Facebook launches searchable transparency library of all active ads

Now you can search Facebook for how much Trump has spent on ads in the past year, which Pages’ ads reference immigration, or what a Page’s previous names were. It’s all part of Facebook’s new Ad Library launching today that makes good on its promise to increase transparency after the social network’s ads were used […]

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Moolah Mobile partners with Surge to offer free mobile service with ads

Moolah Mobile is teaming up with SurgePhone Wireless to offer people a new way to pay their cell phone bills — by putting ads on their homescreens. Moolah CEO Vernell Woods (pictured above) said the startup has already been offering gift cards and other rewards to users who view its homescreen ads. So this is […]

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Before breaking up with Shopify, Mailchimp quietly acqui-hired LemonStand, a Shopify competitor

Here’s an interesting twist on the story from last week about the break-up between Shopify and Mailchimp, after the two said they were at odds over how customer data was shared between the two companies. It turns out that before it parted ways with Shopify, Mailchimp had quietly made an acquisition of LemonStand, one of the […]

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Australian influencer marketing startup Tribe raises $7.5M as it eyes U.S. expansion

Tribe, which helps brands acquire content from so-called “micro-influencers,” has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding. The startup was founded in Australia in 2015 by TV and radio host Jules Lund, who told me he was responding to the growing demand for branded content. “Brands are desperate for content,” Lund said. “When you have […]

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Android users’ security and privacy at risk from shadowy ecosystem of pre-installed software, study warns

A large-scale independent study of pre-installed Android apps has cast a critical spotlight on the privacy and security risks that preloaded software poses to users of the Google developed mobile platform. The researchers behind the paper, which has been published in preliminary form ahead of a future presentation at the IEEE Symposium on Security and […]

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Facebook staff raised concerns about Cambridge Analytica in September 2015, per court filing

Further details have emerged about when and how much Facebook knew about data-scraping by the disgraced and now defunct Cambridge Analytica political data firm. Last year a major privacy scandal hit Facebook after it emerged CA had paid GSR, a developer with access to Facebook’s platform, to extract personal data on as many as 87M […]

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Asia’s AnyMind pulls in another $8M and expands into outdoor advertising

Asia-focused marketing startup AnyMind Group has landed a further $8 million in funding to close out its Series B round and expand into new verticals. The company announced a $13.4 million raise back in November, but that has now expanded to $21.4 million thanks to an additional injection from VGI Global Media, a Thailand-based firm […]

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Slowdown or not, China’s luxury goods still seeing high-end growth

Despite well-documented concerns over an economic slowdown in China, the country’s luxury goods market is still seeing opulent growth according to a new study. Behind secular and demographic tailwinds, the luxury sector is set to continue its torrid expansion in the face of volatility as it’s quickly becoming a defensive economic crown jewel. Using proprietary […]

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Google fined $1.49BN in Europe for antitrust violations in search ad brokering

The European Commission has just announced another antitrust fine for Google . The latest fine — $1.49BN — relates to its search ad brokering business which competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager noted today is “by far” the company’s main source of revenue. “Today’s decision is about how Google abused its domiance to stop website’s using brokers […]

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Media fragmentation is annoying consumers

Deloitte’s Technology, Media and Telecommunications division published its 13th-annual Digital Media Trends survey, focused on identifying changes in the ways US consumers engage with various types of media. Led by an independent research firm, the survey had roughly 2,000 consumer respondents across demographics – with the report categorizing respondents based on age (Gen-Z: ages 14-21, […]

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Optimization company Marketing Evolution raises $26.1M

Marketing Evolution is announcing that it has raised $26.1 million in growth funding. The New York City-headquartered company says it can measure marketing across different channels, delivering the data while the campaign is still running, to a dashboard full of recommendations on how to make the campaign more effective. It recently introduced what it calls […]

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EU gov’t and public health sites lousy with adtech, study finds

A study of tracking cookies running on government and public sector health websites in the European Union has found commercial adtech to be operating pervasively even in what should be core not-for-profit corners of the Internet. The researchers used searches including queries related to HIV, mental health, pregnancy, alcoholism and cancer to examine how frequently […]

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