Broadband Video: TV that watches us

The privacy issues related to the growing field of broadband video distribution measurement requires debate and policy safeguards. Here’s a telling quote from a recent presentation by Video Measures about its online video tracking technology that connects directly with a Flash video player: “This allows us to collect every interaction by every viewer inside every video. So for the first time since the dawn of television, video publishers and video advertisers can understand how their audience is engaging, or often times isn’t, with their content.”

They call their business, in part, “measuring the behavior of Internet video audiences.”

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Google Disses Privacy at New York Times editorial board meeting

All along, we have warned that Google’s business model is at odds with its public posturing as a company concerned about democratic communications. Google’s plans to expand its data collection and targeted marketing apparatus threatens privacy. In a editorial commentary today in the New York Times supportive of online privacy, Adam Cohen reveals that “in a visit to the editorial board not long ago, a top Google lawyer made the often-heard claim that in the Internet age, people — especially young people — do not care about privacy the way they once did.” Green refutes this claim, noting that ” [I]t is a convenient argument for companies that make money compiling and selling personal data, but it’s not true.”

Companies such as Google are opposed to meaningful privacy policies because, they fear, it would reduce revenues by making its micro-targeting and branding system less effective. But they have to engage in more soul-searching here. Wouldn’t it be better to provide its global users with maximum freedom and security? Is Google a leader–or does it have to be dragged into taking a more pro-democratic position through regulatory action, public shaming, and an eventual public privacy backlash?

Is John Malone behind Discovery Channel censorship of Alex

We heard via Democracy Now that the Discovery Channel is refusing to air the Academy-nominated documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side. It’s likely that this censorious decision involves conservative cable TV titan John Malone and his Liberty Media. Malone, once called the Darth Vader of the cable TV biz because of his anti-public interest slash and burn policies, is in the process of taking over Rupert Murdoch’s DirecTV (with an FCC decision soon about the transfer). He is the chair of the Discovery Holding Co.  Malone has long had a financial relationship with both News Corp. and Barry Dillers IAC.

Discovery Channel’s advertisers should be targeted for this decision, which is politically motivated. Pension funds and other investors who hold Liberty shares should protest. The Discovery Channel, never an ally of serious documentary, should be held in scorn by filmmakers and other media groups. Meanwhile, it should also serve as a wake-up call to create several new independent broadband video channels for news, public affairs, and POV programming. Btw, Malone helped block NBC from creating a news channel competitor to CNN years ago; his TCI was also opposed to meaningful support for public access programming, and also undermined plans by the BBC in the early 1990’s to have a news channel in the U.S.

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Google’s mobile vision: “integrated marketing campaigns” for” Fortune 1000 companies”

Google, as we have said previously, deserves praise for its work on open spectrum. But its motives are more aligned with plans to expand its interactive data collection and targeted marketing business. Here’s an excerpt from Google’s job listing for “Team Manager Mobile Advertising, Google Mobile Advertising:
“As a Google Mobile Team Manager, you’ll serve as a mini-CEO responsible for developing and implementing strategies to sustain and increase a multi-million-dollar revenue business in the mobile industry. You’ll hire, train and lead your team, which will work closely with many internal Google divisions to develop integrated marketing campaigns and present them to Fortune 1000 companies. A crucial focus will be to understand how the mobile area fits into cross-media campaigns.”

or perhaps you are interested in: Senior Account Executive, Google Mobile Advertising:

“The Mobile Advertising team that operates within Advertising Sales was organized to fortify the company’s mobile objectives in search, branding and measurement. We do this by striving to identify our clients’ business challenges, to collaboratively shape solutions that drive their strategic initiatives and to keep them educated and informed in the ways that our products can enhance their online and/or offline presence…
Senior Account Executives drive revenue by selling Google’s mobile solutions to top-tier advertisers. This is a high-energy job requiring persistent and persuasive interactions with clients, deep mobile and Internet expertise, proven sales skills, the ability to work collaboratively with internal sales teams, closing deals, strong communication skills and a broad base of mobile industry contacts.”

Microsoft/Yahoo! privacy & merger watch: Yahoo! is "largest behavioral targeting network" according to its Blue Lithium subsidiary

Yesterday, the behavioral targeting firm and Yahoo! subsidiary Blue Lithium gave a lunch time presentation at the OMMA Behavioral Targeting conference. The Yahoo!/Blue Lithium representatives discussed how “Yahoo! was the largest behavioral targeting network,” even prior to its acquisition of Blue Lithium. They talked about the “amount of knowledge we have about users,” including the “deep information” on its “hundreds of millions” of users. Yahoo!, they claimed, had a treasure trove of user data for its targeting “engine,” including search clicks, page views, ad views, and clicks. Yahoo!, they explained, “has spent time and money” to build an ad targeting system that can use all this data, with 400 distinct “categories and models.” Yahoo! has “scale” and “unprecedented reach.” They made a point of noting that [for now], Google doesn’t use behavioral targeting. The representatives also boosted about Blue Lithium’s retargeting capabilities, and that they can target with “specific messages,” and “identify the people that clicked.”  The retargeting is followed up with a “call to action” they noted.

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Microsoft/Yahoo! combination would create a "dominant player in display ads"

From the UK’s New Media Age online ad trade (excerpt). It underscorses for us the failure of regulators to address both the competition and privacy issues (let alone consequences for digital media content diversity): “A merger in the wake of Microsoft’s proposed $44.6bn (£22.7bn) takeover, could create a dominant display provider to match Google’s dominance of the search market…A combined Microsoft-Yahoo! could reach as much as 81.5% of the total worldwide audience…

“I think it would consolidate a position as the dominant leader in display advertising, in the same way that Google is the head-and-shoulders leader in search’ [said Caroline McGuckian, global head of media at LBi.]…Media agencies have largely welcomed the takeover as a boost to the display ad market, particularly behavioural targeting. It’s also seen as bringing welcome competition to Google’s dominance of online.”

source: “Microsoft-Yahoo! Would Be Display Ad Leader.” Danielle Long. NMA. 07.02.08 [sub. required]/

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Google & Microsoft’s Antitrust Teams: the Digitally Well-Connected

Who will represent the interests of the public as Google and Microsoft (and others) scoop up large chunks of the digital eco-system? Here’s an excerpt from Legal Times [“Microsoft Lawyers Map out the Bid for Yahoo.” Feb. 11, 2008. reg. required] on the former federal antitrust officials working for Google and Microsoft:


“Google does have a team of veterans representing its interests in the Yahoo bid. David Gelfand, a Washington antitrust partner at Cleary Gottlieb, and Susan Creighton, Washington antitrust co-chair at Wilson Sonsini, both helped Google get its merger with DoubleClick past federal regulators at the Federal Trade Commission last year. And Creighton was director of the Bureau of Competition at the FTC before joining Wilson Sonsini in 2006.

Microsoft, too, has a connected advocate in [Charles] Rule. When he goes to the Justice Department, he won’t need introductions. Rule worked with Thomas Barnett, the head of the Antitrust Division, while the two were partners at Covington & Burling. Rule has also worked with Barnett’s deputies. David Meyer, now deputy assistant attorney general for civil enforcement, served as Rule’s special assistant in the Antitrust Division in the late ’80s and then worked with him at Covington. (Skadden partners Michael Weiner in New York and James Venit in Brussels, are representing Yahoo on antitrust matters.)”

Microsoft’s quest for Yahoo!—Follow (Your!) Data…or Hi, Ho, Hi, Ho, it’s off to harvest your data we go

We will be covering the proposed takeover, from both the online advertising business and privacy side. Here’s a revealing tidbit from BusinessWeek on what Microsoft hopes to achieve from a deal: “What’s more, the company is hoping to bring together Yahoo’s research and development staff, who’ve done innovative work in online advertising auction theory and data-mining, with its own online lab.”

Yes, a key to analyzing this deal–if it happens–is what are the consequences when Microsoft’s adCenter merges with Yahoo!’s Panama and other data mining assets. That’s why it’s important to keep a spotlight on what Google and Microsoft, among others, plan to do. Here’s an example of where we are headed, courtesy of Microsoft’s adLab demonstration this week [via Clickz]: “Online advertising has been centered around keywords for too long,” said Tarek Najm, an engineer for Microsoft’s advertising and business intelligence systems, adding the “next wave of advertising is going to use new algorithms and technologies” that display ads based on consumer intent.”

Nielsen Tracks Your Brain to Boost Ads, Programming….Get ready for a neuroscience designed "sweeps" period!

The formulation for interactive marketing includes personalized data collection, content creation utilizing immersive multimedia, and targeting across platforms and applications. Part of the ad industry’s quest to perfect engagement as a metric includes incorporating advances in neuroscience. So it’s not surprising that the folks that give us the TV ratings (and more), is making moves to utilize brain research. Here’s an excerpt from Katy Bachman’s Adweek article [Feb. 7, 2007].

“… Nielsen Co.’s announcement today that it has made a strategic investment in NeuroFocus, a firm that specializes in applying brainwave research to advertising, programming and messaging…

The two companies will work together to develop new forms of measurement and metrics based on the latest advances in neurosciences…

“This alliance will enable us to gather truly unique insights about consumers’ attitudes and behavior about which they themselves may not even be fully aware and will complement our other measures of consumer behavior,” said Susan Whiting, evp at Nielsen.

Initially, the alliance will focus on bringing to market new science-based products, services and metrics to clients in consumer packaged goods, television, film and emerging media. Nielsen also intends to use NeuroFocus’ techniques, as part of Nielsen’s Digital Labs research centers, to better understand consumer engagement.”

****

More about NeuroFocus from its website:

“NeuroFocus, Inc. is an innovative company applying the latest advances in neuroscience to the world of advertising and messaging. Leveraging a rapidly growing body of research and insights into how the human brain processes stimuli like ads, messages, and products, we are able to track millisecond-by-millisecond brain responses to messaging.

Our breakthrough techniques utilize advances in measuring attention challenges, emotional engagement, and memory/retention to measure the effectiveness of advertising. Our measurements are precise, unambiguous, and repeatable.”

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Microsoft’s Digital Ad Vision: Part 2

From this week’s Microsoft’s “Strategic Update [Feb. 4, 2008]. Excerpt:

“Advertising is a key part of a number of the opportunities that I talked about, and the key probably right now for us to continue to grow our advertising footprint starts with what we’re doing with search and portal. We have made good progress in that business. It is growing. Since our start four years ago, we now have what I would call a very credible search product, a very credible advertising platform. We’ve got good trajectory. This was, in some senses, the best time for us to ask ourselves, what else can we do to make ourselves even more effective in this business?
And in a sense, the fact that we’re in a stronger position now than we were 12 months ago actually makes this an easier acquisition to consider, even though, as I said in my letter to Jerry Yang, we did have discussions a year ago with Yahoo! about combining the businesses. People say, what are you doing here? Well, what we’re trying to do is take some momentum that we have and ask, how do we really increase that momentum even further? What else can we do?
And the truth is, either on our own efforts or, hopefully, now that we’ve proposed this acquisition, on our efforts merged together with Yahoo!, there are really four things we get a chance to work on. First and foremost is to expand our R&D capacity. We’re going to have to innovate like crazy to get the position want to have in this market. We’re going to have to innovate in the ad platform. We’re going to have to innovate in core search. We’re going to have to invest in new, emerging user experiences —mobile, social media, video, entertainment experience. We need the R&D capability to really compete with the market leader.
We continue to hire people and transfer people. But in fact, bringing together Microsoft and Yahoo! will allow us, because of the fantastic engineering talent both at Yahoo! and at Microsoft, we get more capacity more quickly. We get a chance to not have to think so much about how do we not use the capacity we have, but how do we deploy this incredible team to make sure that we’re doing everything and more that the market leader might be doing?”