Welcome to the Future — A Programmable World. Photo: Courtesy of Wired.

In this week’s Signal: Tumblr joins Yahoo! (though it’s not officially official yet); The potential of a ‘programmable world’; social command centers that allow brands to think and act in the moment; apps that turn the personal into the predictive; the Bing Crosby/Nazis/Silicon Valley connection; quality, not velocity, is the future of online news; “Behind the Banner“ helps to understand how the ad tech ecosystem works; battling fraud: a tough fight; a human-values driven approach to privacy; stop dreaming, interactive TV is already here; baby boomer marketers don’t understand millennials; and more!

*A quick note: This week marks the New York debut of OpenCo, and FMP will be hosting a session in its NY offices. If you are going to OpenCo, sign up to attend our session. If you don’t know what OpenCo is, but will be in NY, check out OpenCo here.*

To the links ….

Yahoo Reportedly Moving Forward with Tumblr Acquisition as its Board Mulls $1.1B All-Cash Offer (TNW) According to Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka of AllThingsD, Yahoo’s board was slated to meet yesterday to vote on (and, apparently, to approve) a $1.1 billion cash offer for Tumblr. Yahoo is also said to be vetting video giant Hulu as another potential target for acquisition.

UPDATE: It seems the deal is indeed done, though the official word is not set to come till Monday morning, after this newsletter goes to press. Here’s a good overview from GigaOm, and here’s my take: Yahoo! And Tumblr: It’s About Display, Streams & Native at Scale.

Behind the Banner, A Visualization of the Adtech Ecosystem (Battelle Media) In which we introduce “Behind the Banner,” a visualization produced with Adobe and Jer Thorp and his team from The Office for Creative Research. The project is underwritten by Adobe as part of next week’s CM Summit, and began with a quest to understand the world of programmatic trading of advertising inventory – a world that “at times feels rather like a hot mess, and at other times, like the future of not only all media, but all data-driven experiences we’ll have as a society, period.” Read all about about it in this release.

In the Programmable World, All Our Objects Will Act as One (Wired) Bill Wasik, a senior editor at Wired, goes in depth on the subject of programmable data. Imagine a future world in which of all the devices, appliances and other ‘things’ in your home, office or anywhere talk to one another: the alarm clock to the coffeepot, thermostats to motion sensors, lights to stereo receivers, etc. “In this future,” writes Wasik, “the intelligence once locked in our devices now flows into the universe of physical objects. Technologists have struggled to name this emerging phenomenon. Some have called it the Internet of Things or the Internet of Everything or the Industrial Internet—despite the fact that most of these devices aren’t actually on the Internet directly but instead communicate through simple wireless protocols. Other observers, paying homage to the stripped-down tech embedded in so many smart devices, are calling it the Sensor Revolution. But here’s a better way to think about what we’re building: It’s the Programmable World.”

Inside Mastercard’s Social Command Center (Digiday) Several brands have designed social command centers to act as a hub where they can collect, analyze and then act on relevant social media conversations. Mastercard’s “conversation suite,” an open floor plan workspace is one. In the space, “a dedicated team of four sits and listens to what stakeholders are saying about the brand. When this team is sleeping, its counterpart in Singapore, Dubai and Australia takes over,” writes Giselle Ambramovich. “The tool is Web-based, so all 60 of Mastercard’s global PR staff have access to it. And some marketing and product specialists can access it as well. The main team (U.S.) of four collaborates internally with PR, marketing, product and customer service teams to better engage stakeholders.” Mastercard’s command center is not just monitoring social conversations, but also looking at everything from share of voice by region to pulling in all the press coverage that has included significant mention of Mastercard.

How Cisco Listens in Social (Digiday) Centralized social command centers, such as the three put in place at Cisco, help to ensure that social data eventually gets turned into some kind of action. Giselle Abramovich explains: “At one, the company identifies spikes in negative mentions that need to be investigated and influencers mentioning Cisco. The data is then sent to the appropriate business unit so that they can act on it. Another six-screen listening center allows Cisco sellers to show customers their social data in the hopes of winning new business. The last is a two-screen kiosk version of the listening center just outside the CEO and CMO’s office and displays social activity around topics such as earnings, acquisitions, launches or campaigns. This is a way of making sure social data reaches the very top of the organization.”

Inside the Digitas ‘Social Bullpen’ (Digiday) Two years ago, Procter & Gamble posed a challenge to integrated brand agency Digitas: Figure out a way to act more quickly and together, because the speed of social channels didn’t mesh with the slow agency-client process. The result: BrandLive, a ‘social bullpen’ embedded in six Digitas offices and designed to drive quick collaboration. “In New York, execs from certain client teams are surrounded by six plasma screens displaying all sorts of social content and data from which Digitas can mine and then create content in the moment,” writes Josh Sternberg. “Digitas calls the room ‘the stew,’ named because it’s where execs can ‘stew’ on ideas. The ever-present screens, pulsing with social activity data, are affectionately called ‘the wire.’ In the best-case scenario, this is where data means inspiration that quickly translates into action.” This type of nerve center can represent the physical manifestation of a mindset shift for a brand to think in the moment, according to Digitas execs.

With Personal Data, Predictive Apps Stay a Step Ahead (MIT Technology Review) New apps based on machine learning software can present users with timely information even without being directly asked for it. For example, they might automatically pull up your boarding pass just as you arrive at the airport, or tell you of a traffic jam that requires you to leave early for your next meeting. “These apps benefit from improved data mining techniques,” writes Tom Simonite, “but they’re also succeeding partly because of how they are presented to users. They are not cast as artificial butlers, a staple of science fiction that Apple tried to mimic with the voice-operated app Siri in 2010. Instead, apps like Google Now are intentionally made without personality and don’t pretend to be people.”

How Bing Crosby and the Nazis Helped to Create Silicon Valley (New Yorker) In the 1940s, one of the things Americans discovered when picking through German technology remains was magnetic tape. The Nazis had been using tape recording to broadcast propaganda across time zones. Engineers brought the discovery to Bring Crosby, who was a hugely popular radio personality at the time, making $30K a week as host of the “Philco Radio Hour.” Crosby was more than just interested. He saw this as a way to advance his art. So, he handed fifty thousand dollars to Ampex corporation to give birth to a new technology. Suddenly audio—recorded media—was flexible. And as tape recording caught on, along came computers with stored programs.

This Is What Happens When Publishers Invest In Long Stories (FastCo) Because Fast Company’s top editors had long felt that the discrete article format was insufficient for covering very large and complicated topics, they decided to experiment with a new, super-long article format akin to ‘”slow live blogging.” When they looked at the resulting traffic charts, their jaws dropped. Here’s what they learned about long form stories — and why quality, not velocity, is the future of online news.

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40+ CEOs, CMOs, VCs and media leaders in two days of unscripted conversation. (Recently added: Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann.) Come to the CM Summit to join the conversation about “Bridging Data and Humanity.” New York City, May 21-22. The only conference this year curated by your faithful correspondent. UPDATE: CM SUMMIT IS SOLD OUT, but we’ll keep the link open for any readers who might want to buy a last minute ticket. More than 500 people are registered!

Also, if it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter or RSS feed on the Signal home page (upper right box).

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Buyers Need to Help Clean Up Ad Tech (Digiday) Walter Knapp, GM and EVP of Media for Federated Media Publishing, discusses the battle against fraudsters that cheat or steal from legitimate marketer-publisher advertising transactions in the ad tech ecosystem. Federated has ramped up its anti-fraud efforts, but to win, according to Knapp, both the supply and demand side will have to lock arms. “This isn’t a supply-side problem or a demand-side problem; it’s a fundamental shared responsibility and a market problem.” Until the sides band together and collectively put the squeeze on the bad guys, the efforts of his teams and others’ to keep the networks scrubbed will go unnoticed by the ecosystem at large.

Devising A Personal Google Glass Privacy Policy — Future Participle (Medium) With Google Glass, we’re pretty far along into the process of learning to live in a world where a handheld recording device is in nearly everyone’s pocket. What does that mean for privacy? “Glass wearers permanently don the mediation between themselves and others — it’s constantly threatening,” posits Ryan Singel. “They’ve embraced being the uncle who won’t put down the video camera at the family gathering, despite pleas to put it away.” So Singel suggests a simple “humans.text” policy that offers a less technical and more human-values driven approach to privacy.

No Need to Dream of Interactive TV — It’s Already Here (Ad Age) We’ve all been waiting for interactive TV, but have we been waiting for it on the wrong screen? Yes, posits Jonathan Nelson: “Today’s TV is increasingly a laptop, mobile or tablet experience, unless it arrives on a ‘proper’ TV screen through a broadband-enabled device like an Xbox or Roku. It’s not coming through the cable operators that, at one time, were thought to hold the keys to iTV. … Given the rapid embrace of iTV services, it is not worth waiting around for the day when seamless, TV-based interactive video is a reality. Let’s accept that the hardware — the devices and infrastructure — are in place, but the ‘software’ — the partnerships and standards for iTV —are not.”

Baby-Boomer Marketers Are Misreading Millennials’ Media Behavior (Ad Age) Senior marketers seem convinced the methods and media that have worked over the past 30 years of their careers will continue to produce results with tech-savvy millennials, even though they have vastly different media habits. Why? Bonnie Fuller asks, and answers.

Facebook ‘Fatigue’ Stirs Concern from Investors (Financial Times) Though their views are mostly based on anecdotal evidence rather than hard statistics, many investors believe people under 25 are suffering from “Facebook fatigue” and defecting to other services, such as Twitter and WhatsApp. “Concern runs high,” writes Robert Cookson, “because people in their teens and early 20s will be critical for Facebook’s future – just as they drove its adoption a decade ago. Young people are often the first to use new technologies before being followed by rest of the population.” But Facebook’s biggest challenge might be the speed with which internet users – particularly younger ones – are shifting to mobile. (Registration necessary.)

The Design that Conquered Google (New Yorker) Over the past two years, smartly designed products marked by tasteful typography, artful use of white space and flatness, full-bleed imagery, and a general sense of restraint have emerged from Google. Google Now is one of those products. Now’s design was a culmination of everything that Google had done before. But it evolved in a mature, new direction, so that it looked quite unlike anything else Google had created. Nearly a year later, the crisp design cues of Google Now and other products are set to become one of the dominant ways in which Google presents certain types of information to users.

Why Is the Sound-Effects Guy From “Police Academy” Talking About Robots and Web Ads? (ATD) Solve Media has published an e-book, called “Bot or Not,” about robots, fake clicks and their effect on the Internet advertising business. The cool thing is that they hired actor Michael Winslow, the sound-effects guy from the “Police Academy” movies, to read it to kids, with a camera rolling. (Video.)

Does Joe Lunchpail Care ‘What They Know’? A Roundup Of Surveys On Ad Tracking Sentiment (Ad Exchanger) Research shows that in the age of social media a lot of consumers are willing to give a little more information about themselves if it results in a better experience. And that’s a big ‘if.’ “A lot of the impressions we’re making on the customer may have a detrimental impact on the relationship with that customer,” said Bob Dutcher, VP of marketing for InsightsOne. “The frustration is, and where marketers and companies can get in trouble, if they are leveraging that information but not giving something back to the consumer, not giving them a better experience. It has to be a two-way relationship.” The balance between protecting consumers’ privacy and reaching them with relevant targeted ads is a constant struggle for the online ad industry.

10 Lessons from the Top 25 Most Engaged Brands on Twitter (Forbes) Brands that have mastered Twitter understand the power of engagement and are creating extraordinary opportunities for their organizations. From Notebook to Disney, there are lessons to be learned.

YouTube Forecast to Make $4 Billion from Ads in 2013 (Beet TV) YouTube viewers have probably noticed that the service is upping the frequency of its pre-roll ads. According to analyst Ian Maude of Enders Analysis, YouTube will generate about $4 billion in advertising revenue this year. Data also shows that YouTube is now more popular than BBC iPlayer on UK cable operator Virgin Media’s connected TiVO service. “Overall TV viewing is growing, but that’s largely being driven by older people,” Maude added. “We’re seeing a divergence between what the under-35s and over-35s are doing.”

Kevin Systrom, CEO of Instagram

In this week’s Signal: Vanity Fair on Kevin Systrom; What if machines finally ran the world?; get back to your quick, dirty, scrappy roots; Eric Schmidt on the morality of data collection; interactive ads that enable viewers to interject their own media; data, not content, is king; digital marketers should swear off the “B” word; brands are relying less on agencies and more on publishers for content; how to be a great CMO; John Battelle discusses his take on Google Glass; and more.

To the links …

The Money Shot (Vanity Fair) Kara Swisher reports on Kevin Systrom’s wild ride from the suburbs of Boston to becoming CEO of Instagram, and on what really happened when Facebook bought his company for $1B last year. A long, but worthy, read.

How Algorithms Will Dominate the World and How We Can Beat Them (B2C) Jean Pascal Mathieu recently attended what he calls an “absolutely terrifying conference” presented by the MIT Media Lab’s Kevin Slavin, who discussed how algorithms and machines are progressively taking over our lives. Slavin outlined a series of examples to support his theory, concluding that we shouldn’t be afraid of machines, but rather realize that they are only truly powerful when humans are involved.

The Importance of Quick and Dirty (Inc.) Jason Fried, co-founder and president of 37signals, wants startups to know that an obsessive focus on quality can be a bad thing. When creating a quick-and-dirty demo for your own company, for example, don’t focus on perfecting it, rather just see if it will work. “A company gets better at the things it practices,” he writes. “Practice quality, and you get better at quality. But quality takes time, so by working solely on quality, you end up losing something else that’s important—speed. … Startups should embrace their scrappiness, not rush to toss it aside. The ability to run with scissors is a blessing, not a curse.”

Google’s Eric Schmidt On Data Privacy: The Internet Needs A Delete Button (FC) On May 6, at NYU’s Stern Business School, economist Nouriel Roubini grilled Eric Schmidt about Google’s evolving role in personal privacy. Roubini described a future when we might embed technology into our bodies to track our health or consumption patterns, claiming that Google Glass is a step in this direction. Schmidt disagreed with Roubini’s assessment of things to come, saying, “I think you’re describing a world of tracking which I think is highly unlikely to occur, because people will be upset about it in the same way you are. Governments won’t allow it, and it’ll be bad business.” But what about the moral issues surrounding data collection? “This lack of a delete button on the Internet is in fact a significant issue,” added Schmidt. “There are times when erasure [of data] is the right thing … and there are times when it is inappropriate. How do we decide? We have to have that debate now.”

Chute raises $7M led by Foundry Group, Unveils Ads, a Platform Adding Real-Time Media Into Banners (TNW) Chute Ads, a new service from media sharing startup Chute, is designed to allow brands to serve interactive ads that enable viewers to interject their own media. Starting with Conde Nast Traveler, banners can be placed on the network that allow photos and videos to be added in real-time. For example, Nike might have a stock image featured on Conde Nast’s network of sites, and invite viewers to upload their own images to fit the campaign. TNW reports that advertisers who are interested in utilizing a Chute Ad will be able to select from one of several formats. All brands will need to do is provide a skeleton design and Chute’s service will overlay on top of it.

Unseating a King: At Meredith Corp. Data, Not Content, Reigns Supreme (Audience Development) According to IBM, humans create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily. About 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. That number doubles about every 40 months. Liz Schimel, EVP and Chief Digital Officer at Meredith, believes that data has performed a coup and ousted content as king. In this Q&A, Schimel details Meredith’s data collection and implementation strategy and the various ways her team is using data to support the growth and development of both existing and new products. “Both the king and queen are extremely important,” says Schimel, “but we feel like we can’t be great at our core business of creating great content and amassing scaled audiences without depth of expertise on the data side.”

Digital Marketers Should Aim For Influence, Not Branding (Ad Exchanger) Adam Heimlich of Razorfish believes that digital is not a continuation of the old method of media influence. “People who know branding can plainly see that search, display and social ain’t it. …It’s time for digital marketers to admit that top advertisers’ focus on traditional media for branding is a data-driven decision,” he writes. “We’ll serve our interests better by asserting that new media influences people in a new way.”

In Content Era, What’s the Role of Agencies? (Digiday) Agencies are finding that many brands are relying less on them and more on publishers for content. That said, what are we to make of the agency role? “Let’s be honest,” writes Giselle Abramovich, “agencies aren’t the best choice for content creation. That’s not what they’re all about. Authenticity also comes into question. After all, having someone create content on your behalf isn’t exactly being authentic and real.” In addition, brands are finding that it’s proving to be less expensive to create a full-service team internally.

How To Be A Great CMO (Forbes) Michael Lazerow, CMO of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, knows what takes to be a great CMO in today’s age of social, local, and mobile. Lazerow, who will speak at the CM Summit this month, sold his last company, Buddy Media, to Salesforce.com for $745 million. Here are his eight tips to help CMOs become truly great in this age of SoLoMo.

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40+ CEOs, CMOs, VCs and media leaders in two days of unscripted conversation. (Recently added: Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann.) Come to the CM Summit to join the conversation about “Bridging Data and Humanity.” New York City, May 21-22. The only conference this year curated by your faithful correspondent.

Also, if it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter or RSS feed on the Signal home page (upper right box).

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Is Google Glass First of Many Mobile Alternatives? (Bloomberg) Our own John Battelle discusses his take on Google Glass, OpenCo New York (May 22-23), and the New York tech scene with Cory Johnson on Bloomberg Television’s “Bloomberg West” (Video). Battelle’s OpenCo is “a mashup of an open studio tour and a business conference, with the vibe of a music festival.” The idea behind it is to identify and celebrate innovative companies by ‘opening up’ the traditional conference model and getting people out into the cities, walking from company to company to soak up the culture and see founders in their native environments.

This Video Of One Half-Second Of High Frequency Trading Is Insane, Terrifying (HuffPost) A new video by the research firm Nanex shows one half-second of trading in just one stock —Johnson & Johnson. Representing more than 1,200 orders and 215 actual trades occurring on May 2, the video illustrates the rise of high-frequency trading robots over the years, providing the first clear look at what those robots are doing every day, all day, now that they control more than half of all market volume.

Publishers: Beware of Easy Money (Digiday) When Criteo approached Vivaki to buy their inventory through a Criteo network, Marco Bertozzi, Executive Managing Director and EVP of EMEA at Vivaki, was prompted to think about the sales policies of publishers. Criteo has created a good business according to Bertozzi, “but they got there through persuading publishers that they should sell to them quality impressions, in some instances first look, even above direct and brand channels at a low cpm vs those direct channels but high vs the RTB market. …Problem is that they buy a lot of it and need to get rid of it and so they want other people to buy it from them, whether that’s trading desks, ad networks or DSPs.” Is it time to ditch the flat cpm and embrace the auctions and private marketplaces? It sure is, says Bertozzi.

EBay Plans to Share Its Users’ Data With Brands Faces Perception Issues (Adweek) Following a similar move by Amazon, eBay will soon start letting brands build out audience segments using its wealth of shopping data so they can target ads to consumers on non-eBay sites. Ebay has been building its advertising business for years and has recently made a key hire. But the question remains, will the typical eBay shopper be as valuable to an advertiser as someone who pays full price at Amazon?

Betaworks’ Vision For the Future of Online News (Mashable) Seth Fiegerman talks to Betaworks’ CEO John Borthwick about the company’s goal to create an ecosystem of media products that improves the way readers discover and consume content online, and about what a 21st century media company really should look like. Borthwick “eventually settled on a few fundamental principles for such a company,” writes Fiegerman. “It would be data-driven. It wouldn’t need to own all the expensive assets that traditional media corporations do. It would be more focused on distribution, but not tied to a particular method of distribution. It would be, [in Borthwick’s words], a ‘loose federation of pieces.’”

Ad Tech’s Got a Business Model Problem (Digiday) Michael Greene, director of research and marketing strategy at Audience Science, a data management platform, believes that the biggest problem in digital advertising is broken economics, and that it’s an issue only marketers themselves can fix. “It’s convenient to push the blame for digital advertising’s ills onto the supply side, and certainly publishers need to be accountable,” he posits. “But for many of the biggest sources of waste in digital advertising today – from bot traffic to frequency overload – advertisers are the only ones capable of enforcing rules across all publisher and inventory sources.”

Has Big Data Made Anonymity Impossible? (MIT Technology Review) Patrick Tucker discusses the privacy legislation introduced by the European Union in 1995, which defined “personal data” as any information that could identify a person, directly or indirectly. Because the amount of data created each year has grown exponentially, he believes that the definition “encompasses far more information than those European legislators could ever have imagined—easily more than all the bits and bytes in the entire world when they wrote their law 18 years ago.” Today, modern data science is finding that nearly any type of data can be used, much like a fingerprint, to identify the person who created it.

Aereo, Citing Tweets and Conference Calls, Fires Off a New Legal Salvo at CBS (ATD) Peter Kafka provides the latest on Aereo’s legal battle with CBS over the issue of unauthorized streaming of copyrighted television programming. Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia will be at the CM Summit, May 21-22 in New York City, to join the conversation about “Bridging Data and Humanity.”

Digitas And HuffPost Attempt ‘Real-Time’ Native Ads (Ad Exchanger) Earlier this month at the Digitas NewFront, Huffington Post executives said they would offer their native advertising content distribution system exclusively to the Publicis Groupe interactive shop’s clients. “More than ever, we see that brands want…to respond and react and reach a specific audience in real-time,” Travis Donovan, Huffington Post’s executive products editor, told Ad Exchanger. “This is for brands that want to be relevant within the moment. I don’t think any other publication – with the kind of mass audience that Huffington Post has – ever made it so easy to do that until now.”

Marketing Technology LUMAscape (Shildeshare) The marketing tech world, illustrated in one big slide.

5 Brands Winning at Pinterest (Digiday) According to a new study by Digitas, the top integrated global brand agency, and Curalate, the only marketing and analytics suite for Pinterest and Instagram, 70 percent of brand engagement on Pinterest is generated by users, not brands themselves. But of the brands that are on Pinterest, some have figured out better than others how to make use of the social image-gathering site. This piece covers the top five.

Tech writer Paul Miller is back online. (Photo Courtesy of The Verge.)

In this week’s Signal: Tech writer Paul Miller is back online after leaving the Internet for an entire year; Yahoo fights for advertising dollars; Microsoft’s new Windows Phone campaign; a look at the “Anti-Cyberhate Working Group”; Digital Newfronts and the evolving nature of media companies; Flipboard to help publishers monetize; welcome to The Retargeting Era; Reddit’s Erik Martin talks advertising; and more.

To the links …

I’m Still Here: Back Online After a Year Without the Internet (The Verge) One year ago, tech writer Paul Miller left the internet. “I thought it was making me unproductive. I thought it lacked meaning. I thought it was ‘corrupting my soul,’” he writes. But he discovered he was wrong. “I’d read enough blog posts and magazine articles and books about how the Internet makes us lonely, or stupid, or lonely and stupid, that I’d begun to believe them. I wanted to figure out what the Internet was ‘doing to me,’ so I could fight back. But the Internet isn’t an individual pursuit, it’s something we do with each other. The internet is where people are.”

Yahoo Announces New Ad Formats: Mobile-Friendly Native Ads And A Big ‘Billboard’ On Its Front Page (TechCrunch) Mike Kerns, Yahoo’s Vice President of Product and Media,  wants you to know that the company is committed “to investing in new advertising experiences.” As part of the Digital Content NewFronts, Yahoo is hoping to bring in more advertiser dollars with two new units that were announced early last week. The first units are Yahoo Stream Ads — sponsored posts that show up in a stream of content (across desktops/laptops, smartphones, and tablets), including the news stories in the new Yahoo mobile app. The second unit is a bit more traditional — a  “billboard” that sits on top of the Yahoo front page for an entire day.

Microsoft Creates an Apple vs. Samsung Wedding Fight for Its New Windows Phone Ad (Verge) In a new minute-long spot that’s due to air soon in the U.S., a wedding reception is interrupted by Apple and Samsung fans. The ad is positioned in a way to show off the third-place position of Windows Phone, and offer it as an alternative. Microsoft is clearly hoping that this campaign will help boost lagging US sales for the all-important smartphone market.

The Delete Squad: Google, Twitter, Facebook and the New Global Battle Over the Future of Free Speech (New Republic) One year ago, Stanford Law School hosted a meeting that may help decide the future of free speech online. Attended by roughly two-dozen people, including a group of tech executives in charge of their companies’ content policies, the discussions concluded with the attendees passing a resolution for the formation of an “Anti-Cyberhate Working Group.” Writer Jeffrey Rosen has dubbed this group “The Deciders.” Because of his work on the First Amendment, Rosen was asked to join the conversations, along with other academics, civil libertarians, and policymakers from the U.S. and abroad. Although he can’t identify all the participants by name, he can (and does in this piece) describe the general thrust of the discussions.

Digital ‘NewFronts’ to Face Higher Expectations (AP) The talk of this year’s Digital NewFronts is of both the great progress of digital entertainment and unrealized promises. Since last year, the industry has come a long way. “Netflix’s first major original series, ‘House of Cards,’ proved that streaming video can compete with the most prestigious cable programs,” writes Jake Coyle. “Google’s YouTube rolled out its 100-plus funded channels in a bid to bring higher quality videos (and thus advertisers) to its platform. One of the biggest TV stars, Jerry Seinfeld, launched a handsome Web series, ‘Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.’ But some of the digital series touted last year have disappointed. … Naturally, growing pains are inevitable, especially when so much is changing so fast. The wide array of NewFront presenters this year exhibits the evolving nature of media companies.”

Mike McCue Wants Flipboard To Be The Home Of Brand Advertising For Mobile Publishers (TechCrunch) Flipboard is a popular app that enables its users to create their own magazines. But more than just a place for publishers to distribute and curate content, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue wants the app to enable publishers to better monetize their content by creating a place where brand advertisers can buy beautiful, full-page ads.

How Much Retargeting is Too Much? (Digiday) Jack Marshall discusses “The Retargeting Era,” the current time in which “many users find themselves chased around the Internet by just a handful of brands at a time.” Retargeting makes perfect sense, he asserts. “The biggest weakness of display versus search is display doesn’t have very good intent signals. Someone who has shopped at an e-commerce site like Zappos — that’s a much better signal than the fact she is reading an article about fashion. The problem is that before long the Web could find itself dominated by retargeted ads and little else.” In this piece, he talks about his experiences, and also reveals what some civilians think about retargeted advertising.

Behind Reddit’s Ambivalent Embrace of Advertising (Digiday) Reddit does not take network ad buys, it employs only two ad sales reps, and it routinely turns down campaigns from advertisers it believes do not mesh with the site’s culture. These are luxuries most ad sellers do not have. Reddit general manager Erik Martin sees this as a simple risk-reward scenario. “Yes, we could turn on network advertising and make a ton of money right now,” he argues. “But we would be undermining this community and this amazing social platform we built up.”

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40+ CEOs, CMOs, VCs and media leaders in two days of unscripted conversation. (Recently added: Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann.) Come to the CM Summit to join the conversation about “Bridging Data and Humanity.” New York City, May 21-22. The only conference this year curated by your faithful correspondent.

Also, if it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter or RSS feed on the Signal home page (upper right box).

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Where Brands Will Spend in Social (Digiday) Last Tuesday, Digiday released its“Brand Investment Report 2013,” the first report in an ongoing series that will look at key drivers, obstacles and benchmarks that reflect how Fortune 1000 companies and their CMOs are navigating the increasingly complex digital marketing ecosystem. According to the report, which was conducted in Q1 of 2013 and is based on primary and secondary research, social is unsurprisingly the top area of focus for brands.

Online Ads Can Now Follow You Home (WSJ) A number of companies are trying to better pinpoint mobile users’ online activity with new software and techniques they say could help advertisers track users across devices. This emergence of cross-screen marketing, according to WSJ’s Spencer Ante, “is one of several new forms of technology aimed at solving a fundamental problem with mobile ads: It is harder to target people on smartphones than on PCs.”

15 Alarming Stats About Online Publishing (DIgiday) With so many publishers vying for users’ attention, building audiences and generating revenue from those audiences is harder than ever online. Feast your eyes on some of the issues they face.

3 Steps to Create Authentic Branded Content (iMedia Connection) You can’t create authentic branded content without first determining what ‘authentic’ means. But even then, you can’t control whether or not readers will view sponsored content as authentic, and whether or not they will share content with friends. What brands can control, though, according to writer Steve Kondonijakos, is “strengthening the fundamentals that put them in a better position to produce compelling sponsored content and increase their chances for an authentic outcome.” Here are his tips on how a brand can achieve that result.

Dark Google Vexes Publishers (Digiday) Many publishers have seen a drop in search traffic, while their share of referrals from social has risen. The drops in search is an analytics problem, caused by “dark search” or “Dark Google,” a technical issue caused by certain browsers blocking websites from tracking exactly how users arrived there. According to digital agency Rosetta, the two biggest sources of dark search right now are Apple devices running iOS 6, and some recent versions of Firefox. But publishers aren’t suffering alone. Dark Google is a huge problem for marketers, too.

Aereo Says Broadcasters Bluffing on Cable Threat (Bloomberg) Chet Kanojia, CEO of Aereo Inc., challenged CBS Corp. and News Corp. to follow through on threats to go off the air and switch to cable to prevent Aereo from retransmitting their shows without permission. The two networks would be sacrificing billions of dollars in ad revenue by making the switch, Kanojia said. “The reality is, they want to get paid twice, and Aereo is just an excuse to articulate that business strategy,” Kanojia said. “Good luck to them.” It will be interesting to see how all this plays out. Kanojia will be speaking at the CM Summit…

Peter Thiel: Twitter Will Outlast the New York Times (CNN Money) Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, argued with Marc Andreessen, creator of the Netscape browser, over the future of Twitter at the Milken Institute Global Conference last Monday. “New technologies are being used to send pictures of your cat halfway around the world,” Thiel said. “We’ve talked ourselves into thinking that throwing cats at birds is the best we can do. We can do more than that.” Andreessen disagreed, comparing Twitter to the printing press and claiming the technology is a fundamental breakthrough in how humans communicate. He also admitted that he feels a bit of schadenfreude seeing the recent struggles of the New York Times as the Internet cuts down on its print profits.

Six Current and Six Rapidly Expanding Trends Marketers Should Focus On (Rishad Tobaccowala) “The future of marketing will be bright,” writes Rishad Tobaccowala, board member of the Wharton Future Of Advertising Project and an advisor at Greycroft Ventures. “Now all of us marketers have to be bright enough in learning, re-inventing and collaborating to remain relevant and truly unleash this potential!” Here are six forces that he believes are driving the future.

Microsoft’s new ad campaign: “Your Privacy Is Our Priority.”

In this week’s Signal: Microsoft is all-in on privacy; the democratization of media; the RebelMouse mashup; riding shotgun on the native ads bandwagon; Tumblr launches mobile ads; IAB’s “Traffic of Good Intent” task force; an interactive look at some of the world’s largest and most interesting data sets; OpenCo celebrates innovative companies; is real-time marketing really real?; great content strategy must-haves; and more.

To the links …

With New Ad Campaign, Microsoft Bets The Farm On Privacy Issue (Ad Exchanger) Microsoft’s new ad campaign, “Your Privacy Is Our Priority,” features TV, radio, print and online ads that create an emotional connection based on the idea that even heavy sharers need some personal privacy. “Through modern tracking technologies such as cookies and beacons, a site could share your browsing history with others,” says the voiceover in one TV spot. “Microsoft is finding ways to give you more control over things you want private. That’s why we’ve added protection in Internet Explorer and included Do Not Track with the belief that one day it too will give you more control.”

The Platform Media Era (Digiday) Digiday spoke with John Borthwick, CEO of Betaworks, a collection of tech and media startups, about the biggest trend he sees in the industry — the democratization of media. Borthwick discussed how media companies are addressing consumers’ shortened attention spans and how “big data” falls into the overarching theme of the democratization of media. He also talked about what the next 12-18 months could look like for digital media.

Rebel Mouse Adds Interactive Twist to Online Publishing (Upstart) RebelMouse is beginning to generate some buzz by targeting everyone from individuals who want a mashup of all their social media accounts to major publishers looking for new ways to interact with readers (and please advertisers). The company’s leader, Paul Berry, describes his project as a “technically ambitious” bridge that spans the “gap between Tumblr and WordPress.”

What’s the Fuss About Native Ads? (Monday Note) Frederic Filloux takes on the ensuing Web vs. Native controversy, which he calls “a festival of fake naïveté and misplaced indignation.” Native Advertising is just another term for advertorial, and publishers have been in a constant the tug-of-war with their sales teams — the people who want ads to appear next to editorial content to provide good “context.” In this piece, Filloux focuses on legacy media brand Forbes. Forbes has not only jumped on the native ads bandwagon, but also industrialized the concept by creating BrandVoice, which allows marketers to connect directly with the Forbes audience by enabling them to create content (and participate in the conversation) on the brand’s digital publishing platform.

Tumblr Launches Mobile Ads Today In Big Revenue Push (Ad Age) In a big about-face for a company that once publicly eschewed advertising, Tumblr launched mobile ads last week, placing ads that look and feel like regular posts on the blog network. Users of Tumblr’s iOS and Android apps will see up to four ads per day. The ads will be differentiated with a dollar-sign icon with beams shooting out of it, just as they are in the two existing placements.

IAB to Rally Industry Against Bogus Publishers and Bots (AdWeek) The Interactive Advertising Bureau has established a task force called “Traffic of Good Intent” (TOGI) to take on the robots and shady characters who are stealing millions from advertisers. Task force leaders are our own John Battelle, who has blogged extensively on the rise of fraud in the online ad industry; and Penry Price, president of the data-driven ad targeting firm Media6Degrees, which has also been vocal about weeding out unscrupulous publishers.

Speaking of good intent …

We’ve Seen This Movie Before…On Traffic of Good Intent (Battelle Media) In light of his seat on IAB’s “Traffic of Good Intent” task force, John Battelle provides a history lesson on fraud, from click fraud in the early days of search to how it has migrated to the open ecosystem of programmatic display today.

Suspicious Web Domains Cost the Online Ad Business $400m Per Year (AdWeek) Mike Shields continues his coverage of ghost sites —“seemingly innocuous content pages responsible for massive amounts of traffic on various ad exchanges but exhibiting little evidence of actual human audiences” — by unearthing still more suspect publishers. Experts say it’s impossible to catch all the offenders, especially since many are said to originate from outside the U.S. So, containment, Shields believes, is the more realistic goal.

Information Revolution: Big Data Has Arrived at an Almost Unimaginable Scale (Wired) “The past two decades have seen a nuclear explosion in the collection and storage of digital information,” writes Joanna Pearlstein. “In 2012, 2.8 zettabytes — that’s 1 sextillion bytes, or the equivalent of 24 quintillion tweets — were created or replicated, according to the research firm IDC.” There are hundreds or thousands of petabyte-scale databases today, and Wired has compared their size to what existed two decades ago. Here’s an interactive look at some of the world’s largest and most interesting data sets.

Brands Get Nervous About Data Ownership (Digiday) Because CEOs are now frequently being asked what their big data strategies are, and CMOs are being pressured to turn the volumes of information their companies collect into business insights and smart marketing strategies, brands are starting to panic and to question where their data lives, who has access to it, and what exactly it’s being used for. Many are turning to their agencies with concerns that their data is being used in ways they didn’t approve and perhaps don’t fully understand. One of the things adding to the anxiety is that data is a very broad term that can mean just about everything.

How Do You Make a Dent In The Universe? On Being An “OpenCo” (John Battelle) John Battelle writes about the idea behind OpenCo. “At the core of the OpenCo idea are innovative businesses that are rethinking industries and trying to make their own particular dent in the universe,” he explains. In the past decade, Battelle and his co-founder Brian Monahan noticed the rise of a class of companies that are about more than making money or finding an exit —they want to make some kind of change in the world. OpenCo’s mission is to identify and celebrate those companies by ‘opening up’ the traditional conference model and getting people out into the cities, walking from company to company to soak up the culture and see founders in their native environments.

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35 CEOs, CMOs, VCs and media leaders in two days of unscripted conversation. (Recently added: Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann.) Come to the CM Summit to join the conversation about “Bridging Data and Humanity.” New York City, May 21-22. The only conference this year curated by your faithful correspondent.

Also, if it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter or RSS feed on the Signal home page (upper right box).

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The Real-Time Marketing Myth (Digiday) Digiday’s Brand Summit was held early last week, and marketers in attendance agreed that people often focus on the flashy outcomes of social media rather than the long, hard labor of raising the metabolism of marketing internally. “The real struggle brands face isn’t tweeting; it’s organizing,” writes Giselle Abramovich. “When you think about it, real-time marketing isn’t real time at all, since companies are planning ahead to prepare for any anticipated conversations that may happen around an event or even a post that a brand makes.”

6 Essential Truths and a Piece of Advice for Content Strategy (ClickZ) Federated Media’s digital and print content strategist Mary Gail Pezzimenti discusses the six must-haves behind a great content strategy, focusing on producing quality content and distributing it to the right, most passionate audience.

Why Brands Struggle with ‘Real Time’ (Digiday) Digital media is moving faster than ever and lots of brands struggle with responding quickly, especially at the pace of platforms like Twitter. Deciding when to act on events is tough but can be extremely rewarding. Digiday spoke to Cecelia Wogan-Silva of Google’s independent ad agency relations team; Sam Niburg, Sr. Associate Brand Manager, at Campbell Soup Company; and others about the things that hold them back from operating at top marketing speed.

Fast Company Puts Twist on Advertiser’s Content (Crain’s) The fast-growing trend of content marketing is taking a new turn with a content partnership between a Fast Company website and the advertising and marketing agency Ogilvy & Mather. Starting next week, Ogilvy will have its own microsite connected to Co.create, the business magazine’s stand-alone entertainment, technology and marketing website. The Ogilvy channel—to be called Content & Pervasive Creativity—will feature videos and blogs supplied by the agency’s executives and clients around the subject of content marketing, says Chief Marketing Officer Lauren Crampsie.

How To Steal Some Of Microsoft’s 76% Ad Tech Market Share (Ad Exchanger) Last week, as part of Ad Exchanger’s “Data Driven Thinking” series, Chris O’Hara, Chief Revenue Officer at NextMark, discussed Microsoft’s impact in the ad tech space as it pertains to Office tools, specifically Excel. Excel has been powering digital media planning since its inception. “While innovative companies have challenged the dominance of these systems in the past, early efforts fizzled,” according to O’Hara. “The complexities of modern digital media planning, combined with the reluctance of agency planners to change their behavior, have hindered innovation. Looking at past and current “systems of record” for media buying, it’s no wonder planners are scared of change.”

Google’s terms prevent third-party Google Glass developers to serve ads to users.

In this week’s Signal: No ads on Google Glass; authenticity is the first casualty in the social media war; Twitter allows advertisers to target; Is it time to make critical distinctions within the Native Matrix?; Data is a hardcore business imperative; Google’s human strategy to combat impression fraud; CMOs are preparing for the digital revolution; Target’s content strategy behind “A Bullseye View”; Is AOL back from the dead?; and much more.

To the links….

Google Bans Devs From Serving Ads on Google Glass (Mashable) Early last week, Google released its Google Mirror API, which lets third-party developers begin building applications for Google Glass. In the terms of service for the API, Google states clearly that developers cannot serve ads to users, or even sell user data for advertising purposes. The company also notes that developers cannot charge users for apps, raising questions about how developers will be able to monetize their services on the platform.

The Rapidly Diminishing Authenticity of Social Media Marketing (ETB) Augie Ray, Director of Social Media for a Fortune 100 financial service company, posits that in the social media war for fans, authenticity was the first casualty and the weapons deployed were sweepstakes, giveaways, contests and social game freebies. “According to the social media gurus, people who fanned a brand would be signalling their authentic affinity for it,” he writes, “and this genuine expression of brand love would ripple through trusted relationships in social networks, multiplying awareness and purchase intent from one consumer to the next to the next. This is not what happened for most brands, because most brands did not start with the most important thing: Fans with authentic affinity. No one benefited from the fact marketers used inauthentic means to amass meaningless fans.”

Twitter Tool Allows Advertisers to Target Tweets (CNBC) As part of its plan to work on new tools to make its ads more effective and boost advertisers’ ROI, Twitter announced on Wednesday that advertisers can now target tweets based on the keywords in them and on the keywords in tweets retweeted or replied to. For example, if someone Tweets about liking a new album from a favorite band, the venue hosting that band’s next performance could target that Twitter user— with a link to buy tickets—based on their location and their conversations about the album.

The Native Matrix (CJR) Felix Salmon takes a stab at drawing useful distinctions between popular terms like content marketing, sponsored content, native advertising, and even brand journalism. Who writes brand material? Was it commissioned by the brand itself, rather than any editor? What happens when content is syndicated? “Trying to draw these distinctions is always going to be a bit silly and futile,” Salmon writes. “Ultimately, they’re all different flavors of the same thing: attempts by companies to get consumers to read things which the company in question, or its executives, wants those consumers to read. There are lots of different ways of trying to skin that particular cat, and none of them is easy. In fact, trying to get consumers to read anything at all, in a world where those consumers are faced with almost infinite choices, has never been harder.”

5 Mistakes Publishers Make With Data (Digiday) Digiday asked industry leaders for their take on what many publishers miss when diving head first into the data-drive media world. The rookie mistakes include tasks such as not knowing where your data is, hiring to the wrong people, and parsing data improperly.

Secret To Google’s Ad Quality Edge: Human Review (Ad Exchanger) Fraudulent ad inventory spawned by bot traffic or browser plug-ins that manipulate ad space on a webpage is often dumped on real-time bidding exchanges, creating a burden of responsibility on the operators of those marketplaces to clean things up. Google, widely regarded as the standard-bearer of policing ad fraud, includes in its strategy a manual review process involving the efforts of hundreds of people. According to the tech giant, those people “review web pages, test our partners’ downloadable software, and prevent ads from showing on sites that violate our policies. Depending on the severity and persistence of the offense, they may stop ad serving on that page or site, or across the publisher’s entire account.”

The Rise of the Digital CMO (HBR) Should CMOs and all marketers be shocked to learn that when it comes to marketing spending, analog still outstrips digital by a factor of three to one? “Sure,” writes Jake Sorofman, “an ample pile of dollars can be attributed to big spending on a few analog media channels, like Super Bowl ads, for example. But I would suggest that there is something more fundamental happening behind the numbers; something lurking in the very nature of digital marketing and what it asks of leadership and what it means for accountability.” Some CMOs are preparing for the digital revolution by filling the gap between expertise and authority; others are afraid of the digital disruption — or exhausted by what it will take to convert digital resistors in the executive suite.

Target’s ‘Show Don’t Sell’ Content Strategy (Digiday) Eighteen months ago, Target began publishing its online magazine called “A Bullseye View.” The site tells the stories behind Target’s products, events, partnerships and other happenings at the company, and now gets about 100,000 unique visitors each month. One thing it doesn’t do: pitch products. The site instead adopts the old journalism mantra, now co-opted by public relations: show, don’t tell. Target’s digital agency, Group SJR, writes the content for the site, and the company’s PR has editorial meetings once a week to discuss what’s going on at the company.

AOL’s Second Life: Reinvention as Media Company (The Economist) AOL’s Tim Armstrong, a former Google executive whose first job was running a small newspaper in Boston, has tried to turn a flagging dial-up internet firm into a content company. Among the properties AOL owns are TechCrunch, a tech-news site; Patch, which provides local news in America’s richer cities, among others; and the Huffington Post, the fourth-most-widely-read news site in America. Armstrong is the company’s biggest individual shareholder, so he has an incentive to do right and has done much to revive a firm that others thought dead. But after just one quarter of growth, is it too early to tap the kegs?

Can Silicon Valley Re-Invent Customer Service? (Washington Post) Customer service is increasingly becoming a premium offering rather than a core offering, and it’s time for that to change, says Dominic Basulto. “Almost without exception, companies have attempted to replace expensive customer service representatives with cheap bots, or even worse — to require the consumer to do the job that customer service workers once did,” he writes. “In many cases, companies no longer even advertise a 1-800 number to contact them — once you’ve signed up as a user, they really don’t want to talk to you ever again. It’s become increasingly clear that if there’s a sweet spot out there for Silicon Valley innovators, it’s using technology to restore ‘service’ to ‘customer service.’’’

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35 CEOs, CMOs, VCs and media leaders in two days of unscripted conversation. (Recently added: Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann.) Come to the CM Summit to join the conversation about “Bridging Data and Humanity.” New York City, May 21-22. The only conference this year curated by your faithful correspondent.

Also, if it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter or RSS feed on the Signal home page (upper right box).

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Brands Give Over the Social Reins (Digiday) To build followers and position themselves as experts in their markets, some brands have given over the reins of their social media accounts to people outside of the company. For example, AARP let a member takeover the company’s Instagram account last week. Gail Dosik, a Baby Boomer who recently started her own custom cookie business, was given the reins for a day. But is it a good idea? Trusting someone to speak on behalf of the brand is never easy, because the brand is held accountable. That’s why Ford, for example, claims it has never and would never cede control. “Our social accounts are part of the system that is responsible for Ford’s reputation,” said Scott Monty, global head of social media at Ford. “From a legal or regulatory standpoint, not to mention what the SEC might think, it would be incredibly irresponsible of us, a public company, to turn over control of our accounts to non-sanctioned individuals.”

Who’s Winning, iOS or Android? All the Numbers, All in One Place (Time Techland) If you want a clear idea of how the world’s two dominant mobile operating systems are doing, you need to consider lots of data points. Harry McCracken has gathered results from a bunch of studies, focusing on information that’s relatively fresh, and offering some key competitive questions and answers.

Inside Weather’s Data Bet (Digiday) Weather Company, a data company with a media business model, is working with advertisers like Home Depot to serve ads based on intent derived from weather conditions, current and predicted. Weather CEO David Kenny believes weather data is as good of a predictor of intent as search, and, when harnessed correctly, it can signal to advertisers what and when messaging will resonate. “Weather is a path to something else,” Kenny believes. “Most people that are checking the weather are planning something. They’re planning their weekend, they’re planning a trip, they’re planning the day.” The good marketers, he added, are building algorithms around what their consumers are likely planning based on the location they’re in.

Foursquare Planning to Offer Check-in Data to Target Ads on Other Platforms (Ad Age) Foursquare has started pitching a new ad product that would use location and behavioral data to contextualize ads on other platforms. The product is still in development and will eventually allow advertisers to use Foursquare data to target ads purchased through ad exchanges or networks. “We are always looking at ways that could make our data more useful for advertisers and partners, while respecting the privacy of our user’s information,” Foursquare said in a statement. “We’re really excited about our 2013 monetization roadmap, and will provide more details when the time comes.”

As AOL’s Brody Resigns, Will Yahoo Build Ad Tech ‘Dream Team’? (Ad Exchanger) The mixture of Henrique de Castro, Yahoo’s COO; Brian Silver, the company’s VP of ad platforms; and AOL Networks CEO Ned Brody — who just resigned from that post —  as ad sales for Yahoo North America, sounds great on paper. But is it really? None are especially regarded as salespeople, writes David Kaplan, who in this piece focuses on Brody and on Yahoo’s ultimate approach to display advertising, an area it was a long-time leader in until being displaced by Google and Facebook.

And, while we’re on the subject of Yahoo …

Yahoo Joins NY Times And Hits Programmatic Wall (Ad Exchanger) Last Tuesday, Yahoo reconfirmed in its quarterly results that programmatic media has changed its business forever. The statement echoes comments made by The New York Times a few months ago, in which the publisher seemed to pin some of its display ad pain on programmatic. Now Yahoo faces a similar problem. For many large publishers, direct-sold inventory cannot support the CPMs of the past – especially if the content is relatively undifferentiated.

IAB: Mobile Ads Captured 9% Of Online Ad Spend In 2012 (Ad Exchanger) 2012 was another banner year for the online advertising space, with revenues up 15% over 2011. Mobile and digital video led much of that growth. Mobile ad spend grew 111% compared to 2011, the second year of triple-digit growth, accounting for 9% of total internet advertising revenue at $3.4 billion. Digital video revenue increased 29% to $2.3 billion, up from $1.8 billion in 2011. Total online ad spend for the year was $36.6 billion.

RTB Volume Doubles, CPMs Fall As Supply Outstrips Demand (MediaPost) The marketplace for exchange-traded media has doubled in the past quarter and has grown 184% over the past year, according to the latest findings by independent trading desk Accordant Media. The “Q1 Market Pulse” report found that RTB trading increased 98% since the fourth quarter of 2012. The volume of North American media impressions transacted via RTB auctions grew 85% over the fourth quarter of 2012, and 146% over the past year. The data comes on the heels of Tuesday’s release of the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report, which showed that the greatest expansion of online advertising revenues is coming not from so-called “premium” display advertising publishers, but from biddable media sources such as Google, Facebook, and secondary premium transacted through programmatic exchanges.

Context Seen Impacting Awareness of – and Receptiveness to – Online Ads (Visual Loop)  Marketingcharts.com has graphed the the propensity to notice online ads, by environment (shopping, email, information, social media, video and gaming sites) and age (Gen Y, Gen X, Baby Boomers and Seniors), with the percentage of respondents indicating where they are most likely to notice an online ad.

Wired co-founders Jane Metcalfe and Louis Rossetto. (Photo courtesy of Louis Rossetto.)

In this week’s Signal: Wired’s 20^th anniversary; what viewers want from branded video; banner ads — creepy interruptions; AOL is automating everything that can be automated; Tumblr disbands Storyboard; OpenCo is headed to NYC with your help; Intel creates the TV service that you’ve always wanted; Google’s Star Trek computer isn’t just a metaphor; and more.

To the links…

How Wired Magazine Changed the Way We Talk About Technology (Adweek) Ted Greenwald gives an exclusive sneak peek at Wired’s 20^th anniversary issue. From ‘the beginning of the beginning,’ when Wired co-founder Louis Rossetto (and your humble editor) sensed that the encoding of information in 1s and 0s was going to change everything, to the ‘manifesto’ and investor pitches, to when the magazine found its voice and the world got Wired, it’s all in here. A fantastic read about the dawning of a legacy that’s still going strong.

Blurring Lines Between Video Ads and Content (Digiday) Today’s consumer is more receptive to storytelling than to product pitches. Not only should branded video tell a story that’s shareable, it should also take into account the many devices consumers will view it on. According to YouTube, video viewers are usually ages 35 and under, and this generation has a thirst for authenticity and participation. So when brands try too hard to be clever or cute, it hardly ever works.

And, since we’re on the topic of video …

Google’s Wojcicki: Pepsi Prank with Jeff Gordon is Future of Online Ads (Paid Content) A Pepsi-produced stunt-driving prank in which disguised racing star Jeff Gordon takes a car salesman for a harrowing ride was watched by 33 million on YouTube last month. According to Susan Wojcicki, a senior VP at Google, this shows how online ad-viewing is an increasingly voluntary experience, and how marketers are more dedicated to producing content people want to see.

Banner Ad’s Creators Dismayed By Its Current State (Digiday) Advertisers and agencies lament the lack of creativity typically given banners, which some see as on their way to becoming a purely direct-response tool. Digiday asked those involved in the creation of the first banner ad — an AT&T ad that ran on HotWired (there’s that Wired brand again!)  in October 1994 — for their thoughts on the state of the banner ad nearly two decades later. “Most [banners] aren’t serving value. They’re in the business of interrupting what you’re doing,” said G.M. O’Connell, founder of Modem Media, the agency that created the first banners. “There’s a limited creativity that’s been applied with what you can do with that space and the space itself is very limiting. On cellphones, it’s worse. Today these retargeting ads are creepy to me.” Don’t worry GM, it’s going to get waaaay better. 

AOL Unveils Its Supply-Side Platform (Ad Exchanger) AOL has launched its long-promised supply side platform, Marketplace. According to Allie Kline, AOL Networks’ CMO, “Everything we’ve been doing the past few months at AOL Networks is meant to give substance to the hype around programmatic tools for buyers and sellers. We’re more prepared to automate the things that can be automated.” Some believe AOL might be acting too late, but as a greater number of publishers appear ready to forge ahead in programmatic, AOL’s timing may be good enough.

Tumblr Cuts Editorial Team (ATD) David Karp, CEO of Tumblr has announced the disbanding of Storyboard, its four-person editorial team. “The team’s mandate was to tell the stories of Tumblr creators in a truly thoughtful way — focusing on the people, their work, and their stories,” Karp wrote in a post on April 9. All four employees will be “moving on.”

But perhaps there’s more to the story …

String of Executive Departures Leaves a Leadership Vacuum at the Top of Tumblr (BetaBeat) The Storyboard layoffs are hardly the only departures Tumblr has faced over the past six or seven months. Rather, they’re the only ones that CEO David Karp has spoken about publicly. Sources close to the company, who requested anonymity, told Betabeat that a handful of high-level deputies have also quietly ended their tenure at Tumblr, leaving a noticeable absence around Mr. Karp where his leadership team should be. “It’s like the f*cking Argentinian government, people just get disappeared,” said one source. This news, combined with current financial concerns, leave some insiders puzzled at the board’s faith in Mr. Karp (not to mention it’s advertising model).

OPENCO is Coming to NYC, But Only If You Support It: Please Help Us!  (BattelleMedia) John Battelle and Brian Monahan, co-founders of OpenCo, have started an IndieGoGo campaign to raise funds for their OpenCoNY Festival. This “festival of innovation” will celebrate companies that embrace a set of values surrounding the concept of openness: open collaboration, open communication, open community, open company and open doors to you. Attendees will meet these innovators in their native habitat and hear about how they are trying to change the world, and why.  Battelle sees OpenCo as a movement. “The kinds of businesses we curate into the festival are literally changing the world, and this festival lets them open their doors to the public and share their knowledge with the community,” he writes. “We keep at least a third of the tickets free to the public, but we also sell tickets at various levels for those who want to ensure they get access to the companies they really want to see.” The OpenCo platform is coming to four cities this year – starting on May 21 in New York.

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35 CEOs, CMOs, VCs and media leaders in two days of unscripted conversation. (Recently added: Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann.) Come to the CM Summit to join the conversation about “Bridging Data and Humanity.” New York City, May 21-22. The only conference this year curated by your faithful correspondent.

Also, if it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter or RSS feed on the Signal home page (upper right box).

###

Intel Cooks Up Future of TV: A Potential Mess for Cable (Ad Age) The TV service you’ve always wanted has been built by Intel, and it’s in the hands of a few secret testers at media companies and agencies. Intel established Intel Media to build an “over-the-top” TV service, joining streaming-video players such as Netflix and Hulu. Its service, however, will be the first to deliver a full array of cable TV channels over the Internet. The company has not announced a name, a price or a release schedule more specific than some time this year, but those who have seen it describe it as a significant advance over any existing cable or satellite platform.

Where No Search Engine Has Gone Before  (Slate) Farhad Manjoo, author and Slate’s technology columnist, has covered Google over the years and long assumed that the company’s Star Trek-like search engine chatter was meant as marketing. He never thought that the tech giant was really trying to build a machine as encyclopedic and humanistic as the all-knowing ship’s computer. But he’s now wondering if that’s exactly what Google is doing. So he went to there to interview some of the people who are working on the search engine. And what he heard floored him. “The Star Trek computer is not just a metaphor that we use to explain to others what we’re building,” Amit Singhal, who heads Google’s search rankings team, told him. “It is the ideal that we’re aiming to build — the ideal version done realistically.”

Sponsored Content’s 5 Biggest Hurdles (Digiday) From the basics of what it is to how it’s measured and how it scales to work for both publishers and advertisers, sponsored content, now commonly known as native advertising, has several hurdles to overcome. Digiday offers some key points (and counterpoints) around definition, scale, measurement, trust and relevance. Regarding the trust factor, Ben Kunz, VP of Strategic Planning at Mediassociates, reminds readers that “native, by its very definition, disguises the source. Anyone else who says otherwise is bullshitting.”

GM Returns To Facebook Ads; Will Super Bowl Be Next? (Forbes) Less than a year after General Motors‘ very public repudiation of the effectiveness of paid advertising on Facebook, the company is testing mobile ads for the Chevy Sonic. GM only came back to the Facebook-advertising fold after several months of wrangling with Facebook executives about ways to improve tracking of advertising results on the site and to boost its effectiveness.

Forget Data Transparency: Options Grow For Letting You Hide Your Data (GIGAom) Increasing concerns about companies’ collection and use of personal Internet user data have given rise to a few solutions, including a personal data locker where users would be able to store their own information and grant companies limited access, rather than abide by companies’ privacy policies. There’s also been talk of compelling companies to disclose the data they keep on consumers, even though it might be hard to understand and use. But, increasingly, others are simply opting out of the data revolution. As more companies dream up more ways to target consumers, and consumers become more weary of being tracked and targeted, better solutions to the privacy problem are likely to be presented in response.

Report: Teen Interest in Social Media Dwindling (TechCrunch) Though teens still consider Facebook their most important social network, Piper Jaffray, a leading investment bank and asset management firm, reports that the numbers are down regarding how many teens see Facebook as the most important social media website. Over the past year, the number of teens who deem Facebook as the most important social media site has dropped from more than 30 percent to just over 20 percent.

Why PC Sales Are In Free Fall (IW: Byte) The latest IDC report has some alarming news for Microsoft and the PC industry. Personal Computer sales are in free fall due to lack of hardware and software innovation. Not only has Microsoft Windows 8 failed to save the PC industry, the hated operating system has actually harmed PC sales.

Facebook’s HOME app will give the company deep insight on what’s popular with users.

In today’s Signal: ‘Intelligent Content’— machines over publishers; find the programmer in you; policing display advertising fraud; autoplay equals auto-annoyance; automated ad buying myths; data’s effect on storytelling; Facebook’s HOME is missing the comforts; the FBI’s ‘top priority’ is wiretapping the Internet; Anil Dash on how we lost the Web; and more.

To the links …

Intelligent Content: Soon Your Media Will Know You Better Than You Know Yourself (Paid Content) In the future, books and magazines will act as human compilers, translating your reading desires into pure machine language that tells the publisher how to present the material for faster and better absorption. In other words, computers will create materials for humans. According to product designer Roger Wood and content designer Evelyn Robbrech, this ‘intelligent content” will be the result of information gathered about the reader, mashed up with data about others interested in related subjects, authors, or publishers. What will become of editors? “In the long term, the algorithm will likely replace the editor and curator. Quick and automatic branding and positioning of the book or magazine on a glowing electronic slab will become more important than the most sage human editor.”

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35 CEOs, CMOs, VCs and media leaders in two days of unscripted conversation. (Recently added: Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann.) Come to the CM Summit to join the conversation about “Bridging Data and Humanity.” New York City, May 21-22. The only conference this year curated by your faithful correspondent.

Also, if it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter or RSS feed on the Signal home page (upper right box).

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Getting in the New EPG: Every Media Company Must Master the Science of Programming (ATD) Remember when content distribution was fixed and scarce? It was nothing like today. Ben Elowitz, co-founder and CEO of Wetpaint, discusses how distribution and consumption are now in constant flux. To be “everywhere” these days, a TV show, for example, has to be on network, cable, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Facebook and Amazon; have its own native app; and have a presence on Google search. “To succeed today,” writes Elowitz, “digital media companies need to get control of their distribution. The opportunity for savvy media companies is to abandon the outdated if-we-build-it-they-will-come mentality, and master the craft and science of programming … the skill of matching content to audience.”

Display Advertising Fraud is a Sell-Side Problem (Ad Exchanger) Douglas de Jager, founder of Spider.io, takes on Will Luttrell, who last week argued that if the display advertising buy side adopts better performance metrics, then the problem of fraud can be solved across display advertising. No new set of performance metrics will prevent fraud, says de Jager. “Fraud is endemic across today’s display advertising ecosystem.” He proposes that display ad exchanges and other suppliers of display ad inventory should be held responsible for policing display advertising fraud.

And speaking of Spider.io …

How Buy-Side Platforms Are Fighting Online Ad Fraud (Ad Exchanger) After London-based Spider.io published details of a botnet responsible for generating billions of illegitimate impressions per month, online fraud bubbled. “The sites that are selling allegedly non-viewable impressions from the Chameleon botnet are not widely recognized brands,” writes Zach Rodgers. “Given the relative anonymity of such sites, it’s easy for the agencies and demand-side platforms [DSPs] to look the other way, especially if ad placements on such properties appear to be performing – via clicks, false roll-overs, or other counterfeited engagement metrics. (Transactions are harder to fake.)”

The Most Hated Digital Ad Tactic (Digiday) Regular Internet users hate autoplay video, but the tactic attracts the top publishers, including ESPN, ABC News, The Washington Post and Weather.com. Autoplays are ultimately up to the publishers, not advertisers. “It’s not our job as advertisers or agencies to create a good user experience on the site,” Danielle Sporkin, senior manager of portfolio management at Universal McCann, told Digiday. “That’s the job of the publisher who’s providing certain ad units for sale. Our job is to evaluate and see how it performs and when it doesn’t optimize out.”

5 Myths of Ad Tech (Digiday) Brian Morrissey spoke to executives on the buy and sell side of automated ad buying about what they see as the misunderstanding of how these markets operate. “For all the talk of ad tech providing a far better system than relationship-driven sales and ad networks,” he writes, “there’s plenty going on behind the scenes that is far from clear.

Data Is Not Killing Creativity, It’s Just Changing How We Tell Stories (TechCrunch) Some say that data is causing us to lose our sense of narration and storytelling. But Alex Williams says that’s not the case at all. He posits that we’re just experiencing a shift similar to what other civilizations faced when the traditional means for storytelling transformed with the changing social times. “Narrative methods to express our imagination will change as techniques emerge that allow us to use programming languages to carry on what we know for the next generations,” he writes. We’re heading toward a new reality that will require us to “think much differently about how we imagine our world and the data that is now far visible than ever before.”

The ‘Financial Times’ Has a Secret Weapon: Data (Mashable) The Financial Times, which employs more than 600 journalists worldwide, is using reader data to hit record subscription levels and make its advertising products more competitive, according to John Ridding, CEO. “We would see the sort of articles they were reading and the frequency they were reading those articles, for instance, and we began to map those,” Ridding said. “People do behave in predictable ways.” He added, “We can prove in real-time quite effectively what advertising is working and put that data in front of advertisers. … Marketers have to justify every cent of what [they're] spending. Our job is to provide the tools and information to justify that decision for running a campaign with the FT rather than anyone else.”

Why Facebook Home Bothers Me: It Destroys Any Notion of Privacy (GIGAom) Om Malik wants you to know that if you install Facebook’s new app, HOME, it’s very likely that Facebook is going to be able to track your every move and action. HOME is deeply integrated into the Android environment and, as such, it wants to be the start button for apps that are on the Android device. This will give Facebook a deep insight on what is popular. But the bigger worry, according to Malik, is that “the phone’s GPS can send constant information back to the Facebook servers, telling it your whereabouts at any time. …The problem is that Facebook is going to use all this data — not to improve our lives — but to target better marketing and advertising messages at us.”

‘Going Dark’: What’s So Wrong with the Government’s Plan to Tap Our Internet? (Motherboard) According to Andrew Weissman, FBI general counsel, being able to wiretap all forms of Internet communication and cloud storage nearly instantaneously is, the agency’s “top priority.” The FBI says its needs don’t “require the Internet to be re-designed or re-architected for the benefit of the government.” But Internet providers argue that by asking institutions to provide a permanent back door into the servers through which the government can access private information, this is precisely what it will require.

How We Lost the Web (Anil Dash) A few months ago, Anil Dash wrote a piece called “The Web We Lost,” in which he shared his ideas about what was left behind with the rise of billion-scale social networks and ubiquitous smartphone apps. He didn’t think his words would interest anyone but old-timers, but he was wrong. As a result of his writing, Dash was invited to speak at Harvard’s Berkman Center. Here’s the video of his talk.

Fake Twitter Followers Becomes Multimillion-Dollar Business  (NYT Bits) Two Italian security researchers, Andrea Stroppa and Carlo De Micheli, spent the last several months investigating the underground economy for Twitter followers and said they had found a thriving market. There are now more than two dozen services that sell fake Twitter accounts.

Online and in Print, Magazine Launches Tumble (Crain’s) According to MediaFinder.com, only 23 magazines launched in the first quarter of 2013, compared with 44 in the same period a year ago, but the number of titles that shut down between January 1 and the end of March also dropped. “Media companies are trying to cut costs, and there seems to be more interest in mergers and acquisitions and selloffs [than in launching titles],” said Trish Hagood, president of MediaFinder.com. The difficulties many digital-only titles have had building an audience and finding advertising seem to be responsible for the decline.

Forbes’ Sponsored Content Bet Pays Off — Digital Dollars Make Up Half of Total Ad Revenue (AdWeek) Forbes has become one of the leaders in native advertising, fueling the debate over whether publishers should be running sponsored posts alongside editorial content. Wherever you stand on the ethics of the matter, it’s working for the media giant.

Forecast: RTB Ad Spending To Be One-Fifth of Total Display Advertising in 2013 (Ad Exchanger) According to eMarketer, US real-time bidding digital display ad spending, for all display formats served to all devices, will reach nearly $3.4 billion in 2013, a 73% increase over 2012. This will grow to $4.6 billion in 2014, a 36% increase, and by 2017, ad spending in the US RTB market will be $8.5 billion, or 29% of total digital display ad spending.

Twitter’s Dick Costolo talks to Bloomberg about building a “global town square.”

In today’s Signal: Dick Costolo on building the global town square; Facebook introduces FBX-targeted ads in News Feed; ad model suggestions that might end the cookie-blocking privacy debate; brands dabbling in the VC space; “Borrowed Interest” as a popular ad tactic; Google’s latest warning to publishers; brands use divisive issues to build relationships; advertising clients aren’t feeling any love from Yahoo; Buzzfeed and Sharethrough reignite the custom content vs. scale debate; and more.

To the links …

Twitter’s Costolo: User Growth Drives Everything (Video) (Bloomberg) Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is, in his own words, “building the global town square.” In this interview with Bloomberg TV, he talks about his desire to reach everyone on the planet and how everything Twitter does is derived from that goal. When asked about how competitors’ moves affect his decisions, he answered, “We have a really clear notion of where we want to go as a company and with the product. … We don’t let other companies’ decisions affect the way we think about where we’re going.” He also discusses his birthday wish for Twitter.

Report: Twitter Ad Revenue to Hit Nearly $1 Billion Next Year (Mashable) According to a new estimate from eMarketer, Twitter’s global ad revenue is expected to hit nearly $1 billion in 2014. According to the report, “the upward revision comes as advertisers have shown more interest in spending money on mobile advertisements on Twitter, and as recent audience figures from multiple research sources analyzed by eMarketer have suggested Twitter’s reach is improving.” eMarketer also attributes some of the increase to the launch of Twitter’s API.

Facebook’s News Feed Ads: Now Real-Time Biddable (Ad Exchanger) Last fall, Facebook introduced Facebook Exchange (FBX), a way for businesses to show ads to people on the social site based on their browsing interests. Last week, the company launched a small alpha test to introduce FBX-targeted ads in News Feed. This move suggests that FBX has become a significant revenue driver for the company. In addition, by supporting FBX in the News Feed, Facebook could be laying the groundwork for an expansion of its real-time bidding sales strategy into mobile.

All You Can Eat (And Other Real Solutions To The Online Privacy Fiasco) (AdExchanger) Jay Friedman, COO at Goodway Group, discusses the cookie-blocking privacy debate. He wants advertisers to continue providing relevant, non-intrusive ads to consumers, and offers three models that address the current problems, hoping that the Interactive Advertising Bureau can take one of his solutions — whichever one the industry as a whole decides is best — and make it a standard for everyone.

Should Brands Act Like VCs? (Digiday) American Express, Walmart and Coke have all made investments in several startups. Because digital technology is changing their businesses, they’re investing in companies that might give them new ways of doing business or reaching consumers. Digiday’s Giselle Abramovich takes a look at whether dabbling in the VC space is right for brands, especially given the recent rumors that Best Buy will be shutting down its VC unit, Best Buy Capital.

Ads That Speak the Language of Social Media (NYT) “Borrowed Interest” is the term used to describe the tactic by which brands seek to associate themselves with elements of popular culture that are familiar to the everyman. Case in point: Social media’s new starring role in product pitches. Examples include ads for Snickers Peanut Butter Squared candy, sold by Mars, that depict the word “like”; and ads for the cosmetics retailer Sephora, addressed to “a busy networker,” that promote beauty creams as “your new must-have status update: They prime, hydrate, treat, protect and perfect.”

As News Publications Experiment With Sponsored Content, Google Says Keep It Out Of Google News (Search Engine Land) Last Wednesday, Google issued a warning to publishers that they should keep sponsored content — namely affiliate, promotional, advertorial, or marketing materials — out of Google News. “Google’s chief concern with affiliate links,” writes Danny Sullivan, “has been whether they are used as a way to push paid links to build rankings, given links are effectively used as votes by Google.” He added, “I don’t think publishers need to worry if they have affiliate links from major, recognized programs in their news stories … [but] if someone creates content lacking any real news value, affiliate links or not, that will be an issue for Google News.”

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35 CEOs, CMOs, VCs and media leaders in two days of unscripted conversation. (Recently added: Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann.) Come to the CM Summit to join the conversation about “Bridging Data and Humanity.” New York City, May 21-22. The only conference this year curated by your faithful correspondent.

Also, if it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter or RSS feed on the Signal home page (upper right box).

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Should Brands Take Stances on Social Issues? (Digiday) Unless you were totally disconnected from the Web last week, you probably noticed that Bud Light and other brands took to social media to support marriage equality. Brands obviously want to build relationships with consumers in social media, but should they be taking a stand on a divisive social issue? Matt Rednor, chief strategy and innovation officer of MRY, weighs in: “It’s all about the brand’s tolerance for risk and what they stand for overall. Entering a polarizing debate will certainly get a brand talked about but invites both positive and negative conversation. So, if a brand wants that, then they better have their response and crisis management strategy in place.”

Yahoo: Ad Agencies Frustrated Waiting for Vision (Ad Age) Yahoo’s advertising clients are growing tired of waiting for both attention and insight into Marissa Mayer’s vision. One senior agency executive told Ad Age, “I don’t know what their strategy is, but if it includes agencies then they are going to have to fix what they currently have.” The same executive said that Mayer and COO Henrique De Castro have made it clear they have little interest in building relationships with media agencies. However, there are some executives who think the company’s approach is refreshing. Jeff Lanctot, Chief Media Officer at Razorfish, believes that if Yahoo can win over entrepreneurs, it will help drive innovation. “If they innovate, that will help win over consumers,” he said. “You know what agencies flock to? Innovative companies that consumers flock to.”

BuzzFeed, Sharethrough Battle to Bring Native Ads to the Masses (Ad Age) Buzzfeed and Sharethrough have reignited the custom content vs. scale debate. Buzzfeed is starting to sell to agencies its own version of an ad network to get more scale for its “native-advertising” posts. Sharethrough, on the other hand, is focusing solely on the distribution of branded content across publisher sites of all sizes, and betting that enough marketers crave more scale out of native ads. BTW, FMP’s been doing this for years. Welcome to the party, guys!

This Woman Is Keeping Online Ad Companies on Their Toes (Adweek) Genie Barton directs the Council of Better Business Bureaus’ online behavioral advertising and mobile marketing initiatives. In that role, she enforces the Digital Advertising Alliance’s AdChoices program, which requires brands to place a small, triangular blue icon on their ads. When consumers click on the icon, they are sent to a website where they can opt out of targeted ads. Barton spoke to Adweek’s Katy Bachman about privacy and ad targeting, and also offered her thoughts on the lawmakers who insist advertisers can’t police themselves.

Adobe CMO Ann Lewnes Talks About Marketing to Marketers (Ad Exchanger) AdExchanger sat down with Adobe’s Ann Lewnes to find out what her biggest challenges are as a CMO, what the future role of the CMO will be, and the current challenges of digital marketing. “One of the challenges that we face, as an industry,” she said, “is that marketers and agencies have been too slow to make this change [to digital marketing]. The marketers and the agencies that don’t do it will suffer. I’m not speaking as an Adobe representative or someone who’s trying to sell something; I’m speaking just as a representative of change in this industry.”

To the links …

What Happens in an Internet Minute? (Intel) Intel has came up with a figure that describes what happens in sixty seconds on the Internet: 639,800 GB of global IP data gets transferred. “Today, the number of networked devices is equal to the global population. By 2015, the number of networked devices will be twice the global population.” The infographic here says it all.

Meet the Most Suspect Publishers on the Web (AdWeek) A new breed of cheat is plaguing the exchange world: the ghost publisher. I’ve written about this before, but AdWeek’s story broke the programmatic industry into a sweat last week. These ghost sites are billed as legitimate media properties and look authentic on the surface, but few of these sites’ audiences are real people. Yet, big name advertisers are spending millions trying to reach engaged users on them. Mike Shields takes a look at six of these properties.

Want to Shift Ad Dollars Out of TV Into Web Video? Good Luck With That (Ad Age) TV advertising is expensive and campaign reach is declining thanks to audience fragmentation. So, many advertisers are now looking to shift their TV ad budgets to take advantage of multiplatform-platform video. But that might be unrealistic, says Ad Age’s Dave Morgan, because 97% of all video viewing in the U.S. still occurs on TV. “Whether the data is from Nielsen, Pew or eMarketer,” he writes, “all agree that only a small fraction of video viewing in the U.S. today occurs on devices other than the TV.”

Four Big Takeaways From Pew’s “State of the Media” Report (Pando Daily) If you’re in the news publishing biz, pay attention. Pew Research Center’s just-released State of the News Media 2013 report suggests that ads don’t cut it anymore and it’s time to start thinking about paid content models. Of the U.S.’s 1,380 daily newspapers, 450 have started or announced plans for some kind of paid content subscription or paywall. Expect to see a lot more action and experimentation in 2013.

Meet the Gatekeepers to Twitter and Facebook Data (AdAge) Facebook and Twitter have drastically different approaches when it comes to meting out access to the millions of conversations occurring daily on their platforms. Facebook has no agreements in place with data resellers, so, in theory, anyone who can code can get just as much out of Facebook’s Graph API as an enterprise-level service. Twitter, though, has three authorized resellers—Gnip, DataSift and Topsy—which can provision companies that need Twitter data to fuel a service.

WPP Admits Actual Prices Of Online Ads Are Often ‘Not Disclosed’ To Clients (BI) Rob Norman, WPP’s digital media buying chief, has admitted to arbitrage — the practice of buying media and then reselling it at a profit to clients without disclosing the original cost. He told Business Insider, “We never operate on a non-disclosed basis without the specific contractual consent of our clients. Around the world we have over 1,500 such specific agreements. It is our unshakeable belief that the agency/client contract together with whatever law operates in the relevant territory has primacy and is inviolable.”

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JUST ADDED: PINTEREST FOUNDER BEN SILBERMANN.

35 CEOs, CMOs, VCs and media leaders in two days of unscripted conversation. Come to the CM Summit to join the conversation about “Bridging Data and Humanity.” New York City, May 21-22. The only conference this year curated by your faithful correspondent.

Also, if it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter or RSS feed on the Signal home page (upper right box).

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Forget the Cellphone Fight — We Should Be Allowed to Unlock Everything We Own   (Wired) Kyle Wiens, co-founder and CEO of iFixit, believes that once we buy an object — any object — we should own it. “We should be able to lift the hood, unlock it, modify it, repair it … without asking for permission from the manufacturer,” he touts. While it’s true that copyright laws were originally designed to protect creativity and promote innovation, they are now doing exactly the opposite.

Sponsored Content: Slippery Slope or Lifeline? (Digiday) Brian Morrissey discusses the latest “boogeyman” of newsrooms — sponsored content: “News veterans are uncomfortable with the blurring of the lines between pristine editorial and grubby advertising,” he writes. “There are reasons to maintain church and state. Anyone who has been in publishing for more than a couple years has run into instances where the exigencies of the business side come into conflict with the principles of the edit side.” The world of sponsored content isn’t new, but because “native” advertising works, it’s gaining in popularity.

15 Alarming Stats About Banner Ads (Digiday) “The banner ad is now 18 years old,” writes Brian Morrissey. “It has become a symbol of all that’s wrong with online advertising. It is more often than not devoid of creativity; it stands out as an intruder on webpages; and it is mostly ignored by readers. And yet it continues to be a bulwark of the online advertising system.” Here’s just one of the 15 facts Morrissey provides that might make you wonder if there’s got to be a better way: “You’re more likely to survive a plane crash than click a banner ad.”

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Third-Party Cookies (AdExchanger) Eric Picard, CEO of Rare Crowds, details the reasons why third-party cookies aren’t needed by the ecosystem, and why doing away with them as a default setting is both acceptable and not nearly as harmful as many are claiming. It would put more power back in the hands of publishers, he argues: “It solidifies their value proposition as having a direct relationship with the consumer, and will drive a lot more investment in data management platforms and other big data by publishers.”

In Order To Build the Future Systems of Content, Forget the Past (Ad Age) Today, millions of people on social platforms are giving up millions of pieces of personal data in the form of content they create. Each post, tweet, etc., tells the platform exactly what a consumer is thinking and what content engages him or her. This kind of reach and data have never been available before, so brands need to rethink much of what was learned about digital creative and buying as it relates to bid management, re-targeting and banners, and start talking to people at a scale never before imagined — and in real time.

Google’s Sergey Brin sporting his Google Glass.

In this week’s Signal: The FTC makes a rule update important to digital advertisers; Google Glass — on your face and in your face?; Digg picks up where Google left users hanging; marketing meets tech at SXSW; Facebook as a modern crystal ball; cookie restrictions are inevitable; publishers’ love fest with data; and much more.

To the links …

Twitter, Facebook Ads Must Show Disclosures (USA Today) Last week, the Federal Trade Commission issued a rule update notifying marketers that digital ads that pop up on Twitter, Facebook and other mobile sites must be accompanied by disclosures to avoid deceptive practices. The disclosure must be placed on all devices that consumers may use to view the ads. The Commission, which may impose a fine on rule violators, also told marketers to avoid using pop-ups to display disclosures.

Death By Notification: Will Google Glass Drown Us In Data? (The Verge) Google’s Timothy Jordan told developers attending a presentation at SXSW that Google Glass is all about “getting technology out of the way.” But The Verge’s Ellis Hamburger believes that Glass “could easily become just another screen, buzzing, beeping, and vying for our attention.” More than on your face, Glass will be in your face, he posits: “When notifications stream to your face every few minutes, or even every hour, “its going to be difficult to avoid becoming a “Glasshole.” He said it; I didn’t.

Google, Don’t Turn Off Reader. Signed, The Internet  (The Verge) Last Wednesday, Google announced that it’s killing off the Google Reader RSS aggregator. Users aren’t happy. Verge has the reactions.

And, speaking of Google Reader …

Digg Building a Replacement for Google Reader (CNET) Digg didn’t waste any time in seizing an opportunity after what many see was a huge mistake by Google: It’s building a reader that “makes the Internet a more approachable and digestible place.” Digg’s Andrew McLaughlin said that the company’s reader project is now at the top of the priority list and that his team is working to make something available by the time Reader shuts down.

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35 CEOs, CMOs, VCs and media leaders in two days of unscripted conversation. Come to the CM Summit to join the conversation about “Bridging Data and Humanity.” New York City, May 21-22. The only conference this year curated by your faithful correspondent.

Also, if it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter or RSS feed on the Signal home page (upper right box).

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Why Brands Fell for SXSW (Digiday) SXSW is where marketing meets (and hunts for) tech. “Brands are obsessed with how they can speed up their operations and make digital essential to what they’re doing,” says Brian Morrissey, who is covering SXSW for Digiday. “For some brands, SXSW is simply a way to connect with a young, tech-savvy audience. For brands like Oreo, which is deploying heavily here, the goals are slightly different. It’s more about flexing muscles as a progressive brand.”

Facebook Can Reveal Your Secrets, Study Finds (CNN) According to a new study from the University of Cambridge, it’s possible to predict a person’s private traits — sexual orientation, political leanings, religion, intelligence, etc. — just by analyzing their Facebook likes. Researchers looked at the FB profiles, likes, surveys and personality tests of 58,466 individuals, and from that data developed a model that predicts personal attributes with a great deal of accuracy.

Imagining a World Without Cookies (Digiday) Some in the ad biz believe that any move to restrict cookies, whether it’s through browser defaults or regulations, is a threat to the industry. But Digiday’s Alex Kantrowitz believes that the more likely result would be “a period of turmoil, followed by adaption. There would be winners and losers.”

Publishers Branch Out (Digiday) Many publishers are embracing data and have decided that the best way to find scale is to stitch together a network of sites to find their audiences. In the world of programmatic ad buying, where finding specific audiences is easy, the moves are a necessity.

How Does Facebook Exchange Measure Up? (eMarketer) Retargeting company AdRoll partnered with Facebook Exchange (FBX) early on and has since brought over 700 advertisers worldwide onto the platform. At the end of 2012, the firm examined the performance of its advertisers running both online display and FBX retargeting campaigns. Here are the results.

New Microsoft Advertising Study: Consumer Experience is the New ‘Crown Prince’ (MS Advertising Blog) In a new study called Cross-Screen Engagement, Microsoft found that while the notion of ‘Content is King’ is still viable, there’s a new ‘Crown Prince’ coming on the scene: consumer experience. “While marketers once generated content to fit manufactured and static advertising placements,” writes MSFT’s Natasha Hritzuk, “consumers now control their own flow of content—from day to night, and from screens large and small. So it’s even more imperative that marketers understand consumer motivations in order to meet them in their moment.” She provides an outline of the study, as well as some tips for marketers that are based on the research findings.

“Zero TV” Households Now At 5 Million, Says Nielsen, Up From 3 Million In 2007, But Still Just 5% Of Market (TechCrunch) Sound familiar? “Just” is what they said about the Internet in 1994. Even within the cord-cutting group, the TV isn’t obsolete. It’s a platform used for console gaming, watching DVDs and, of course, surfing the Internet.