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Malicious Flash ads attack, spread via clipboard

A new type of Internet-based attack is spreading in which Flash-based ads seize control of a Web surfer's clipboard and paste in a link to a malicious site in the hopes that it will be spread from there into e-mails, blogs, and instant messages.

The ads have been spotted on MSNBC.com, Newsweek.com, and Digg.com, and victims have reported on numerous forums and blogs that they appear to be fake alerts that a virus has been detected on the computer and offer to clean it up, according to antivirus vendor Sophos.

The malicious link, which includes "… Read more

Google quietly launches AdSense for Feeds

Bits and pieces of Google's acquisition of FeedBurner continue to seep out. Friday marked the quiet "public" launch of AdSense for Feeds, a service that was soft-launched to a small group of AdSense users back in May.

Once integrated into publishers' RSS feeds, it'll serve up contextually-related advertising based around the content, helping publishers make money off the growing number of users accessing their site through RSS readers instead of the site where page and ad views have been factors in revenue.

For users who did not have access to the AdSense for Feeds menu in … Read more

Class action suit means Facebook's Beacon just won't go away

A class action lawsuit filed earlier this week targets Facebook and eight of the participants in Beacon, its ill-fated advertising product that shared information about third-party site activity with the social network. The set of 20 plaintiffs, mostly residents of Texas, filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday. Named as defendants are Facebook, as well as current or former Beacon participants Blockbuster, Fandango (owned by Comcast), Overstock.com, STA Travel, Zappos, Hotwire (owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp), and GameFly.

A Facebook representative told CNET News on Thursday that the company had … Read more

Between a rock and YouTube, video execs see promise

SAN FRANCISCO--If the $1 billion Web video advertising market is to reach the level of television's estimated $50 billion, it ironically won't be thanks to YouTube, the Internet's most popular spot for watching clips.

That's at least the read from Internet video executives here Thursday at the RBC Capital conference. Executives from popular video search and ad companies said that so-called user-generated videos like those on YouTube aren't drawing any significant dollars from advertisers or agencies. Advertisers need to control their brand, and it's seen as too risky to give up that control on … Read more

Google fine-tunes ad controls, accountability

Google has added some abilities for advertisers to control and track their display advertisements.

Advertisers now can keep an ad from being shown too frequently to each user, Google said on its corporate blog Thursday. Advertisers also can see data about how many people have seen an ad campaign and the average number of times people have seen the ads.

Google also is letting advertisers see "view-through conversion" statistics, which measure when a person who's been shown an ad visits the advertiser's Web site. This is significant because advertisers want to know how influential their ads … Read more

Google offers 'Insights for Search'

Google has taken its popular Google Trends and launched a spin-off product called Google Insights for Search. Geared toward advertisers, it's a tool to track a particular search term's popularity across the Web and geographic regions of the world.

For Google, this can help boost advertiser confidence and potentially win its program some new converts who would've otherwise been skeptical regarding how effectively they could target an online ad campaign.

With Google Insights for Search, you can search for a term to track how much it's been googled over time, where on a "heat map&… Read more

More mobile ads for AOL's Platform-A

AOL has formally launched the third-party mobile-advertising division of its Platform-A ad-serving technology, the company said Monday. The division has sprung out of Third Screen Media, a mobile-ad start-up that AOL acquired last spring.

Third Screen Media runs its own mobile-ad network, but Monday's announcement is focused on a new technology that enables publishers to put their ads on multiple networks using a strategy that AOL calls "inventory partitioning." They can, in other words, use a Web interface to pick and choose what percentage of their available ads go on which networks.

Mobile advertising got a big … Read more

Hollywood takes a FreeWheel-ing approach to ads

Hollywood is starting to take note of a Silicon Valley start-up that claims to possess the answer to its Web-advertising woes: the trick, according to the company, is to take an opposite approach to DRM.

Managers at FreeWheel say one of the reasons TV networks and film studios are reluctant to syndicate their content widely on the Web is piracy. The other main reason is that it's hard to track, control, and manage their own ads when they're dispersed across dozens of sites.

FreeWheel says it has the answer, and some in the entertainment sector agree. About 15 … Read more

Tough times for "tradigitalists"

David Armano argues that " Digital Marketing Needs a Reboot." Read this excerpt from his recent contribution to Ad Age's Digital Next:

"Old habits die hard. While consumers are out there spending countless hours on social networks, file sharing applications, chat, community sites, buying stuff, selling stuff and using multiple devices, some of us tradigital old fogies are still reaching for our beloved toolbox of the past in the hopes of getting their attention. While online user behavior tells us that people respond well to simplicity, we labor to create complexity in the form of experimental navigation … Read more