/* ---- Google Analytics Code Below */
Showing posts with label Ads. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ads. Show all posts

Sunday, June 18, 2023

Google debuts AI-powered ad Placement tools

Lets see it.

Google debuts AI-powered ad placement tools

BY MIKE WHEATLEY

Alphabet Inc.’s Google said today it’s enhancing its online advertising placement capabilities with the launch of two new artificial intelligence-powered tools that are designed to find the best ad placements for brands automatically across its range of websites and services.

AI has become one of the hottest trends in the technology industry this year thanks to the hype surrounding chatbots such as Google’s Bard and OpenAI LP’s ChatGPT. Those chatbots can respond to almost any kind of prompt or query in a humanly way, holding open-ended conversations with users. However, Google is deploying a different kind of AI in its bid to help advertisers, which generate the bulk of the company’s revenue.

Google has introduced AI tools for advertisers in the past, but today’s launch marks the first time it’s helping brands to achieve such specific goals for their ads. For instance, the new Demand Gen feature relies on AI smarts to help place photo and video ads on various services, such as Google Search, Gmail, the main YouTube feed and Shorts, which is YouTube’s short-form video feature similar to TikTok.

In a blog post, Vidhya Srinivisan, Google’s vice president and general manager of ads, said Demand Gen effectively eliminates the need for advertisers to manually determine their ad placements. The AI uses its knowledge of users and their behavior to find “shiny, visual and immersive placements” that will have the most impact.  ...  ;

Saturday, May 20, 2023

Digital Ad Industry

Another thing we dabbled with.  We had lots and lots of ads in archives. How do you use and reuse them efficiently

How the digital ad industry can guide the ways AI transforms businesses.  in Venturebeat.

When Microsoft-funded lab OpenAI launched ChatGPT in February, millions of people realized almost overnight what tech professionals have understood for a long time: Today’s AI tools are advanced enough to transform daily life as well as an incredibly broad range of industries. Microsoft’s Bing leaped from a distant second place in search to a much higher-profile level. Concepts like large language models (LLMs) and natural language processing are now part of mainstream discussion. 

However, with the spotlight also comes scrutiny. Regulators around the world are taking note of AI’s risks to user privacy. The Elon Musk-backed Future of Life Institute amassed 1,000 signatures from tech leaders asking for a six-month pause on training AI tools that are more advanced than GPT-4, which powers ChatGPT.

As heady as legal and engineering matters may be, the basic ethical questions are easily digestible. If developers need to take a summer vacation from working on AI advancements, will they shift focus to making sure AI upholds ethical guidelines and user privacy? And at the same time, can we control the potentially disruptive effects AI may have on where ad dollars are spent and how media is monetized? 

Google, IBM, Amazon, Baidu, Tencent, and an array of smaller players are working on — or already launching, in Google’s case — similar AI tools. In an emerging market, it’s impossible to predict which products will come to dominate and what the outcomes will look like. This underscores the importance of protecting privacy in AI tools right now — planning for the unknown before it happens.

Join us in San Francisco on July 11-12, where top executives will share how they have integrated and optimized AI investments for success and avoided common pitfalls.

As the digital advertising industry eagerly looks to AI applications for targeting, measurement, creative personalization and optimization and more, industry leaders will need to look closely at how the tech is implemented. Specifically, we’ll need to look at the use of personally identifiable information (PII), the potential for accidental or intentional bias or discrimination against underrepresented groups, how data is shared through third-party integrations and worldwide regulatory compliance.

Search vs. AI: The great spend re-allocation?

As far as ad budgets are concerned, it’s easy to imagine how a “search vs. AI” face-off might look. It’s very convenient to have all of the information you’re seeking collected in one place via AI rather than rephrasing search queries and clicking through links to zero in on what you’re really looking for. If we see a generational shift in how users discover information, that is, if young people accept AI as a central part of the digital experience going forward, non-AI search engines are threatened with vanishing relevance. This could have a great impact on the value of search inventory and the ability of publishers to monetize traffic from search.

Search remains the driver of a significant share of traffic to publisher sites, even with the ongoing movement of publishers to foster audience loyalty through subscriptions. And now that advertising is making its way into AI chat — Microsoft, for example, has been testing the placement of ads in Bing chat — publishers are questioning how AI providers may share revenue with the sites from which their tools source information. It’s safe to say publishers will be looking at another set of data black boxes from walled gardens on which they rely for revenue. In order to thrive in this uncertain future, publishers need to lead conversations to make sure stakeholders across the industry understand what we’re rushing into .... ' 

Saturday, February 18, 2023

Microsoft Plans to Bring Ads to AI

 Lets get it right first.

Microsoft is reportedly already planning to bring ads to Bing's AI chatbot   

It's early days, but Microsoft is figuring out how to monetize the tool.

Kris Holt|@krisholt|February 17, 2023  in Engadget.

Microsoft is reportedly in talks with advertising agencies on how to slot ads into the juiced-up Bing, particularly when it comes to the generative AI-powered chatbot. The company is already testing ads there, according to Reuters, including by slotting in traditional search ads.

The ad agency talks are still said to be in the early stages. Only a small number of users have access to the chatbot, and millions more are on the waitlist. As such, Microsoft may not feel like there's a rush to incorporate ads right away.

Microsoft reportedly anticipates that the chatbot's more conversational approach to delivering information will bring in more users and, in turn, advertisers. Ads in the chatbot might also be featured more prominently than conventional search ads. One place where you might see ads is in the links that the chatbot uses for citations in its responses. Microsoft told Reuters that it will work with partners and advertisers as it starts exploring the potential of the tech for ads.    ... ' 

Sunday, February 12, 2023

Malvertizing Search

Now reemerging,  imagine Google is very concerned.   

Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software

Over the past month, Google has been outgunned by malvertisers with new tricks.

Dan Goodin

Searching Google for downloads of popular software has always come with risks, but over the past few months, it has been downright dangerous, according to researchers and a pseudorandom collection of queries.

“Threat researchers are used to seeing a moderate flow of malvertising via Google Ads,” volunteers at Spamhaus wrote on Thursday. “However, over the past few days, researchers have witnessed a massive spike affecting numerous famous brands, with multiple malware being utilized. This is not ‘the norm.’”

One of many new threats: MalVirt

The surge is coming from numerous malware families, including AuroraStealer, IcedID, Meta Stealer, RedLine Stealer, Vidar, Formbook, and XLoader. In the past, these families typically relied on phishing and malicious spam that attached Microsoft Word documents with booby-trapped macros. Over the past month, Google Ads has become the go-to place for criminals to spread their malicious wares that are disguised as legitimate downloads by impersonating brands such as Adobe Reader, Gimp, Microsoft Teams, OBS, Slack, Tor, and Thunderbird.  ... ' 

Monday, December 05, 2022

Are Ads Causing Shoppers to Lose Faith in Amazon search results?

 Significantly?

Are ads causing shoppers to lose faith in Amazon search results?   by Matthew Stern in RetailWire.

Amazon.com has long been the main go-to place for online product search, but a recent Washington Post article finds that it is no longer giving customers what they want because advertisements are muscling out the real search results.

Running a search for “cat beds,” the Post found that the entire first screen of results displayed advertisements masquerading as listings rather than products arrived at because they provided the best combination of price and quality. The results included one ad that featured a dog in the picture, rather than a cat.

On the first five pages of search results, more than half of the listings were either ads or Amazon’s own products. A Profitero study found that Amazon lists sponsored products on its first page of search results at a rate twice that of Walmart and four times that of Target. Other online outlets, like food delivery platforms and Google and Apple’s app stores, have also started displaying ads as search results.

Amazon’s ad business grew 58 percent in 2021, making it the third largest online ad seller, according to a Recode article. Six high-volume sellers told Recode that to succeed on Amazon today, sellers have to spend between 10 and 20 percent of their sales on ads.

Amazon’s practices surrounding how it lists search results have been criticized before. ... ' 

Wednesday, May 18, 2022

Are Shoppable Ads Finally Ready for Prime Time?

 Or has prime time completely changed its shopping dimensions?

Are Shoppable Ads Finally Ready for Prime Time?                by Tom Ryan in RetailWire 

At International Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) NewFronts showcase for digital marketers, Condé Nast, AMC Networks, Roku, YouTube, NBCUniversal and Amazon’s Twitch platform were among those pitching the promise of shoppable ads.

“How cool would it be if you could buy dresses right off the red carpet?” wondered Pam Drucker Mann, Condé Nast’s global chief revenue officer and president, during the publisher’s NewFront presentation in early May, according to Advertising Age.

Shoppable television ads — called t-commerce (television commerce), back in the day — were first hyped in the nineties when network executives promoted the idea of couch potatoes clicking a “buy” button on their remote control to purchase the sweater worn by Friends’ star Jennifer Aniston. Since then, experiments with apps, QR codes, website links, chatbots and screen placement to drive TV-watching impulse buys have taken place to little progress.  ... ' 

Monday, October 18, 2021

Facebook's Tools can Target a Single User

Well I would think the title above is clearly true, but the question is how effective is it in a useful context? And is that ethically more powerful than a typical ad?  

Researchers Show Facebook's Ad Tools Can Target Single Users

TechCrunch, Natasha Lomas, October 15, 2021

Spanish and Austrian researchers have showed that Facebook can target ads to a single individual, given sufficient knowledge of that person’s assigned interests. The researchers described a data-driven model that characterizes a metric indicating the likelihood a Facebook user can be identified based on interests attached to them by the social media giant's ad platform. The model found that "the four rarest interests or 22 random interests from the interests set FB assigns to a user make them unique on FB with a 90% probability," the researchers wrote. These findings raise issues about potentially harmful uses of Facebook's ad-targeting tools, and about the legality of the platform's personal data processing system. ...

Thursday, June 11, 2020

Google Ad Manager

Late to notice this, intriguing approach managed by Google.  In the Google Blog. Note there are 4 previous posts on this.

Use insights to make better business decisions

Chelsea Rice
Product Manager, Google Ad Manager

This is the fifth and final post in a series exploring several of Ad Manager’s key features and how they help our publisher partners maximize their ad revenue. To learn more, read posts one, two, three and four. 

Today, data from a publisher’s advertising activities can extend beyond revenue to inform nearly every aspect of their business. From helping steer content strategy, to delivering better user experiences, to driving subscriptions, ad data can be incredibly useful, but only if you have the tools to gather and analyze the relevant insights.

Google Ad Manager was built to power our partners’ entire digital advertising businesses, including the ability to discover, visualize, and activate data-driven opportunities. For the majority of our partners, the platform has everything they need to manage and optimize their ads business. And for our largest and most data-centric partners, Ad Manager features seamless integrations with Google Analytics, Cloud, and more to support sophisticated data initiatives and segmentations. 

Most importantly, our data solutions always comply with applicable privacy regulations, are consistent with Google's commitments to protect users and their data, and offer partners the tools they need to ensure the right level of privacy for their customers.   ... "