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AOL upped its advertising cache today by announcing that it bought Buysight, an ad company that focuses on retargeted and intent-based targeted advertising.

Buysight will be folded into AOL's Advertising.com Group. This group works on ad technology for desktop, mobile, tablets, and Internet connected televisions.

"We strongly believe that both brand and performance display, as well as mobile and video campaigns benefit from dynamic, targeted creatives and messaging," Advertising.com Group CEO Ned Brody said in a statement. "The acquisition of Buysight brings proven Dynamic Creative Optimization and machine learning capabilities which will further enhance … Read more

We all live with the consequences of our finest ideas.

Or the ones that seemed the finest at the time.

I am confident that when the fine minds at Square Enix created Hire Hitman they had a sense that it would prove popular with men who are boys and boys who think they are men.

After all, this little Facebook app -- launched to promote the no doubt very fine and possibly religious computer game Hitman: Absolution -- allowed you to peg a friend as the target of a virtual hit by the computer game's protagonist, Agent 47, and share a video of the friend's termination, which incorporated a photo of the friend from his or her profile. … Read more

Facebook is testing a couple of new features that, as usual, some people may like and others not so much.

The two features would add notices of upcoming events and recently released albums to a user's news feed, according to The Next Web.

The upcoming events feature would suggest nearby events. But these would be events that you wouldn't necessarily have been invited to join, revealed blog site AllFacebook. This is also a follow-up to the upcoming concerts feature that the social network started testing last month.

The recently released albums feature would list new albums by artists … Read more

It's looking like Google may have to soon cough up the $22.5 million fine it agreed to pay in order to settle Federal Trade Commission claims that it illegally bypassed user privacy settings in Apple's Safari Web browser.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston approved the fine in San Francisco federal court late Friday, according to the Associated Press. This is the largest penalty the FTC has ever levied against a single company.

Google and the FTC reached the settlement agreement in August when the Web giant agreed to pay $22.5 million on charges that it &… Read more

It looks like Judge Richard Seeborg may be turning a corner in the lawsuit over Facebook's "sponsored stories" feature. He said today that he would review the social network's second settlement offer and would issue a ruling "very shortly," according to Reuters.

The crux of the case focuses on Facebook's use of advertising in its sponsored stories. The original five plaintiffs, which aimed at representing more than 100 million members in a class-action suit, claimed the social network violated users' right to privacy by publicizing their "likes" in advertisements without asking … Read more

An amusing spoof advertisement for the recently released iPad Mini has taken off on YouTube.

The fake ad, which details why you'll almost inevitably buy the iPad Mini, was created by John Elerick and his team, masquerading as Apple execs including design head "Jony Five." Billed as a "banned" iPad Mini promo, it mimics an official Apple ad remarkably well.

Laden with sarcasm, the spoof video borrows Apple's visual style and tone, and highlights some of the more "interesting" features of the new tablet, comparing processor speed, camera capabilities, and the various … Read more

Twitter is trying to suss out which of its users are male and which are female. And so far, it's gotten its prediction science down to a 90 percent accuracy rate.

But, let me back up. Why in the world would the social network want to figure out the gender of its individual users?

Why for advertising, of course.

According to Twitter, the fairer sex might like to see a promoted tweet featuring cosmetics, while men would most likely ignore such advertising. All of this apparently matters when trying to generate ad revenue and monetize the site.

Unlike some … Read more

Looking to amp up its ad revenue, LinkedIn rolls out global video advertising.

The professional networking site announced today that its self-serve platform, LinkedIn Ads, now lets advertisers use their YouTube or other videos to promote brands.

"Video ads are currently available through the LinkedIn Ads self-serve interface, our targeted advertising platform that lets large and small advertisers place text and image ads across the LinkedIn site," LinkedIn's online marketing manager, Will Hambly, wrote in a blog post today. "With LinkedIn Ads you can control your costs, pay per view or click, and stop your campaign … Read more

Google and the French government are engaged in an on-going battle over news results displayed in Google searches.

The French government is proposing a law that would require search engines to pay for news articles if they wanted to include them in query results, according to global news agency AFP. And Google has said that rather than complying with the law, it will simply omit French media sites from search.

In a letter sent by Google to a handful of government offices this month, which was obtained by AFP, the search giant said it "cannot accept" the law'… Read more