Advertising & Marketing

In what may be a first for the platform, a New York frozen yogurt chain is leveraging Snapchat for a promotion that presents users with a coupon that self-destructs within 10 seconds. The idea came about when the chain — 16 Handles — noted that a lot of its young users were using their Snapchat Continue Reading →

There are nearly 70 million tablet users in the U.S. alone, a figure that has doubled from the year before. This means that nearly 30% of the country’s Internet users are browsing on a tablet device. Tablet traffic to e-commerce sites grew by 348% from 2011 to 2012, overtaking smartphone traffic for the first time. Continue Reading →

While its popularity has evened out over the last few months, Pinterest is still carrying a lot of the momentum it gathered at the beginning of the year. Considering that it drives more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined and had 23 million unique visitors to the site in August, its ability to Continue Reading →

The holiday season approaches, and it is time to whip out your wallet and spend your year’s savings on the people in your life who grudgingly tolerate you so long as you keep them plied with new toys. This year, we’ve funded a heap of projects on sites like Kickstarter, and we’ve seen somewhat fewer Continue Reading →

New advertising rules may have lifted a major barrier to Facebook’s long-held desire of signing up children under 13 years of age. The Federal Trade Communication revised the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) to exclude parental consent from ads that are based on behavior, rather than personal information. So-called “contextual advertisements” would permit Facebook Continue Reading →

Facebook said Thursday it has begun testing a system for users to send messages to people outside their immediate circle of social contacts for a payment of one dollar, as the company continues to find new ways to capitalize on its popularity. In a statement posted online, the Menlo Park, Calif.-based social site cited research Continue Reading →

“…risk management is about fragility, not naive interpretation of past data. If Fannie Mae is sitting on a barrel of dynamite I would not use past statistical data for my current analysis. Risks are in the fragility.” – Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan  “Not seeing a tsunami or an economic event coming is Continue Reading →

Your Facebook News Feed is about to get more annoying. The social network is getting ready to populate feeds with video ads according to AdAge. Why now? To “attract big swaths of ad dollars from TV advertisers.” By April, Facebook will reportedly have video ads airing on its desktop site and smartphone and tablet apps. Continue Reading →

“You agree that a business may pay Instagram to display your photos in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions without any compensation to you.” That sentence was added to Instagram’s terms of service yesterday, sparking widespread outrage — the most panicked analysis claims Instagram just gave itself permission to sell everyone’s photos at Continue Reading →

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. I have always viewed that expression as quaint and rather colloquial. But over the last few weeks, as I have been preparing for a friends and family soft launch, I have been playing with new ways of telling stories, of conveying information in a meaningful Continue Reading →