This is a guest post by Harley Lorenz Geiger from the Center for Democracy & Technology

The digital signage industry is rapidly becoming aware of the privacy issues raised by interactivity and audience measurement techniques. There is, however, no industry-wide consensus about how to address those concerns. Some industry figures agree that privacy guidelines need to be adopted if audience measurement and other digital signage applications are to progress. Others, though, have referred to calls for the industry to be sensitive to privacy as “attacks” and have condemned privacy concerns as a lot of hype over nothing. The privacy issue is real, particularly if one considers the big picture of where digital out-of-home (DOOH) media is headed.

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This is a guest post by Harley Lorenz Geiger from the Center for Democracy & Technology

Marketers are creating digital signs that can display targeted ads based on information they extract from examining the contours of individual human faces.

These smart signs are proliferating in commercial establishments and public places from New York’s Times Square to St. Louis area shopping malls. They are a powerful innovation in advertising, but one that raises compelling privacy issues – issues that should be addressed now, before digital signs that monitor our behavior become the new normal.

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Check out Google’s first television ad, developed by Google Japan.

24-year old founder and CEO Mark Zukerberg of Facebook showed everyone at the World Economic Forum in Davos something very kool. He polled more than 100,000 Americans asking them if they thought President Obama’s new fiscal stimulus package would be enough to get out of recession. Two out of Five thought it would not be enough.

What is interesting is how he was able to get more than 100,000 responses from very targeted groups of people in a matter of minutes. Facebook has amassed a wealth of information from its 150 million strong user base (check out Facebook Planatir to see a geographical representation of users communicating) and it now plans to capitalize on the wealth of information by giving more access to corporations for market research purposes. Marketers will be able to use information you put on your Facebook profile, including your current mood, your location, content you upload, to poll and analyze you.

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You just launched your business. You make all the operations, finance, and marketing decisions. But how well do you really know your market? Are you doing everything you can to maximize ROI from your campaigns? Many people think they know their market all too well, unfortunately, that is not the case. In this post, I will discuss the various steps you should consider to better understand your market and hopefully maximize your return. The biggest pitfall is lack of planning because people don’t take the time to layout a map of what they need to do. That is why I’ve developed an outline for you to consider when planning for your own business.

Step 1 – Know Your Environment
The first thing you should do is prepare a situation analysis. You should firstly start by looking at past business and marketing plans. The whole point to this step is to analyze your environment. This includes identifying competitors, the various macroeconomic factors that impact your environment and the various driving forces behind these changes. Typically, the driving forces affect legal, technological, and market related factors, so you should be aware of how these changes will affect your environment Read the full story

So, you have your online business that’s getting global hits, but, within these markets there are many differences you should be aware of that can help ensure you provide the most value to all your visitors that will help maximize your sales.

In this post, I examine various issues that you should consider when you develop marketing campaigns and applications for your online business.

One of the biggest pitfalls to having a truly successful online business is the failure to realize that dissimilar markets require different needs. This is especially true for people in North America. We’ve become accustom to making instant payments online with PayPal and Google Checkout, and to constantly being connected with very few service interruptions. But the truth is many profitable markets in the rest of the world aren’t as nearly as advanced as North America.

One primary issue to consider is that different markets have different infrastructure. Connection speeds will therefore vary and it could be fairly costly for a user to use the internet. For that reason, you should remember to build your web applications as simply as possible to minimize load times. For example, subscription costs in Japan are about $25 per month, compared to about $50 for comparable service in Switzerland. Read the full story