Verizon Wireless has announced that it will be adding cookies to the web browser of anyone who visits the Verizon Wireless website, and then Verizon will track you across the web, and sell the data it collects on you to marketers. What’s more, they are selling the data to marketers to whom they are giving marketing access to your Verizon Wireless device!
Alexander Hamilton, Groupon thinks that you’re absolutely great! For some people, President’s Day is all about the guys whose faces are carved on Mount Rushmore. You know, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and those other two guys. Frankly, we’re still upset that Washington’s birthday and Lincoln’s birthday used to be separate holidays in February and got combined into one holiday known as President’s Day. Groupon decided to break out of the traditional mold and celebrate a lesser known president – President Alexander Hamilton of the $10 bill.
Once again Facebook, your friendly social media hotspot, is the target of marketers wanting and gaining access to your personal data — as a loyalty frequent shopper card program can use that data to cross-reference your likes and interactions to target your pocketbook. And all of it is correlated to you, personally, without so much as a choice to opt-in.
The concept of “The Internet Of Everything,” the notion that all products, people, and services communicate for the sake of personalization and efficiency, is more than just the wave of the tech future. It could mean very big business. According to Cisco Systems, the concept is worth $14 trillion in revenue over the ten years.
Big name designers such as Michael Kors, Nanette Lepore, Badgley Mischka and Carolina Herrera have taken advantage of digital media by showing their fashion shows online during Mercedes Benz Fashion Week. Major designers are realizing that online fashion shows are a great way to bring their collection to wider audience, and new designers can produce online fashion show for a fraction of the pricetag of an in-person show, which can cost upwards of $100k.
Perhaps iOS 6’s Mapplegate was simply meant to be a great distraction from the fact that Apple is now covertly tracking users through IFA (or IDFA) tracking technology with the iOS 6 update. While Apple had disabled the tracking of iPhone users by advertisers by disallowing app developers from using the data from Apple devices through the unique serial number permanently assigned to each device, it seems that iOS 6 has brought tracking back.
Well, Facebook has finally done it, they’ve found a way to allow unscrupulous marketers to spam your Facebook account. Facebook will allow advertisers to target users based on personal information such as phone numbers, user IDs, and email addresses. In a confirmation to PCMag.com, Facebook relayed their new marketing program which will begin next week, targeting ads to their “existing customers.”
If Microsoft wanted to play it safe when designing their new logo, they pulled it off flawlessly. While a few are calling the new logo “great,” and a few are calling it “awful,” it seems the overwhelming response is “meh.”
With the announcement that they are introducing, “expecting a baby,” as a life event option for parents-to-be, Facebook is once again proving that they have mastered the art of capitalizing on their users’ lives. And in true Facebook fashion, they claim that, no, this is just another thoughtful tool for excited expectant parents to share their overwhelming joy with their loved ones…but that perhaps they will consider using it for advertising at a later date.
In a move that is not unheard of, but completely reprehensible, defeated Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is selling off his campaign’s donor and activist email list as the campaign attempts to crawl out of their $4 million hole of debt. And perhaps “slithering” is a better word as Newt is slapping his donors right in the face by not just selling their email addresses to other political campaigns, but to any unscrupulous company with equally slippery ethics.
Slashdot, that ubertech, ubergeek site that we all know and love, has inserted “Ads by Google” Adsense ads into the Slash dot RSS feed for a while. Nothing wrong with that. But lately some of the ads have been really racy. Take, for example, this ad (see screen capture below) for the online dating site Anastasia Dates, at AnastasiaDates.com
Forget the two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun. What’s hot these days at McDonald’s is mommy bloggers. That’s right. While multi-million dollar television advertising campaigns are certainly no thing of the past, the new marketing frontier which McDonald’s is openly mining is mommy bloggers. Mommy bloggers are just what they sound like – moms who blog. And they can mean big business, as some of these mom bloggers have a substantial following.
Remarketing is a term you are likely to start hearing more of, with the buzz about the possiblity of a Do Not Track registry. This is both because remarketing is one of the leading uses for online tracking of consumers’ movements on the Internet and across the web, and because remarketing is one of the big reasons that Internet advertisers, Internet marketers, and their lobbying organizations oppose a Do Not Track list. Remarketing, you see, is online advertising that follows you around the web or, as we call it, stalkvertising.