marketing – Noise

How we evaluated the business impact of marketing campaigns

Grab Tech — Sun, 19 May 2024 00:10:10 +0000

In a previous post, we introduced our systems for running marketing campaigns. Although we sent millions of messages daily, we had little insight into their effectiveness. Did they engage our users with our promotions? Did they encourage more transacti...

Zelle Is Using My Name and Voice without My Consent

Bruce Schneier — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 20:05:56 +0000

Okay, so this is weird. Zelle has been using my name, and my voice, in audio podcast ads—without my permission. At least, I think it is without my permission. It’s possible that I gave some sort of blanket permission when speaking at an event. It’s not likely, but it is possible.

I wrote to Zelle about it. Or, at least, I wrote to a company called Early Warning that owns Zelle about it. They asked me where the ads appeared. This seems odd to me. Podcast distribution networks drop ads in podcasts depending on the listener—like personalized ads on webpages—so the actual podcast doesn’t matter. And shouldn’t they know their own ads? Annoyingly, it seems time to get attorneys involved...

Facial Scanning by Burger King in Brazil

Bruce Schneier — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 12:05:55 +0000

In 2000, I wrote: “If McDonald’s offered three free Big Macs for a DNA sample, there would be lines around the block.”

Burger King in Brazil is almost there, offering discounts in exchange for a facial scan. From a marketing video:

“At the end of the year, it’s Friday every day, and the hangover kicks in,” a vaguely robotic voice says as images of cheeseburgers glitch in and out over fake computer code. “BK presents Hangover Whopper, a technology that scans your hangover level and offers a discount on the ideal combo to help combat it.” The stunt runs until January 2nd...

Surveillance Cameras Disguised as Clothes Hooks

Bruce Schneier — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 16:23:52 +0000

This seems like a bad idea. And there are ongoing lawsuits against Amazon for selling them.

Scaling marketing for merchants with targeted and intelligent promos

Grab Tech — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 00:00:10 +0000

Introduction A promotional campaign is a marketing effort that aims to increase sales, customer engagement, or brand awareness for a product, service, or company. The target is to have more orders and sales by assigning promos to consumers within a gi...

Malicious Ads in Bing Chat

Bruce Schneier — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 11:08:12 +0000

Malicious ads are creeping into chatbots.

Stepping up marketing for advertisers: Scalable lookalike audience

Grab Tech — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 00:00:10 +0000

The advertising industry is constantly evolving, driven by advancements in technology and changes in consumer behaviour. One of the key challenges in this industry is reaching the right audience, reaching people who are most likely to be interested in ...

Hacking Food Labeling Laws

Bruce Schneier — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 11:03:49 +0000

This article talks about new Mexican laws about food labeling, and the lengths to which food manufacturers are going to ensure that they are not effective. There are the typical high-pressure lobbying tactics and lawsuits. But there’s also examples of companies hacking the laws:

Companies like Coca-Cola and Kraft Heinz have begun designing their products so that their packages don’t have a true front or back, but rather two nearly identical labels—except for the fact that only one side has the required warning. As a result, supermarket clerks often place the products with the warning facing inward, effectively hiding it...

UK Government to Launch PR Campaign Undermining End-to-End Encryption

Bruce Schneier — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 12:05:35 +0000

Rolling Stone is reporting that the UK government has hired the M&C Saatchi advertising agency to launch an anti-encryption advertising campaign. Presumably they’ll lean heavily on the “think of the children!” rhetoric we’re...

Banning Surveillance-Based Advertising

Bruce Schneier — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 14:44:39 +0000

The Norwegian Consumer Council just published a fantastic new report: “Time to Ban Surveillance-Based Advertising.” From the Introduction:

The challenges caused and entrenched by surveillance-based advertising include, but are not limited to:

privacy and data protection infringements
opaque business models
manipulation and discrimination at scale
fraud and other criminal activity
serious security risks

In the following chapters, we describe various aspects of these challenges and point out how today’s dominant model of online advertising is a threat to consumers, democratic societies, the media, and even to advertisers themselves. These issues are significant and serious enough that we believe that it is time to ban these detrimental practices...

How Grab Leveraged Performance Marketing Automation to Improve Conversion Rates by 30%

Grab Tech — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 00:13:30 +0000

Grab, Southeast Asia’s leading superapp, is a hyperlocal three-sided marketplace that operates across hundreds of cities in Southeast Asia. Grab started out as a taxi hailing company back in 2012 and in less than a decade, the business has evolved trem...

Opt-in to the new Amazon SES console experience

Simon Poile — Fri, 12 Feb 2021 19:09:52 +0000

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to announce the launch of the newly redesigned Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) console. With its streamlined look and feel, the new console makes it even easier for customers to leverage the speed, reliability, and flexibility that Amazon SES has to offer. Customers can access the new console experience […]

Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

Bruce Schneier — Mon, 14 Dec 2020 20:03:03 +0000

Persuasion is as old as our species. Both democracy and the market economy depend on it. Politicians persuade citizens to vote for them, or to support different policy positions. Businesses persuade consumers to buy their products or services. We all persuade our friends to accept our choice of restaurant, movie, and so on. It’s essential to society; we couldn’t get large groups of people to work together without it. But as with many things, technology is fundamentally changing the nature of persuasion. And society needs to adapt its rules of persuasion or suffer the consequences...