Bassel Khartabil, a leading figure in the Syrian Open Source software community, has been imprisoned by the Syrian government since March 2012, accused of “harming state security”. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has declared his imprisonment arbitrary and called for his immediate release. Khartabil’s wife, human rights attorney Noura Ghazi, has recently been contacted by insiders in the Assad government and told that Bassel has been secretly sentenced to death. (English translation/comments on Noura’s Facebook post, which is in Arabic.) It is impossible to confirm these rumors, but this is deeply disturbing news for friends of Bassel and defenders of freedom of expression anywhere. The Internet Governance Forum in João Pessoa, Brazil, has released a statement demanding that the Syrian government alert Bassel’s family to his whereabouts and exercise clemency in his case. We at the MIT Media Lab join this call, and urge the internet community to exercise whatever pressure we can on the Syrian government to make Bassel’s whereabouts known and release him from detention. On October 22, the MIT Media Lab invited Bassel Khartabil to join the Lab as a research scientist in the Center for Civic Media, to continue his work building 3D models of the ancient city of Palmyra, whose ruins have been destroyed by ISIS. We continue to hope that Bassel will be able to take his position at the Media Lab, and we desperately hope the rumors of his death sentence are untrue. We ask for your help in calling attention to Bassel’s arbitrary detention and seeking his whereabouts and immediate release.

The price of 1, 000 advertisement impressions on one webpage. If a website publisher charges $2 CPM, that means an advertiser must pay $2 for every 1, 000 impressions of its ad. The "M" in CPM represents the roman numeral for 1, 000. CPM is the most common method for pricing web ads. However, an advertisement's success cannot be measured by CTR alone, because an ad that is viewed but not clicked on may still have an impact. BREAKING DOWN 'Cost Per Thousand - CPM' Website publishers like CPM advertising because they get paid for simply displaying the ads. Other methods of pricing website advertising include cost per click (CPC), where the advertiser pays each time a website visitor actually clicks on the ad, and cost per acquisition (CPA), where the advertiser only pays each time a website visitor makes a purchase that can be directly traced to having clicked on that ad. Different pricing methods will be more appropriate for some ad campaigns than others. CPM makes the most sense for a campaign focused on heightening brand awareness or delivering a specific message.

Mary Meeker delivers her Internet Trends report every year. One of the most-watched digital reports of the year is out—Mary Meeker's Internet Trends—and it shows just how much room mobile advertising has to grow. Meeker runs digital investments for top Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, and every year she releases a comprehensive breakdown of the entire Web landscape. Meeker looks at how people around the world use the Internet, how many are on mobile, how they spend their time online, and which companies and industries stand to gain the most. Here's what you should be focused on this year in digital and on mobile: Mobile Internet use is growing faster than Internet usage in general: There are 2.8 billion Internet users, up 8 percent from 2014, and 2.1 billion mobile Internet users, an increase of 23 percent. Mobile data usage rose 69 percent last year, and 55 percent of mobile data traffic is from video. In 2008, Americans spent 20 minutes a day on average with the mobile Web. This year, they spend close to three hours, more time than they spend on laptops. The mobile ad industry is still short $25 billion. Mobile commands 24 percent of time spent with media but accounts for only 8 percent of ad dollars spent. Facebook and Twitter are growing but not like they used to. Revenue per user and monthly user growth is slowing. Facebook revenue per user is at $9.36, up 29 percent over last year, but growth neared 60 percent last year. Year-over-year user growth was 13 percent last quarter, the slowest growth ever. Twitter revenue per user was $5.14, an increase of 45 percent over last year, whereas growth was 80 percent last year at this time. User growth was 18 percent, down from 25 percent a year ago. The mobile ad industry as a whole grew 34 percent year over year, while desktop digital advertising only grew 11 percent. Buy buttons equal optimized for mobile, and they have popped up across Google, Facebook and Twitter. Vertical screens and vertical content are a big deal now with 29 percent of people's daily screen time spent looking at smartphones. Five years ago, time spent in front of such vertical-oriented screens was only 5 percent of overall viewing time. Snapchat is all about vertical ads and says users watch them until the end nine times more frequently than they watch horizontal ads in its app. Snapchat now has 100 million daily active users, and the app generates 2 billion video views a day. One event like Coachella can draw 40 million video views to Snapchat Live Stories. Facebook gets 4 billion video views a day, 75 percent of which are from phones. Pinterest is getting manlier with the number of men's fashion pins up almost 100 percent over a year ago—car and motorcycle pins were up 120 percent. Twitch can draw 1 million viewers at the same time. Teens continue to be trendsetters. The five most important social networks for U.S. teens, in order, are Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Tumblr. E-commerce is starting to pick up, with $300 billion in spending last year representing 9 percent of retail sales. E-sales accounted for less than 1 percent of retail revenue in 1998. Alibaba, China's e-commerce giant, has more than $350 billion worth of merchandise on its platform. Amazon has closer to $100 billion worth. Online...

Advertisers use online customer data to target their marketing appeals. This has heightened consumers' privacy concerns, leading governments to pass laws designed to protect consumer privacy by restricting the use of data and by restricting online tracking techniques used by websites. We use the responses of 3.3 million survey takers who had been randomly exposed to 9, 596 online display (banner) advertising campaigns to explore how privacy regulation in the European Union (EU) has influenced advertising effectiveness. This privacy regulation restricted advertisers' ability to collect data on Web users in order to target ad campaigns. We find that, on average, display advertising became far less effective at changing stated purchase intent after the EU laws were enacted, relative to display advertising in other countries. The loss in effectiveness was more pronounced for websites that had general content (such as news sites), where non-data-driven targeting is particularly hard to do. The loss of effectiveness was also more pronounced for ads with a smaller presence on the webpage and for ads that did not have additional interactive, video, or audio features.

We didn't become a leader in the local business community overnight. Here are some of our key milestones. '05 Yodle is born. Nathaniel Stevens, Ben Rubenstein, John Berkowitz and Kartik Hosangar found the company. First product launches. Yodle launches a proprietary, algorithm-based local paid search advertising solution. Top 25 Under 25. Yodle's co-founders are recognized in BusinessWeek's list of Top 25 Entrepreneurs under 25. '06 New York office opens A new Yodle office is opened and becomes the company's headquarters. '07 Court Cunningham appointed CEO Court joins Yodle's less than 15 employees and 250 customers to manage all aspects of the company's operation and strategy. Charlotte office opens As Yodle continues to grow, a new office is opened in Charlotte, North Carolina. '08 Introducing Yodle for Brand Networks Yodle's product offerings are extended to local business owners in franchise, dealer/manufacturer, and multi-location networks. Google partners with Yodle A strategic partnership is formed to drive even better results for local businesses. Scottsdale office opens Still growing! Yodle's first west coast office location opens its doors in Scottsdale, Arizona. '09 Named "Most Valuable Startup" Business Insider names Yodle the 37th most valuable startup in the world. '10 Yodle Organic launches Yodle creates the first automated, scaled local SEO solution. Ranked #35 on the Inc. 500 Yodle lands a spot on the prestigious Inc. 500 list as one of the 500 fastest-growing private companies in the country. Court co-authors local advertising book Dummies, the world's bestselling reference brand, publishes Local Advertising for Dummies. '11 ProfitFuel acquisition Yodle acquires ProfitFuel, an Austin-based provider of local SEO solutions. 20, 000 local business owners! Yodle hits the incredible milestone of serving 20, 000 business owners nationwide - and hires its 700th employee. '12 Named Google Premier Partner Yodle becomes one of only 19 Google Premier SMB Partners in the entire country. Award-winning mobile technology Yodle creates a mobile marketing solution that lands the company a spot on the CIO 100 list. '13 Lighthouse acquisition Yodle acquires Lighthouse, an award-winning provider of automated patient communications. Centermark launches Yodle introduces Centermark, a distributed marketing automation platform for networked businesses. Named Google Mobile Champion For the 2nd year in a row, Google awards Yodle for innovations in mobile marketing. 40, 000 local business owners! In less than two years, Yodle is serving twice as many people — and surpasses 1, 000 employees. '14 Named Most Promising Company Forbes names Yodle the 9th Most Promising Company in America. Marketing Essentials™ launches Yodle launches Marketing Essentials, an all-in-one marketing platform that enables local business owners to find and keep more customers in just a few minutes a week.

It’s the age of video, but it isn’t every day that you come across really good videos that you don’t mind watching over and over again. There are some really good ones in the form of heart-warming wedding proposals, and inspirational and mind-boggling new discoveries. To add to that, we have everyone’s favorite, creative marketing advertisement campaigns, sometimes known as guerrilla marketing. This type of marketing is almost always out of the comfort zone, usually has a cause worth fighting for and are pretty much delivers results in terms of conversions and brand exposure . Because what’s the good of an ad campaign if it doesn’t put the product in the spotlight, right? Recommended Reading: 60 Creative Public Awareness Ads That Makes You Think These 10 creative marketing ad campaigns (arranged in no particular order) you will watch next are quite different. They will put a smile on your face, a tear in your eye or make you go "That’s a really smart idea." Have fun watching and do share this with a friend who needs some inspiration in their lives. 1. S-Oil – Here Balloons Don’t you hate looking for parking without those automated LED systems that tell you where there is an available slot? Well, in an open space, you can actually use balloons instead. Check out how S-Oil does it with Here Balloons. The idea is to tie a simple balloon in the middle of a parking spot. When a car parks into the spot, it will pull the balloon down as it parks over the balloon string. Similarly when the car exits the lot, the balloon will float freely in the air, to be seen from afar for the next parking-seeking driver. The idea is simple, effective and allows drivers to associate this oil-saving practice with the company behind the idea, S-Oil. 2. Volkswagen – Fast lane Volkswagen invites you to take the fast lane why is way faster than the stairs, and even the escalator. Commuters who want to take the plunge get to slide down the red slide built right next to the staircase, and try to briefly live life on the fast lane, and be the envy of those who took the escalator instead. Have you seen so many smiles in the subway? Yeah, that means it works! 3. E-mart – Sunny Sale Campaign Competition in the household shopping department is big business and in South Korea, QR Codes have been used in the subways to help shoppers shop while en route to work. E-mart however has a different problem, a low number of shoppers during lunch hour, 12pm to 1pm. Their solution: a 3D QR Code activated by the ‘noon’ Sun. The code gives shoppers access to special shopping coupons under the Sunny Sale campaign and raised Emart membership by nearly 60%. Sunny Sale Campaign will go on to win multiple awards such as the London International Awards and Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. 4. Volvo – Suspensions & Speedbumps If you live in a country where your streets are populated with speedbumps, having a good suspension system for your car will help ensure a smoother ride. At the entrance of car dealerships in this particular example, a softer, air-filled version of the regular speedbump is installed. Drivers who expect things to get bumpy was surprised to not feel the expected rise and fall. They were then greeted with a strategically placed sign promoting the use of Volvo’s suspension system. Car buyers associated the smooth ride across the fake speedbump with a feeling of a smooth ride made possible with the suspension system. Interest in the system rose and the idea has spread from the United Arab Emirates to car dealerships across the Middle East. 5. Coca-Cola – Small World Machines If you haven’t seen Coca-Cola’s marketing techniques with their vending machines then you are going to be treated with one of their many amazing ad campaigns. This one is the Small World Machine campaign where Coca-Cola unites their fans in India and Pakistan for brief moments of fun and a good time. By setting up camera feeds connected in real-time and a touchscreen vending machine that spews out instructions, friends in Lahore, Pakistan and New Delhi, India connect with gestures, waves and dance — in exchange for free Coke. I bet participants took away than a thirst-quenching drink from that exercise. It’s a small world after all. 6. Samsung – "Stare Down" the S4 For 1 Hr The Samsung Galaxy S4 knows when you are staring at it (that’s how they get the videos paused when you look away) and this campaign has turned this into a staring contest. The rules: just stare at the S4 at this booth in the Zurich railroad station for 1 hour to win yourself your own S4.

A FEW MONTHS ago Progressive, an insurance company, ran a video ad on Facebook featuring a grown man who acts like a baby and is carried around in a sling. The ad urged youngsters to “act your age” by renouncing their parents’ car insurance and buying their own. When Facebook employees chuckled about it during a meeting, David Fischer, the firm’s 41-year-old head of marketing, wondered why he had never seen it. He was too old, his colleagues said. Progressive was trying to appeal to young drivers, so it served up the ad only to them. In 1963 David Ogilvy, the father of Madison Avenue and author of a classic business book, “Confessions of an Advertising Man”, wrote: “An advertisement is like a radar sweep, constantly hunting new prospects as they come into the market. Get a good radar, and keep it sweeping.” Half a century later advertisers are at last taking him at his word. Behavioural profiling has gone viral across the internet, enabling firms to reach users with specific messages based on their location, interests, browsing history and demographic group. Ads can now follow users from site to site: a customer who looks online for flights to Frankfurt will be inundated with German holiday offers. Conversant, a digital-marketing firm, uses an algorithm to deliver around 800, 000 variations of an ad to its big clients’ prospective customers to make it as irresistible as possible. Kraft, a food company, monitors online opinions on its brands in an office which it calls “the looking glass”. Extreme personalisation in advertising has been slow to come, except in search advertising, where Google, Yahoo and other engines have been serving up ads tailored to users’ interests for years. But now it has arrived in earnest. According to one poll by Adobe, a software company, most marketers say they have seen more change in the past two years than in the previous 50. In the classic advertising model, firms used to place ads with media that brought together the audiences they were after. They would go for business executives in the Wall Street Journal , for example, or youngsters on MTV. But now advertisers no longer have to rely on media as proxies for consumers, because they have more tools and data to target precisely the people they want to reach.

Back in January, TED founder Chris Anderson announced a new initiative called Ads Worth Spreading. The concept of Ads Worth Spreading was to find the best video ads around-ads that are compelling, creative, outside-the-box, and that most represent what the future of advertising might be. Over a thousand ads were submitted, and after a carefully-selected panel viewed them all, the. It's only my opinion, but a campaign like Ads Worth Spreading is vitally important. Brands are the video creators with the most money. They have more creative resources and more distribution experience than amateur directors and newer brands. As online video drives the creation of more entertainment-based marketing content, brands are poised to lead the charge in evolving "online video" into whatever it is destined to become. Anderson knows this, and that's why he decided to use Ads Worth Spreading to stimulate the conversation about what an ad is and what it can be. Because of TED's reputation for forward thinking and big ideas, I've been pretty curious to see what the eventual winners would look like... and now we know. I could just list the ads by name, brand, and creative agency, but where's the fun in that? We're a site about video, let's show you the videos-besides, a lot of these brands and creative agencies are names you probably haven't heard before, so a text-based list won't give you any real sense of it anyway. You need to see the ads to get a sense of what Anderson's vision was all about. For those of you pressed for time, here's a 3-minute "teaser" overview of the winning ads: For the rest of you... The 10 Best Video Ads - TED's Ads Worth Spreading Chrysler: "Born of Fire" (Wieden+Kennedy) The Nike Foundation: "Girl Effect, The Clock is Ticking" (Wieden+Kennedy) Dulux: "Dulux Walls" (Euro RSCG London) Intel: "The Chase” (Venables Bell & Partners) Nokia: "The World's Smallest Stop-Motion Character Animation" (Wieden + Kennedy London) Hornbach and HEIMAT Berlin: "Infinite House" (@radical.media) The Topsy Foundation: "Selinah” (Ogilvy Johannesburg) Batelco: "Infinity" (FP7/DXB, Bahrain) Savory Institute: "Changing Our Future" (Foresight Multimedia) Target: "Kaleidoscopic Fashion Spectacular” (Mother NY and Legs Media) Reactions & Reflections Overall, there are some great ads in that group. And a lot of them stand on merit as works of entertainment, rather than merely traditional commercial spots. Which is the whole point of this initiative. In the words of Chris Anderson at the outset of Ads Worth Spreading: Our mission — of spreading ideas around the world — is supported in part by advertising. And we believe that advertising should evoke the same emotions a TEDTalk does — it should make you think, make you respond, make you want to share — a great idea, a product that makes the world better, an initiative that might change the world. Taking a closer look at the winners, I'm not really surprised to see Wieden & Kennedy on that list so many times (three separate campaigns). Old Spice Man alone made them more of a household name (which sounds strange considering their long history of creating memorable ads-they were behind the classic "Bo Knows" ads starring Bo Jackson, among many others). I am, however, surprised to see which spots won them the acclaim. There's a certain suave body wash pitchman who is missing from that list, despite arguably being the most ubiquitous pitchman of the last year. And I guess maybe that's my only complaint with the whole list. There's a lot of great artistry, but maybe not as much innovation as I expected. I see stop motion... I see celebrity endorsements... I see kinetic typography. And all that stuff's great-seriously, I don't want to give the impression I think those styles are dead, because they're not. And the winning ads are all great in their own right. But where's the interactive thinking-the kind Old Spice employed when they had their spokesman create hundreds of personalized videos for personalities across the web? Or that Tipp-Ex used with their "hunter shoots a bear" ad? Or Google's Chrome Speed Test ad that was part quiz, part commercial? On the original, Anderson specifically solicits videos featuring a "new use of technology." I suppose it's possible they didn't have very many interactive ads submitted, but that seems a little strange. Maybe they had interactive ads submitted that simply weren't very good? Or maybe I'm just being too picky. The Batelco ad had an interactive Facebook component, and the Target ad definitely did some cool and innovative things with technology. I guess I just expected at least one ad that blew me away with some technique we've never seen before. All in all, though, I can't fault them for choosing the winners they did. Each demonstrates a clear step ahead of the advertising pack in thinking and execution. Seeing ads like these, and knowing there must have been many more that didn't make the final ten, gives me a lot of hope for the immediate future of video advertising... and online video in general.

One way to very quickly increase your web presence is by using pay-per-click advertising to have your business appear prominently in search engine results. This is probably the quickest way to promote your business, but is also probably the most expensive. You will need to budget carefully and ensure you make the most of any paid ads. Pay-per-click ads are sold by auction so they can get very expensive very quickly. If you do get one, create a strong landing page for people who click through. Ensure you have the systems in place to analyse the amount of traffic and custom you receive through your ad. You need this information to evaluate whether it was worth the investment. Join listing sites. Listing sites are essentially online databases which make large numbers of companies easily accessible and searchable.There are a number of major listing sites which are likely to appear higher up in search engine results than your own site. For this reason it's important to maximise your presence on these heavily frequented sites. Many listing sites are free to join and can direct a lot of traffic your way so you should take advantage of this. You may already have been added to listings and review sites by a customer, but by taking charge of your presence you can control how your business is presented. See which listings sites are most prominent in your field of business simply by searching online and writing down which ones come high in the results. Connect with web affiliates. You can join up with other businesses and develop mutually beneficial relationships. Web affiliates will typically provide links to each other's stores on their web pages to help direct traffic to your affiliates. This can be particularly effective when the online stores have something in common or sell complementary goods. For example if you sell hair care products you could share links with a store that sells skin care products, and recommend each other's goods. Only do this with a company you like and trust who share a similar ethos to you. You can expand these relationships into shared offers and deals if they prove effective and bring in traffic. As well as sharing links, affiliates can agree a deal to sell each other's products on their site. Method 2 Optimising Your Store for Search Engines SEO is a collection of techniques which increase the chances of your site being high up in search results on search engines. Rather than paying for a more prominent position, the practice of SEO can drastically help increase the profile and presence of your online store. It's free and effective, but it does take a little time to understand the principles of SEO and apply them to your website. Major search engines provide guides to how they work for those wishing to optimise their results. SEO is necessary primarily because of the ubiquity of search engines. Think about how you search for something online. Ask yourself how often you click through past the first couple of pages of results. You probably think you already have a decent idea of the key words that bring traffic to your website, but it's best not to leave any stone unturned when doing SEO. Use online tools to determine which words bring traffic to your store. There are a few different ways to measure key words. Key word frequency refers to how often a word appears in the title or description of a website. Be aware though, if you have stuffed your site full of key words it may be judged spam. The key word weight is the number of key words in comparison to the total number of words. By having less text on a page, you can achieve a heavier key word weight. The positioning of words in relation to each other is known as key word proximity. For example, if you are selling "black socks", you will outrank someone selling "black cotton socks" if the search term is "black socks". Having your key words high up on a page and prominent in headings and the first paragraph of text gives you a good key word prominence score. Similarly, having the words in titles or links can equal good key word placement. Once you have a clear picture of the best key words for driving traffic to your site, and how to include them in your web copy and site design it's time to put this into practice. Give your website a thorough audit revising main sections to make sure they are optimised for key words in frequency, weight, position, prominence and placement. Remember to do this in a considered and careful way. If you load it down with key words out of context your site may be deemed spam and ignored. Put key words in tags, titles, links and high up in copy.

Media fragmentation is accelerating. Mass media is losing its mass. The Grammy Awards and Winter Olympics were once regarded by advertisers as vast oceans of interested viewers. This year America yawned and ignored these events completely; too much to do, too little time. To advertise effectively today, you must abandon the old-school idea of "reaching the masses." The famous ad man Morris Hite, who was known for his good-ol'-boy approach to advertising, said it best when he quipped, "There is no such thing as national advertising. All advertising is local and personal. It's one man or woman reading one newspaper in the kitchen or watching TV in the den." The key to effective advertising today is to focus on the individual. Here are some low-cost ways to do it: Door-hangers on doorknobs. If your target is geographically defined, such as a day care or grocery store, print a specific offer on door-hangers and place them on doorknobs in your area. This method will produce results in direct proportion to the strength of your offer. For example: "Professional day care for your little ones" is less likely to trigger people's interest in your day care than "Put your little ones in the care of someone you trust. Our professional day care services are available Monday through Friday." "Big enough to serve you, small enough to know you, " is less likely to create new shoppers than "Let us wash your car for free while you shop. 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. every Saturday at Super Foods." Flyers under windshield wipers. If you need to reach the drivers of pickup trucks, what better way than to send your doorknob-hanging team into parking lots with flyers to put under windshield wipers? Yes, they may get run out of the mall parking lot by that security guard in the golf cart, and don't be surprised if some lonely soul with nothing better to do calls you to complain, but the results are definitely worth it. Purchased word-of-mouth. Hire someone to be a walking ad and ride up and down in the elevators of tall buildings, stand at bus stops, wait at train stations, hang around in coffee shops and strike up conversations with strangers. "Have you tried that new deli over on 4th street? It's awesome." Sounds nuts, I know, but it works. Virtual showroom. Build a website to serve as a virtual showroom. It's one of the best advertisements there is. Use it when people call to ask details about your company, your products or your services. "Are you sitting in front of a computer? Good." Most people will be, or can easily walk across the room to one. "Now go to Blahblah.com. Yeah, that's me, there on the right. Now click the button that says 'Equipment.' See that second photo?..." Think of this website as a place where you sit down to talk with interested prospects. Make sure the virtual showroom is equipped with all the same tools and props as your physical showroom. You'll be shocked what it does for the conversion rate of inquiries. Nighttime silhouettes. You've probably never seen one, but that's all the more reason you should do it. Nobody else in your town has seen one either. First, locate a windowless wall at least three stories tall in a part of town that has lots of traffic at night, especially foot traffic. Then arrange with the owner of that building-and the building across the street-to let you install a logo projector. They're unbelievably effective. And in the long run, cheap. In some situations you can even use an old slide projector to achieve the desired effect. T-shirts and vests. My rather successful little ad firm, with its 41 offices worldwide, was launched in 1980 with a t-shirt advertising a telephone thought-for-the-day on an answering machine. "Take a Break in Your Day. Dial Daybreak. 258-7700." I could only afford one such printed t-shirt. I wore it a lot. Hand stamps. Someone I know recently attended a ticketed event that required a hand-stamp for readmission. The hand-stamp was a delightful little mini-ad for one of the sponsors. Can you imagine a better advertising vehicle for creating personal identification with a brand? There's something about looking down at your own hand and seeing a brand image that's part of you for the evening and knowing that the image has value. You're having fun, the brand is there, and it's part of you. The ink might...