It turns out that Facebook could in fact use data collected from its Portal in-home video device to target you with ads:

Facebook announced Portal last week, its take on the in-home, voice-activated speaker to rival competitors from Amazon, Google and Apple.

The biggest question surrounding the device: Why should anyone trust Facebook enough to put Facebook-powered microphones and video cameras in their living room or kitchen? Given Facebook’s year of privacy and security issues, privacy around the device — including what data Facebook collects and how it’s used — has been an important part of the story surrounding Portal.

That’s why we need to update our reporting.

Last Monday, we wrote: “No data collected through Portal — even call log data or app usage data, like the fact that you listened to Spotify — will be used to target users with ads on Facebook.”

We wrote that because that’s what we were told by Facebook executives.

But Facebook has since reached out to change its answer: Portal doesn’t have ads, but data about who you call and data about which apps you use on Portal can be used to target you with ads on other Facebook-owned properties.

Shocking! A company making money through targeted ads based on the profiles of over 2 billion active Facebook users might use that data to help their bottom line.

The longer Facebook is around the creepier it reveals itself to be.

Facebook Enabled Advertisers to Reach ‘Jew Haters’:

Want to market Nazi memorabilia, or recruit marchers for a far-right rally? Facebook’s self-service ad-buying platform had the right audience for you.

Until this week, when we asked Facebook about it, the world’s largest social network enabled advertisers to direct their pitches to the news feeds of almost 2,300 people who expressed interest in the topics of “Jew hater,” “How to burn jews,” or, “History of ‘why jews ruin the world.’”

To test if these ad categories were real, we paid $30 to target those groups with three “promoted posts” — in which a ProPublica article or post was displayed in their news feeds. Facebook approved all three ads within 15 minutes.

As if I needed another reason to stay off Facebook.

Here at Daily Exhaust I can guarantee you’ll find no Jew-hating, or hating of people of any other religion or race.

You will, though, find Microsoft-bashing.

50 Years Later, Heinz Approves Don Draper’s ‘Pass the Heinz’ Ads and Is Actually Running Them:

In a meta union of advertising’s real and fictional worlds, Heinz just greenlighted the ads—and will run them almost exactly as Draper intended, beginning today, in print and out-of-home executions in New York City.

So great. Mad Men is one of my favorite shows of all time (Breaking Bad is still in the #1 spot).

The ads really are clever too. This is why Mad Men was such a great show: it was well-written and Matthew Weiner’s attention to the details of the ’50s and ’60s was fanatical.

This is awesome.

The Blackbird is, “the first fully adjustable car rig that creates photoreal CG cars.”

From what I can decipher from the video, not only does the Blackbird adjust it’s size to match the car it’s mimicking, but it also captures the environment around it with the 360-degree cameras mounted on top, so when it comes time to render the vehicle on screen, it’s indistinguishable from the real thing.

They’re positioning this as a breakthrough for the ad industry, but I see this being used in many more industries—gaming to name the most obvious. I wonder how the Blackbird compares to the technology Sony Interactive uses for game franchises like Gran Turismo?

Nerdy detail: When you click on the link above, note the ® register mark at the end of the URL. The Mill clearly sweats the details.

Pepsi-Cola Sign in Queens Gains Landmark Status

Speaking of Lenovo, Ars Technica on the new ‘PC Does What?’ ad campaign to take on Apple:

You’ve got to feel for the PC. While there’s no denying its practicality or gaming chops, ever since IBM dropped the first beige box of PC joy on the world over three decades ago, the PC has never really managed to be cool—and for the likes of Intel, Microsoft, HP, Dell, and Lenovo fighting against a declining market that’s a problem.

So the five of them have teamed up to take on Apple and make the PC cool again, or at least encourage people to upgrade from their five-year-old PCs—of which Intel says there are over 500 million out there—to shiny new laptops with touch-screens, and thin metal enclosures, and longer battery life. The result of their collective marketing prowess is the “PC Does What?” campaign, a collection of short TV ads set to run in the US and China in the coming months.

They’re as cheesy as I expected.

Fake traffic has become a commodity. There’s malware for generating it and brokers who sell it. Some companies pay for it intentionally, some accidentally, and some prefer not to ask where their traffic comes from. It’s given rise to an industry of countermeasures, which inspire counter-countermeasures. “It’s like a game of whack-a-mole,” says Fernando Arriola, vice president for media and integration at ConAgra Foods. Consumers, meanwhile, to the extent they pay attention to targeted ads at all, hate them: The top paid iPhone app on Apple’s App Store is an ad blocker.

—Bloomberg: The Fake Traffic Schemes That Are Rotting the Internet

These ads are crazy.

Hank Green has some interesting ideas on rethinking the cost-per-impression ad model:

Imagine that you would like to consume a piece of content, but in between you and that content is a paywall. They’re asking $15 for one person to view the content one time. While a YouTube video might net you $2 per thousand viewers, this fantasy world I’ve just described will net you $15,000 per thousand impressions…A $15,000 CPM!

With a $15,000 CPM, every two thousand views is a full-time, living-wage human per year!

Of course, this model would never work…except that it works every day at every movie theater in America.

As he admits, some of the numbers sound crazy, but if you read the whole post and actually sit with his ideas, it’s not crazy at all.

Art has squarely met science in the modern practice of digital marketing, ushering in new forms of collaboration among marketers, agencies and technologists. Successful campaign execution now requires as much deftness with data and analytics as it does with creative and media planning disciplines.

This approach isn’t entirely new, however.

For decades, marketers have used consumer insights to inform creative and communications strategies, and relied on data signals to understand, target and measure audience reach. This is still true today, but with a twist: the shift towards auction-based buying of media formats such as search and video and automated trading of display media, has moved the industry to data-driven, technology-centric planning and buying modes.

But:

All this is not to say that human skills – such as judgement, creativity, storytelling – are any less vital to a great advertising campaign. Quite the opposite. Understanding people’s motivations, discerning consumer insights, creating compelling messages and delivering them across multiple channels and devices at appropriate intervals remain fundamental inputs to successful marketing communications.

—Eileen Naughton, Mad men, meet the algorithm: the art and science of modern marketing

PAN AM knows how to motivate.
[via Designer News]

I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web. The fallen state of our Internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services. Through successive rounds of innovation and investor storytime, we’ve trained Internet users to expect that everything they say and do online will be aggregated into profiles (which they cannot review, challenge, or change) that shape both what ads and what content they see. Outrage over experimental manipulation of these profiles by social networks and dating companies has led to heated debates amongst the technologically savvy, but hasn’t shrunk the user bases of these services, as users now accept that this sort of manipulation is an integral part of the online experience.
—Ethan Zuckerman, The Internet’s Original Sin

Before Samsung took over as the most prominent advertiser at Heathrow’s Terminal 5, it was Nokia that used to occupy the big billboards inside the home of British Airways. Unwilling to hand over the advertising crown with grace, the company now operating under the Microsoft Devices banner has decided to troll Samsung’s ads by sending out a set of four “Lumianauts” in search of a flight out into the Galaxy. Describing their apparent disappointment at not finding anything extraordinary at the terminal, Microsoft concludes that at least “the Lumia we have in our pockets is always out of this world.”
—Vlad Savov, Microsoft, Samsung, and the inane battle for Terminal 5
It’s shit like this that gives advertising (and the companies who pay them) a bad name.

Google’s ad ambitious may reach further than you think. In a newly revealed letter to the SEC, the company said it could someday be serving ads on “refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities,” as part of a larger point about breaking out mobile ad revenue.
—Russell Brandom, The Verge
No fucking way. Not in my house.