Science
Viewability of Directly Placed Display Ads Improves in H1
source: http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/direct/viewability-of-directly-placed-display-ads-improves-in-h1-36622/?utm_campaign=rssfeed&utm_source=mc&utm_medium=textlink
61% of directly placed ads stayed in-view for at least 1 second during the fist half (H1) of 2013, up from 56% in the second half of 2012 and 49.9% in H1 2012, according to [pdf] a new study from Integral Ad Science. Viewability for directly placed ads was better than for networks (43%, slightly up from 42.2%), exchanges (40%, up from 37.6%), and hybrids (40%, down from 41.1%).
Longer engagement with viewers was much harder to come by: just 31% of directly placed ads remained in-view for 15 seconds, although that was a significant rise from 22.7% in the previous 6-month period.
Details from Integral’s “Semiannual Review” indicate that viewability continues to be better for vertically oriented (160×600 – Skyscraper) ads, with an average of 67% in-view for at least 1 second.
Suspicious Activity Lowest for Directly-Placed Ads
Directly placed ads not only had the highest engagement, they also were deemed to be lowest risk. While more than 1 in 5 impressions overall were suspicious of being fraudulent activity, only 2% of those placed directly exhibited suspicious activity. By contrast, exchanges were far riskier, with 20% of impressions deemed questionable (though that was down from upwards of 30% in H2 2012).
While the Integral study suggest some improvements in fraudulent activity, a recent report from Solve Media indicated that levels of suspicious activity continue to rise. Solve Media also pointed to rising fraud within the video ad space: in its study, Integral reveals that 3% of impressions on pre-roll ads were suspicious, with suspicious activity more concentrated on in-banner video ads. In fact, 40% of impressions through exchanges on in-banner video a! ds were e! stimated to be suspicious, according to the report.
Other Findings:
- Food sites boasted the highest level of engagement, with an average in-view time of more than 2.1 seconds. Education sites fared worst on this level, with an average in-view time of about 1 second.
- Ads on shopping sites were again deemed the least risky in terms of suspicious activity, while family and health sites had the highest rates of suspicious activity.
- The overall proportion of high-risk inventory (impressions that represent a low degree of brand safety) stood at roughly 6% in Q2, and was relatively consistent across channels.
- Risk content continues to be mostly the realm of illegal downloads, drugs, offensive language and alcohol. Risky adult and hate speech inventory declined between Q1 and Q2.
- About 13% of ads collided with another ad from the same campaign during H1, down from more than 20% in H2 2012.
- Canada received the largest amount of the US’ non-geo-targeted content, at 16.4% in Q1 2013 and 15.8% in Q2. Both were improvements from 34.5% in Q4 2012.
7 Retail Tricks Designed To Make You Spend More
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/7-ways-stores-make-you-spend-more-2012-11
This post originally appeared on Bankrate.com.
Today’s retailers have uncovered the science behind shopping. Your favorite mall stores actually hire such retail researchers as Paco Underhill, author of Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping.
Underhill has tracked hundreds of thousands of shoppers to study how they shop. “There is nothing random about how a store is arranged and designed. It is carefully calculated to appeal to you in every possible way,” he says.
“The stores have a plan, so you should, too,” says Dave Ramsey, best-selling author of The Total Money Makeover and host of a syndicated financial talk show on the radio.
1. Display ‘magic’
We can learn a lesson in Underhill’s book from a story told by a retailer about a tempting display of T-shirts.
“We buy them in Sri Lanka for $3 each. Then we bring them over here and sew in washing instructions, which are in French and English. Notice we don’t say the shirts are made in France. But you can infer that if you like. Then … we fold them just right on a tasteful tabletop display, and on the wall behind it we hang a huge, gorgeous photograph of a beautiful woman in an exo! tic loca le wearing the shirt.”
Resist the urge: “Write a monthly mall shopping budget and stash cash in an envelope specifically for that purpose. When the envelope is empty, stop spending,” says Ramsey. “A written budget makes you think twice when you are tempted by impulse buys.”
2. BOGO and 2-fer deals
BOGOs (buy one, get one), two-fers (two for the price of one) and bundled-item promotions successfully tempt you into shopping more often and spending more to raise the store’s number of sales as well as ticket averages, or amount of each sale. T
hey’re not always a good deal for you if you’re not familiar with the store merchandise and its regular prices. “You’re not saving if you are actually spending more than you planned,” says Underhill.
Resist the urge: “Know your favorite retailers, brands, regular prices, promotions and discounts, and always check the clearance area first to find a similar item on sale to avoid buying two of anything and spending more,” says family financial expert Ellie Kay, author of The 60-Minute Money Workout. “Ask yourself, ‘Do I really need two sweaters or two of the same jeans?'”
3. The right aisle trick
“Retail shopping studies have found that most people turn right when they enter a store. That’s because the majority of the population is right-handed and right-oriented,” says Underhill.
Knowing this, stores highlight tempting new items and trends to the right of the entrance. You’ll find that the music is louder and the displays are brighter to attract you where you will look and turn first. This is also where the most expensive items in the store are generally displayed.
R esist the urge: “Shop with blinders on,” says Kay. “Stick to your list with the cash in your hand. Avoid credit card debt at all costs, and head straight to what you came for.”
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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6 Brilliant TED Talks That Every Business Leader Should Watch
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/6-ted-talks-entrepreneurs-must-watch-2012-11
TED.com is just about the best place to hang out online if you have a few minutes to kill.
That’s because it offers free recorded lectures given by brilliant people doing amazing things in areas including technology, entertainment, design, business, science, and global issues.
And what’s cool about it is the talks are tagged so if you’re in the mood for something inspiring or funny, for example, you can get just the kinds of videos to do the trick.
Here are a handful of insightful TED talks posted this year that every entrepreneur should check out.
Shawn Achor explains how to change your perception of reality to produce better work.
Psychologist Shawn Achor doubles as a comedian in this talk, during which he says the lens through which your brain views the world shapes your reality.
“And if we can change the lens not only can we change your happiness, but we can change every single educational and business outcome at the same time,” he says in this highly entertaining video.
Drew Curtis discusses how he defended his business from a patent troll.
When Fark.com was sued by a patent troll “…for the creation and distribution of news releases via email” alongside companies such as Yahoo, MSN, Reddit, AOL, and TechCrunch, the eight-person company stood its ground.
“I had hoped to team up with some of these larger companies and defend against this lawsuit but one by one they settled out of the case even though not one of these companies infringed on the patent,” says Drew Curtis, founder of Fark.
The reason? The average troll defense costs $2 million and takes 18 months if you win. He proves that little guys don’t have to let themselves get bullied with ! frivolou s lawsuits.
Julia Burstein gives 4 lessons in creativity.
In this inspiring talk, radio host and book author Julie Burstein gives voice to several interviews with remarkably talented people who found that creativity grows when you pay attention to the world around you, learn from challenges, push against the limits of what you can do as well as the hardest thing of all—embrace loss.”
“We have to stand in that space between what we see in the world and what we hope for, looking squarely at rejection, at heartbreak, at war, at death,” she says.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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This Photo Shows Exactly Why You Should Be Skeptical Of Psychology Research
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-psychology-research-is-unreliable-2012-10
One of the biggest problems in the world of science is researcher bias.
More transparency is needed across the board, say Joseph Simmons and Uri Simonsohn of Wharton and Leif Nelson of UC Berkeley in their paper “21 word solution.”
It’s a follow-up to their 2011 paper, “False Positive Psychology,” which uncovered many of the holes that exist in psychology research. One of the problems is “p-hacking,” or the practice of changing assumptions or data in an experiment to ensure that the probability (“p”) an opposite hypothesis (“null”) contradicts the research is below a certain level. Ultimately, “p-hacking” makes research less valid and increases the number of “false positives.”
Because of this, the authors put together a 21-word statement every researcher should use as a disclosure, which they hope will make the field of science more transparent:
“We report how we determined our sample size, all data exclusions (if any), all manipulations, and all measures in the study.”
The authors perfectly sum up the transparency problem with an analogy and a photo. Whereas coffee shops are required to label milk containers, scientists don’t have to “label their milk.” In other words, researchers don’t have to relay what data they started out with, whether they took observations out, or whether they’ve dropped things from their model:
The table below of simulated results from their earlier paper shows how much these! unrepor ted techniques can impact statistical significance:
The lesson? Look for disclosures in any scientific paper, and always be skeptical.
Read the full article here
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Exploit uses firewalls to hijack smartphones, turns friends into foes
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/05/22/exploit-uses-firewalls-to-hijack-smartphones/
Normally, firewalls at cellular carriers are your best friends, screening out malware before it ever touches your phone. University of Michigan computer science researchers have found that those first lines of defense could be your enemy through a new exploit. As long as a small piece of malware sits on a device, that handset can infer TCP data packet sequence numbers coming from the firewall and hijack a phone’s internet traffic with phishing sites, fake messages or other rogue code. The trick works on at least 48 carriers that use firewalls from Check Point, Cisco, Juniper and other networking heavy hitters — AT&T being one of those providers. Carriers can turn the sequences off, although there are consequences to that as well. The only surefire solution is to either run antivirus apps if you’re on a mobile OS like Android or else to run a platform that doesn’t allow running unsigned apps at all, like iOS or Windows Phone. Whether or not the exploit is a serious threat is still far from certain, but we’ll get a better sense of the risk on May 22nd, when Z. Morley Mao and Zhiyun Qian step up to the podium at an IEEE security symposium and deliver their findings.
Exploit uses firewalls to hijack smartphones, turns friends into foes originally appeared on Engadget on T! ue, 22 M ay 2012 03:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://gizmodo.com/5885321/how-iphone-apps-steal-your-contact-data-and-why-you-cant-stop-it
The internet is starting to realize something unsettling: our iPhones send information about the people we know to private servers, often without our permission. Some offending apps are fixing themselves. Some aren’t. But the underlying problem is much bigger.
Apple allows any app to access your address book at any time—it’s built into the iPhone’s core software. The idea is to make using these apps more seamless and magical, in that you won’t have dialog boxes popping up in your face all the time, the way Apple zealously guards your location permissions at an OS level—because fewer clicks mean a more graceful experience, right? Maybe, but the consequence is privacy shivved and consent nullified. Your phone makes decisions about what’s okay to share with a company, whose motivation is, ultimately, making money, without consulting you first.
Once you peel back that pretty skin of your phone and observe the software at work—we used a proxy application called Charles—watching the data that jumps between your phone and a remote server is plain. A little too plain. What can we see?
As Paul Haddad, the developer behind the popular Twitter client TapBot pointed out to me, some of App Store’s shiniest celebrities are among those that beam away your contact list in order to make hooking up with other friends who use the app smoother. From Haddad’s own findings:
Foursquare (Email, Phone Numbers no warning)
Path (Pretty much everything after warning)
Instagram (Email, Phone Numbers, First, Last warning)
Facebook (Email, Phone Numbers, First, Last warning)
Twitter for iOS (Email, Phone Numbers, warning)
Voxer (Email, First, Last, Phone numbers, warning)
Foursquare and Instagram have both recently updated to provide a much clearer warning of what you’re about to share. Which every single app should follow, providing clear warnings before they touch your contacts. But plenty of apps aren’t so generous. “A lot of other popular social networking apps send some data,” says Haddad, “mostly names, emails, phone numbers.” Instapaper, for example, transmits your address book’s email listings when you ask it to “search contacts” to connect with other friends using the app. The app never makes it clear that my data (shown up top) is leaving the phone—and once it’s out of your hands and in Instagram’s, all you can do is trust that it’ll be handled responsibly. You know, like not be stored permanently without your knowledge.
Trust is all we’ve got, and that’s not good. “Once the data is out of your device there’s no way to tell what happens to it,” explains Haddad. Companies might do the decent thing and delete your data immediately. Like Foursquare, which says it doesn’t store your data at all after matching your friends, and never has. Twitter keeps your address book data for 18 months “to make it easy for you and your contacts to discover each other on Twitter after you’ve signed up,” but can delete the data at any time with a link at the bottom of this page. Or a company might do the Path thing, storing that information indefinitely until they’re publicly shamed into doing otherwise. Or worse.
We need a solution, and goodwill on the part of app devs is going to cut it. All the ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DO THIS? dialog boxes in the world won’t absolve Apple’s decision to hand out our address books on a pearly platter. iOS is the biggest threat to iOS—and nothing short of a major revision to the way Apple allows apps to run through your contacts should be acceptable. But is that even enough? Maybe not.
Jay Freeman, developer behind the massively popular jailbroken-iPhone program Cydia, doesn’t think Apple’s hand is enough to definitively state who gets your address book, and when:
“Neither Apple nor the application developer is in a good position to decide that ahead of time, and due to this neither Apple’s model of ‘any app can access the address book, no app can access your recent calls’, nor Google’s method of ‘developer claims they need X, take it or leave it’ is sufficient.”
Freeman’s solution? Cydia’s “one-off modifications to the underlying operating system” that we deal in, nicely transfers this control back to the user.” In other words, we can’t trust Apple or the people that make apps—so let’s just trust ourselves to control how iOS works.
Freeman left us with one, final, disquieting note. Shrewd devs and others with the knowhow have been able to dig through app traffic to find out of they’re shoveling around your address book. But there’s no easy way to do this—and if a dev really wants to sneak your data through the door, there’s technically nothing we can do to stop him: “There are tons of complex tricks that can be used to smuggle both information in network traffic and computation itself.” It’s a problem fundamental to computer science—once the data’s in a dev’s hands, he can conjure it away, too small to be noticed by App Store oversight in churning sea of other apps.
Unless Apple keeps him from getting that information in the first place by letting us all make informed decisions with our phone and the private life poured into it. Your move, iOS.
Photo: Motorolka/Shutterstock
We Love Facebook Because It Tricks Us Into Thinking We’re Doing Something Important [Science]
When you’re perusing your Facebook account, your brain might be fooling you into thinking you’re doing something incredibly creative and productive that will improve your life. If only that were true!
Scientists in Milan and at M.I.T. examined the various physiological states of 30 people using Facebook compared to when they were relaxing looking at natural panoramas or taking a math test. They measured physical and psychological responses including breathing rate, brain activation, and pupil dilation, and found that only while looking at Facebook (not while looking at nature pics or doing math), the study subjects were transported into a “core flow state,” which is that thing that people often call, simply, flow. It’s what you might experience when you’re practicing an instrument, or if you’re writing and feeling like everything is just, well, flowing. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes it wonderfully in this TED talk.
We already know Facebook is harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol. So it’s not all that surprising that Facebook is enjoyable. Cocaine is enjoyable! But like an addictive drug, the results suggest the social network might have a sinister effect: Facebook makes you think you’re being productive when really you’re probably just telling everyone how delicious your lunch was and discovering that your best friend’s cousin’s baby just ate squash.
That’s why perhaps it’s important to keep in mind what Harvard’s Daniel Gulati said: over time, Facebook is making us miserable. Everyone is a shiny happy person on Facebook. Very few people share their insecurities, misgivings, evenings spent alone in the fetal position. And if you experience any of that you might feel very much alone if your visiting Facebook often. In which case maybe consider playing your favorite instrument, hanging out with your kids, working on that novel, or doing something else that leads to actual flow. [Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking]
Image: Shutterstock/PressureUA
I Read 21 Books About The Financial Crisis And They Explained Nothing
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/andrew-lo-21-books-financial-crisis-2012-2
Ever thought you would have to read 21 books to get to the bottom of what caused the financial crisis?
Andrew Lo, an economist at MIT, has some bad news: it’s going to take at least 22.
Lo, a leading expert on hedge funds and financial engineering, has written a paper (h/t NPR) for the Journal of Economic Literature describing his experience reading 21 books on the crisis — nine by journalists, 11 by academics and one by a former Treasury Secretary.
His conclusion: In a field that prides itself on its scientific rigor (however dismal), the books reveal that alarmingly few facts about the crisis have been agreed upon. Was there too little or too much regulation? How much of a factor were low interest rates? No one’s been able to say conclusively.
“After each book, I felt like I knew less,” Lo told NPR’s Planet Money.
Economics, he says, has fallen well short of that standard when it comes to understanding the crisis:
“Many of us like to think of financial economics as a science, but complex events like the financial crisis suggest that this conceit may be more wishful thinking than reality.”
Read Andrew Lo’s Reading About the Financial Crisis: A 21-Book Review >
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See Also:
- Goldman In Talks To Hire Former Geithner Aide To Lead Communication Effort
- Lloyd Blankfein Just Fired His Fall Guy, But Goldman’s Problems Aren’t Going Away
- Here’s The Will Ferrell Super Bowl Ad For Old Milwaukee That You Missed
Apple And Google Get A Record Breaking Christmas (AAPL, GOOG)
Apple and Google activated a record breaking number of mobile devices this Christmas, according to Flurry analytics, which delivers mobile analytics to developers. Flurry has 140,000 apps running its software, and believes it can track every new Android or iOS device activated.
Between December 1 and 20, 1.5 million Android and iOS devices were activated daily on average. On Christmas day, a record breaking 6.8 million devices were activated, a 353% increase over the rest of the month. It’s also much better than 2010, when 2.8 million devices were activated.
Don’t miss: The First 15 iPhone Apps You Must Download
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See Also:
- CHART OF THE DAY: Google Is Activating 700,000 Android Devices Daily
- CHART OF THE DAY: The Facebook iPad App Crushed Facebook On The iPad’s Web Browser
- CHART OF THE DAY: How Apple’s Magazine Subscription Plan Helped Sell More Copies Of Popular Science
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