Stronger. Faster. Better.
Okay so technically TV because by now I’ve watched all the films I wanted to on the various One World flights around the word. Qantas though are promoting Australian home grown TV which is awesome and Barracuda had me waiting for my next flight so I could watch the next epsiode.
So this post is entitled “Who’s Grabbing Consumer Data from Publishers?” by AdAge but let’s be clear here what they mean is your data from most websites.
Consumers may not know how the world of web advertising works but pretty soon thanks to concerted efforts by the IAB in the UK and advertising campaigns by EDAA due in the summer they should be a bit better informed. In the meantime information is out there but it is on trade and industry blogs and news sites like AdAge.
For most consumers it’s a confusing world that’s hard to understand with company names they have never heard of and know little about. It’s always been one of the challenges of the AdChoices initiative, consumer education is key but enabling opt-out of tracking only works when you know who is tracking you. As can be seen below many of the trackers drop additional trackers so there is a daisy chain of third parties involved and likely only one initial relationship with the website you are actually visiting.
I should disclose here that I work for AOL Advertising so many of the companies we own drop cookies for this kind of tracking, it’s nothing sinister and we don’t want to know you as an individual, we simply want to group people together to package up as an audience.
So as they say in the TV adverts here’s the science bit;
Tracking tags are bits of code that enable ad serving, site analytics, audience-segmentation, and social sharing tools on websites. In other words, tags are what make the web tick. By the end of last year there were nearly 1,000 different tracking tags floating around the top 500 websites. That was over 50% more than the 645 unique trackers found in the first quarter of 2012, according to Evidon.
Evidon’s analysis of tracking tags for FoxNews.com. See links below to launch an interactive version of this chart for one dozen popular websites.
Those tags are pretty active, too. In many cases, one tracking tag installed directly by a site publisher might spawn others, and those still additional tags, and so on. Publishers and other data providers don’t always know whether tag spawning leads to the dissemination of actual consumer data gathered on their sites, or if it is merely part of the cookie-syncing process performed to match a cookie ID in one system to an ID in another for ad targeting purposes.
via Who’s Grabbing Consumer Data from Publishers? | DataWorks – Advertising Age.
The findings should “ring alarm bells” for users, privacy campaigners said.
The study used 58,000 volunteers who alongside their Facebook “likes” and demographic information also provided psychometric testing results – designed to highlight personality traits.
The Facebook likes were fed into algorithms and matched with the information from the personality tests.
The algorithms proved 88% accurate for determining male sexuality, 95% accurate in distinguishing African-American from Caucasian-American and 85% for differentiating Republican from Democrat.
Christians and Muslims were correctly classified in 82% of cases and relationship status and substance abuse was predicted with an accuracy between 65% and 73%.
The links clicked rarely explicitly revealed these attributes. Fewer than 5% of gay users clicked obvious likes such as gay marriage, for instance.
Instead, the algorithms aggregated huge amounts of likes such as music and TV shows to create personal profiles.
via BBC News – Facebook ‘likes’ predict personality.
Bear Grylls visited the Discovery UK head office today for an impromptu question and answer session. He’s broken his shoulder so isn’t filming Born Survivor, Man v Wild or Ultimate Survivor depending where you live.
Check out Bear Grylls update on the Born Survivor website.
If I had the money to start a TV channel this would be the channel I would fund. Really funny parody of Facebook newsfeeds in a news bulletin format. Very funny from the collegehumor folks
Okay so loads of people are looking for the CTU ringtone again since the new series is on TV.
The details of how to create it or the sound files are all located in previous posts.
Be warned you will not be able to get this tune out of your head!
While I was in Sydney (yes I know I have mentioned the trip a few times) they had a dodgy reality TV show called My Restaurant Rules. Now Sam & Catherine were perhaps the most annoying couple. They kept whining on about wanting to learn Italian etc etc and nothing really about the restaurant. The location was perfect, so it couldn’t possibly fail. Practically opposite The Colombian and next to Wagamama. Shame then that it’s the first one to close 😉
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