Robarts Stacks HC110 .C63 B53 2009X

Facebook decided that organic social won't be counted as political speech as long as the payments are behind the scenes. Facebook always make the worst possible decision for public interest.

If you’re surprised by the rise of ad-blockers in spite of the hoops you must jump through in order to install them, I implore you to go try to read an article on the internet. Perhaps try Forbes, for example. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

It's not even Valentine's Day yet, and we're already talking about candy eggs? In this episode of "What Were They Thinking?" Melissa shares news about Cadbury's launch of its new video streaming service, EATertainment. via Pocket

Who wouldn't want to trade in some of their ex's stuff for free food? In this episode of "What Were They Thinking?" Melissa shares a new anti-Valentine's Day campaign created by Burger King and Warner Bros. Pictures, featuring DC Comics' Harley Quinn and the new "Birds of Prey" film. via Pocket

Yelp introduced its Yelp Store Visits metric, which uses opt-in location information and other engagement signals to help advertisers measure how online activity drives physical store foot traffic. The platform also introduced Showcase Ads, a video-centric format for national marketers to highlight in-season promotions, according to a company announcement.
Denny's, the casual dining chain with more than 1,700 locations, piloted Yelp Store Visits with help from its media agency, Spark Foundry, according to materials shared with Mobile Marketer. Meanwhile, an unnamed national casual dining restaurant drove store visits at an average cost of $1.17 per visit in a separate test of the new ad metics. Almost all (91%) of the visits happened within 24 hours of engaging with an ad on Yelp, per the announcement.

Instagram has overtaken parent company Facebook's social network among top 50 brand profiles and audience size, per a quarterly report by Socialbakers that was shared with Mobile Marketer. The research also found that brand engagement on Instagram and Facebook dropped during the holiday season, possibly indicating that brands didn't understand what kinds of content were appealing to consumers.
Ad spend on Instagram Stories, the app's feature for disappearing posts, rose 40% from a year earlier to reach 10% of Instagram's total ad spend at the end of Q4. Spending on Facebook Stories also grew, but to just 0.4% of total spend on the social network. Facebook's core News Feed still led with about 58% of total ad spend, per Socialbakers.

Facebook is designed to make you anxious, depressed and dissatisfied, three states of mind that make you more vulnerable to advertising and other forms of behavioral manipulation.

Johnny Ryan is chief policy officer at Brave, an independent browser:

<p>“<a href="https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Surveillance-on-UK-council-websites_compressed_version.pdf">Surveillance on UK council websites</a>”, a new report from Brave, reveals the extent of private companies’ surveillance of UK citizens when they seek help for addiction, disability, and poverty from their local government authorities.

None of the data collecting companies recorded in this study had received consent from the website visitor to lawfully process data. 

• Nearly all councils in the UK permit at least one company to learn about the behaviour of people visiting their websites<br />• People seeking information about disability, poverty, drugs and alcoholism services are profiled by data brokers on some council websites<br />• 198 council websites in the UK use the “real-time bidding” (RTB) form of advertising. Real-time bidding is the biggest data breach ever recorded in the UK. Though illegality is not in dispute, the UK Information Commissioner (ICO) has failed to act<br />• Google owns all five of the top embedded elements loaded by UK council websites, giving it the power to know what virtually anyone in the UK views on council sites<br />• Over of a quarter of the UK population is served by councils that embed Twitter, Facebook, and others on their websites, leaking data about what sensitive issues people read about to these companies.</p>

Hard to believe that none of the companies had consent from the visitor; isn't that why we're always clicking cookie settings?

In early 2019, Spotify began betting big on podcasts. Since the start of 2019, Spotify has spent more than $600 million buying Gimlet Media, Anchor, Parcast, and most recently, The Ringer. By getting into podcasts in a big way, Spotify is trying to evolve from a dedicated music streaming service dependent on music rights holders for achieving profitability to an audio company with a platform delivering audio entertainment to as many people as possible.

Spotify’s financial picture stands to improve if the company can better monetize its 280M subscribers. One of the primary goals in developing an audio platform consisting of podcasts is to generate higher gross margins by having subscribers spend time listening to something other than music. With a captive audience of hundreds of millions of people, Spotify is in an interesting position to be more of an advertising company. In the future, Spotify’s long-term strategy may include having third-party developers create new kinds of audio experiences.