Ad campaigns produced by consumer product goods (CPG) companies attracted nearly as many online video shares as movie, TV and videogame trailers during Q1 2013, according to a recent report from video tech company Unruly.

The Mumbai-based BMW Guggenheim Lab has gamified the topic of privacy by visually mapping the expectation of privacy people claim in 10 different activities compared in cities across the globe.

One important strategy few online retailers tap points to tying Web search with Web site query data and using cloud services to support targeting. A study from Microsoft Research, "Data Services for E-tailers Leveraging Web Search Engine Assets," analyzes the options and presents three cloud data services--entity synonym, query to entity, and entity tagging -- to support smaller etailers whose marketing execs don't believe their company can match the same rich user experiences as larger online retailers.

More and more often, scientists are taking data "off the shelf" and combining it with machine learning to derive insights in biology, Microsoft Research's David Heckerman explains in a video. "The cost of sequencing human DNA is dropping extremely quickly, much faster than Moore's Law," he said, explaining the cost went from several billion a little more than 10 years ago to sequence one human genome to about $1,000 today. "Soon it will cost less than taking blood."

For as long as I have been covering digital media -- and especially behavioral targeted advertising -- technology companies and ad networks have complained that they're being held to a higher standard of consumer privacy protection than the off-line world. After all, credit card companies, magazine companies, telemarketers, and direct mail have all been swapping our names, addresses, and demographics for decades. But despite industry protests, digital data tracking has always been seen as somehow more surreptitious and dangerous than offline data gathering. Well, the retail segment may actually be doing online advertisers and technology companies an unintentional favor. The …

iPass released findings from its Q1 2013 Global Mobile Workforce Report analyzing the evolution of the bring your own device (BYOD) trend and the hurdles to Wi-Fi connectivity and download speeds. The research shows that while business users of mobile leverage a variety of devices, data limits affect productivity. And while the report doesn't mention this as a problem, slowing access or lack of connectivity could also affect the way ads serve-up across the internet and targeting techniques.

Facebook is experimenting with an extraordinarily bad idea: using push notifications in mobile apps to get people to update their status more frequently. Facebook confirmed to Mashable that this was a limited test it was trying in specific regions. It almost goes without saying that this is incredibly stupid. Users almost certainly will get annoyed and quickly disable the app.

The Chameleon Botnet discovered in February cost advertisers $6.2 million monthly, targeting more than 202 Web sites, and accounting for about 9 billion of the 14 billion ad impressions served up monthly, according to U.K.-based Spider.io. Scary thought considering how much money advertisers waste.

I noticed quite a few really smart people speaking at the latest South by Southwest interactive (SXSWi) conference expressed their discontent with the overall quality of the Internet. That's aside from the World Wide Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee, who during a keynote said that "the reason the Internet sucks today is because we haven't fixed it yet. ... We messed up."

Amazon is No. 1 in customer service, even above Nordstrom, according to Todd Morris, EVP brand development at Catalina. The reason? Personalization, he told South by Southwest attendees during a session titled "Death by Demographics: Killing Off your Ad Budget."