Can reviews on Amazon be trusted?
“The way Amazon presents reviews to you is a form of hypnosis,” says Saoud Khalifah, who runs the fake review detection site, Fakespot. “They put a glowing 5-star review right in your face. They...
Tracking Talk The Blog of ReferDigital. How Marketing Works Now.
Amazon’s Rise in Ad Searches Dents Google’s Dominance
Advertisers are starting to shift spending on search ads from Alphabet Inc.’s Google toward Amazon.com Inc., a sign of how the online retailer is capitalizing on becoming the top destination for consumers’ product searches.
Drunk shopping is a $48B industry
Consumers are spending on average $440 a year on purchases made while intoxicated, and most of those sales are made on Amazon, according to a survey from The Hustle. E-commerce is encouraging the trend, with...
The Most Important Writing Lesson I Ever Learned
Advertising teaches its own lessons. For starters, everyone hates advertising. Advertising lies. Advertising misleads. It’s evil, phony, it’s trying to sell us crap we don’t need. I can’t argue with any of that, except to observe that for a...
Giant Ad Fraud Scheme Drained Users’ Batteries And Data By Running Hidden Video Ads In Android Apps
A scheme to stealthily run video ads behind banner images drained users’ batteries and data while they used popular Android apps.
Amazon to Launch Mobile Ads, in a Threat to Google and Facebook
Amazon.com has hit on a new way to grab a chunk of the $129 billion digital advertising market now dominated by Google and Facebook Inc.: sell video spots on the e-commerce giant’s smartphone shopping...
Sir Martin Sorrell says S4 Capital is ‘firing on all cylinders’
S4 is comprised of Dutch advertising company MediaMonks bought last July, and California-based digital agency MightHive, which helps larger companies buy online advertising, added in December. In its first set of annual results, S4...
Billionaire Kylie Jenner Is the Future of Shopping
The public’s fickleness means Jenner’s star will fade eventually, but the social media phenomenon that she represents is surely here to stay – especially given that the big consumer brands are deeply unimpressed with the...
Amazon is putting its counterfeit problem in brands’ hands by letting them delete knock-offs themselves
Through Project Zero, Amazon will allow brands to use its self-service counterfeit removal tool to delete knock-off products.
Confessions of a location data exec: ‘It’s a Ponzi scheme’
Who goes into a shop with their phone in-hand looking at a publisher site? That’s not how people behave when they’re shopping. And yet there are location data vendors who are selling data sets of people who are...
US Digital Ad Spending Will Surpass Traditional in 2019
Also for the first time, the combined share of the duopoly (Google and Facebook) will drop, even as their revenues grow.
The CEO of Drift on Why SaaS Companies Can’t Win on Features, and Must Win on Brand
Because SaaS products are so easy to build and deploy today, if a market has serious demand, it will quickly become flooded with products touting similar features. So to win, you need to win...
Scout24 Gets $5.5 Billion Boost to Rival Axel Springer, EBay
Hellman & Friedman and Blackstone Group agree to pay €46 per share for Scout24, valuing the Germany-based online classifieds company at €4.9B
Why People Still Don’t Buy Groceries Online
We shop online for almost everything. Why not food? Twenty-two percent of apparel sales and 30 percent of computer and electronics sales happen online today, but the same can be said for only 3...
Amazon Gets Some Blame in Ad Industry’s 24-Hour, $5 Billion Rout
Mirabaud analyst Neil Campling said consumer goods companies can have as many as 25 ad agencies working for them and that looks inefficient.
Facebook will reveal who uploaded your contact info for ad targeting
Facebook will start to show when your contact info was uploaded, if it was by the brand or one of their agency/developer partners and when access was shared between partners.
Charlotte Russe files for bankruptcy and will close nearly 100 stores
The company hopes to emerge from bankruptcy with a new owner and a lighter balance sheet. It secured $50 million from lenders to continue running about 400 Charlotte Russe and Peek Children’s stores, as...
Report: YouTube ad revenue jumped 11% in 2018 thanks to repeat advertisers
YouTube saw a 51 percent ad renewal rate among brands in 2018, with an 11 percent increase in revenue year over year, an study by MediaRadar found. Three brands — Geico, Samsung and Disney...
Google Play apps with >4.3 million downloads stole pics and pushed porn ads
The 29 apps concealed their malice and were hard for many infected users to uninstall.
Reddit to Provide Cost-Per-Click Ads on Platform, Receiving Mixed Reviews From Agencies
Reddit is making what it calls its first foray into performance-driven ad bidding with its official debut of cost-per-click ads on its platform on Wednesday. However, this isn’t a new endeavor for most companies.
