of the hit TV series “Mad Men,” one of the biggest events of 2008 was the sudden emergence of a number of the show’s characters on Twitter.
At first, it seemed as though whoever was posting regular tweets from within the fictionalized 1960s world of the AMC network show was doing so on behalf of the producers. But as is well known now, they were a group of people who had taken on the task themselves, and who quickly found their project shut down.
In a recession, budgets are tightened, jobs are cut, and those who remain are expected to do more with less. Given this type of economic reality, it’s surprising to hear of an industry reporting an increase in spending on anything, much less on something as new as social media. Yet that’s exactly what’s occurring. According to a new Forrester Research survey of 145 global interactive marketers in both B2B and B2C companies with more than 250 employees, the use of social media as a marketing tool is on the rise.
They kept their Twitter feeds quiet and their iPhone cameras dormant. Most of them didn’t want their names to be used. There was more than a little bit of paranoia in the air as the guests arrived at last weekend’s Summit Series event, formally the Young World Leaders Summit–not the most modest of names. It was a gathering of about five dozen under-35 entrepreneurs and executives at a beachfront luxury resort outside the glitzy vacation city of Cancun.
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