Just Trust Us
In the era of fake news, a cottage industry of startups is competing to turn media credibility into a booming business. Do we really want that?
Tracking Talk The Blog of ReferDigital. How Marketing Works Now.
Thanks to addressable TV, budgets are starting to move away from Facebook
Ad budgets are flowing from Facebook back into TV in the U.K. But the inversion isn’t solely due to how fed up brands are with the social network; it’s also down to the emergence...
Facebook employees busted leaving 5-star reviews for Portal on Amazon
Just another reminder that you can’t really trust reviews on Amazon. The system is gamed and many of them are incentivized.
Yahoo Gemini (Oath) coming back to Bing Ads in March
If you currently run search campaigns on Oath Ad Platforms, your campaigns will keep running on Oath Ad Platforms until March 31, and you should keep them running. You’ll have until mid-March, or as...
After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
The publisher blocked all open-exchange ad buying on its European pages, followed swiftly by behavioral targeting. Instead, NYT International focused on contextual and geographical targeting for programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace deals and has...
Take with a grain of salt: The Theory of Peak Advertising and The Future of the Web
A rather dubious (in our opinion) article from 2013… 6 years later, the industry is still growing strongly.
Amazon comes for Facebook’s ad money – Cowen
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) could have 12% of total US ad spending by 2020, roughly double its current share, according to a new Cowen survey via Recode.
Amazon’s new ad strategy: Free samples based on what it knows about you
Amazon is quietly piloting a program to let brands like Maybelline and Folgers pay to send free samples to consumers — all based on what the retail giant already knows they’re likely to buy.
(Well-known) retailers that went bankrupt in 2018
The full list: David’s Bridal Sears Mattress Firm National Stores Gumps Brookstone Rockport Nine West Claire’s The Walking Company Bon-Ton Stores Kiko USA A’gaci
Instagram is helping save the indie bookstore
Stores like Books Are Magic and the Last Bookstore are benefiting from love on #bookstagram.
When a Sponsored Facebook Post Doesn’t Pay Off
The agency Speakr set influencers up with brands for lucrative campaigns—and then stiffed them.
Turning Off Facebook Location Tracking Doesn’t Stop It From Tracking Your Location
Even with location tracking turned off, Facebook uses IP addresses, check-ins, and cities on profiles to approximate user locations for ads and other services.
Dirty dealing in the $175 billion Amazon Marketplace
Sellers are more worried about a case being opened on Amazon than in actual court, says Dave Bryant, an Amazon seller and blogger. Amazon’s judgment is swifter and less predictable, and now that the...
India finds a new way to tax Google, Facebook
Facebook has 294 million users in India as of October, says data site Statista, while its messaging platform WhatsApp in February said it had 200 million users in the country, making it the largest...
Samsung Overtakes P&G As World’s Largest Advertiser
The South Korean consumer electronics and appliance marketer pumped $11.2 billion into advertising and sales promotion in 2017, a 13 percent increase. That moved it ahead of packaged-goods powerhouse P&G, which spent an estimated...
Marijuana and CBD companies can’t advertise on Facebook and Google, so they’re getting creative
The companies are looking to events, sponsorships and other ways to connect with customers… “So you can’t advertise on Facebook or Google – it’s not the end of the world,” said Wirth. “There are...
Dear tech companies, I don’t want to see pregnancy ads after my child was stillborn
And then, after all that, Experian swoops in with the lowest tracking blow of them all: a spam email encouraging me to “finish registering your baby” with them (I never “started,” but sure) to...
EU scrutinizes tech giants’ online advertising profits
Online ads are already a focus for several smaller antitrust agencies in Europe, often prompted by complaints from media companies as advertising spend shifts to the web.
The annual PornHub year in review tells us what we’re really looking at online
PornHub, a popular site that features people in various stages of undress, saw 33.5 billion visits in 2018. There are currently 7.53 billion people on Earth.
