go-Digital Blog on Digital Marketing

If you thought robots could never replace journalists, think twice.

That’s certainly been the case at The Associated Press, America’s oldest 24-hour news agency. AP produced 3,000 articles in the past quarter, 10X more than it used to, by using automated technology.

According to The Verge, AP has been able to do it by partnering with Automated Insights, a company that specializes in “robot journalism.” Automated Insights uses artificial intelligence and Big Data analysis to automatically generate data-heavy articles, such as earnings reports.

Initially there was some human editing involved, but now most of the articles are fully automated — with far fewer errors than human reporters and editors. In theory, it could crank out 2,000 articles per second.

But AP says the purpose of having “robot journalists” is not about replacing its reporters, at least in the foreseeable future. Instead, it is to allow the reporters to spend more time on high-quality journalism.

Of course, this is not the first time we’ve seen a computer software do a better job than its human counterparts. Last year, we wrote about Narrative Science, another story automation company, that claims it can do the type of deep analysis a $250,000 per year consultant would do.

If you’re still not a believer in “robot journalism,” make sure you read AP’s article on Apple’s latest earnings. There’s no byline, but just a small note at the end: “This story was generated by Automated Insights using data from Zacks Investment Research.”

—
drag2share – drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)

Don’t click any porn links on Facebook. Just don’t. It’s a good rule of thumb, but there’s an extra good reason right now. There’s a troubling type of porn-based malware that’s apparently infected over 110,000 Facebook users in two days. And you could get the same Click Transmitted Disease.

—
drag2share – drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)

Living a wholly private life on the internet is getting to be impossible, but months of thinkpieces and public outcry finally seem to have done a little good where one company is concerned. According to the New York Times, Verizon Wireless is giving its customers the option to fully opt out of the quiet, advertiser-friendly web tracking it’s been conducting for the better part of two years. Alas, there’s no word yet on just when that change will take effect, though it can’t come soon enough for the privacy advocates and concerned consumers that’ve been raising hell since the existence of so-called “supercookies” came to light.

Right, let’s take a step back for a moment. Since 2012, Verizon’s been modifying some of its mobile web traffic to include what are technically called a Unique Identifier Header — better known these days as “supercookies” — that quantify your activity on the web to help build a pattern of interests and actions. That information forms an invisible portrait of you that’s incredibly valuable to advertisers looking to target ever more specific subsets of people who might want to buy their crap. Now in fairness, Verizon has been giving people the option to opt-out of the advertising side of the equation for a while now. Thing is, their web traffic would continue to be tagged with supercookies anyway. Users never had a say in whether or not they were tracked, just whether or not they were pandered to in the process. That thankfully won’t be the case for too much longer (we hope) but c’mon Verizon — if you’re going to pull something like this, at least give us the choice to opt in rather than bail out of something you’ve unilaterally imposed on us.

—
drag2share – drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)

Source: Adobe [pdf]

Notes: Weekends tend to garner a greater share of search ad clicks on mobile devices than on desktops, finds Adobe in its most recent quarterly Digital Advertising Report covering Q4 2014. Indeed, almost one-third (32%) of mobile search ad clicks came on the weekend, with Sundays (17%) netting the largest daily share. By comparison (and not altogether unsurprisingly), weekends saw a lower combined share (27%) of desktop text ad clicks, with Monday (16%) seeing the largest daily portion. When it came to interaction rates on Facebook, though, Friday was best for likes and shares from b! rand Fac ebook followers.

Source: Facebook [pdf]

Notes: Facebook’s advertising revenues grew by 53% year-over-year in Q4 to reach almost $3.6 billion, the social network reported yesterday. Mobile’s share of ad revenues climbed yet again, to 69%, up from 53% during the year-earlier period. Some 64% of Facebook’s 1.39 billion monthly active users accessed the site daily, with that figure unchanged from a quarter earlier. Nevertheless, that translated to 890 million daily active users (DAUs), of whom roughly 84% were mobile DAUs.

Source: Experian Data Quality [download page]

Notes: Despite all of the benefits attributed to data-driven marketing, data quality issues continue to persist, according to a new report from Experian Data Quality. In new survey results, Experian finds that US companies believe that 32% of their data, on average, is inaccurate, up from 25% a year ago. That’s even higher than the global average, which has steadily risen over the past couple of years: in this year’s study, respondents estimated that an average 26% of their data is inaccurate, up from 22% in 2014 and 17% a year earlier. Human error continues to be the main culprit, cited by 61% of respondents, followed by a lack of internal communication between departments (31%) and an inadequate data strategy (28%).
Meanwhile, the most common data accuracy errors are incomplete or missing data (51%), outdated information (48%) and inaccurate data (44%), and the most common methods of detection are problems reported by employees, customers or prospects (57%) and proactive data audits (44%).