IBM’s “People For Smarter Cities” ad campaign, created by Ogilvy.

In today’s Signal: Ads that are clever and utilitarian; Snapchat: more than just a novelty; the technologies behind the NSA’s data-collection practices; programmatic’s problems; publishers look for the mobile money; Google offers native ads through DoubleClick; the cost of Cannes; and more.

To the links…

These Brilliant Ads Don’t Just Pitch You, They Double as Benches, Shelters and Ramps (TNW) IBM’s “People For Smarter Cities” ad campaign, created by Ogilvy, will make you see ads in a whole new and entirely useful way way. By adding a simple curve to the design, the ads double as a benches, shelters and ramps. Clever!

Snapchat Hiring Massive Sales Team, Said To Be Raising $100M At A Near $1B Valuation To Pay Them (TechCrunch) Snapchat, a photo messaging app developed by four Stanford University students, is aggressively recruiting sales people from Stanford as well as USC for its impending debut of a monetization scheme. It’s raising $100 million at a valuation as high as $1 billion to pay those new hires and others, as well as buy more servers. While many wrote off Snapchat as just a novelty, it’s becoming more and more clear that it’s actually an important new medium for communication. But can they create a place for brands?

Under The Covers of the NSA’s Big Data Effort (GigaOm) We’ve been learning more and more about the NSA’s recently uncovered data-collection practices. In this piece, GigaOm’s Derrick Harris shares what he knows about some of the technologies underlying them, what the NSA can and can’t do with the data, and the policies that are in place. “The technological linchpin to everything the NSA is doing from a data-analysis perspective is Accumulo — an open-source database the agency built in order to store and analyze huge amounts of data,” he writes. “Accumulo is especially adept at analyzing trillions of data points in order to build massive graphs that can detect the connections between them and the strength of the connections.”

At Video Forum, Major Publishers Embrace Programmatic, As Buyers Demand Outcomes  (Ad Exchanger) Programmatic ad sales methods are becoming mainstream for major publishers that built their businesses on print and glossy magazine pages. David Kaplan covers how they’re addressing the problems that programmatic has forced on them, namely the struggle over developing a common metric, and how the values of inventory change when costs are shaved thanks to greater automation. “Those problems weren’t solved at the video ad services provider LiveRail’s Video Publisher Forum,” he notes, “but they did get a full hearing.”

What Cannes Really Costs (Digiday) Next week, more than 10,000 people will descend upon the French Riviera for the Cannes Lions festival. The festival celebrates the most creative work the ad industry has to offer. Jack Marshall breaks down the costs, from entry fees to yacht hires.

More Publishers Tap Responsive Ads (Digiday) As publishers across the board see more of their traffic coming from mobile devices, it’s now crucially important they find ways to better generate more revenue from those audiences. Say Media is selling responsive ad formats instead of device-specific ones in an effort to help publishers figure it all out. “The company launched new responsive ad units on its readwrite.com property this week to coincide with the site’s redesign,” writes Jack Marshall, “but it will eventually roll them out across its entire portfolio, which includes brands such as xoJane, Remodelista and Gear Patrol. The hope is that the large, visual units will attract dollars from big brands. Siemens is the first to buy them.”

From Legolas To Upfront Digital Media: Aiming At Programmatic Direct (Ad Exchange) Legolas Media has re-branded the company Upfront Digital Media, effective immediately. The company claims to be a cross-screen, multi-format programmatic direct solution, offering a mixture of digitally addressable targeting, which is popular in spot markets, while guaranteeing the reach and scale of upfront buys presented via an advertiser’s insertion order.

Google to Offer Native Ads on Publisher Sites (BtoB) Google has announced it will begin offering native ads through its DoubleClick display ad platform on publisher websites. The company is testing the ad units, which look like surrounding journalistic content but are actually sponsored by advertisers, with a handful of publishers, and will expand the service in the coming months.

Ernst & Young: Digital entertainment revenue to surpass ‘traditional’ media by 2015  (zdNet) A new report from Ernst & Young suggests that the entertainment industry is in the middle of a shift, projecting that digital entertainment revenue will surpass that of “traditional” media by 2015. “Interestingly, the report didn’t explicitly define ‘traditional media,’” writes Rachel King. “However, ‘digital media’ is easier to pinpoint as researchers reiterated advancements made by smartphones, tablets, and other online services. Analysts warned that entertainment companies only have a narrow window of opportunity to extend their lead — or catch up — with the digital transformation underway.”

AOL Chief Seeks Standards for Native Advertising (AdWeek) AOL CEO Tim Armstrong believes that the big roadblock for native advertising is its ability to scale. He believes that the publishing community must band together to create standards around native advertising. According to Armstrong, If a company can’t do it at scale, “it’s going to end up being too expensive to actually create native ads on all these different platforms, and that’s going to even lean more heavily into programmatic, because it can be done at a high scale.”

Sponsored Content’s Got a Cost Problem (Digiday) Compared to the low cost of most of online advertising, sponsored content is at risk of being just not worth the effort, even if it is more effective than old-fashioned banner ads. Adam Broitman, VP of Global Digital Marketing at Mastercard, and Ron Faris, CMO of Virgin Mobile, weigh in on the issue.

The official seal of the National Security Agency.

In this week’s Signal: The NSA’s Prism program, questions about how it was reported, and reactions to it; advertisers’ social media content problem; Facebook’s new ad strategy; Launch founder Jason Calacanis on why he broke up with YouTube; Google’s decision to allow advertisers to run images with search ads; the next generation of mobile-first Web design; Gary Vaynerchuk’s new social media strategy; the NYSE’s ‘Big Stage’; why blogging and revenue-generation don’t have to be at odds with each other; and more.

To the links…

U.S., British Intelligence Mining Data from Nine U.S. Internet Companies in Broad Secret Program (WP) Washington Post writers Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras sparked outrage with this report that the National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies. The program, code named PRISM, extracts audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets.

The real story in the NSA scandal is the collapse of journalism (ZDnet) Well, the story certainly has spiraled. This piece notes how strongly our society, and in particular our journalists, want to believe that the government really is doing what we suspect they are doing. It documents how the Washington Post (and by extension, many other outlets) most likely didn’t get the story above right. I don’t believe we’ve even scratched the surface of “the truth” in this matter, but it’s a major win that we’re even talking about it as passionately as we are now.

“Direct Access” Is The Defining Phrase Of The NSA Scandal (BuzzFeed) The Washington Post’s initial report about PRISM, a massive NSA digital surveillance operation, alleged that it gave tech companies “direct access” to the servers of America’s largest tech companies. This particular detail, it seems, is one that these companies feel they can respond to — and they have.

What the …? (Google Blog) Larry Page, CEO of Google, and David Drummond, the company’s Chief Legal Officer, respond to press reports alleging that Internet companies have joined a secret U.S. government program called PRISM to give the National Security Agency direct access to our servers. “First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers,” they write. “Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday. Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process.”

Tech Companies, Bristling, Concede to Federal Surveillance Program (NYT) Discussions between the government and tech giants have opened about developing technical methods to more efficiently and securely share the personal data of foreign users in response to lawful government requests. According to the Times, “In at least two cases, at Google and Facebook, one of the plans discussed was to build separate, secure portals, like a digital version of the secure physical rooms that have long existed for classified information, in some instances on company servers. Through these online rooms, the government would request data, companies would deposit it and the government would retrieve it.” Since tech companies’ cooperation with the government was revealed Thursday, tech execs have called for more transparency.

Boundless Informant: The NSA’s Secret Tool to Track Global Surveillance Data (Guardian) The National Security Agency has developed a powerful tool for recording and analyzing where its intelligence comes from. The tool, called Boundless Informant, details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks, raising questions about the NSA’s repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications.

President Obama’s Dragnet (NYT) The New York Times editorial board believes that the Obama administration has now lost all credibility on the issue of phone data collection. According to the board, “Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. … Based on an article in The Guardian published Wednesday night, we now know that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency used the Patriot Act to obtain a secret warrant to compel Verizon’s business services division to turn over data on every single call that went through its system. We know that this particular order was a routine extension of surveillance that has been going on for years, and it seems very likely that it extends beyond Verizon’s business division.”

The Distasteful Side of Social Media Puts Advertisers on Their Guard (NYT) Advertisers are trying to figure out how to prevent their brands from appearing on social media pages that contain offensive content. The problem came to light last week when, after failing to get Facebook to remove pages glorifying violence against women, feminist activists waged a digital media campaign that highlighted marketers whose ads were found alongside those pages. Nissan and several smaller advertisers temporarily removed their ads from the site.

Facebook Changes Ad Strategy to Woo Madison Avenue (CNBC) To fix its problem of having too many ad programs which are complicated and confusing, and, as a result, discourage ad buyers from spending, Facebook announced that it will offer more solution-oriented programs. The goal is to help brands drive in-store sales, generate online conversations, drive app downloads, and improve brand awareness. With this new approach, Facebook is slashing the 27 ad products it offers to just six or seven over the next six months.

I Ain’t Gonna Work On YouTube’s Farm No More (Launch) Launch founder Jason Calacanis spent the last year as a funded YouTube partner and was one of the top 10% of content creators who had their deals renewed in ‘cycle two.’ But he turned down their money, and in this editorial he explains why. The bottom line, he says, is that “someone needs to create a viable alternative to YouTube, even if it’s the top 100 channels on YouTube getting together and creating their own product that lets content creators own the relationship with their users and advertisers.”

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Google Allows Advertisers to Run Images Alongside Search Ads (Biz Journals) Last Wednesday, Google announced that it would allow advertisers to run images alongside their search ads. Advertisers can choose the images to be displayed and send them in for review. The company emphasized the need for necessary rights to the images, and said that image extensions are running in English globally.

Native is the Only Advertising Solution for Mobile (Digiday) Patrick Keane, President of Sharethrough and a veteran of the consumer Internet industry, believes that the next generation of mobile-first Web design is about feeds and streams, not columns, banners and boxes. He touts that the user consumption paradigm on mobile is feeds, not banners, splash pages, pre-roll or other interruptive traditional IAB units. “Publishers are seeing that an average of 30 to 40 percent (and in many cases higher) of their audience and traffic migrate to the mobile Web,” he writes. “Interruptive traditional desktop advertising strategies are threatening to derail mobile monetization before it starts. Mobile will be part of the digital marketing mix only if the advertising is user initiated, and native is the best solution.”

Why Gary Vaynerchuk’s New Social Media Strategy Should Change The Way You Do Business (Forbes) Gary Vaynerchuk relaunched his blog on Wednesday, signaling that he’s going to become an even greater content provider. Forbes reports that he’s redeployed an employee at VaynerMedia, his social media consultancy, to “shadow” his life “by following him at conferences and key local events to record his remarks and turn them into social media content.” Vaynerchuk believes it’s only a matter of time before this arrangement becomes common, and cautions that throwing up your hands and saying you’re too busy just isn’t an option.

NYSE Jumps on Content Marketing Trend with New Site, The Big Stage (Adweek) The New York Stock Exchange has launched a standalone, photo-heavy site designed by Digitas and called The Big Stage. Visitors to the site can find videos, feel-good profiles, Q&As around NYSE-listed companies and their executives, and more. “Hard-hitting journalism it’s not,” writes Lucia Moses, “but with a small army of 10 behind it, The Big Stage is the latest example of how brands are putting big resources in the service of audience engagement, lured by the idea that marketers can be publishers. Indeed, Marisa Ricciardi, CMO of the exchange, called the site NYSE’s “first entree into brand journalism.”

Bloggers: Don’t Bet on Display Ads (Digiday) Oliver Deighton, Vice President of Marketing at VigLink, believes that display advertising won’t enhance blogs, but native advertising can. “There’s a simple truth about blogs,” he writes. “Readers rarely, if ever, come to one to be marketed to. … Ads are an interruption, a betrayal of the natural flow individuals expect of a well-written, informative blog. Yet blogging and revenue-generation don’t have to be at odds with each other. What many bloggers, online forums, product review sites and other “independent” sources of online content haven’t yet embraced is that the very thing people come for, credibility, is a trait that has economic value.”

Why Content Marketers Should Love Programmatic Marketing (Ad Exchanger) Chris Sukornyk, Founder and CEO of Chango, pens this latest “Data Driven Thinking” column about how programmatic marketing is quickly evolving beyond direct response. He looks at the two fundamental ways to use programmatic marketing for content campaigns: on-site content optimization and off-site content optimization.

eMarketer: Amazon Ad Revenues To Reach $835 Million This Year (Ad Exchanger) As our own John Battelle predicted in January of this year, Amazon is breaking out. Worldwide advertising revenue for the company will reach more than $800 million in 2013.

Twitter Ad Exchange Excites Media Buyers (Digiday) Jack Marshall asks five agency executives about the prospect of a Twitter exchange or retargeting product.

Facebook Is For Old People (Lefsetz) Every once in a while an article like this one comes around, touting that the young generation is technologically hip and that the gray-haired generation is stuck in yesterday’s Internet just waiting to die.

Twitter plans ad exchange. (Photo: Courtesy of Mashable)

In this week’s Signal: Google, global king of media; Twitter plans an ad exchange; Edelman’s new mantra; the disease of low-quality marketing content; tech startups help brands automate pieces of content; shedding a light on being kept in the ‘data dark’; the Economist dares you to “go deep”; New York Times to embrace new sponsorship opportunities; Eric Picard on fraud in digital advertising; and more

Google Ranks as World’s Largest Media Owner (The Drum) ZenithOptimedia’s Top Thirty Global Media Owners report ranks Google the world’s largest media owner, with media revenues of $37.9B. That’s 39 percent higher than nearest competitor DirecTV Group ($27.2B). According to The Drum, “it was found that Google alone accounted for 49 percent of the world’s Internet ad spend, Yahoo for six percent and Microsoft and Facebook both stand on four percent. It was the first time that Facebook and Microsoft have made the list, which was last published in 2010.”

Twitter Preps Ad Exchange to Rival Facebook’s (Ad Age) Like Facebook did with Exchange, Twitter is planning to let brands re-target people who visit their sites with ads. According to Ad Age, “Twitter would also like brands to buy directly on the exchange and has reached out to at least one, a multichannel retailer, per an executive familiar with the matter.” With an exchange, Twitter would benefit from advertisers’ growing adoption of display re-targeting and, more broadly, the practice of buying online advertising through exchanges via automated real-time auctions.

Show Me (a Little of) the Money (Edelman) Richard Edelman, president and CEO of Edelman, discusses the new mantra at the company, which is that the paid ought to support the earned and owned content, to make it work harder and more intelligently than a classic media buy that stands on its own. This means flipping the traditional model on its head. “Our advantage will never be scale in buying; rather we will have a more intelligent approach, a smart bomb instead of multiple bomber runs,” he writes. “But to do this, we will have to be given access to some advertising funds to be used at our discretion when a story seems to be taking off in popularity. We also need some money to initiate a surround-sound approach from conference sponsorship to proprietary content creation to online discussion moderation and aggregation of related content. So clients will have to entrust us with some of the paid media funds, then hold us to even higher standards for delivery of results.”

Cleaning Up Content Marketing (Digiday) “Low-quality content is a disease that has the potential to damage the effectiveness of content marketing for everyone, including the marketers who are executing it well,” writes Andrew Susman, president of content marketing management company Studio One. When a reader clicks on what looks like a promising link, only to find it is just a disguised marketing pitch, he’ll ignore anything that looks similar. That type of marketing “abuse” is degrading the effectiveness of the content tool. “Unfortunately there is no magical review board to provide a “seal of approval” for quality branded content,” Susman correctly states, “so it comes down to marketers and publishers respecting their consumers.”

Automation Comes to Content Marketing (Digiday) A number of technology startups are helping brands automate pieces of brand content. There are content creation companies, such as Contently and Percolate, and then there are distributors, such as Taboola or Outbrain; the latter let brands generate traffic to a brand’s piece of content via other sites. “The bet all are making,” according to Josh Sternberg, “is that some degree of tech is needed to make this scale.” But, let’s not forget that brands still need to create the content. And that takes humans, not machines.

If My Data Is an Open Book, Why Can’t I Read It? (NYT) Natasha Singer knows that her wireless providers — Verizon and T-Mobile — know all about her comings and goings and sell this info to marketers. So, she called to get this data for herself. But call-center agents told her that their companies don’t share customers’ own location logs with them without a subpoena. Singer then asked the same of other companies that gather data on her, and got similar answers. “Never mind all the hoopla about the presumed benefits of an ‘open data’ society,” she writes. “In our day-to-day lives, many of us are being kept in the data dark.”

The Economist Raises Eyebrows with BuzzFeed Ad (boing boing) The Economist is challenging what you know in order to expand your worldview, and it has enlisted comedian and actor J.B. Smoove to help take its message to the streets via  dare2godeep.com. Prepare to be schooled on the importance of going beyond the surface of the news.

New York Times Is Said to Consider More Sponsored Stories (Bloomberg) After10 straight quarters of declining newspaper ad sales, the New York Times is seeking new sources of revenue. Insiders say that outside execs, including BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti, were invited to a series of meetings to talk about creating successful native ads, which often take the form of sponsored stories. According to Bloomberg, “annual advertising revenue has been cut almost in half to $711.8 million last year from $1.27 billion in 2006, before the recession and a proliferation of mobile devices crippled the newspaper industry.” In embracing new sponsorship opportunities, the Times will make it clear when readers are seeing an ad versus a regular story.

NYT Is Open For Programmatic Business — ‘Issues’ Remain (Ad Exchanger) David Kaplan discusses one particular challenge for the New York Times’ display ad business: programmatic media buying methods. He also talks about the hiring of ad veteran Matt Prohaska as programmatic advertising director at the company. “The NYT still regards exchange and automated media selling environments with a clear degree of concern but also considers them manageable and advantageous,” he points out.

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Which Type Of Fraud Have You Been Suckered Into? (Ad Exchanger) In AE’s latest “Data Driven Thinking” column, Eric Picard, CEO at Rare Crowds, discusses two major types of fraud taking place today in digital advertising and affecting the online display space: page fraud and bot fraud. “Page fraud,” he writes, “is clearly aimed at benefiting the publisher but also benefiting the networks. Bot fraud is a little less clear – and I do believe that some publishers who aren’t aware of fraud are getting paid for bot-created ad impressions.”

The Newsonomics of Climbing the Ad Food Chain (Nieman) Digital advertising is still growing (at a 15 percent pace annually in the U.S.), but not so much for publishers. The New York Times Company reported digital ad sales down 4 percent for the 1st quarter, while McClatchy managed a 1.5 percent increase in the first quarter. Ken Doctor asks and answers, How can news companies compete with the Googles and Facebooks for advertiser dollars?

Why Tumblr Was a Massive Steal for Yahoo (ATD) Adam Rifkin, CEO of PandaWhale, takes a look at five factors which might lead a big company to value Tumblr more highly than Instagram: the more specific the interest, the more valuable; readers are far more valuable than writers; valuable content is king; the closer to the point of sale, the more valuable; and, search is the best entry point.

Continued Growth of Programmatic Requires Changes on the Supply-Side (Media Post) The programmatic market has seen unbelievable growth over the past couple of years. The good news is that demand-side platforms have scaled and both supply-side platforms and exchanges have seen growth; the bad news is that the supply-side has become complacent, and the old formula won’t drive growth in the future. What changes are required to transition into the new world? Adrian Tompsett shares a starting list that will benefit buyers and sellers alike.

Digital’s Newest ‘Shiny Object’ is Native Advertising (Digiday) Gabe Rogol, VP of Media Sales at Demandbase, believes that native advertising is a tactic that has been oversold as a potential solution to display’s performance problem. “The obsession with native advertising stems from the false belief among marketers that display advertising does not perform,” writes Rogol. “Rather than a performance problem, display has a metrics problem.” Many marketers still judge display advertising performance by click-through rate, a fundamental problem in the industry, he notes. When marketers abandon their fixation on CTR and explore new technologies to measure impact, display advertising will become a critical piece of marketing.

Americans Spend 58 Minutes a Day on their Smartphones (ZDNet) Experian Marketing Services published a new report last Tuesday positing that the average American spends approximately 58 minutes per day on a smartphones. “Smartphone owners spend 26 percent of the time on their phones talking, with another 20 percent devoted to texting,” writes Rachel King. “Social media follows up at 16 percent while mobile Web browsing accounts for 14 percent of time spent.” Many more findings inside.

Report: Online Video Ads More Effective Than TV (Mashable) A new eMarketer report found that 75% of ad agency executives say that online video ads are more effective than traditional TV ads, compared with just 17% who say they are less effective. “The popularity of digital video viewing is helping drive the expansion of the online video ad market,” the report read. “Ad execs may be responding to U.S. consumers’ seemingly endless demand for online video.” Overall, research estimates that video views among Internet users grew by 23% this year.

In this week’s Signal: Highlights from Internet Week and the CM Summit; how mobile developers are influencing website design; what it will mean for publishers if Google News kills sponsored content; getting on the same page about native advertising industry concepts; Google and the FTC; some numbers behind the mobile era of search; teens find Facebook exhausting; Wired’s new look; and more.

To the links …

Are Today’s App Companies Amusing Us to Death or Building the Future? (The Atlantic) Internet Week just finished up its sixth year in New York City, drawing the uber-creative and innovative — people and companies who want to change the world. Zachary Karabell writes about these companies, most of which didn’t exist a decade ago. “The swirl of Internet Week is exactly the right mix of ambition and dreams,” he posits. “The silliness of some of it doesn’t matter nearly as much as the animating spirit, which is key to our future.”

Digital Media Summit Ends With Mozilla And IAB On-Stage Debate (Ad Exchanger) As part of New York City’s Internet Week, LUMA Partners brought together ad tech executives from near and far for various events. At one, LUMA’s master of ceremonies and founder Terence Kawaja interviewed IAB President and CEO Randall Rothenberg. John Ebbert covers what happened next: “As the IAB chief finished explaining that Mozilla’s recent cookie-blocking moves were anything but consumer friendly, Kawaja ‘surprised’ the crowd – and seemingly Rothenberg, too – by inviting Mozilla SVP of Business and Legal Affairs Harvey Anderson to the stage to debate and discuss Mozilla’s recent moves.” Read the transcript of the discussion that followed.

The Top 5 Disruptions In Digital Media (Tim Cadogan) At the CM Summit last week in New York, CEO of OpenX Tim Cadogan led a conversation about the most significant disruptive shifts currently taking place across the digital media landscape. He later shared his thoughts on LinkedIn: “We are all simultaneously creating, being disrupted by and exploiting an incredible array of changes in the way our digital world works. While these shifts can sometimes seem overwhelming because they are proliferating and accelerating so fast, their broad themes can be simplified to help us understand their underlying meaning.” In this piece, Cadogan lists five of the most significant shifts currently taking place in the industry.

The Adobe View of Data + Creativity (Digiday) Since adding Web analytics provider Omniture and search platform Effective Frontier, Adobe has become a major player in the marketing world, positioned to bridge the gap between data and creativity. John Battelle interviewed Adobe CMO Ann Lewnes at the CM Summit in New York last week, discussing this, Adobe’s reasoning behind its Adobe Marketing Cloud product, and what the connection between the data and creative worlds will look like in five years.

If You’re Building Specifically for Mobile, You’re In the Past (Pando Daily) Neal Mohan, who leads Google’s display advertising efforts and is known to many as “Google’s $100 million man,” shared his thoughts on mobile at the recent CM Summit in New York. Mobile can no longer exist as a separate entity, he believes. It’s part of an integrated experience that spans not just phones and tablets but Google Glass, smartwatches, Spark Devices, SmartThings, etc. “If you’re building specifically for mobile you’re in the past,” Mohan said. “Consumers live in a multi-screen world. We see it as part of an integrated, consumer-centric experience.”

The Pageless Web (Pando Daily) Chuck Longanecker believe that since the Internet made its public debut in the mid-90s, basic website structure has remained virtually untouched. “Still tied to the same print-based paradigms and catalog-style navigation, these outdated formats now shackle designers to a limited framework that prevents them from truly exploring the advantages inherent in the digital medium,” he writes. Websites have suffered by emulating the print paradigm, he contends, but website designers are now taking cues from mobile developers, embracing visceral design to the evoke satisfaction we receive from our favorite mobile apps.

Will Google News Kill Sponsored Content? (Digiday) Sam Slaughter, managing editor at Contently, a technology company for brand publishing tools and talent, argues that Google’s recent announcement that it won’t include sponsored content in the search results for Google News doesn’t much matter at all for publishers. “Established news outlets already possess the captive audiences that brands are looking to reach, and they don’t need Google to drive traffic to those eyeballs,” he writes. “Sponsored stories do a great job of helping brands reach publishers’ already engaged audiences, and they’ll continue to do so. And an effective sponsored story gets traction through shares and reactions, not because of how attractive it looks to the Google robots.”

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Native Ad Terminology is a Mess (DIgiday) Is everyone on the same page when it comes to conversations around native advertising industry concepts? Jack Marshall believes that if content marketing is the future lifeblood of digital media, as many claim, perhaps it would serve the industry to at least agree on working definitions for these terms.

Google Faces New FTC Probe Over Display Ads (Washington Post) Is Google using its increasingly potent position in the online advertising market to undermine competition? Federal officials want to know. According to the Post, “this newest phase of federal scrutiny for Google underscores how regulators worldwide are perhaps the most important potential checks on the growth of an ambitious, highly profitable company as it seeks to consolidate its position in existing markets and move into several new ones.”

Welcome To The Mobile Era Of Search (SearchEngineLand) Google’s mandatory switch to enhanced campaigns in AdWords on July 22nd is, according to writer Josh Dreller, the “bang of the starting gun” for the new, mobile era in search. As we begin to understand how the second decade of modern paid search will be affected by this change, Dreller reaches for the numbers, and shares them here.

Facebook Losing Interest of Teenagers, Study Says (Buzzfeed) Last week, the Pew Research Center and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society released a study on teens, social media, and privacy. The study confirms what anecdotal evidence has suggested for some time now: Facebook is falling out of favor with teenagers. Buzzfeed’s Charlie Warzel reviewed the research, concluding that what’s “most telling … are the quotes from the teens themselves, which indicate not only fatigue, but the very real concern that the Facebook has simply become another exhausting extension of teens’ everyday lives.”

Tumblr Is Yahoo’s Instagram — Or Is it? (Ad Exchanger) AdExchanger asked a number of Yahoo and Tumblr watchers, including Jordan Bitterman
, SVP at Digitas, and Steve Katelman, EVP at Digital and Omnicom Media Group, for their take on the acquisition news, and what it means for the two from an advertising perspective.

‘Wired’ Completely Overhauls Print Magazine (Mashable) On Tuesday, Wired Magazine hits the stands with a new look. Redesigned by Scott Dadich, who before being named editor-in-chief last November worked as creative director of Wired from 2006 to 2010, the new look is modern and, according to writer Lauren Indvik, “feels more like a lifestyle magazine — and a rather sophisticated, thoughtful one at that.” Beyond the aesthetic changes, the magazine’s structure has been entirely revamped.

Welcome to the Future — A Programmable World. Photo: Courtesy of Wired.

In this week’s Signal: Tumblr joins Yahoo! (though it’s not officially official yet); The potential of a ‘programmable world’; social command centers that allow brands to think and act in the moment; apps that turn the personal into the predictive; the Bing Crosby/Nazis/Silicon Valley connection; quality, not velocity, is the future of online news; “Behind the Banner“ helps to understand how the ad tech ecosystem works; battling fraud: a tough fight; a human-values driven approach to privacy; stop dreaming, interactive TV is already here; baby boomer marketers don’t understand millennials; and more!

*A quick note: This week marks the New York debut of OpenCo, and FMP will be hosting a session in its NY offices. If you are going to OpenCo, sign up to attend our session. If you don’t know what OpenCo is, but will be in NY, check out OpenCo here.*

To the links ….

Yahoo Reportedly Moving Forward with Tumblr Acquisition as its Board Mulls $1.1B All-Cash Offer (TNW) According to Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka of AllThingsD, Yahoo’s board was slated to meet yesterday to vote on (and, apparently, to approve) a $1.1 billion cash offer for Tumblr. Yahoo is also said to be vetting video giant Hulu as another potential target for acquisition.

UPDATE: It seems the deal is indeed done, though the official word is not set to come till Monday morning, after this newsletter goes to press. Here’s a good overview from GigaOm, and here’s my take: Yahoo! And Tumblr: It’s About Display, Streams & Native at Scale.

Behind the Banner, A Visualization of the Adtech Ecosystem (Battelle Media) In which we introduce “Behind the Banner,” a visualization produced with Adobe and Jer Thorp and his team from The Office for Creative Research. The project is underwritten by Adobe as part of next week’s CM Summit, and began with a quest to understand the world of programmatic trading of advertising inventory – a world that “at times feels rather like a hot mess, and at other times, like the future of not only all media, but all data-driven experiences we’ll have as a society, period.” Read all about about it in this release.

In the Programmable World, All Our Objects Will Act as One (Wired) Bill Wasik, a senior editor at Wired, goes in depth on the subject of programmable data. Imagine a future world in which of all the devices, appliances and other ‘things’ in your home, office or anywhere talk to one another: the alarm clock to the coffeepot, thermostats to motion sensors, lights to stereo receivers, etc. “In this future,” writes Wasik, “the intelligence once locked in our devices now flows into the universe of physical objects. Technologists have struggled to name this emerging phenomenon. Some have called it the Internet of Things or the Internet of Everything or the Industrial Internet—despite the fact that most of these devices aren’t actually on the Internet directly but instead communicate through simple wireless protocols. Other observers, paying homage to the stripped-down tech embedded in so many smart devices, are calling it the Sensor Revolution. But here’s a better way to think about what we’re building: It’s the Programmable World.”

Inside Mastercard’s Social Command Center (Digiday) Several brands have designed social command centers to act as a hub where they can collect, analyze and then act on relevant social media conversations. Mastercard’s “conversation suite,” an open floor plan workspace is one. In the space, “a dedicated team of four sits and listens to what stakeholders are saying about the brand. When this team is sleeping, its counterpart in Singapore, Dubai and Australia takes over,” writes Giselle Ambramovich. “The tool is Web-based, so all 60 of Mastercard’s global PR staff have access to it. And some marketing and product specialists can access it as well. The main team (U.S.) of four collaborates internally with PR, marketing, product and customer service teams to better engage stakeholders.” Mastercard’s command center is not just monitoring social conversations, but also looking at everything from share of voice by region to pulling in all the press coverage that has included significant mention of Mastercard.

How Cisco Listens in Social (Digiday) Centralized social command centers, such as the three put in place at Cisco, help to ensure that social data eventually gets turned into some kind of action. Giselle Abramovich explains: “At one, the company identifies spikes in negative mentions that need to be investigated and influencers mentioning Cisco. The data is then sent to the appropriate business unit so that they can act on it. Another six-screen listening center allows Cisco sellers to show customers their social data in the hopes of winning new business. The last is a two-screen kiosk version of the listening center just outside the CEO and CMO’s office and displays social activity around topics such as earnings, acquisitions, launches or campaigns. This is a way of making sure social data reaches the very top of the organization.”

Inside the Digitas ‘Social Bullpen’ (Digiday) Two years ago, Procter & Gamble posed a challenge to integrated brand agency Digitas: Figure out a way to act more quickly and together, because the speed of social channels didn’t mesh with the slow agency-client process. The result: BrandLive, a ‘social bullpen’ embedded in six Digitas offices and designed to drive quick collaboration. “In New York, execs from certain client teams are surrounded by six plasma screens displaying all sorts of social content and data from which Digitas can mine and then create content in the moment,” writes Josh Sternberg. “Digitas calls the room ‘the stew,’ named because it’s where execs can ‘stew’ on ideas. The ever-present screens, pulsing with social activity data, are affectionately called ‘the wire.’ In the best-case scenario, this is where data means inspiration that quickly translates into action.” This type of nerve center can represent the physical manifestation of a mindset shift for a brand to think in the moment, according to Digitas execs.

With Personal Data, Predictive Apps Stay a Step Ahead (MIT Technology Review) New apps based on machine learning software can present users with timely information even without being directly asked for it. For example, they might automatically pull up your boarding pass just as you arrive at the airport, or tell you of a traffic jam that requires you to leave early for your next meeting. “These apps benefit from improved data mining techniques,” writes Tom Simonite, “but they’re also succeeding partly because of how they are presented to users. They are not cast as artificial butlers, a staple of science fiction that Apple tried to mimic with the voice-operated app Siri in 2010. Instead, apps like Google Now are intentionally made without personality and don’t pretend to be people.”

How Bing Crosby and the Nazis Helped to Create Silicon Valley (New Yorker) In the 1940s, one of the things Americans discovered when picking through German technology remains was magnetic tape. The Nazis had been using tape recording to broadcast propaganda across time zones. Engineers brought the discovery to Bring Crosby, who was a hugely popular radio personality at the time, making $30K a week as host of the “Philco Radio Hour.” Crosby was more than just interested. He saw this as a way to advance his art. So, he handed fifty thousand dollars to Ampex corporation to give birth to a new technology. Suddenly audio—recorded media—was flexible. And as tape recording caught on, along came computers with stored programs.

This Is What Happens When Publishers Invest In Long Stories (FastCo) Because Fast Company’s top editors had long felt that the discrete article format was insufficient for covering very large and complicated topics, they decided to experiment with a new, super-long article format akin to ‘”slow live blogging.” When they looked at the resulting traffic charts, their jaws dropped. Here’s what they learned about long form stories — and why quality, not velocity, is the future of online news.

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40+ CEOs, CMOs, VCs and media leaders in two days of unscripted conversation. (Recently added: Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann.) Come to the CM Summit to join the conversation about “Bridging Data and Humanity.” New York City, May 21-22. The only conference this year curated by your faithful correspondent. UPDATE: CM SUMMIT IS SOLD OUT, but we’ll keep the link open for any readers who might want to buy a last minute ticket. More than 500 people are registered!

Also, if it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter or RSS feed on the Signal home page (upper right box).

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Buyers Need to Help Clean Up Ad Tech (Digiday) Walter Knapp, GM and EVP of Media for Federated Media Publishing, discusses the battle against fraudsters that cheat or steal from legitimate marketer-publisher advertising transactions in the ad tech ecosystem. Federated has ramped up its anti-fraud efforts, but to win, according to Knapp, both the supply and demand side will have to lock arms. “This isn’t a supply-side problem or a demand-side problem; it’s a fundamental shared responsibility and a market problem.” Until the sides band together and collectively put the squeeze on the bad guys, the efforts of his teams and others’ to keep the networks scrubbed will go unnoticed by the ecosystem at large.

Devising A Personal Google Glass Privacy Policy — Future Participle (Medium) With Google Glass, we’re pretty far along into the process of learning to live in a world where a handheld recording device is in nearly everyone’s pocket. What does that mean for privacy? “Glass wearers permanently don the mediation between themselves and others — it’s constantly threatening,” posits Ryan Singel. “They’ve embraced being the uncle who won’t put down the video camera at the family gathering, despite pleas to put it away.” So Singel suggests a simple “humans.text” policy that offers a less technical and more human-values driven approach to privacy.

No Need to Dream of Interactive TV — It’s Already Here (Ad Age) We’ve all been waiting for interactive TV, but have we been waiting for it on the wrong screen? Yes, posits Jonathan Nelson: “Today’s TV is increasingly a laptop, mobile or tablet experience, unless it arrives on a ‘proper’ TV screen through a broadband-enabled device like an Xbox or Roku. It’s not coming through the cable operators that, at one time, were thought to hold the keys to iTV. … Given the rapid embrace of iTV services, it is not worth waiting around for the day when seamless, TV-based interactive video is a reality. Let’s accept that the hardware — the devices and infrastructure — are in place, but the ‘software’ — the partnerships and standards for iTV —are not.”

Baby-Boomer Marketers Are Misreading Millennials’ Media Behavior (Ad Age) Senior marketers seem convinced the methods and media that have worked over the past 30 years of their careers will continue to produce results with tech-savvy millennials, even though they have vastly different media habits. Why? Bonnie Fuller asks, and answers.

Facebook ‘Fatigue’ Stirs Concern from Investors (Financial Times) Though their views are mostly based on anecdotal evidence rather than hard statistics, many investors believe people under 25 are suffering from “Facebook fatigue” and defecting to other services, such as Twitter and WhatsApp. “Concern runs high,” writes Robert Cookson, “because people in their teens and early 20s will be critical for Facebook’s future – just as they drove its adoption a decade ago. Young people are often the first to use new technologies before being followed by rest of the population.” But Facebook’s biggest challenge might be the speed with which internet users – particularly younger ones – are shifting to mobile. (Registration necessary.)

The Design that Conquered Google (New Yorker) Over the past two years, smartly designed products marked by tasteful typography, artful use of white space and flatness, full-bleed imagery, and a general sense of restraint have emerged from Google. Google Now is one of those products. Now’s design was a culmination of everything that Google had done before. But it evolved in a mature, new direction, so that it looked quite unlike anything else Google had created. Nearly a year later, the crisp design cues of Google Now and other products are set to become one of the dominant ways in which Google presents certain types of information to users.

Why Is the Sound-Effects Guy From “Police Academy” Talking About Robots and Web Ads? (ATD) Solve Media has published an e-book, called “Bot or Not,” about robots, fake clicks and their effect on the Internet advertising business. The cool thing is that they hired actor Michael Winslow, the sound-effects guy from the “Police Academy” movies, to read it to kids, with a camera rolling. (Video.)

Does Joe Lunchpail Care ‘What They Know’? A Roundup Of Surveys On Ad Tracking Sentiment (Ad Exchanger) Research shows that in the age of social media a lot of consumers are willing to give a little more information about themselves if it results in a better experience. And that’s a big ‘if.’ “A lot of the impressions we’re making on the customer may have a detrimental impact on the relationship with that customer,” said Bob Dutcher, VP of marketing for InsightsOne. “The frustration is, and where marketers and companies can get in trouble, if they are leveraging that information but not giving something back to the consumer, not giving them a better experience. It has to be a two-way relationship.” The balance between protecting consumers’ privacy and reaching them with relevant targeted ads is a constant struggle for the online ad industry.

10 Lessons from the Top 25 Most Engaged Brands on Twitter (Forbes) Brands that have mastered Twitter understand the power of engagement and are creating extraordinary opportunities for their organizations. From Notebook to Disney, there are lessons to be learned.

YouTube Forecast to Make $4 Billion from Ads in 2013 (Beet TV) YouTube viewers have probably noticed that the service is upping the frequency of its pre-roll ads. According to analyst Ian Maude of Enders Analysis, YouTube will generate about $4 billion in advertising revenue this year. Data also shows that YouTube is now more popular than BBC iPlayer on UK cable operator Virgin Media’s connected TiVO service. “Overall TV viewing is growing, but that’s largely being driven by older people,” Maude added. “We’re seeing a divergence between what the under-35s and over-35s are doing.”