Class #4, July 15th 2009

Welcome to class #4 to be led by Levi Shapiro. Have a great class! Notes will be added here. Please check the blog and comment. I am in an immersive program and will have little time the next few weeks but I will continue to respond to emails. Sphere: Related Content

Class #3 July 8th Trends

Some articles for this week:

Quantcast

You might not be able to read this unless you have a WSJ sub. It’s about how Quantcast is selling Behavioral Targeting to as an ad network server system to ostensibly boost CPM rates. I often use QC to get a relative read on site stats. BT is derived from data-mining methods using multi-variant analysis to infer correlations. It generally draws upon taxonomy and ontology disciplines and sometime semantic analysis using “bag-of-words” statistical analysis such as the frequency distribution of terms. In other words, if you have visited www.edmunds.com and www.lexus.com and www.wsj.com we can make certain demographics / psychographic inferences about you Vs. if you visit www.mtv.com , www.tmz.com , www.perezhilton.com and we can therefore target the right ads to the right audience for bigger bucks. In fact some of these systems can collect not only WHAT sites you visit, but WHICH pages you go to on those sites.

www.quantcast.com

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124684239585598449.html

As a counterpoint to the above, there are many privacy worries about the vast amount of data these companies are collecting on a vast number of users. Is this big brother? Is PRC Communist Party sourcing the software? The industry claims that this information is held “Anonymously” so that actual “personal” info is not really stored. But who believes that?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/business/media/02adco.html

And finally, this piece on the flame out of JOOST and the elusiveness of an online video business model even when you start with $45 million VC dollars and have to reinvent yourself after an initial disaster with “client” software and a second disaster due to a surprise called HULU.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/joost-reinvents-itself-again/

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Class #2 July 1st Mark Heninger

Happy 4th of July weekend to everyone! Please post and comment on this class.

Thank you for all the great comments for the first class. I will be responding to the all.

Tangentially related to our course, I had a fascinating meeting in Chicago with Adam Siegel, the Co-Founder of www.inklingmarkets.com , which is a crowdsourced "prediction marketplace" useful for consumer insight and in some cases, a form of advertising itself.

Angelica will post her summary of the class as well.

Please start choosing and asking approval on your book report and course presentation. Several have asked about BLINK and TIPPING POINT. I think I have to take the off the list. I think Mr. Gladwell makes great points that inform many thing related to our subject but I don't believe the books are relevant enough in light of so many more pertinent works available.

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