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.
London to Sydney in business class on Etihad for the first time, in two legs. EY0012 out of Heathrow at 09:15 on 28 February, then EY0454 from Abu Dhabi at 22:25, landing in Sydney the following evening. Which, this being 2012, meant arriving on 29 February. I had not planned a leap day arrival and it took me a while to work out why the date looked wrong.
Travelling on my own, which is probably the only reason there are notes at all. I took them as I went, largely because I kept being handed things.
This is a small thing that turns out not to be a small thing. On Virgin Atlantic you are pointed at a section of the aircraft and left to find your own way down it. On Etihad somebody greets you at the door and then walks you to your seat, which sounds like theatre until you have done a long-haul boarding and realised how much of the low-grade stress is just not knowing where you are meant to be.
Everything after that followed the same pattern. Small differences, all of them in the direction of you not having to ask.
Champagne before takeoff is standard enough. What was not standard was being asked, while still at the gate, what I wanted to drink once we were up. The order was taken on the ground and arrived immediately after takeoff, at the point where you are normally still waiting for the seatbelt sign and wondering whether anyone is coming.
It was possibly the strongest vodka and coke I have ever been served, by anybody, anywhere. It came with a chicken kebab that I have thought about since, which is why there is now a tag on this blog called Lovely Chicken.
The mezze later on was very good. Not good-for-a-plane good. Good.
Genius. That was the note, word for word, and I stand by it.
This was the thing that actually stayed with me. When the cabin goes down for the night section of the flight, the ceiling lights up deep blue with tiny LEDs scattered across it, so you are lying under a very convincing set of stars at thirty something thousand feet.
It costs them almost nothing. It is not a service, it is not a product feature, nobody is going to choose an airline because of it. And it is the single detail I have described most often to other people since, which presumably tells you something about how this stuff actually works.
Tower Heist was on the return leg. My note about it reads, in full, “Josh or Tony? Charlie?”, which was me sitting at thirty something thousand feet failing to remember that Casey Affleck plays Charlie. He is, for the record, both better looking and a better actor than his considerably more famous brother, and I am not taking questions on this.
Somewhere in among all that was an advert for Pocari Sweat, which is a real drink, sold in enormous quantities, and named as though nobody in the room spoke English. I have no notes on the advert itself. I have extensive notes on the name.
Yes. Obviously yes. The individual things are all quite small and most of them are cheap, which is rather the point. Somebody has clearly sat down and gone through the whole journey asking where a passenger is likely to feel slightly lost or slightly ignored, and then removed those moments one at a time.
There was a hotdog stand in the lounge. An actual stand, in an airport lounge, doing hotdogs. My note on this says “the hotdog stand at anz” and I have no idea why I wrote anz, because it was certainly not at a stadium. Whatever I meant, the hotdog stand happened.
Written up in Sydney on 7 March, waiting for EY0451 home.
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!
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