The man who wants to regulate Web advertising, or more precisely, Web advertising that knows who you are and what you do, puts Google, Yahoo and Facebook on the Congressional hotseat.
Talk to online ad folks for any amount of time and you’ll walk away thinking that behavioral targeting–whereby marketers track and chase Web surfers based on which sites they visit and what they do there–is both old hat and the wave of the future. But I’m still convinced that there’s a very big gap between the way the ad industry views this stuff and the way politicians and average Americans do. For a reminder, head on over to NebuAd’s Web site, which no longer works. That’s because the targeting firm, which once employed 60 people, closed up shop on Friday.
That was fast.
The recent resurgence of “Saturday Night Live,” spurred by Republican VP candidate and Alaska governor Sarah Palin and her comic doppelgänger, Tina Fey, may already be over.
How do I know? Well, there’s the gut check–I watched most of Saturday’s show, which didn’t feature Palin or Fey, and it was a snoozer (the absence of new mom Amy Poehler probably didn’t help either).
But we can also gauge the reaction of Internet users, thanks to the good folks at TubeMogul, a small start-up that specializes in tracking Web video views.
And the results are not so good.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
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