For the past year, Google has been doing everything it can to prove to its advertising partners that people purchase their products after seeing ads on Google.
In October, the company announced a solution to track the purchases people made on their laptops after seeing an ad on a smartphone. Last month, it rolled out a product that tracks when people make an in-store purchase after seeing a Google ad.
But for all of the work Google has done tracking these so-called "conversions," there's one big hole in the company's measurement strategy: most of the world's really big brands aren't necessarily trying to get people to buy a product right away.
If you think of what you see on television from brands like Nike and Bud Light, the ads are less about getting people to run to the store during halftime and more about communicating the brand's "personality" so that people will remember it the next time they are in a store.
As a result, these big brands are spending the biggest chunks of their ad budgets on television, where they can have a full screen and 30 seconds to tell viewers their story, as opposed to an easy-to-ignore banner ad or a search link.
Not only that, brands and the media buyers who work on their behalf are comfortable with the idea that TV ads are effective because they have been buying them for decades.
According to eMarketer, brands spent $66 billion on U.S. TV ads in 2013, compared with $42.3 billion in online advertising. (Google itself books about $60 billion a year in ad sales.)
In a speech Tuesday at LUMA Partners' Digital Media Summit in New York, Google vice president of display ad products Neal Mohan laid out the company's plan for cutting out a slice of the $66 billion TV pie.
In Mohan's mind, the two things that will allow Google to do this are the video storytelling capabilities of its YouTube platform and the company's dedication to proving that its ads actually work for big brands.
Mohan told those in attendance at the Digital Media Summit that 84% of the marketers he spoke with said they would be willing to spend a 25% more of their budgets on digital advertising if they had a good way to measure the impact of their online ads.
"What I would say is that we -- For more information read the original article here.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced Wednesday that Nest Labs has recalled as many as 440,000 Nest Protect Smoke + CO alarms.
Last month, the smart appliance maker alerted users to a bug in the device's “wave to dismiss” feature and, for safety reasons, advised them to update the product's software. Nest pushed out a software patch to deactivate the function pending a fix.
At that time, the company stopped short of officially putting out a product recall, but now, it has apparently changed its mind. Although the classification of the advisory has changed, the recommended steps for customers haven't.
"The CPSC press release issued today refers to the same corrective action referenced in our April Safety Notice from the CEO, and in fact, we'll be bringing Nest Protect back on the market soon," a Nest spokesperson told me via email. "We have been working with CPSC and they have approved our corrective action as previously announced. Nothing else has changed since our initial announcement last month."
To date, Nest Labs has not received any incident, injury or damage reports related to this issue. However, if you have a Nest Protect, the company urges you to contact it at (800) 249-4280 or to visit Nest online and consult the Nest Protect Safety Notice for information on how to shut off the feature.
"Current customers who have already followed these instructions can continue to use their Nest Protects once the Nest Wave feature has been disabled," said the spokesperson. "Even with the Wave feature disabled, the Nest Protect Alarm will continue to perform its essential safety functions, monitoring for increased levels of smoke and CO, and alerting users via local alarms and Nest app alerts (if set up)."
Consumer Reports, in covering the product recall, noted that the device didn't make its recommended list “because it was slow to detect fast-flaming fires in our tests.”
This morning, a friend of mine sent me an email.
"A friend of mine is going to kill themselves, according to Secret," he wrote. He attached the image above. Secret is an app where people can post anything they want anonymously.
My friend told me he didn't know what to do. He didn't know who had written the post, because that's the whole point of Secret's platform. All he knew was that whoever wrote it was someone he had stored in his contacts. The only option, it seemed, was to report the message to Secret. A drop down box allowed him to check "self harm" as the reason for reporting the post. After being flagged, the suicide threat disappeared.
And that was it. It could be a troll, sure. The internet has its fair share of those. Or maybe it's someone clammering for attention.
But what if it isn't? That's someone you're friends with.
Then what?
Anonymous apps have been all over the news in the last few months. Whisper, another anonymous app just raised $36 million, giving it $60 million in total funding. At the end of 2013, Whisper was doing 3 billion pageviews per month. Then there's Yik Yak, another anonymous app that's popular with teenagers. It stopped time in high school hallways everywhere.
Secret gives you a blank box to write a small amount of text in, and has mostly served as a venue for Silicon Valley startup speculation and inside-tech baseball smear campaigns.
People are encouraged to post anything, estranging themselves from their identity.
But Secret has that one crucial piece that the others do not: You know if a Secret is coming from a "Friend." This creates a new element of sustainable community that Whisper and Yik Yak may not have, but, in a case where the poster is threatening to harm themselves or others, it also creates one that an innocent bystander may not want to be a part of.
Anonymous sites have never been lacking in threats of self-harm.
PostSecret founder Frank Warren made an entire career out of collecting people's secrets, choosing the most aesthetically pleasing, gripping ones, and packaging them up to be sold to the masses.
Messages like this were all over PostSecret:
Lots of people felt connected to those secrets. But no one felt responsible for them. There -- For more information read the original article here.
Here is what most people do on the Internet all day, according to GfK and the Interactive Advertising Bureau, via the WSJ. Social networks like Facebook, and email take up the biggest chunk of our time. After that, it's watching video, doing searches, and online gaming. Chart from Statista.
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