Category: Advertising

According to a new study from Cloud IQ, published by Marketing Charts, 47% of online shoppers in the US, UK and Australia deemed speed “critical” to a great online experience, with another 47% saying it’s “important.” Close behind 45% said it’s “critical” that the experience be seamless and easy, and 47% saying that it is “important”.

Other research from SUMO Heavy showed that US adults said the most important aspect of a great e-commerce website is its usability and functionality. Separately, research from the CMO Council said that for consumers, the most important attribute of a great customer experience was a fast response time to the customer’s needs and issues. And, in previous research from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), fast response times and a simple purchasing process emerged as by far the leading elements of an ideal customer experience.

Read more at Media Post.

Data chart courtesy of Media Post.

Researchers at the University of Washington have found a way to track a person’s location and app use through serving ads on mobile apps. The result opens the door for significant privacy invasions through the app-based advertising system.

The researchers obtained the information by purchasing a series of ads targeted to specific locations and apps, then checking which mobile subscribers fit the targeting. In experiments conducted on Android devices, the team was able to pinpoint a person’s location within eight meters through a targeted ad. They tested ads on 10 different apps, including Grindr, Imgur, Words with Friends, and Talkatone, all using widely available ad networks.

By serving ad content to a user’s apps, the ad buyers could learn what apps the user has installed. That information could be sensitive, revealing a user’s sexual orientation or religious affiliation. For instance, ads served on Grindr will tell the ad buyer that the user has Grindr installed.

Read more at The Verge.

Image courtesy of The Verge.

In 1989, TV Guide put television’s celebrity-du-jour, Oprah Winfrey, on its cover, perching her upon a pile of money. The picture was exactly the kind of thing that tends to sell magazines on newsstands and in supermarket check-out lines: It was friendly, it was saucy, it was sparkly. The only problem was that it wasn’t, actually, Oprah. TV Guide had taken a picture of the talk show host’s face … and grafted it onto the body of ’60s star Ann-Margaret. The magazine had asked the permission of neither woman before it published its odd bit of Frankensteinery.

Photoshop was invented in 1987 and widely distributed, for the first time, in 1990; the TV Guide debacle would mark one of the last times that art editors had to physically splice images to create new manipulations. But a lack of Photoshop, while the software ushered in our present age of doctored photography, did nothing to stop would-be fakers from their, er, fauxtography.

Read more at The Atlantic.

Image courtesy of The Atlantic.

Over the past couple of years, Roombas haven’t just been picking up dust and chauffeuring cats around, they’ve also been mapping the layout of your home. Now, Colin Angle, the chief executive of Roomba maker iRobot, has said he wants to sell the data from these maps in order to improve the future of smart home technology.

In 2015, iRobot introduced the Roomba 980, its first Wi-Fi-connected model. This meant that while a Roomba was quietly whirring around your floors, it was also collecting spatial data using visual localization, sensors, and more. This data helps the Roomba figure out how your home is laid out and adjust cleaning patterns on-the-fly to deal with things like moved furniture. But Angle thinks it could be put to use by more devices.

“There’s an entire ecosystem of things and services that the smart home can deliver once you have a rich map of the home that the user has allowed to be shared,” Angle told Reuters. Angle says that this data won’t be sold without permission, but Reuters says he thinks “most would give their consent in order to access the smart home functions.”

Read more at The Verge.

Image courtesy of The Verge.

Until last week, Travis Kalanick, a founder of Uber and its chief executive, ruled his company absolutely. That was the Silicon Valley way; ever since Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple in the 1980s, tech founders have demanded, and been awarded, enormous deference by investors and corporate boards. So even as successive waves of scandal have hit Uber, Mr. Kalanick’s position looked safe.

Then, all of a sudden, it wasn’t. Amid many reforms, Mr. Kalanick announced a leave of absence last week and late Tuesday said he was resigning as Uber C.E.O.

It is the swiftness of the fall that’s interesting here. In another time, Mr. Kalanick might have been able to hang on. But we live in an era dominated by the unyielding influence of social feeds. Every new Uber revelation ignited a massive campaign against the company on Twitter and Facebook. A swirl of negative branding took on a life of its own — and ultimately could not be ignored.

The story is bigger than Uber.

Read more at The New York Times.

Image courtesy of The New York Times.

Let’s say you’ve recently been in a conversation about marketing technology where at least somebody didn’t exactly know what martech is. They got through by saying things like “consumer journey,” “Lumascape” and “Marketing tech is going to be the hottest trend this year, no doubt.”

We’re not saying that person was you. But to help end the confusion one sometimes encounters over marketing technology, here’s an easy explainer.

What is martech, anyway?
“Every piece of technology a marketer uses to reach a potential customer is martech,” said John Koetsier, mobile economist at Tune, a mobile analytics and performance marketing company, and a former journalist who covered the subject for years at publications including VentureBeat. “Everything from an email marketing system like MailChimp to social media marketing platform like HootSuite.”

Read more at Ad Age.

Burger King’s latest ad stunt is resulting in some less-than-flattering descriptions of its Whopper sandwich.

The hamburger chain unveiled a 15-second ad Wednesday designed to trigger Google Home devices into reciting the definition of a Whopper, pulled from the website Wikipedia. But the website can be edited by users, and the definition had been changed to insert “cyanide” as an ingredient in one version. Another user later changed the definition to say the Whopper is “the worst hamburger product” sold by the chain.

Read more in The Seattle Times.

View the original ad and read additional commentary from Ad Age here.

Image courtesy of Ad Age.