"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" – Mark Twain
There’s been a lot of chatter recently about the “dark side” of online advertising, in particular, the activities of companies like NebuAd and Phorm using somewhat shady techniques to gather behavioral data about users and using this data to target ads. I’ve even blogged about it myself. And click fraud remains a significant challenge to … Read more
Welcome to the second part of my Online Advertising 101 series. One of the things that I’ve discovered people fail to appreciate about online advertising is how much goes on behind the scenes in order to bring you an innocuous-looking banner ad. Whilst this is a relatively technical topic to cover in a series which … Read more
You may have heard of Silverlight, our Rich Internet Applications framework – and if you haven’t, you’re sure to hear more about it this summer, as it’ll be used on the NBC site to stream Olympics videos. But you don’t have to be NBC to take advantage of Silverlight video streaming – or know anything … Read more
When you spend as much time as I do examining the workings of the online ad industry, it’s easy to forget that, to many people, it really is pretty opaque. Not only is it characterized by some of the most complex and scalable technology in the world, but it also has its own, pretty unique, … Read more
As anyone who has spent any time in the UK will know, the BBC is a safe haven from that most grubby of industries, advertising. It’s enshrined in the BBC’s charter. But the BBC’s ban on advertising only applies to the UK (where anyone who owns a TV has to pay a $300 licence fee … Read more
The last few weeks have seen plenty of interesting announcements from our esteemed competitors, Yahoo! and Google. But two that you might not have paid so much attention to are are Yahoo’s launch of AMP! (those guys have got to get over this whole silly exclamation point thing), and Google’s new AdManager product. Both are … Read more