Category Archives: Advertising

Advertising marketplace design

In the past decade several Nobel prizes in Economics have been awarded in the broader area of market (mechanism/auction/game) design. This is not surprising as the combination of Internet connectivity and ample computing resources are causing automated markets to pop … Continue reading

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Anatomy of an online ad

I’ve been asked to explain how online ads are delivered many times and every time I’m surprised by the complexity of covering even the most basic elements of how ads appear on Web pages. Since Wikipedia’s article on ad serving … Continue reading

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The Swoop Credo

I just updated the Swoop entry on my Linkedin profile with the following: Swoop is a native advertising platform that puts users first. Web democracy is powered by advertising-supported content. Traditional online advertising makes the Web suck. Swoop can fix … Continue reading

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Better Advertising backs self-regulation

Better Advertising has a new web site. Check it out. Also, our corporate blog is up. The current post outlines the three pillars of behavioral targeting self-regulation: Education, to empower consumers Transparency, to make clear who is doing what to … Continue reading

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Exploring privacy

The title of this post is also the title of the first of three public roundtable discussions by the FTC focused on privacy online. The Federal Trade Commission will host a series of day-long public roundtable discussions to explore the … Continue reading

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Better Advertising Launches

Exciting day today. Better Advertising just came out of stealth. I’m acting CTO & co-founder, much in the way we started Plinky/Thing Labs last year. In fact, I got to know Better Advertising CEO Scott Meyer though the Plinky diligence … Continue reading

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Mobile advertising got more (less?) competitive

Google just nabbed AdMob for a handy $750M. Congrats to AdMob founder Omar Hamoui who got into the space early and executed very aggressively. More details on the acqusition here. The background story here is of the explosion in mobile … Continue reading

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Hats off to Arrington

Well, it seems that the Mike Arrington’s pointed critique of social marketing practices is getting even the very large players to move quickly. Today, we’re adding a fifth principle that clarifies a specific use case that we feel is particularly … Continue reading

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Do social networks care about your privacy?

Following my post yesterday on Twitter having to think carefully about privacy, a friend pointed me to a study that shows how social networks leak deep personal information, allowing third parties to combine what you do with who you are. … Continue reading

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Twitter gets in the privacy game

TechCrunch saw Twitter re-writing all links to point to their site. Great idea as it gives them wonderful data. Potentially bad idea from a privacy standpoint if they do anything more than count how many times a link is clicked. … Continue reading

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