advertising

Get ready for some LinkedIn ads masquerading as slideshows. The company is pushing its SlideShare tool as an advertising medium within its network, LinkedIn announced today.

The network has signed on General Electric and marketing firm Constant Contact as the initial brands to try out this type of advertising.

These slideshow ads, called SlideShare Content Ads, will blend in on the LinkedIn pages, according to Meera Bhatia, head of Product Management for Marketing Solutions. The advertising will appear as a "sponsored presentation," and users can click through it within the advertisement or they can expand it into a … Read more

In the world of "so bad, it's good," this may well qualify as bad. Or good.

It's Domino's Pizza selling a new iTunes app in Japan. Because if there's one thing pizza needs, it's an iPhone app.

Domino's wants you to know that no expense was spared in the creation of this app. So it wasn't going to sink to using Brad Pitt, Jack Nicholson, or Leonardo DiCaprio to sell it.

No, it was going to employ that versatile performer Scott Oellkers. Should you have been unaccountably held up in North Korea playing basketball, Oellkers is the president of Domino's Japan.… Read more

A new bill intended to grant more privacy protections to Internet users was introduced today by U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller.

Dubbed "Do-Not-Track Online Act of 2013," the bill would make it law for all Web browsers, online companies, and app makers to give users a choice of opting out of being tracked online, according to The New York Times. Advertisers and data brokers commonly track users to collect information on sites visited, search queries, purchasing patterns, and more.

"The privacy of Americans is increasingly under assault as more and more of their daily lives are conducted … Read more

After months of speculation, Facebook today agreed to buy Microsoft's Atlas online-advertising platform, boosting the social-networking giant's ability to compete against Google in the display ad business.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The companies also didn't disclose the number of employees the deal affects, but Facebook noted that Atlas' employees will remain in Seattle.

Facebook and Microsoft, already partners in several businesses, began talking about a deal for Atlas, which helps advertisers buy and manage ads, late last year. The deal could help Facebook develop its own one-stop shop for advertisers and agencies to buy, … Read more

By opening up an ad tool that thrives on user contact information, Facebook is giving more advertisers a chance to market directly to users.

The social network announced today that it's expanding access to its custom audience tool -- a tool that lets companies target their ads to existing customers based on their phone numbers and e-mail addresses. The tool, one of Facebook's several advertising tools that rely on user data, rolled out in September. The contact information is not directly shared between companies -- it's hashed to protect privacy and then used to place ads, according … Read more

The long-rumored sale of Microsoft's Atlas online advertising platform to Facebook is scheduled to close tomorrow, according to AdAge.

The trade publication reported on its Web site that "two people briefed on the plans" said the companies will likely announce the deal tomorrow, though it acknowledged some chance for delay.

Microsoft and Facebook both declined to comment on the report.

Microsoft acquired Atlas as part of its $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive in 2007. The software giant wrote off most of the costs of that deal last July. And it's reportedly been trying to sell Atlas … Read more

Google, who? Facebook, huh? Yeah, that's right. The Internet behemoths don't pose any threat to business-reviews site Yelp and its still-blossoming local advertising business. Well, that's Yelp's attitude anyhow.

"Today, we're really competing with print, radio, and television," Geoff Donaker, Yelp's chief operating officer, said Tuesday when speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom conference.

But what about Internet businesses like Google and Facebook? Donaker is sure the pair will compete with Yelp in the local advertising arena eventually -- emphasis on eventually. Yelp will let that battle "play … Read more

Apple may be on the way to controlling more of how advertisers get user information from mobile devices.

According to TechCrunch, unnamed industry sources are saying that Apple's App Review team is denying apps that use "cookie tracking." This could be a signal that the company is going full force into its own Advertising Identifier technology.

Theoretically, the way cookie tracking works on mobile is similar to desktop: a cookie saves data and information on users' browsing history that can be used later by the app or Web site. According to TechCrunch, it was introduced as an … Read more

Firefox will soon be able to block third-party advertising cookies by default, preventing ad networks from tracking users' browser activity.

Advertisers use cookies to track users' Web activity to deliver more-targeted ads. The new patch will allow cookies from sites users actively visit but block those from third-party sites that haven't been visited by the user.

Firefox users have long had the ability to manually disable the cookies, but the patch will allow the browser to automatically perform the task. Contributed by Jonathan Mayer, a researcher at Stanford, the patch is expected to be released in Firefox 22 on … Read more