advertising

Michael Pick of Particls has written the perhaps most comprehensive overview of attention profiling and APML (attention profiling mark-up language) to date. APML is a proposed standard that allows users to share their own personal attention profile and compress all forms of attention data into one portable file format that can be traded between attention seekers and givers:

"We have reached the point of information hyper-saturation. It can become quite a chore to find relevant content online, when there is so much other information competing for your attention. But by implementing attention profiling, it becomes possible to have the … Read more

Antitrust regulators with the Federal Trade Commission have received an extension to review the controversial $3.1 billion Google-DoubleClick megamerger, according to sources.

The FTC faced a Thursday deadline to either challenge the deal or allow it to go through. But the commission is now expected to stay quiet for at least several more days as it continues to study the impact of the proposed merger on competition and consumers. A decision Thursday is unlikely.

Google complied with the FTC's second request for information on the merger on November 14. Once a company complies with a "second request,&… Read more

Viacom's MTV Networks unit announced on Tuesday that it has created Digital Fusion, a new-media advertising division designed to bring together the marketing for its oft-disparate digital brands.

Digital Fusion, according to a release from MTV Networks, encompasses both innovation and consolidation. On one hand, it's an efficiency move to give the company an edge in the increasingly competitive online-ad market. But with that renewed efficiency, MTV hopes to go further, using it to "create entirely new digital-ad products, from creative uses of existing inventory to original interactive experiences, including video content, online games, microsites, and widgets.&… Read more

It's often difficult to find existing or new customers to adopt a new release. Openads, however, is having the opposite problem. With 10,000 publishers jumping onto the latest release of its ad network, the "problem" will be managing its growth:

Think of Openads as the open-source Doubleclick. Except that it offers real choice for publishers:… Read more

A few weeks back, I posted about Sony using a 1965 John Dominis photograph to illustrate how "Timing Is Everything." Given that the picture in question could hardly have been taken with a Sony digital camera (which wouldn't exist for decades), I thought it a poor choice to illustrate the technical prowess of Sony's latest digital SLR.

After I wrote the original post, I noticed something else when I was studying the original photograph and the one in the ad; they weren't quite the same. I thought it a slightly amusing oddity but not much … Read more

This post was updated at 1 PM PT with comment from Overstock.com.

Plagued by allegations of everything from deceptiveness to invasion of privacy, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has publicly backed down on the social-networking site's controversial Beacon advertisements and announced new modifications.

In a post on the company blog on Wednesday morning, the 23-year-old executive apologized for the mess surrounding Beacon, which shares information about users' activity on third-party partner sites and posts it to their friends' "News Feeds."

"We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more … Read more

"Successful advertising campaigns today spark discussions rather than blatantly sell products." This point is the core of a new analysis out of Harvard Business School--a study of how consumers use online communities to learn about advertisers and products. It's a reflection of changes in the way people get reliable information--through each other, within closely-networked Web-based networks, in addition to various forms of media.

Read the full story at HBS's Working Knowledge site.

Facebook's "Beacon" advertising program nearly ran aground this week.

First, the liberal activist group MoveOn.org tore into the strategy, which shares members' activity from third-party sites on their Facebook "news feeds," as an invasion of privacy. Then MoveOn upped the ante earlier this week over the program's lack of an opt-out control. Then, on Thursday, reports began to surface that the program was close to being heavily altered or even cut altogether. The advertising program continues to be scrutinized by legal experts, and several advocacy groups have already filed complaints to the Federal … Read more

This post has been updated to clarify the names of companies participating in the Beacon program.

Facebook has altered its controversial "Beacon" advertising program, following complaints by users and protests from activist groups like MoveOn.org. The Beacon ads, which project Facebook users' activity on third-party partner sites--retailers like Blockbuster and eBay, for example--to their friends' "news feeds," are a key part of Facebook's much-hyped new social-advertising program, but they hadn't received the friendliest of reception.

It's a situation reminiscent of the one last year when the initial launch of Facebook's News … Read more