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Month: March 2018

Facebook Should be Worried About the FTC and Here is Why

Facebook Should be Worried About the FTC and Here is Why

Last week several news outlets, including the Washington Post, ran articles saying the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating Facebook, and a few days later the FTC officially confirmed the reports. Most of the articles said the FTC is looking into how Facebook has been butchering an agreement the FTC reached with the company back in 2011 regarding Facebook’s mis-use of user data back then. If the FTC concludes Facebook ignored the agreement, it could fine the company tens of…

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Theft on Auto-Pilot: Bot Fraud in Digital Advertising or How to Waste Millions of Dollars Without Really Trying

Theft on Auto-Pilot: Bot Fraud in Digital Advertising or How to Waste Millions of Dollars Without Really Trying

Bots are digital robots programmed to do something online. Okay, there is a lot more to what bots are and what they do, but for now let’s just go with this quick definition. Bots are doing a lot of bad things online. One of the most costly things they do online (costly for advertisers and marketers) is pretend to be human and to look at digital advertising. Several times we wrote in the Digital Marketing Report about such misdeeds and…

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What Vizio was Doing Behind the TV Screen (Hint: It is Creepy, Very Creepy)

What Vizio was Doing Behind the TV Screen (Hint: It is Creepy, Very Creepy)

What Facebook has been caught out doing is bad, really, really bad. And, there is much more to this horrible story to come out in the news, much, much more. Meanwhile, here is a story we published in the February 20, 2017 issue of the Digital Marketing Report newsletter. I have uploaded it here as two JPEG images. Here, though, is some of the text from the article (in case you cannot enlarge the page images enough to read them):…

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The Trade-off Fallacy: How Marketers are Misrepresenting American Consumers and Opening Them up to Exploitation

The Trade-off Fallacy: How Marketers are Misrepresenting American Consumers and Opening Them up to Exploitation

I have decided, in light of the shocking disclosures about Facebook which have come to light during the past few days, to share some of the content from a Digital Marketing Report, a monthly newsletter for digital marketing professionals we published for two years (May 2015 through May 2017). For various reasons I made the decision in 2017 to stop publishing the report. One of the reasons, admittedly, was disappointing subscription numbers. But, as I suspected then and now, many (not…

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