AVG can sell your browsing and search history to advertisers

 Security firm AVG can sell search and browser history data to advertisers in order to "make money" from its free antivirus software, a change to its privacy policy has confirmed.
AVG is the third most popular antivirus product in the world according to market analysis from software firm Opswat. The company has a 8.6 percent share of the global market, behind Microsoft on 19.4 percent and Avast on 21.4 percent.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-09/17/avg-privacy-policy-browser-search-data

 Exclusive Interview: Susan Wojcicki's Plan to Make YouTube 'Stars' Real-Life Famous

April 14, 2014
YouTube, with estimated annual revenue just north of $5 billion, created the market for short-form video. But it's also attacking a market bigger than search and online display combined: TV's $212 billion global ad market.
In the past, YouTube treated all content and advertisers pretty much the same, but now it's packaging its top 5% of content as determined algorithmically (of course) in 14 categories and offering that up front on a guaranteed basis to advertisers. Called "Google Preferred," the offering is built for TV advertisers who want to reserve in advance and know what they're getting, separate from direct-response advertisers that buy YouTube impressions by the ton.
Yet the reality is media companies built on YouTube are generally either big and money-losing (Maker, Machinima) or small businesses that earn a considerable chunk of their revenue from YouTube. YouTube takes 45% of ad revenues.
http://adage.com/article/digital/exclusive-interview-susan-wojcicki-s-plan-youtube/292621/

Strutting their stuff

The purpose of fashion shows is changing. Now everyone can watch.

Feb 14th 2015

With a 10- to 15-minute catwalk display costing up to a few million dollars, some industry commentators wonder if there are better ways for fashion brands to spend their marketing budgets than parading their wares at more and more shows.  

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Luxury brands have been cutting out the middlemen in their distribution chains. More than 80% of the shoes, bags and other products bearing the Prada label are now sold in its own shops, compared with about 50% a decade ago.

So the fashion shows have become less about selling the latest collection to other retailers’ buyers and more about communicating the brand’s image to a wider public.

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There are now legions of fashion “influencers”, with big followings on Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. A recent survey of the luxury industry by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) concluded that word of mouth overtook magazines last year as the biggest influence on consumers’ purchase decisions.

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Streaming also helps the fashion firms gather information on fans: Marc Jacobs, an American designer, has used it to capture e-mail addresses, by getting devotees to register in advance for live-streams in return for a chance to win tickets to shows.

The luxury industry in the 1990s was defined by the rise of global brands. The 2000s were all about those brands taking control of the retail “experience” offered to customers. The BCG report posits that in the coming decade, the industry will focus on getting to know individual customers. Fashion shows are part of that model.

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21643133-purpose-fashion-shows-changing-now-everyone-can-watch-strutting-their-stuff 

Google's search business might not be as water-tight as people think it is

Overall, paid search represents $70 billion, or 48%, of the $145 billion global digital ad market, according to eMarketer.
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Also, separate data from online research company comScore suggests that just 12.6% of all searches in the US were generated by smartphone users in Q4 of last year.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-number-of-people-using-search-engines-is-in-decline-2015-9 

 

The fusion of native and programmatic advertising is finally underway - BI Intelligence report

Many advertisers and publishers hope to meld native-ad units with programmatic buying tools, and this may finally be possible thanks to a new specification from the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
The IAB's OpenRTB 2.3 spec could underpin a programmatic-native ecosystem if it’s adopted in the ad-tech world.
In simplistic terms, the key to the new spec is the ability to serve up sponsored content that matches the look and feel of a publisher site in real time through automated processes.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/fusion-of-native-and-programmatic-underway-with-new-iab-specs-2015-6?r=US&IR=T

How video-on-demand tech is changing the TV landscape

Subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services such as Amazon's have sent shockwaves through the broadcast world, as they gain millions of new viewers each year and produce ever more of their own award-winning content.
Netflix, the market leader, is now in over 15% of British homes, while Amazon's market share is about 5%.
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The difficulty for SVOD services in the past was that you could only watch the programmes on a laptop or desktop, which meant they weren't ideal for collective family viewing.
Now internet-enabled smart TVs are bridging the gap, and new technologies, such as Amazon's Fire Stick and Google's Chromecast, are enabling viewers to beam content wirelessly from any connected device to their TV sets with relative ease.
Many cable TV services, such as Virgin's Tivo, also offer Netflix as part of their packages, again widening access.
But SVOD's Achilles heel is currently internet bandwidth - or lack of it.
Average download speeds in the UK are still around 23 megabits per second (Mbps).
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And it's important to put SVOD growth numbers in context.
Such services accounted for about 3% of total UK viewing in 2014.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34050865

Advertising's Century of Flat-Line Growth

Looking at data since the 1920s, the U.S. advertising industry has always been about 1 percent of U.S. GDP.

“Advertisers have failed to convince the client community of the value of advertising as an investment.” The ratio of sales to ad spending has remained stubbornly flat at 3.5 percent for a century.

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-03-03/advertisings-century-of-flat-line-growth