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Remember When Facebook Wanted Your Phone Number For ‘Security’? It’s Using It To Sell Ads (FB)
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-phone-number-security-being-sold-to-advertisers-2012-11
Since about September, Facebook has offered its advertisers a powerful new way to track its users as they surf the web: It’s called “phone number retargeting.” The move came after Facebook made a big effort to collect its users’ mobile phone numbers to prevent security breaches.
More recently, according to AdExchanger, Facebook has combined phone retargeting with a new “conversion pixel” — a type of tracking device, basically — within ads displayed on Facebook.
The combination of phone retargeting and conversion pixels allows advertisers to target you directly with ads and then measure exactly how you respond to them, whether by clicking, ignoring or buying something from the advertiser’s site.
Some advertisers have been doing this kind of thing on other web sites for years.
But most Facebook users don’t know it’s going on within Facebook. Instead, they believe the primary reason Facebook prompts them for a mobile phone number is to prevent account hacking, and to allow users to upload photos and make status updates from their phones.
In fact, earlier this year, Facebook began asking every user for a phone number for “security” purposes. Here’s what Facebook says about that:
But Facebook has since made those phone numbers available t! o advert isers as part of its new Custom Audience targeting product. “Audiences can be defined by either user email address, Facebook UIDs, or user phone numbers,” the product states.
Here’s how it works: Let’s say you are a member of your local gym. You probably gave the gym your phone number. But then you let your membership lapse, and now the gym wants to persuade you to come back. The gym can cross-reference its list of members’ phone numbers with users’ phone numbers on Facebook, and serve an ad on the page of any user with a matching number. Suddenly, you’re seeing ads that say, “Get 10% off if you rejoin your local gym!”
If you click on that ad, a conversion pixel will enable a “cookie” to track what you do so that the gym can see how successful its campaign was.
There’s a level of privacy built in to the system: Although your phone number will be targeted by ads, the number will be “hashed,” meaning that the system disguises it by replacing it with random code, making you anonymous. So the gym might target 100 phone numbers, but it won’t know which of those specific people actually responded to the ad (until they pay for a membership online, of course). All the gym will know is that a certain number responded to the ad, and that those users must have been on the original phone list.
Facebook launched the system to make its ads more effective for advertisers. The company believes they lower cost-per-acquisition (of users) for advertisers by 40 percent.
Disclosure: The author owns Facebook stock.
Related: Here Are The Sealed Court Papers On ‘Invalid Clicks’ Facebook Doesn’t Want You To See
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Zara Has Fundamentally Changed Fashion And There’s No Going Back
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-zara-is-changing-fashion-forever-2012-11
Fast-fashion retailer Zara is on a mission to take over the world, and in the process it has changed the whole fabric of the industry.
Zara’s strategy involves stocking very little and updating collections often. Instead of other brands that only update once a season, Zara restocks with new designs twice a week, reported Suzy Hansen at the New York Times.
That strategy works two ways, according to Hansen. First, it encourages customers to come back to the store often. It also means that if the shopper wants to buy something, he or she feels that they have to in order to guarantee it won’t sell out.
As a result of its massive success, Zara is making luxury retailers pretty nervous. Zara tries to build their stores as close as possible to the luxury boutiques like Stella McCartney and Chanel. Meanwhile, those retailers are trying to stay far away from the fast-fashion company.
“They broke up a century-old biannual cycle of fashion,” an analyst told Hansen. “Now, pretty much half of the high-end fashion companies” — Prada and Louis Vuitton, for example — “make four to six collections instead of two each year. That’s absolutely because of Zara.”
Another important way that Zara has impacted the fashion is by negating the idea that expensive clothes are more desirable. Kate Middleton has often been photographed in the brand, and getting something chic for a steal is something to brag about.
Zara also fits in with another trend: today’s demanding consumer.
Now that shoppers can get what they want from virtually any channel for a variety of prices, they’re becoming much more discerning about what they want.
That means that a company that sells high fashion for low prices and offers constant new merchandise is set to do well in today’s marketplace, and other retailers should be rushing to emulate Zara’s model.
DON’T MISS: 19 Years In The Evolution Of The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show >
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Donald Trump Is Attacking Brian Williams In Another Twitter Meltdown (CMCSA)
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-attacking-brian-williams-on-twitter-2012-11
Donald Trump wasn’t satisfied with just making a clown of himself last night on Twitter.
He’s continuing today, attacking NBC’s star newsman Brian Williams.
Last night Williams talked about Trump’s tweets on air and said he had “driven well past the last exit to relevance and veered into something closer to irresponsible.”
This morning, Trump is firing back as only he can, saying, “Brian–Thanks dummy–I picked up 70,000 twitter followers yesterday alone.” And, “Brian Williams was never a smart guy but always passes himself off as such. People will learn the truth!”
Here’s the full tweet-rant, read from the bottom up.
And here’s the Williams video:
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Donald Trump Is Attacking Brian Williams In Another Twitter Meltdown (CMCSA)
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-attacking-brian-williams-on-twitter-2012-11
Donald Trump wasn’t satisfied with just making a clown of himself last night on Twitter.
He’s continuing today, attacking NBC’s star newsman Brian Williams.
Last night Williams talked about Trump’s tweets on air and said he had “driven well past the last exit to relevance and veered into something closer to irresponsible.”
This morning, Trump is firing back as only he can, saying, “Brian–Thanks dummy–I picked up 70,000 twitter followers yesterday alone.” And, “Brian Williams was never a smart guy but always passes himself off as such. People will learn the truth!”
Here’s the full tweet-rant, read from the bottom up.
And here’s the Williams video:
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Textbooks
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/kno-starts-renting-k-12-e-textbooks-2012-8
Kno is launching its first e-textbooks for the K-12 market tonight.
Here’s the thing: It’s entering a market that doesn’t really exist. Most public schools issue textbooks to students. Why pay for something you get for free?
Here’s why Kno CEO Osman Rashid think he can get parents to pay $9.99 a year to rent textbooks: backpacks, he told us.
It’s well-documented that schoolkids are suffering back pain from schlepping around all their textbooks.
So Rashid’s pitch: Rent a digital version of the same textbook your kids use at school so they don’t have to carry it home.
Kno’s textbooks run on iPad, Android, and Windows 7 devices, as well as the Web. It faces competition from Amazon and Apple—though Rashid makes a compelling argument why Apple won’t dominate the e-textbook market.
It’s not clear that this is a moneymaking move for Kno. It’s partnering with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the titles. Rashid wouldn’t disclose financial details of the arrangement, but conceded that Kno sometimes offers e-textbooks at a loss.
Instead, he’s aiming for grassroots adoption of Kno’s digital textbooks by parents, in the hopes that they’ll become ubiquitous enough in classrooms to spur slow-moving school bureaucracies into striking deals with Kno.
It’s a strategy akin to what startups like www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/yammer“>Yammer do in enterprise software. Call it the consumerization of education.
Rashid’s not relying entirely on the bottoms-up approach. Kno is also partnering with ClassBook.com, a New York-based company which sets up online bookstores for school systems to sell digital textbooks to schools.
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Mitt Romney Twitter Fraud – 117k Followers On A Weekend Day
Digital Forensic Analysis by Augustine Fou
The first graph shows search interest in “mitt romney” over the period of June 25 – July 24, 2012. There is no discernible lift in interest around July 21, according to Google Insights for Search
The second chart below was generated by Twitter Counter and shows a dramatic increase of nearly 117,000 followers in 1 day, when the average number of adds per day over the same period was usually a steady 7,800 per day.
Something is not kosher. The spike happened on a Saturday, July 21. Saturdays and Sundays are usually the worst days to tweet according to a study by FastCompany.
Many of the followers listed on Romney’s twitter page have ZERO tweets, ZERO followers, etc. (see screen shot)
See at the bottom an example of the proliferation of “service” which help users buy thousands of followers at a time.
Google Just Created A Gigantic New Mobile Ad Marketplace (GOOG)
Google has integrated AdMob, its mobile advertising service, into AdWords so that anyone buying web ads through AdWords can now also buy them on mobile devices served by AdMob, according to Jonathan Alferness, Google’s director of product management/mobile ads.
The move essentially turns the web and mobile ad markets into the same, massive market. It adds 350 million mobile devices and 300,000 mobile apps to the AdWords universe, on all types of devices. Previously, AdWords reached 2 million web sites accessible by computers.
The move comes hours after Facebook did something similar—providing turnkey access to mobile and desktop, display and news feeds ads through its ads API. Taken together, it appears that Google and Facebook envision the web and mobile ad marketplaces eventually fusing into a relatively seamless whole.
Jason Spero, head of global mobile sales and strategy at Google, told Ad Age he believes that the AdWords/AdMob conjunction will scale up the mobile market dramatically by applying Google’s main ad revenue engine to handheld device platforms.
On mobile, available inventory has thus far outmatched the demand for ads against it, depressing prices dramatically (especially at Google). A new influx of mobile advertisers from AdMob might raise mobile prices, but by directly pitting web ad inventory against mobile inventory it could also lead to lower average prices across the board.
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