Pinterest is breaking into mobile messaging with a new feature for users to chat about particular Pins, or anything else that comes to mind. Encouraging broader interactions, Pinterest has also made it possible for users to send Pins -- the visual bookmarks that users amass on their "boards" -- and messages to multiple people. “We wanted to make it easier for [community members] to have a good old-fashioned conversation,” Tom Watson, a product designer at Pinterest, explained in a blog post. “We hope this will help you plan projects, swap creative ideas and share your best discoveries,” Watson said. The move seems like a logical next step for Pinterest, which has already established itself as one of the Web’s more popular sites. A cross between a social network and a visual search engine, about 40 million users are expected to visit Pinterest at least once a month, this year -- nearly 16% more than a year ago -- according to eMarketer. Pinterest also claimed about 750 million boards on its platform, with 30 billion pins about travelers, foodies and more. Driven by a dramatic rise in mobile usage, messaging has become a key battleground for social networks. That fact became glaringly clear after Snapchat rebuffed a $3 billion buyout bid from Facebook, last year. Since then, Facebook has dropped $19 billion on WhatsApp, and launched its own ephemeral messaging app, dubbed Slingshot. Snapchat remains the most popular disappearing messaging service, per Forrester -- but it faces increasing competition from Whisper, Secret, PostSecret, sixbillionsecrets and Facebook’s Slingshot. Similar to WhatsApp, more straightforward messaging apps include Kik Messenger, WeChat, Line and Tango. Despite aggressive monetization efforts -- like adding a self-service component to its Promoted Pins ad product -- Pinterest recently decided to take another $200 million in capital at a valuation of $5 billion. The company has used a significant share of capital on acquisitions, including Icebergs -- a Barcelona-based start-up that specializes in content-organizing and sharing tools, which Pinterest agreed to buy last week. Other acquisitions include culinary community Punchfork; review aggregator app Livestar; coding competition site Hackermeter; and image recognition and visual search startup Visual Graph. The company is also focused on international growth and additional monetization. Worldwide, Pinterest says it is now available in 31 countries, while international users represent about 30% of its total audience. Pinterest declined to elaborate on its messaging strategy, on Thursday.
Honda likes to flip the typically mundane summer sell-down (otherwise known as summer clearance) campaign template on its head. Instead of the usual "parade 'o cars" tier 2 TV ads, the automaker has been doing offbeat social media campaigns inviting consumer participation to get people to dealerships for deals. Last summer, for instance, Honda touted summer sales with real-time offbeat videos based on consumer tweets. This time it's about “Cheerance” where, in addition to traditional media executions, Honda is launching a social flotilla of humorous videos, off-beat installations, GIFs, events and a partnership with YouTube celeb du jour, Andrew Hales. All of it is around the idea of creating unexpected cheer -- something everyone probably needs right now, assuming world peace and a cure for ebola doesn't happen in the next 24 hours. The campaign running this week, launched with an introduction video that sets up the scheme. The content is tagged with a Honda Summer Clearance Event call to action. Hales is promoting the program with two videos on his own channel LAHWF YouTube channel, where he dances with strangers, among other things. The video content includes candid-camera type footage of unsuspecting people getting cheered in a couple of ways: they might encounter piñatas at various locations, and Honda has a “Stand Here for Cheer” box in busy areas. A person who stands in the painted box gets a surprise, but a good one. Honda says it might involve, for example, a sax player serenade. Honda also showed up at a beach with a “Cheer Detector” that “found” a buried treasure chest whose contents were shared with onlookers. Honda is also partnering with Pandora, which is running a custom "Cheerance" pop music playlist. Honda is also running radio ads in top DMA's, including drive-time radio segments featuring comedian Steve Simeone, who voices two 60-second, custom-made “Summer Cheerance” comedy bits during commercial breaks. Honda's campaign Web site is hosting the candid guerrilla video grabs of Honda’s impromptu cheer happenings. “Summer Cheerance” pre-roll appears before humorous videos on social channels. Banner ads are running on sites like as Cars.com, KBB.com and Edmunds.com and Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Honda says it is also running "Summer Cheerance" pre-roll creative before humorous videos sites like YouTube. Print ads are in People, Sports Illustrated and local newspapers in top DMAs. Network radio spots will also air during the event. But no self-respecting clearance campaign would be without at least some TV. Honda's Summer Clearance Sales Event has six spots including Spanish-language versions referencing last year’s Vine video campaign by responding to tweets, and offering a solution: a new car. Honda says network placements for the TV spots will be on “The Bachelorette,” “New Girl,” “24” and “MasterChef” and on national cable networks such as Bravo, Discovery, TBS and HGTV. Honda is also using the effort to support a cause with which Honda motorcycles and the Honda riders club has had an association with over the years, the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation, to which the automaker will donate $100,000, but only if the automaker reaches a goal of cheering up three million people by week’s end. The Web site has a counter keeping a running tally.
Sprint did indeed confirm that it had dropped its bid for T-Mobile and was replacing longtime CEO Dan Hesse with Marcelo Claure yesterday, as anticipated, providing grist for analysts’ observations and material for T-Mobile’ CEO John Legere’s jibes at his erstwhile frenemy. Now they are clear rivals once again in the battle for the No. 3 position in the domestic mobile market. The “always-colorful” Legere “seems to have plenty of opinions on his company's one-time suitor,” reportsAd Age’s Mark Bergen, in a battery of tweets [@JohnLegere] that, in the past “T-Mobile staff have insisted … are unscripted.” “If you’re a @sprint customer, you’re in the middle of a #framilyfued and it’s time to up and go!” he tweeted. Then, a few minutes later, he posted: “Looks like @sprint has a new #framily member… and he’s got a lot of framily therapy to do, asap,” in an obvious reference to Claure’s appointment. For his part, Claure “has the management experience, passion and drive to create the strongest network and offer the best products and services in the wireless industry,” Sprint chairman Masayoshi Son said in a statement. Claure will resign his position as CEO at Miami-based Brightstar Corp., which he founded, effective Aug. 11, when he formally takes over at Sprint. Son’s SoftBank, which is based in Tokyo, will acquire Claure’s remaining interest in the company. Legere predicted in a later tweet that T-Mobile would overtake Sprint in total customers by the end of the year. “There, I said it!,” he wrote, linking to a press release issued yesterday announcing that “the Un-carrier has overtaken rivals AT&T, Verizon and Sprint to become the No.1 U.S. wireless provider in the increasingly important prepaid mobile marketplace. “ But “T-Mobile US’s feistiness may have counted against” Son’s efforts to make the case that a combined Sprint and T-Mobile would present a more formidable challenge to No. 1 Verizon and No. 2 AT&T, observes the Schumpeter blog in The Economist. “The company has been a thorn in the side of AT&T, especially, with novel pricing plans and publicity stunts.” As for Claure, his own sporting instincts may prove more valuable in meeting Legere’s challenge than any therapeutic capabilities he may possess. “The charismatic Claure was so good at helping big companies gain market share that within six years, revenues reportedly jumped north of $1.2 billion,” reports Erin Carlyle in Forbes. “He also managed to force his two major competitors — public Cellstar and Brightpoint — out of Latin America entirely.” But Sprint is a different kettle of challenges. “Sprint is the clear loser here,” MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett said in a note to clients quoted by Bloomberg. “Son and Sprint will need to refocus squarely on improving results internally, and that won’t be easy.” That’s because “Sprint’s problems are largely structural, not cultural, Moffett said,” pointed out reporters Alex Sherman, Cornelius Rahn and Matthew Campbell, “questioning how much difference a new CEO can make.” Adds Tokyo-based Yoshihiro Nakatani, a senior fund manager at Asahi Life Asset Management: “If Sprint can’t buy T-Mobile, it will be difficult for Sprint to do business. I’m concerned about Sprint’s operations.” But for all of Legere’s crowing, “T-Mobile will have to weigh the merits of a deal with another suitor against going it alone in a market that is about to get a lot more competitive and a lot more expensive,” write Thomas Gryta and Sam Schechner in the Wall Street Journal. While it “has added more than four million lucrative postpaid customers over the past six quarters,” they point out, “those gains are coming at a cost. T-Mobile is paying subscribers' termination fees when they switch, and a looming spectrum auction will require big outlays of cash if the company is to remain competitive.” Paris-based Iliad, which last week made its own $15-billion bid for T-Mobile US, took the news as a positive and “plans to forge ahead with its surprise bid … to buy 56.6% of T-Mobile, despite objections from the company that Iliad's offer was too low,” a source told the WSJ’sSchechner in a separate story. Meanwhile, Dish chairman Charlie Ergen said yesterday’s developments “opened up more options for his satellite-TV carrier as it looks for ways to expand into the wireless business,” Caitlain McCabe reports in Bloomberg Businessweek. “While he said Dish remains interested in T-Mobile, Ergen also lauded Sprint, which he said has a better network and has potential to expand. The odds are low of a deal with anyone before the government’s spectrum auction in November, he said.”
Marketing tech company Unruly, which has a focus on social video, on Thursday announced that it has partnered with Nielsen to bring the Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) to its ad platform. The ratings allow advertisers to target specific audiences via online video ads. “With three-quarters of video views happening outside of YouTube, it’s more important than ever to reach audiences where they are watching and sharing videos,” stated Richard Kosinski, president of Unruly U.S. “And now with Unruly and Nielsen OCR, advertisers can be assured that their social video ads were not just viewed, but were also seen by their desired audience within Nielsen’s dataset. “Advertisers continue to struggle to keep pace with the evolving landscape associated with programmatic exchanges. Nielsen OCR provides clients with a deeper understanding of where their ads are being watched,” he added. Advertisers will be able to buy in-stream pre-roll video ads via Unruly against the Nielsen OCRs.
Hackers slipping malicious software into online advertisements and emails continue to create risks for consumers and brands. In fact, 91.7% of major brands fail to provide adequate email security, per an Online Trust Alliance study -- one of two released Wednesday suggesting that marketers are still losing the battle against malware and viruses embedded in content across the Internet. The other report from Cisco Systems attributes malvertising to the uptick. A recent example points to reports that Russian hackers stole 1.2 billion unique username and password combinations, and more than 500 million e-mail addresses, reports The New York Times. Experts agree this situation is becoming increasingly common, unfortunately -- across a variety of media from social to email and search, along with publisher, retail, and brand sites. The OTA's 2014 Email Integrity Audit report analyzed email campaigns from nearly 800 consumer Web sites and found that only 8.3% passed the audit, suggesting that companies protect the consumers visiting them; the remainder failed. The audit tracks the adoption of three critical email authentication standards aimed at improving the privacy of email communications in transit from one user to another. OTA Executive Director and President Craig Spiezle believes that businesses and government agencies fail to adopt email and other online security practices fast enough, which puts consumers at risk for losing sensitive information like credit card numbers, social security numbers and identities. A handful of government agencies and business continue to step up to protect consumers and site visitors. While the report doesn't list names, it runs through the percentages and the types of businesses doing the most to protect consumers. Those that have stepped up include 28% of the top 50 social media companies, 17% of the top 100 financial services companies, 14% of the top 100 Internet retail companies, 6% of the top 50 news companies, 6% of the top 500 Internet retailers, and 4% of the top 50 U.S. government agencies. The Ponemon Institute estimates the average cost of a company's data breach at $5.4 million in 2014, up from $4.5 million in 2013, per the Cisco Systems 2014 Midyear Security Report released this week. The report also cites stats from the Cost of Cyber Crime and Cyber Espionage that estimates the U.S. economy loses $100 billion annually -- and as many as 508,000 U.S. jobs are lost -- because of malicious online activity. Cisco points to malvertising as one reason for the increase as media and publishing sites attract more traffic from individuals across the globe. Cloud services supporting media and publishing sites hold the highest risk, followed by pharmaceutical and chemical, available, transportation and shipping, manufacturing, insurance, agriculture, professional services, and others like food and beverage, and retail. iFrames and malicious scripts dominate for all industries, although malicious events across the U.S. Europe and Asia-Pacific appear to rely on exploits to target specific industries. In APJC, scams, phishing, and click-fraud are used to compromise the trust of users in the transportation and shipping industries -- whereas mobile Web malware remains low, for now, in all three regions, per Cisco's report. "Paper note and fishing hook" photo from Shutterstock.
Pinterest is breaking into mobile messaging with a new feature for users to chat about particular Pins, or anything else that comes to mind. Encouraging broader interactions, Pinterest has also made it possible for users to send Pins -- the visual bookmarks that users amass on their "boards" -- and messages to multiple people. “We wanted to make it easier for [community members] to have a good old-fashioned conversation,” Tom Watson, a product designer at Pinterest, explained in a blog post. “We hope this will help you plan projects, swap creative ideas and share your best discoveries,” Watson said. The move seems like a logical next step for Pinterest, which has already established itself as one of the Web’s more popular sites. A cross between a social network and a visual search engine, about 40 million users are expected to visit Pinterest at least once a month, this year -- nearly 16% more than a year ago -- according to eMarketer. Pinterest also claimed about 750 million boards on its platform, with 30 billion pins about travelers, foodies and more. Driven by a dramatic rise in mobile usage, messaging has become a key battleground for social networks. That fact became glaringly clear after Snapchat rebuffed a $3 billion buyout bid from Facebook, last year. Since then, Facebook has dropped $19 billion on WhatsApp, and launched its own ephemeral messaging app, dubbed Slingshot. Snapchat remains the most popular disappearing messaging service, per Forrester -- but it faces increasing competition from Whisper, Secret, PostSecret, sixbillionsecrets and Facebook’s Slingshot. Similar to WhatsApp, more straightforward messaging apps include Kik Messenger, WeChat, Line and Tango. Despite aggressive monetization efforts -- like adding a self-service component to its Promoted Pins ad product -- Pinterest recently decided to take another $200 million in capital at a valuation of $5 billion. The company has used a significant share of capital on acquisitions, including Icebergs -- a Barcelona-based start-up that specializes in content-organizing and sharing tools, which Pinterest agreed to buy last week. Other acquisitions include culinary community Punchfork; review aggregator app Livestar; coding competition site Hackermeter; and image recognition and visual search startup Visual Graph. The company is also focused on international growth and additional monetization. Worldwide, Pinterest says it is now available in 31 countries, while international users represent about 30% of its total audience. Pinterest declined to elaborate on its messaging strategy, on Thursday.
YouTube — star-maker, entertainment distributor, quirky pet archive and ad channel, — has topped the positive Buzz rankings with American men this summer. With a BrandIndex Buzz score of 27.4 the Google video brand has edged out Amazon and Subway for top spot during the month of July. Although YouTube has frequently featured in our BrandIndex ranking lists, this represents a strong six-point uptick since the same period last year when the video channel was only the fourteenth ranked brand for men. YouTube has long established itself as the go-to viral launch location for budding video stars, trailers, TV clips, music videos and is currently receiving over a billion unique global visitors every month. Although the FIFA World Cup end over a month ago, the World Cup content is still generating hits for the newly converted male soccer fans. The Men’s top Buzz list for July is dominated by various flavors of media: YouTube, Netflix, and one traditional broadcast network, History Channel all make the men’s Top 10. This summer Netflix started inviting filmmakers to create documentary content specifically for the channel and Sundance hit "The Battered Bastards of Baseball" debuted in mid-July. History Channel’s late spring programing was headlined with “World Wars,” while“Top Gear” returned for season four in July. Technology is represented on the men’s top ten by the big two, Samsung and Apple. Number two Amazon.com and home store Lowe’s represent the retail category. Ford is top auto brand. Brands appearing on both the women and men’s Top 10 are Netflix, YouTube, Amazon and Subway. Netflix, however, tops the women’s list, which also includes Walgreens and more female-targeted brands like Dawn and Dove. For men, the biggest Buzz improver in comparison to the same month in 2013 is Men’s Wearhouse. The brand suffered a dip in perception last summer after founder George Zimmer left the company, but achieved an impressive 19.1-point bounce with men since this time last year. Food Network and Carnival both made significant gains after some rocky media events in the last couple of years, however, both these brands also appear on the women’s Top 5 gainers list. Six Flags and CNN Headline News round out the men’s top gainer lists, although CNN is still in negative perception with an aggregate July score of -10. BrandIndex’s Buzz score asks adults "If you've heard anything about the brand in the last two weeks, through advertising, news or word of mouth, was it positive or negative?” Buzz scores represent the net sentiment generated across all media for over 1,300 brands in the U.S.
Honda likes to flip the typically mundane summer sell-down (otherwise known as summer clearance) campaign template on its head. Instead of the usual "parade 'o cars" tier 2 TV ads, the automaker has been doing offbeat social media campaigns inviting consumer participation to get people to dealerships for deals. Last summer, for instance, Honda touted summer sales with real-time offbeat videos based on consumer tweets. This time it's about “Cheerance” where, in addition to traditional media executions, Honda is launching a social flotilla of humorous videos, off-beat installations, GIFs, events and a partnership with YouTube celeb du jour, Andrew Hales. All of it is around the idea of creating unexpected cheer -- something everyone probably needs right now, assuming world peace and a cure for ebola doesn't happen in the next 24 hours. The campaign running this week, launched with an introduction video that sets up the scheme. The content is tagged with a Honda Summer Clearance Event call to action. Hales is promoting the program with two videos on his own channel LAHWF YouTube channel, where he dances with strangers, among other things. The video content includes candid-camera type footage of unsuspecting people getting cheered in a couple of ways: they might encounter piñatas at various locations, and Honda has a “Stand Here for Cheer” box in busy areas. A person who stands in the painted box gets a surprise, but a good one. Honda says it might involve, for example, a sax player serenade. Honda also showed up at a beach with a “Cheer Detector” that “found” a buried treasure chest whose contents were shared with onlookers. Honda is also partnering with Pandora, which is running a custom "Cheerance" pop music playlist. Honda is also running radio ads in top DMA's, including drive-time radio segments featuring comedian Steve Simeone, who voices two 60-second, custom-made “Summer Cheerance” comedy bits during commercial breaks. Honda's campaign Web site is hosting the candid guerrilla video grabs of Honda’s impromptu cheer happenings. “Summer Cheerance” pre-roll appears before humorous videos on social channels. Banner ads are running on sites like as Cars.com, KBB.com and Edmunds.com and Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Honda says it is also running "Summer Cheerance" pre-roll creative before humorous videos sites like YouTube. Print ads are in People, Sports Illustrated and local newspapers in top DMAs. Network radio spots will also air during the event. But no self-respecting clearance campaign would be without at least some TV. Honda's Summer Clearance Sales Event has six spots including Spanish-language versions referencing last year’s Vine video campaign by responding to tweets, and offering a solution: a new car. Honda says network placements for the TV spots will be on “The Bachelorette,” “New Girl,” “24” and “MasterChef” and on national cable networks such as Bravo, Discovery, TBS and HGTV. Honda is also using the effort to support a cause with which Honda motorcycles and the Honda riders club has had an association with over the years, the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation, to which the automaker will donate $100,000, but only if the automaker reaches a goal of cheering up three million people by week’s end. The Web site has a counter keeping a running tally.
Sprint did indeed confirm that it had dropped its bid for T-Mobile and was replacing longtime CEO Dan Hesse with Marcelo Claure yesterday, as anticipated, providing grist for analysts’ observations and material for T-Mobile’ CEO John Legere’s jibes at his erstwhile frenemy. Now they are clear rivals once again in the battle for the No. 3 position in the domestic mobile market. The “always-colorful” Legere “seems to have plenty of opinions on his company's one-time suitor,” reportsAd Age’s Mark Bergen, in a battery of tweets [@JohnLegere] that, in the past “T-Mobile staff have insisted … are unscripted.” “If you’re a @sprint customer, you’re in the middle of a #framilyfued and it’s time to up and go!” he tweeted. Then, a few minutes later, he posted: “Looks like @sprint has a new #framily member… and he’s got a lot of framily therapy to do, asap,” in an obvious reference to Claure’s appointment. For his part, Claure “has the management experience, passion and drive to create the strongest network and offer the best products and services in the wireless industry,” Sprint chairman Masayoshi Son said in a statement. Claure will resign his position as CEO at Miami-based Brightstar Corp., which he founded, effective Aug. 11, when he formally takes over at Sprint. Son’s SoftBank, which is based in Tokyo, will acquire Claure’s remaining interest in the company. Legere predicted in a later tweet that T-Mobile would overtake Sprint in total customers by the end of the year. “There, I said it!,” he wrote, linking to a press release issued yesterday announcing that “the Un-carrier has overtaken rivals AT&T, Verizon and Sprint to become the No.1 U.S. wireless provider in the increasingly important prepaid mobile marketplace. “ But “T-Mobile US’s feistiness may have counted against” Son’s efforts to make the case that a combined Sprint and T-Mobile would present a more formidable challenge to No. 1 Verizon and No. 2 AT&T, observes the Schumpeter blog in The Economist. “The company has been a thorn in the side of AT&T, especially, with novel pricing plans and publicity stunts.” As for Claure, his own sporting instincts may prove more valuable in meeting Legere’s challenge than any therapeutic capabilities he may possess. “The charismatic Claure was so good at helping big companies gain market share that within six years, revenues reportedly jumped north of $1.2 billion,” reports Erin Carlyle in Forbes. “He also managed to force his two major competitors — public Cellstar and Brightpoint — out of Latin America entirely.” But Sprint is a different kettle of challenges. “Sprint is the clear loser here,” MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett said in a note to clients quoted by Bloomberg. “Son and Sprint will need to refocus squarely on improving results internally, and that won’t be easy.” That’s because “Sprint’s problems are largely structural, not cultural, Moffett said,” pointed out reporters Alex Sherman, Cornelius Rahn and Matthew Campbell, “questioning how much difference a new CEO can make.” Adds Tokyo-based Yoshihiro Nakatani, a senior fund manager at Asahi Life Asset Management: “If Sprint can’t buy T-Mobile, it will be difficult for Sprint to do business. I’m concerned about Sprint’s operations.” But for all of Legere’s crowing, “T-Mobile will have to weigh the merits of a deal with another suitor against going it alone in a market that is about to get a lot more competitive and a lot more expensive,” write Thomas Gryta and Sam Schechner in the Wall Street Journal. While it “has added more than four million lucrative postpaid customers over the past six quarters,” they point out, “those gains are coming at a cost. T-Mobile is paying subscribers' termination fees when they switch, and a looming spectrum auction will require big outlays of cash if the company is to remain competitive.” Paris-based Iliad, which last week made its own $15-billion bid for T-Mobile US, took the news as a positive and “plans to forge ahead with its surprise bid … to buy 56.6% of T-Mobile, despite objections from the company that Iliad's offer was too low,” a source told the WSJ’sSchechner in a separate story. Meanwhile, Dish chairman Charlie Ergen said yesterday’s developments “opened up more options for his satellite-TV carrier as it looks for ways to expand into the wireless business,” Caitlain McCabe reports in Bloomberg Businessweek. “While he said Dish remains interested in T-Mobile, Ergen also lauded Sprint, which he said has a better network and has potential to expand. The odds are low of a deal with anyone before the government’s spectrum auction in November, he said.”
Marketing tech company Unruly, which has a focus on social video, on Thursday announced that it has partnered with Nielsen to bring the Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) to its ad platform. The ratings allow advertisers to target specific audiences via online video ads. “With three-quarters of video views happening outside of YouTube, it’s more important than ever to reach audiences where they are watching and sharing videos,” stated Richard Kosinski, president of Unruly U.S. “And now with Unruly and Nielsen OCR, advertisers can be assured that their social video ads were not just viewed, but were also seen by their desired audience within Nielsen’s dataset. “Advertisers continue to struggle to keep pace with the evolving landscape associated with programmatic exchanges. Nielsen OCR provides clients with a deeper understanding of where their ads are being watched,” he added. Advertisers will be able to buy in-stream pre-roll video ads via Unruly against the Nielsen OCRs.
Hackers slipping malicious software into online advertisements and emails continue to create risks for consumers and brands. In fact, 91.7% of major brands fail to provide adequate email security, per an Online Trust Alliance study -- one of two released Wednesday suggesting that marketers are still losing the battle against malware and viruses embedded in content across the Internet. The other report from Cisco Systems attributes malvertising to the uptick. A recent example points to reports that Russian hackers stole 1.2 billion unique username and password combinations, and more than 500 million e-mail addresses, reports The New York Times. Experts agree this situation is becoming increasingly common, unfortunately -- across a variety of media from social to email and search, along with publisher, retail, and brand sites. The OTA's 2014 Email Integrity Audit report analyzed email campaigns from nearly 800 consumer Web sites and found that only 8.3% passed the audit, suggesting that companies protect the consumers visiting them; the remainder failed. The audit tracks the adoption of three critical email authentication standards aimed at improving the privacy of email communications in transit from one user to another. OTA Executive Director and President Craig Spiezle believes that businesses and government agencies fail to adopt email and other online security practices fast enough, which puts consumers at risk for losing sensitive information like credit card numbers, social security numbers and identities. A handful of government agencies and business continue to step up to protect consumers and site visitors. While the report doesn't list names, it runs through the percentages and the types of businesses doing the most to protect consumers. Those that have stepped up include 28% of the top 50 social media companies, 17% of the top 100 financial services companies, 14% of the top 100 Internet retail companies, 6% of the top 50 news companies, 6% of the top 500 Internet retailers, and 4% of the top 50 U.S. government agencies. The Ponemon Institute estimates the average cost of a company's data breach at $5.4 million in 2014, up from $4.5 million in 2013, per the Cisco Systems 2014 Midyear Security Report released this week. The report also cites stats from the Cost of Cyber Crime and Cyber Espionage that estimates the U.S. economy loses $100 billion annually -- and as many as 508,000 U.S. jobs are lost -- because of malicious online activity. Cisco points to malvertising as one reason for the increase as media and publishing sites attract more traffic from individuals across the globe. Cloud services supporting media and publishing sites hold the highest risk, followed by pharmaceutical and chemical, available, transportation and shipping, manufacturing, insurance, agriculture, professional services, and others like food and beverage, and retail. iFrames and malicious scripts dominate for all industries, although malicious events across the U.S. Europe and Asia-Pacific appear to rely on exploits to target specific industries. In APJC, scams, phishing, and click-fraud are used to compromise the trust of users in the transportation and shipping industries -- whereas mobile Web malware remains low, for now, in all three regions, per Cisco's report. "Paper note and fishing hook" photo from Shutterstock.