The online media industry will by now have had time to digest the news that Firefox 22 intends to block 3rd party cookies by default. What this means is that when an ad is served to a website hosted by this version of the browser, the technology that serves the ad will not be able… Continue reading »
I’ve had the good fortune of consulting with a number of start-ups over the past few months on their media and marketing strategies. Start-ups are very different beasts from the larger corporate giants we media folk are more used to engaging with. For a start they won’t always have a marketing function, your client will… Continue reading »
A couple of weeks ago we heard the news that Facebook acquired Atlas for the sum of $100M. Atlas is primarily an ad serving platform born from the agency Avenue A (aka Razorfish), who wanted to develop an in house tool to manage their online display buying. During the early noughties Atlas quickly became a… Continue reading »
I recently entered into a discussion with a client about the potential of marketing their app instead of driving traffic to the website. I held the view that the app was a much more engaging and rich experience than the more transactional website and that getting more people to use the app would show healthier… Continue reading »
Over the last 6 months I have seen many briefs from brands requesting ‘content marketing’ services. Some indicate a desire to shift away from online paid media, reallocating budget into producing and seeding content. This is partly due to a view held that paid online media is a bottomless pit requiring constant funding, and that… Continue reading »
I feel like we’re at an important juncture in digital media. Consolidation is happening all over the place so that a few key players are emerging in ecommerce, in social and in technology.. We’ve witnessed Facebook struggle in 2012 potentially putting a spanner in the works for many upcoming tech companies. The impact of this has signalled a warning sign… Continue reading »
We’ve all become used to the clichéd ‘data is the new oil’. In digital media at least, data is what drives performance, data is what helps us make business cases, helps us to prove or disprove hypotheses and what ultimately justifies our fees. Having data at our fingertips is not new, it’s just that we… Continue reading »
Google’s launch of a new tag management product this month happened with little fanfare or reason to comment. After all, Google has launched many new media products over the years, many of which are free to use. They’ve probably given TagMan, BrightTag and SiteTagger some cause for concern. After all, which client will want to… Continue reading »
I’ve recently been reading an outstanding publication called ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ by Daniel Kahneman. The book is about ‘human rationality and irrationality’ and how the brain can often jump to the wrong conclusions. One reason for this cites Kahnenman is ‘because people are prone to apply causal thinking inappropriately, to situations that require statistical… Continue reading »
I’m going to be totally honest and say that I had originally planned to fill this this article with a diatribe about mobile display advertising. I was going to criticize the misleading stat that click through rates are 15 times higher on a mobile, (50% of which occur in error I might add), especially in view of… Continue reading »
