The Merchants of Cool

Full Episode Here

Value an Elaborate Prank

Joseph Turow – Media buying, privacy, transparency, and the data enomomy.

From “When the Audience Clicks: Buying Attention in the Digital Age” presented at the Oxford Internet Institute.

Check out 68:28 for a lively discussion on my favorite behavioral targeting topic – coffee cup capitalism.

Flash Cookies – Taste Better than Browser Cookies

Have you ever wondered why sites like Pandora.com seam to know who you are – even if you deleted your browser cookies recently?

Up to 100k, difficult to find, non transparent, non expiring, not cleared by any browser “Clear / Delete Cookie” functions – Flash Cookies are oh so very sweet for collecting data – so much better than plain old browser based Cookies.

I have heard the stories of ADNETS using Flash to re-spawn browser cookies when a user deletes their browser Cookies; but I had no idea just how many sites are using Flash Cookies for tracking.

Viewing my own Flash cookies (hundreds of entries) I identified no less than a dozen ADNET’s, ad servers, and online marketer cookies. My bank is even using them – they don’t even have flash on their site… Check Your Flash Cookies yourself…

Want more… check out this wired article on Flash Cookies.

Publishers and marketer value chain.