Creepy Advertising

New York Times gets the measure in this article of the latest trend in online advertising: retargeting. Criteo, a French company, are leading the charge in the UK and have been working with well-known retailers such as John Lewis, Marks & Spencer, Watches.com, Asus and many more. Because they are the leaders in the field (at the moment) their dominance of retargeting in the 'remnant' space (ie when publisher cannot sell all their websites' advertising space at a premium price) means that the user experience is like feeling stalked by a rather creepy-like persistent salesman. I'm directly involved in this area of the online ad business day-to-day and even I don't like the current experience. There is certain reactive (and proactive) control given to consumers, but the amount of ads across many, many sites can be simply overwhelming, even creating a negative effect for the brands involved.

9-5 life

Pomaceous presentation

Cool design for invitations to Apple's yearly end-of-summer hype-up...
 

FindTheBest.com

Interesting new data comparison engine site, launched by DoubleClick founder Kevin O'Connor. FindTheBest.com is stil in beta, but is clearly very useful. US-centric data restricts it for now, but try this for comparing blog software, or this for learning more about plants.

"You can find anything on the web but it can take you hours or days of research to compile it into a useful form to make a decision. People need objective, factual information in order to make side-by-side comparisons in order to make the best decision. We've created the first broad-based comparison engine to help people make informed decisions quickly." 

"FindTheBest is a comparison engine that allows users to find a topic, compare their options in a side-by-side chart, sort and narrow data with smart filters, and select the best choice based on what's important to them. This all happens inside 'Comparison Apps' or 'Apps', which are presented in the form of filterable charts."

Excerpts from an article in the Huffington Post on FindTheBest.com launch.