How to Build Brands on the Internet

From Cheap Talk,

A major theme of the conference was market design and I heard a story repeated a few times by participants connected with research and implementation of online ad auctions.

Ads served by Yahoo!, Google and others are sold to advertisers using auctions. These auctions are run at very high frequencies. Advertisers bid for space on specific pages at specific times and served to users which are carefully profiled by their search behavior. This enables advertisers to target users by location, revealed interests, and other characteristics.

Not content with these instruments, McDonalds is alleged to have proposed to Yahoo! a unique way to target their ads and their proposal has come to be known as The Happy Contract. Instead of linking their bids to personal profiles of users, they asked to link their bids to weather reports. McDonalds would bid for ad space only when and where the sun was shining. That way sunshine-induced good moods would be associated with impressions of Big Macs, and (here’s the winner’s curse) the foul-weather moods would get lumped with the Whopper.

WTF Story of the Day

The Reddit headline for this story goes "We’ve secretly replaced this couple’s alarm clock with a Chevy Malibu. Let’s see if they notice the difference."

CNN has the full take. What's great is that CNN has to use the word "allegedly" in front of any crime. So you get reporting that goes:

With motor fluid spraying their faces and the weight of a car numbing their bodies, two Nevada college students struggled to stay calm after a drunk driver allegedly tore into their home, ripping them from their slumber.

Kristin Palmer and Trent Wood were asleep in their home last week when a motorist allegedly drove into their bedroom around 4 a.m., mistakenly believing it was his ex-girlfriend's home.

Allegedly? I think the photos of the car inside the house, the ER calls, the testimony from the College students, etc. all add up to a fairly convincing story.

I wonder what the protocol is for this type of tone. If a bombing goes off somewhere, should they say it's an "alleged" bombing? If there is a suicide bomber involved; did he "allegedly" cause the explosion? Or do you only need to use "allegedly" if there is a criminal case involved? In which case; it's a little odd that the factual circumstances behind an event must be discussed with an ambiguous tone as soon someone investigates the case.

I mean, if we can't be sure about whether or not someone drove a car into a home; what basis does CNN have for any of their stories?