It’s been a while since I last wrote on my blog, and for a good reason. I’ve spent the last few months setting up a technology start-up to bring together outstanding engineering with deep online advertising understanding. Its goal is to take advantage of the gap in businesses between their great advertising ideas and their lack of engineering resources to make them work. Good engineering with advertising understanding is very hard to find. We called it ShiftForward, and you can learn more about it at http://www.shiftforward.eu
Forrester’s forecast on online advertising for the next 12 to 24 months, covering RTB, DSP, and other three-letter acronyms no one had heard of a year ago. Caught it on ExchangeWire , here’s a copy, well worth seeing:
When a competitor does something interesting and it benefits the whole industry, it should be commended and shared. So here it is, “2020 The Future of Behavioural Targeting” by Audience Science, looking back at the evolution of the Internet as a media consumption platform and speculating where it will be in 11 years time:
update: someone just pointed out to me how incredibly similar this presentation is with the original “Shift Happens” video from Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod. And me thinking it was something original… Links to original “Shift Happens” videos: http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com/versions
Online privacy is now a hot a topic as it ever was since the introduction of cookies in the early 90s. Cookies enable a website to recall that your browser is the same browser that visited it on previous sessions, and over time this effectively lets the web sites build a list of interest topics your browser has visited. This becomes the source for Interest-based behavioural targeting advertising, a step on from contextual-ads you are most certainly used to see. But do you know what they know? Find out if your cookies are revealing your real passions.
List of sites showing what information advertisers have based on your cookies:
Very neat trick I found out recently is that if you omit the protocol from an HTML src tag it will use the same protocol as the current URL, which is ideal if you need to have one universal HTML tag that works with both HTTP and HTTPS without having to use JavaScript tricks to detect the protocol. This is great to use with ad server tracking pixels for example, or any other images:
Standard HTML code: <img src="http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/images/logo.gif">
The browser will use the same protocol for the image call as the base URL where the tag is on, akin to a relative-path URL. This means e-mail clients and the sorts (like file explorers) will not be able to use this (as there is no base URL)
Tested on IE6 + 7, FF2 + 3 and Safari 2 + 3.
Syntax is part of the HTML spec since 1995, just not widely used (don’t know why)
It’s been a while since I last wrote on my blog, and for a good reason. I’ve spent the last few months setting up a technology start-up to bring together outstanding engineering with deep online advertising understanding. Its goal is to take advantage of the gap in businesses between their great advertising ideas and their lack of engineering resources to make them work. Good engineering with advertising understanding is very hard to find. We called it ShiftForward, and you can learn more about it at http://www.shiftforward.eu
Online privacy is now a hot a topic as it ever was since the introduction of cookies in the early 90s. Cookies enable a website to recall that your browser is the same browser that visited it on previous sessions, and over time this effectively lets the web sites build a list of interest topics your browser has visited. This becomes the source for Interest-based behavioural targeting advertising, a step on from contextual-ads you are most certainly used to see. But do you know what they know? Find out if your cookies are revealing your real passions.
