The chief executive officer, Bob Parsons, of the popular Internet services company, GoDaddy Inc., is being heavily criticized today after a video showing him killing an elephant in Zimbabwe made the rounds on the Internet starting early this morning.

In the video embedded below, Mr. Parsons slayed the elephant by firing two shots with a rifle, causing a herd of other elephants to scatter amid the night commotion.

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Digital screens that can gather information about consumers are growing more common in stores and other public places. In response to privacy concerns, trade associations have issued privacy standards. Will they be enough?

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Harley Geiger, Policy Counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), a non-profit public interest organization based in Washington, DC. With expertise in law, technology, and policy, CDT’s mission is to keep the Internet open, innovative, and free. Geiger wrote a paper on digital signage privacy standards for CDT and worked with Digital Signage Federation to adapt the paper into their guidelines.

All too often, it is only after public uproar that companies see the value of privacy and adopt safeguards that should have been present in the first place. For industries seeking to grow in visibility and to attract and retain customers, it is not helpful to be burdened with a reputation for being intrusive or creepy. Consumer mistrust can last long after any public outcry fades. The digital signage industry just took a critical step in the other direction, adopting privacy rules before large-scale controversy.

The Digital Signage Federation, a major industry trade association, announced last week that it is adopting a comprehensive set of digital signage privacy standards for its member companies and their affiliates. The move comes as identification technologies are gaining traction within the digital signage industry. The digital signage trade associations are showing considerable prudence in adopting the standards now, rather than after a backlash over privacy. However, as digital signage transforms the media landscape, it remains to be seen whether the voluntary standards will be enough. That is up to the individual companies deploying and using the technology.

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PepsiCo has unveiled a new taller and skinnier soda can for its Pepsi soft drink, expected to debut some time in March.

The company says the new can was developed to celebrate “beautiful, confident women [everywhere],”

Pepsi is going to unveil the new can at an upcoming fashion show to be held in New York City days from now on February 11.

PepsiCo also owns a number of other well-known soft drinks, including Mtn Dew, among others, but the company will only offer its Pepsi beverage in the new can.

The retail giant will also continue to offer Pepsi in the traditional regular seize cans already available.

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The Seattle-based premium coffee brewer, Starbucks, has made the biggest update to its corporate logo since its inception in 1971 in Seattle’s Pike Place Market.

The logo now entirely features the sea nymph, and no longer includes the “Starbucks coffee” wording around the logo.

This March would mark forty years since the company first launched, and today, the company offers a lot more than just coffee.

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Canada’s largest cellular telecom by subscribers, Rogers Communications, could face stiff penalties imposed by the Canadian Competition Bureau (CCB), after an internal investigation into allegations made by competitors concerning advertising claims were found to be inaccurate.

The investigation was initiated last September following a complaint to the bureau by one of Canada’s latest discount telecom players, Wind Mobile, who argued information conveyed in television and print ads for the Rogers discount telecom, Chatr, were false and misleading.

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Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Harley Geiger from the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), a non-profit public interest organization based in Washington, DC. CDT’s mission is to keep the Internet open, innovative, and free.

The digital signage industry has established a burgeoning offline version of the behavioral advertising that currently occurs online. Digital signage companies increasingly use facial recognition, RFID, Bluetooth, and other technologies to track consumers and tailor ads to their personal information. Several uses of these technologies have proven controversial, and some systems‚ such as one using license plate scanners, have been scrapped altogether due to privacy issues.

(What is digital signage? See my previous post, Ads with Eyes. Or, for a dramatization of digital signage gone wrong, watch the famous advertising scenes from the movie Minority Report.)

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Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Joseph Pope (Linkedin), who works in Broadcast Media. He previously worked at MTV Networks as a Senior Sales Planning Analyst. He has BS, Information Studies and Technology from Syracuse University, and has a MBA, Finance and Media Management from Fordham University.

Comcast Spotlight, the ad sales division of Comcast, announced on Thursday that interactive television (iTV) advertising is now available in 30 U.S. markets, reaching more than 10 million homes. Comcast has a total footprint in 80 U.S. markets, reaching around 30 million homes.

iTV is an appealing option for advertisers, compared to having viewers record a show and fast forward through the entire commercial. In that scenario the brand message is lost and the ad buy is wasted. With iTV the viewer is engaged, educated and perhaps persuaded to make a purchase.

“The message from clients couldn’t be clearer: more than ever, their focus is on the return on their marketing investment,” said Kevin Smith, Group Vice President, Spotlight Integrated Media Sales. “Combining qualified leads and accountability with cable television’s reach and ability to efficiently segment audiences makes spot advertising an even more powerful tool.”

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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.