Attribution Challenges Business Objectives by Laurie Sullivan

Marketers have entered a multitouch world. Identifying the way consumers interact with brands through offline and online paths to measure and reallocate marketing dollars will become the focus of search marketers this year. This requires significant data, technology and support from c-level executives across all business units in the organization to become successful. ...Read the whole story

  • search Mobile Ad Platform Serves Up Local Offers In Real-Time by Laurie Sullivan

    edo is building out an advertising channel where a swipe of a credit or a debit card becomes the signal to serve up ads. The swipe at the point of sale activates Geocommerce Offers, a mobile advertising platform combining purchase and location data to target ads and offers in real-time. ...Read the whole story

Believing Is Seeing by Gord Hotchkiss

In his book "The Believing Brain," Michael Shermer spends several hundred pages exploring just how powerful beliefs are in forming our view of the world. Beliefs impact not just what we think, but they literally filter what we see and do. And, once in place, beliefs tend to be stubbornly unshakeable. We will go to great extents to defend our beliefs with rationalizations that are often totally or partially fabricated. As Shermer says, "Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs follow." ...More

  • Microsoft Releases Predictive Behavior Research by Laurie Sullivan

    A group of researchers at Microsoft and the CS Department of Technion-Israel Institute of Technology explored methods for modeling query and click behavior in Web searchers, as well as temporal characteristics in query and URLs ...More

  • Report: Forcing Search Engines To Be 'Fair' Violates Free Speech by Wendy Davis

    Search engines have a free-speech right to display whichever results they choose, in whichever order they choose, constitutional law scholar Eugene Volokh argues in a paper commissioned by Google and submitted to the Federal Trade Commission. Volokh argues that Google has the same free-speech rights as newspapers, encyclopedias or other publishers in deciding what content to feature -- even if the decisions are seen as unfair or harmful to other businesses. ...More