AdWeek

Quantcast, a San Francisco-based audience measurement company, is meshing consumer Web and mobile app behavior with an eye on making real-time ad buying more targeted.

Its new data-reporting system, dubbed Audience Interests, is aimed at digital publishers and has recently been tested by BlogAds, the proprietor of highly trafficked PerezHilton.com.

Attention retailers: shoppers are not as interested with beacons and in-store tracking as you think they are, according to a new report from digital marketing platform Punchtab.

The "Mobile Tracking: Are Consumers Ready?" report surveyed 1,153 consumers on how they feel about handing over information about themselves in exchange for some form of personalized messages. While 50 percent of participants did not want to be tracked, 27 percent of the consumers surveyed said they were open to it -- but only under certain circumstances.

The remaining 23 percent of consumers in the study did not care if they were tracked or not. Of the 50 percent of participants who didn't want to be tracked online, privacy was the No. 1 reason offered, at 51 percent.

Comcast says it's sorry for the unusual inconvenience it caused AOL VP of product Ryan Block during a 20-minute phone call where Block, somewhat painfully, tried to disconnect his service while a customer service representative refused to do so.

"We are very embarrassed by the way our employee spoke with Mr. Block and Ms. Belmont and are contacting them to personally apologize," Tom Karinshak, Comcast Cable SVP of customer experience, said. "The way in which our representative communicated with them is unacceptable and not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives. We are investigating this situation and will take quick action.”

Everyone in advertising is buying exhaustive records of your purchases -- all your purchases -- and comparing them to your viewing habits so that they know which ads you saw and whether or not they changed your behavior. All of your financial information is for sale.

Here's how it's collected:

• When you shop frequently at a store, you get a points card so that you can get a discount or coupons. Stores give these away like they're going out of style, ostensibly to reward loyalty -- Kmart, Walmart, Target, Walgreens and CVS all do this.
• Two main companies, Acxiom and Experian, collect this data, among other data sets.
• The Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1994 in particular is why companies like Acxiom, Experian, and other data brokers (and the companies that use data brokers) are skittish about publicity -- the clauses that allow the use of this data are designed to expressly forbid the direct identification of anybody involved.
• So data brokers tip-toe right up to the edge of that line—they whitelist everything they have, meaning that they strip out names and addresses except for the ZIP +4 code (you know, 55555-5555, instead of just 55555.
• Well, you probably bought all that stuff with a credit card, and there's a company called Argus that one data company executive said provides "the majority of credit card transactions" to them for the same purposes.

According to a new report from eMarketer, spending on digital advertising globally will swell 16.7 percent in 2014 to $140.15 billion, marking the first time digital will make up more than one-quarter of media spend.

Unsurprisingly, mobile is driving that growth. Marketing spend on smartphones and tablets will jump 84.7 percent in 2014 to $32.71 billion.

Due to the ramp-up of mobile-centric ad products from social media players like Facebook and Twitter, smartphones and tablets will account for one-quarter of all digital spending in 2014. Overall global ad expenditures will reach $545 billion in 2014, up 5.7 percent year over year. That percentage doubled from 2013’s 2.6 percent uptick.

Nielsen Media Research has declared itself "open for business" in terms of tracking TV viewing on smartphones, tablets and other electronic gadgets. But don’t expect those numbers, which will be available for the first time with the new fall broadcast season, to be impressive, statistically speaking.

"It will start small and build gradually," Cheryl Idell, Nielsen’s executive vice president of US media, said. “We won’t see dramatic changes in ratings with this data added in.”

That may not be the big splash the advertising community has been hoping for. Claire Browne, vice president and director of media research at ad agency RPA in Los Angeles, described Nielsen as "behind the curve" and "playing catch-up" on measuring mobile viewing, a project that’s been in the works for years.

"They have to do this to remain relevant," she said. "Consumer behavior is running so far ahead of the research."

The mobile data will come via software meters that have been embedded into media companies’ "watch anywhere" apps, Internet browsers and mobile devices themselves, Idell said. Those meters will identify pieces of content and report back on when and how those were watched, whether through a smartphone, iPad video app or other device.

Privacy encryption will reveal demographic but not personal tidbits about the viewer, who may opt out of the research. Nielsen will add the mobile viewing data to a TV show’s overall ratings to give a more accurate picture of how many people across the US watched an episode of The Walking Dead or a season of CSI.

The World Cup semifinal between Germany and Brazil became the most discussed sporting event ever on Twitter.

The match's 35.6 million tweets, peaking at 580,166 tweets per minute, were the most ever for a sporting event on Twitter, per the San Francisco-based company. The 2014 Super Bowl, for the sake of comparison, generated 24.9 million tweets.

A new report from the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau says that millennials, women 18-24 in particular, are not cutting the cord as quickly as previously thought.

In fact, TV's share of viewing hours grew from 84 to 88 percent in the fourth quarter of 2013 (data in the study was sourced from the Nielsen Cross-Platform Report), from 129 total hours out of 133 overall to 111 hours out of 113 overall.

Yes, that's still shrinkage in terms of absolute time spent (and the cable-free rate for men is higher), but it is notably less time watching digital video.

Further, the study found that young women spend nearly four times as much of their time watching cable as they do broadcast -- more than 16 hours surfing cable vs. 4.5 with the broadcast networks. Much of that may simply be that the women in this survey are predominately college students, but the CAB sees it as a hopeful sign.

In some alternate social media history, the term Crush List is a verb -- meaning to elevate a friend to the most prominent position within one’s social network. And somewhere MySpace founder Tom Anderson is cursing the name Orkut Buyukkokten -- not Mark Zuckerberg.

And in this reality, social media giant Google has more than a billion people on Orkut, the service that defined the next great Internet era after search.

The loss of Orkut is yet another sign of how social still vexes Google, a company that tinkers with autonomous cars. Sure, it has Google+, but even that strategy has its troubles to the point that tech blogs are reporting on its imminent demise, too. With Orkut gone, it’s a good time to highlight Google’s failures in social media:

• Orkut
• Dodgeball
• Latitude
• Google Buzz
• YouTube
• Google+
• Waze, Twitch

The Media Rating Council is adopting a viewability metric, or “currency,” for online video ads that defines when viewable display impressions count. It’s the industry’s first attempt to address the problem of brands paying publishers for ads no one sees. While the industry generally welcomes the development, the fine print causes some concern.

Marketers are unhappy for the call to pay for ads when they’re only watched for two seconds and in cases where only half the video player is viewable in the browser.

“It’s way too short,” said Kevin Scholl, digital marketing manager at Red Roof Inn. “We want to set the metric, but does the starting point have to be so low?”

Amy Dickerson, VP, digital director at Spark SMG -- who is already negotiating deals for her clients using the MRC’s metric -- agreed. “Two seconds is not, by any means, a great representation of a 15-second [ad],” she said. “But it’s better than what we had.”