As countless media outlets and opportunistic startups count user votes and try to declare ad “winners” and “losers” in yesterday’s Super Bowl, one brand dominated them all because it was present in many of the ads good and bad -- Twitter. According to MarketingLand’s count of hashtag and Twitter mentions, 26 ads during the game itself had a Twitter reference compared to merely 4 that aimed people at Facebook, one to Instagram and one to YouTube. Google+ got no love last night from advertisers. Hashtag counter Matt McGee notes that Twitter increased its mentions 300% over last year, when advertisers only mentioned it 8 times. Twitter also became the place where fleet-footed brands capitalized on the stadium blackout that hit at the start of the second half of play. Oreo planted a photo with the headline “You Can Still Dunk In The Dark” attached to the post “Power Out? No Problem.” Audi needled rival Mercedes Benz with the Tweet “Sending some LEDs to the @MBUSA Superdome right now…” Finally, Walgreens tweeted reminders that they sell candles and lights. Twitter’s own advertising team posted a note claiming “It took just four mins after the lights went out for the first Twitter advertiser to bid on [power outage] as a search term.” The Twitter ad team also crowed that it had been mentioned in half of the Super Bowl ads. At least one major Super Bowl advertiser, Calvin Klein, also made use of Twitter’s latest entry into the mobile app world, the video clip sharing app Vine. The company posted a well-cut man exercising his abs in CK undies. Twitter posted this morning that in all 24.1 million tweets related to the Super Bowl were posted apart from the ad hashtags. “By the beginning of the second half, the volume of Tweets had already surpassed last year’s Tweet total,” the company reports. The power outage proved to be the height of conversation, with 231,000 tweets per minute, but it was outpaced by mentions of Beyonce during the halftime show. The Super Bowl win for Twitter plays right into the micro-blog’s marketing plan. The company has been much more aggressive of late in promoting to media programmers and advertisers its role as a channel for discussion around TV. For the recent Golden Globes Awards, Twitter promoted its own second-screen experience by assembling “Twitter-sanctioned” celebrity Tweeters and offering behind-the-scenes content at a #goldenglobes hashtag.
Viewers snoozed through the first half of Super Bowl XLVII: The Baltimore Ravens were inexplicably blowing out the San Francisco 49ers, and the ads—many of which had been thoroughly teased in the weeks leading up to the big game—didn’t offer many surprises. But the partial blackout in the third quarter changed everything. With broadcasters forced to make football small talk for 34 minutes, brands flexed their social strength and took to the Twittersphere. Among the three fastest “newsjackers,” reports bloggers at Marketing Land, were Oreo, sending out a “you can still dunk in the dark message” via Instagram, and a “We do carry candles” tweet from Walgreens. And Audi took the opportunity to poke competitor Mercedes-Benz, and its Mercedes-Benz Superdome, the likely cause of the power outage: “Sending some LEDs to the @MBUSA Superdome right now...” One @Phillyadman took the opportunity to run a custom blackout Twitter ad for Tide: “We can’t get your blackout. But we can get your stains out,” according to MediaPost’s #adhuddle feed. Of course, the blackout also gave the 49ers a chance to shift the game’s momentum, making advertisers who made third- and fourth-quarter ad buys look like sports Einsteins. “The ads were like the game, in that they started slow and picked up steam at the end. The ads in the second half greatly outperformed the earlier ones, “ says Steve McKee, president of McKee, Wallwork & Company, an Albuquerque, N.M., ad agency which has been running AdBowl since 2002. His agency sponsors AdBowl, an event that allows voters to rank their favorite spots. McKee’s favorite? “The Dodge Ram farmer spot, which was voted No. 1. It was an anthem, and a statement. Chrysler is one of those advertisers that chose to keep its powder dry and not pre-release the spot, and I think that was a good call for them. And I love how different it was from their previous ads. It didn’t try to make a sequel to the Clint Eastwood or Eminem ad. But it was still in the same spirit and really well done.” In a twist, this year the agency turned its Ad Bowl into a Kitty Bowl, having the ads face off against cat videos. “Cats are the most popular videos on the Internet, except during the Super Bowl. So we thought this would be fun,” he says. (Not to mention a nice paw swipe at the Puppy Bowl.) And in early voting, while ads dominated the top three spots, cats took two of the top 10 places, “proving a homemade cat video can be just as effective as an ad that cost millions to make.” (Voters also had a chance to make an online contribution to the Animal Humane Society of New Mexico.) After the Dodge Ram ad and the second-ranked Tide Miracle Stain ad, with Joe Montana in topiary, the most popular ads were Budweiser’s baby Clydesdale, Coca-Cola’s Security Camera, Kia’s Space Babies, Audi’s Prom Spot, Oreo’s Whisper Fight and Jeep’s Whole Again. Two highly anticipated spots, Samsung’s hilarious two-minute Galaxy commercial and the Mercedes-Benz introduction of Willem Dafoe as the devil, failed to make the Top 10. But Volkswagen and its buzzed-about "Get Happy" ad ruled the war of the tweets, generating a score of 86,000 of them, as measured by BrandBowl. (Developed by Mullen, Radian6 and Boston.com, that contest calculated the number of positive and neutral mentions a brand had in the weeks leading up the game, minus the negatives.) Bud Light gathered the most overall chatter. And Taco Bell's rabble-rousing seniors earned the most love, followed by Doritos, with the Dodge Ram Farmer spot coming in third.
The maker of entertainment guide and discovery app NextGuide, Dijit Media Inc. announced it is in the process of acquiring GoMiso, maker of the Miso, SideShows and Quips apps, which enhance TV viewing. Dijit says it will continue to support both the Miso app, which enhances TV content, and SideShows, which identifies actors, fashion and other aspects of on-screen content. Quips, which pulls quotes and image grabs from TV content for social sharing will be discontinued. GoMiso founder Somrat Niyogi will act as an advisor to Dijit. In its announcement, Dijit CEO Jeremy Toeman says “this acquaition will give us more tools to give our users a guide experience that redefines how people discover content. Dijit’s NextGuide app taps into the broad range of multimedia on demand and broadcast channels, from the TV grid to Amazon, Netflix and Hulu premium services and iTunes to personalize media recommendations and discovery. NextGuide so far has emphasized content discovery rather than synchronized, enhanced experiences. This acquisition give Dijit technology and a footprint in that second-screen world. GoMiso was among the earliest entrants in the “second screen” app category that tries to enhance or guide TV and multi-screen experiences. The founders said on their company blog that the Miso and SideShows apps and their community of users will live on under Dijit. They claim to have been among the first to use media “check-ins” and to offer synchronized second-screen experiences. The acquisition is another sign that second-screen apps are maturing into a new phase of possible consolidation and partnership. After a protracted courtship Viggle walked away from merger plans with GetGlue. UK entrant Zeebox penned a partnership with Comcast that allows the app to act as a remote control for cable boxes. With the most lucrative medium yet invented in play, the social TV space is already mightily cluttered with startups, white-label solutions serving networks and show producers and platforms like Twitter now moving more aggressively to stake a claim to all the second-screen activity that goes on across devices.
Microsoft's search engine Bing might resemble a fast-moving train this year, as the search engine lines up a variety of product launches -- as many as one a week, depending on the country, Bing GM David Pann told MediaPost. Bing will make a foray in click-to-call ads geared toward specific market segments in a few months, with help from the Windows mobile team. The product road map in the future leads to click-to-call video ads that will allow consumers to contact merchants through Skype technology, depending on the client installed on the phone. Pann said Bing and Skype teams are working together to build call metering and phone-number generation features. Advertisers will have the ability to provision 800 numbers within Bing ads. Microsoft, once known as a 1,000-pound gorilla impossible to move, has become an agile beast. An accelerated product release cycle underscores Pann's enthusiasm for a long list of new features and services. "We are probably releasing somewhere in the world one new capability weekly," he said, noting that the engineering team is "designing features and capabilities advertisers want." The company continues to fine-tune the offering with a handful of large advertisers. Bing's product ads offering will launch this year and look similar to Google product listing ads. The plans to test Bing PLAs on mobile devices in specific vertical markets mean slightly different formats depending on the device, Pann said. The change in thinking drove higher market share for Bing in 2012. The company experienced declines in 2011, but managed to grab paid-search ad share last year. In fact, marketers spent 54% more on Bing in 2012, on 39% higher click-volume growth and 11% higher cost per clicks, according to Rimm-Kaufman Group. In December, Microsoft Sites rose 0.1 percentage points to 16.3% organic search market share, according to comScore. Bing Ads wants to enable in 15 minutes what takes 45 minutes in Google AdWords, making it easier to participate in the marketplace, Pann said. Today the platform allows marketers to upload campaigns from Google AdWords in a read-only format -- but in time, a Bing Ads feature will synchronize changes such as description, word or price. If the campaign changes in Bing Ads, marketers will have the option to alter the campaign in Google AdWords. Pann also touched on the Yahoo and Bing search alliance, explaining that Microsoft's revenue per search guarantee payment to Yahoo ends in March. On a recent earnings call with analysts, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said the company remains excited and happy to work with Microsoft, but expects "modest headwind from the combined impact of anticipated loss of the Microsoft RPS guarantee and the closure of operations in Korea."
Pioneered by Hulu and other platforms, giving content consumers multiple ad options continues to gain traction. Some marketers even see the model as a solution to low mobile engagement rates. At clients' request, for instance, Selectable Media is now making its ad selector service available via mobile devices. “We have run mobile campaigns with Google and Ebay over the last six months,” said Matt Minoff, CEO of Selectable. “We expect clients will start to make mobile [and] tablet a part of all campaigns over the next 12 months, given the success we have had on PC efforts.” Selectable specializes in tools that give consumers access to digital content in exchange for viewing ads, or somehow interacting with brands. Clients yet to test Selectable’s ad selector tool via mobile include NBC, Wendy’s, Kraft, HBO and Samsung. So far, the startup’s mobile strategy has performed better than expected, said Marc Rothschild, COO of Selectable Media. “Our mobile campaigns are seeing completion rates of more than 96% and click-through rates of higher than 10%,” he said. More broadly, ad selector models have been shown to drive better performance for brands, including 290% higher ad recall, and 109% click-through rates when compared to standard pre-roll, according to research by Vivaki. Late last year, Selectable got a boost when it was accepted into Microsoft’s Bing Fund. In a blog post, Rahul Sood, General Manager of Bing Fund, said of the union: “Bing Fund will be working closely with the [Selectable] team to exhaustively explore and identify the paths to help them reach the next level whether that’s through access to domain expertise Microsoft possesses, technology resources, business development opportunities, or funding.” Game developer 50 Cube is just the latest client to adopt Selectable’s ad selector tool for mobile.
For mens’ lifestyle guide Thrillist, the email newsletter has always been at the heart of its content strategy. It’s how the site keeps its 2 million subscribers in the know about new restaurants, bars, and places to shop in 21 cities nationwide from New York to Seattle. But as properties from Facebook to Pandora to LinkedIn are finding, more and more of its users are now accessing its content from mobile devices rather than the desktop Web. Over the last year or so, the share of readers coming to the newsletter via mobile has grown from a small fraction to 30% to 40%, according to Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer's estimates. That meant mobile users had to “pinch and zoom” the screen to enlarge text and images because the email publication had not been optimized for mobile. “We said we have to optimize…so about six months ago we started coding for mobile first,” said Lerer. A big part of that effort has been simplifying things for the mobile environment. In practice it has meant tailoring images to the smaller format, reducing the amount of text and stripping out extra buttons that tend to clutter up the mobile screen. Instead, Thrillist focused on the key features thay users valued most -- getting contact and mapping information for a venue, and the ability to save and share content. “We pared it down to the stuff that people wanted,” said Lerer. Likewise, the company optimized its native ad units, labeled as “Allied” content for the mobile screen, with a prominent image above a paragraph of text that links to a site or ad landing page. A Cartier ad, for example, features an eye-catching photo of a watch in the brand’s Calibre de Cartier line, with a chunk of text and links to the Web page for that collection. Since updating the custom ad format for mobile, Thrillist has seen click-throughs more than double. The company says mobile visits to the Web site via mobile have also more than doubled (up 121%). The email click-through rate is up 35%. The property also operates a mobile site and has iPhone, iPad and Android apps, updates are in the works. The current mobile version of its site launched only a month ago and will be continuously refined in the coming weeks. The Thrillist apps will also get a refresh during the first half of the year. Lerer pointed out that the company’s app for its JackThreads sub-brand, which he called a “best-in-class “mobile experience, provides a model for how the Thrillist app will be upgraded. But while the fashion-focused site now drives about 20% of its ad revenue from mobile, Thrillist itself hasn’t seen mobile revenue reach that level yet. “We now have the supply if people want to shift dollars that way; we have real mobile engagement on a daily basis, and an ad product that can be really valuable. But we haven’t seen a massive shift in ad dollars moving in that direction yet,” said Lerer.
Mobile social network Path agreed to create a comprehensive privacy policy to settle charges that it deceived users by secretly uploading their address books, the Federal Trade Commission announced on Friday. The social network also agreed to pay $800,000 to settle separate allegations that it violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act by collecting names and other personal data from children. The address-book uploads occurred between November 2011 and February 2012, the FTC alleged in a complaint made public on Friday. During that time, the Path App for iOS automatically gathered and stored contacts in users' address books, regardless of users' preferences, the FTC said. Path's interface gave people the option of uploading their contacts in order to find friends, but the app allegedly imported the information in all cases. "As a result, the user had no meaningful choice as to the collection and storage of personal information from the user's mobile device contacts, and the user interface options were illusory," the complaint reads. The first report about Path's address-book uploads surfaced last year, when developer Arun Thampi reported it on his blog. Path CEO Dave Morin quickly apologized in a blog post and said the company had deleted the data. In addition to implementing a privacy program, Path also agreed to obtain outside audits. Google, Facebook and MySpace previously agreed to similar terms to settle privacy charges. Path isn't the only mobile app developer to engage in questionable privacy practices. Last February, it emerged that mobile app Hipster had also uploaded users' contacts. Hipster CEO Doug Ludlow acknowledged that the company had done so and apologized for the data collection. Both Path and Hipster are now facing potential class-action lawsuits. The FTC also charged Path with violating COPPA by knowingly collecting personal data from around 3,000 children under 13 without their parents' permission. The FTC alleged that Path asked users for their birthdates and then proceeded to collect emails, names, phone numbers and other data from users who said they were under 13. The company allegedly did so between November 2010 and May 2012. Path said in a blog post on Friday that it has closed the accounts of all children under 13. "From a developer’s perspective, we understand the tendency to focus all attention on the process of building amazing new things. It wasn’t until we gave our account verification system a second look that we realized there was a problem," the company said.
The mobile company Hipster has been hit with another privacy lawsuit alleging that it wrongly uploaded users' address books.The lawsuit, filed this week in federal court in the Northern District of California, marks at least the second time that Hipster has been sued for allegedly importing users' contacts without their consent. The case comes the same week that Path settled FTC charges for allegedly deceiving users by uploading their contacts.The new case against Hipster, now owned by AOL, was filed by three Texas residents -- Francisco Espitita, Vanessa Zendejas and Joe Sanchez Frairer. They allege in a potential class-action that Hipster was able to obtain addresses of users' family and friends, as well as "highly sensitive personal information, revealing contact address data for professional treatment involving sexuality, mental illness, alcoholism, incest, rape and domestic violence."Texas-based attorney Joseph Malley, who has brought privacy cases against Facebook and other Web companies, is representing the consumers who sued Hipster.The case stems from a February 2012 report stating that Hipster's app uploaded users' address books without their consent. Then-CEO Doug Ludlow confirmed the report, which was published by an outside developer, and apologized for the data collection. The company was acquired by AOL the following month.Last year, Hipster was one of more than 12 mobile companies named in a potential class-action privacy lawsuit. That case, brought by Texas resident Marc Opperman, was recently transferred to the Northern District of California.Online companies accused of privacy violations typically argue that users can't proceed in court without some form of economic injury. The group that is suing Hipster addresses that hurdle in its complaint by alleging that the data collection drained their battery life and bandwidth. They also allege they incurred costs to "remove embedded code" and reinstall other programs.It's not yet clear whether they will be able to proceed based on those alleged injuries. But a federal judge in California recently ruled that a user who is suing Path could proceed, based on his contention that removing the app's "tracking software" could cost as much as $12,500. Path said that deleting the code was "a simple act requiring no more than two swipes" on the iPhone, but the judge ruled that the issue couldn't be decided without more evidence.
As the retail to e-tail purchase shift gathers momentum, what are the real implications for brands and their packaging? Ten years ago, if you were asked to name four companies that had most changed people’s lives, you would have probably have suggested manufacturing giants like Ford, GE or IBM. Nowadays in our "i for information" age, we’d probably agree to give this accolade to Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon. The four digital "Emperors" of computing, search, social and shopping -- or perhaps the four horsemen of the e-pocalypse? Either way they are well on their way to reinventing commerce, with far-reaching implications for marketers. It was not until smartphones (and tablets) became common that we started seeing a fundamental change in our online shopping "experience." The now ubiquitous tap-and-swipe interface changed the way we thought about mobile devices. Hence the word on every marketer’s lips, "m-commerce" -- e-commerce on steroids -- with consumers increasingly searching, sharing, comparing and buying from mobile devices rather than clunky old-fashioned desktop or laptop computers. Using smart devices to browse not just the Internet but real-world objects is predicted to make the technology of Augmented Reality (AR) the next "mass medium." Like many mass media before it, its principal role will be to make buying more convenient and perhaps more entertaining. Think of the products that we’re prepared to buy online, where we once missed the sensorial stimulus of physically interacting with them in stores: Books first, then music and film, and now clothes, groceries, even high-value items like jewelry and cars. Faced with this situation, could the marketing machine that was invented for 1950s suburban America (TV advertising plus out-of-town superstores with car parking) become redundant? Online grocery shopping certainly has come a long way to replacing it, although it still leaves a lot to be desired. The experience of finding and selecting the 50 or so items that constitute the average weekly online grocery shop is less engaging than actually going shopping. No car journey and trolley-pushing maybe, but also no real opportunities to browse for those unexpected delights that supermarkets are expert at confronting us with. At least until now. I believe this will change suddenly and dramatically in the near future, as we consumers wake up and wonder why we have been acting like desperate housewives all these years. Technologies like Augmented Reality will enable us to access rich virtual experiences of brands and products, at times and locations that suit us. Real, tangible packaging will still need to perform and deliver in transit and in home -- after all a virtual ready meal is not much use to anyone -- but it will no longer need to double up as the beacon of temptation on the supermarket shelf too. That job can be taken on by a delightful brand and product experience, delivered digitally at a virtual point of purchase. The first motor cars were designed (and named) as "horseless carriages." Early virtual supermarkets, from Tesco's famous South Korean subway wall to China's Yihaodian augmented reality supermarkets in "blank city spaces," have followed a similar pattern. But while this is a natural way to ease reluctant humans to adopt new technology en masse, it will soon be replaced by a more efficient model. As search evolves and becomes more visual rather than textual, we are starting to see a new clarity and ease of presentation, as online shopping borrows cues from apps and social media sites such as Pinterest. The ability to "add to basket" from brand and product avatars accessed from multiple digital sources will become the norm. As we witness this perfect storm of more intuitive search, rich augmented brand experience and ubiquitous purchase points such as this smart innovation, never before will the term "brand image" have been more relevant. And relieved of some of its "silent salesman" duties, expect real packaging to reinvent itself in surprising ways too. With the sale already made digitally, the "hard copy" will be able to offer far more useful and actionable information. Neither will we need to worry about all that scanning and reading a smart screen -- pretty soon we will be requesting the information with voice commands and see it appear on our personal heads-up display. Apple, Google, Microsoft and others are already racing to bring us that extra layer of convenience -- because we can never have too much of that.
According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and its Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence, in partnership with Viggle, consumers are turning to smartphones and tablets to place online orders for pick-up or delivery, with 69% of those polled saying they have placed food orders via mobile devices. 60% of Respondents Order Takeout or Delivery Weekly or MoreFrequence of Takeout% of Respondents Daily 2% 4-6 times a week 8 2-3 times a week 24 Once a week 26 Every other week 16 Once a month 11 Less than 1/month 10 Never 2 Source: Viggle-IAB, January 2013 50% of media savvy mobile users are so committed to their favorite destination for fast eats, that they have downloaded at least one restaurant-specific app. In addition, 55% of those polled have at least one “multi-restaurant” app, with Yelp the most popular at 37%, followed by Urbanspoon (24%) and Zagat (9%). 26% planned to order take-out or delivery to complement their Super Bowl viewing. While the survey didn’t ask about specific Super Bowl mobile dining plans, respondents were clear in their mobile internet ordering preferences, with pizza taking the top spot at 72%, followed by a tie between sandwiches/burgers and Chinese food at 31%. Wings (24%) and Mexican food (15%) rounded out the list. Anna Bager, Vice President and General Manager, Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence, IAB, says “... the mobile internet is increasingly becoming a vital tool to help consumers navigate their everyday lives... when it comes to simple tasks such as ordering a pizza... Restaurant and fast-food chain marketers should... make (mobile offers) it a key part of their ad-buying strategy...” Consumers surveyed also use their mobile devices to research restaurants for delivery or take-out:
Mobile is a mess,” said Forrester’s Senior Analyst Joanna O’Connell during last week’s OMMA RTB event. Her panel of agency execs pretty much agreed. Limitations in the creative palette of the small screen, platform fragmentation, and limited tracking and metrics are frustrating everyone, especially as the they feel the need to invest in the “next big thing.” One major way for post-PC platforms to become a more palatable solution for media buyers is for mobile to stop being just mobile. Lumping together two very different platforms, smartphones and tablets, in most metrics around the field was an early marriage of convenience that needs to end. Deloitte predicted that 2013 will be the last year the industry conflates ad performance, scale and conversion metrics as simply “mobile.” None too soon. As a recently released study of cross-platform behaviors from Adobe makes clear, the use cases, sensibilities and effectiveness of the two devices are different in ways that marketers need to understand and embrace in their targeting. “We believe tablets are a more intuitive shopping device that lends itself more to completing a transaction,” says Adobe Senior Product Marketing Manager Dave Dickson. The company's survey, fielded in late November and early December, the height of the holiday shopping season, found that 44% of tablet owners use their device for shopping, compared to 20% of smartphone owners. But the central difference between the two devices is that the larger screen leads people to the buy button. Among those mobile users who do use their devices to shop, 55% of tablet owners say they purchase products on the device, while 28% of smartphone owners do. Adobe, which makes an app publishing platform, likes to underscore the special role of apps vs. mobile Web use for device-based shopping. Asking consumers to project their behaviors into the future, 60% of current tablet shoppers said they expected to increase their use of apps for shopping in the next year, and even 25% of non-shoppers on tablets expected they would. Dickson contends that apps tend to be the environments where customers engage more deeply with retail brands and ultimately tend to convert to purchase. Web browsing on tablet and smartphone tends to be about retailer discovery, while apps are about immersing oneself in the product catalog. 70% of tablet shoppers and 68% of smartphone shoppers say they tend to download apps connected to brands they already know, and 67% on both devices say they only use apps from their favorite stores. In fact, distinguishing between tablet and smartphone targets is important to the messaging. Consumers shopping on both devices say that, foremost, they look for money-saving offers from retailers (52% on tablets, 67% on smartphones). But the next most popular feature for tablet owners (49%) are images and slideshows of the products. Tablets are for luxuriating with the merchandise. On smartphones, 60% of shoppers say store locators are most important, followed by ability to make purchases (58%), couponing (57%) and support for loyalty programs (56%). There is a lot of evidence that the personal social channel is among the most effective ways for retailers’ mobile apps to get discovered. The Adobe survey found that among tablet shoppers, 89% cited friends as the greatest influence on what they buy via their devices. The same was true for tablet non-shoppers (79%), and for smartphone shoppers (67%) and smartphone non-shoppers (77%). Fairly close behind among mobile shopping influences, however, were email communications from companies, online ads, Facebook and online videos. Clearly, in order to drive mobile shopping behaviors, retailers need to take a multichannel approach and make customers aware at every turn that a device-based experience is available to them. While app stores are still the leading source of discovery for users (42%), 32% say they are finding out about apps from company Web sites. One of the earliest of users' mobile behaviors that carriers noticed in the days before smartphones was what we might call the “look at this" effect. People tended to show off the cool new thing on their devices to others. That activity is still alive. Adobe found that 53% of people share opinions about apps in person. Curiously, only 22% of people say they find out about apps in a retailer’s store. Arguably, that is the one place a merchant most wants to engage users. Letting a user know a valuable app is available from the brand in-store can be the best defense against showrooming. It puts the consumer into the brand’s digital loop so that even if customers don't make the buy on the spot, the retailer has the opportunity to capture them later on the Web or device. Dickson says that 2013 will be a year when many retailers start focusing on tablet deployments. I think many of these companies need to focus on cross-screen synchronization. People are making purchase decisions in increments and across devices, from Web to tablet to smartphone, in different places and times. Loyal consumers may be leaning back and shopping on their tablets during prime time, but they need an easy way to push that information to the smartphone they bring into the store. Likewise, a product they discover and contemplate in store they will want to research on the desktop or on the tablet. The next big stage in learning to target different content to the various screens is allowing the consumer to knit these experiences together more easily.
Do-not-track isn't just for desktops, the Federal Trade Commission said on Friday. Mobile platform companies -- including Apple, Google and Blackberry -- also should develop a do-not-track mechanism that would "prevent an entity from developing profiles about mobile users," the FTC recommended in a new report about mobile privacy. "A DNT setting placed at the platform level could give consumers ... a way to control the transmission of information to third parties," the report states. "Offering this setting or control through the platform will allow consumers to make a one-time selection rather than having to make decisions on an app-by-app basis." The report adds that apps relying on behavioral advertising "would remain free to engage potential customers in a dialogue to explain the value of behavioral tracking and obtain consent to engage in such tracking." Ad networks also should "work with platforms to ensure implementation of an effective DNT system for mobile," the report says. "This collaboration is important to ensure that consumer choice is honored.” Do-not-track is just one recommendation in the 36-page FTC staff report, titled "Mobile Privacy Disclosures: Building Trust Through Transparency." The FTC also says that app developers should disclose data collection practices before gathering information, and obtain opt-in consent before collecting sensitive data -- including financial or health information. "For instance," the report says, "if an app collects blood glucose information or shares it with third parties, the app developer should provide the consumer with a just-in-time disclosure of that fact and obtain affirmative express consent prior to the initial collection or sharing." The report comes the same day that Chairman Jon Leibowitz announced his resignation. Leibowitz has made online privacy a priority for the FTC, and has repeatedly urged the ad industry to implement a do-not-track mechanism that would allow consumers to avoid all online behavioral advertising. Efforts to create such a mechanism for desktops moved forward in 2011, when Mozilla and other browser developers began offering do-not-track headers. Those headers signal to publishers and ad networks that users don't want to be tracked, but don't actually prevent tracking. The initiative hit a roadblock last year after the Internet standards group World Wide Web Consortium was unable to agree on standards for how to interpret the headers. One of the main sticking points centers on whether ad networks and analytics companies should be able to continue collecting data from consumers who have turned on a do-not-track command. Many online ad companies say that they should be able to do so, as long as they don't use the information for behavioral advertising purposes. Leibowitz told reporters today that he still hopes that the industry implements a do-not-track system in the near future.