Gender and Interest Targeting for Sponsored Post Advertising at Tumblr

As one of the leading platforms for creative content, Tumblr offers advertisers a unique way of creating brand identity. Advertisers can tell their story through images, animation, text, music, video, and more, and promote that content by sponsoring it to appear as an advertisement in the streams of Tumblr users. In this paper we present a framework that enabled one of the key targeted advertising components for Tumblr, specifically gender and interest targeting. We describe the main challenges involved in development of the framework, which include creating the ground truth for training gender prediction models, as well as mapping Tumblr content to an interest taxonomy. For purposes of inferring user interests we propose a novel semi-supervised neural language model for categorization of Tumblr content (i.e., post tags and post keywords). The model was trained on a large-scale data set consisting of 6.8 billion user posts, with very limited amount of categorized keywords, and was shown to have superior performance over the bag-of-words model. We successfully deployed gender and interest targeting capability in Yahoo production systems, delivering inference for users that cover more than 90% of daily activities at Tumblr. Online performance results indicate advantages of the proposed approach, where we observed 20% lift in user engagement with sponsored posts as compared to untargeted campaigns.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, Proceedings of the 21th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2015), Sydney, Australi

Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence United States Senate on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election: Volume 2: Russia\u27s Use of Social Media, with Additional Views

In 2016, Russian operatives associated with the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) used social media to conduct an information warfare campaign designed to spread disinformation and societal division in the United States. Masquerading as Americans, these operatives used targeted advertisements, intentionally falsified news articles, self-generated content, and social media platform tools to interact with and attempt to deceive tens of millions of social media users in the United States. This campaign sought to polarize Americans on the basis of societal, ideological, and racial differences, provoked real world events, and was part of a foreign government\u27s covert support of Russia\u27s favored candidate in the U.S. presidential election. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence undertook a study of these events, consistent with its congressional mandate to oversee and conduct oversight of the intelligence activities and programs of the United States Government, to include the effectiveness of the Intelligence Community\u27s counterintelligence function. In addition to the work of the professional staff of the Committee, the Committee\u27s findings drew from the input of cybersecurity professionals, social media companies, U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and researchers and experts in social network analysis, political content, disinformation, hate speech, algorithms, and automation, working under the auspices of the Committee\u27s Technical Advisory Group (TAG). The Committee found, that the IRA sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton\u27s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin. The Committee found that the IRA\u27 s :lnformation warfare campaign was broad in scope and entailed objectives beyond the result of the 2016 presidential election. Further, the Committee\u27s analysis of the IRA\u27s activities on social media supports the key judgments of the January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections, that Russia\u27s, goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton,· and harm her electability and potential presidency. However, where the Intelligence Community assessed that the Russian government aspired to help President-elect Trump\u27s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him, the Committee found that IRA social media activity was overtly and almost invariably supportive of then-candidate Trump, and to the detriment .of Secretary Clinton\u27s campaign

The effect of social media and celebrities on Millennials’ Consumers : the Pantene example

The present dissertation provides an overview of significant marketing related topics such as digital branding, digital marketing, targeting, positioning, social media as a marketing tool and the effectiveness of celebrity endorsers’ campaigns. These topics are discussed and analysed in a case study focused on the haircare industry, where Pantene takes the centre stage. The case study introduces this extremely competitive industry, whose dynamics have been shifting due to the price sensitivity of the average consumer. Additionally, consumers spend, nowadays, most of their free time connected to the online world; therefore, brands have now to establish a presence in the digital world, in order to connect with its target audience. The entire dissertation revolves around the huge potential of social media as a marketing instrument that must be capitalized in today’s fast moving world. The main dilemma this dissertation attempts to resolve and provide an answer to, focus on how can Pantene target a younger age segment of consumers. To this end, celebrity endorsers are also worthy of being highlighted, as they perform a crucial role in influencing millennials’ behaviours and perceptions. A market research is performed, afterwards, in order to clarify the issues raised above and from which, a set of recommendations was produced. To conclude, a Teaching Note summarizes the case study and provides indications on how to explore it in a classroom environment.A presente dissertação oferece uma visão geral de importantes temas na área do marketing, como marketing e branding digitais, targeting, posicionamento, redes sociais como instrumentos de marketing e a eficácia de campanhas protagonizadas por celebridades. Estes tópicos são discutidos e analisados num caso de estudo focado na indústria do cuidado capilar, onde a Pantene ganha um lugar de destaque. O caso de estudo introduz esta indústria extremamente competitiva, cujas dinâmicas têm sido alvo de alterações devido à sensibilidade do consumidor médio relativamente ao preço. Adicionalmente, os consumidores passam, nos dias de hoje, a maioria do seu tempo livre conectados ao mundo online; por isso mesmo, as marcas têm de estabelecer a sua presença no mundo digital, de modo a estarem ligadas às suas audiências. Esta dissertação concerne o grande potencial das redes sociais enquanto instrumento de marketing que tem de ser concretizado nos altamente mutáveis dias de hoje. O grande dilema a que esta dissertação pretende dar resposta é o seguinte: como pode a Pantene atrair um segmento jovem de consumidores? Com este objectivo em mente, focamo-nos nas celebridades visto que elas desempenham um papel crucial em influenciar os comportamentos e percepções da Geração Y. Subsequentemente, de modo a clarificar as questões levantadas anteriormente, é apresentando um estudo de mercado, a partir do qual foi produzido um conjunto de recomendações. Para concluir, uma Nota de Ensino resume o caso de estudo e fornece indicações de como explorá-lo num ambiente de aula

Evolution of Ego-networks in Social Media with Link Recommendations

Ego-networks are fundamental structures in social graphs, yet the process of their evolution is still widely unexplored. In an online context, a key question is how link recommender systems may skew the growth of these networks, possibly restraining diversity. To shed light on this matter, we analyze the complete temporal evolution of 170M ego-networks extracted from Flickr and Tumblr, comparing links that are created spontaneously with those that have been algorithmically recommended. We find that the evolution of ego-networks is bursty, community-driven, and characterized by subsequent phases of explosive diameter increase, slight shrinking, and stabilization. Recommendations favor popular and well-connected nodes, limiting the diameter expansion. With a matching experiment aimed at detecting causal relationships from observational data, we find that the bias introduced by the recommendations fosters global diversity in the process of neighbor selection. Last, with two link prediction experiments, we show how insights from our analysis can be used to improve the effectiveness of social recommender systems.Comment: Proceedings of the 10th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2017), Cambridge, UK. 10 pages, 16 figures, 1 tabl

"What are you meant to do when you see it everywhere?": Young people, alcohol packaging and digital media

The consumption of alcohol plays an important part in the way in which people create identities and live their social lives. Alcohol brands become embedded in everyday life through marketing practices, and this is amplified by an increase in new technologies that facilitate the transference of marketing messages. This research explores how alcohol brands use social networking sites (SNS) and packaging as part of their repertoire of marketing activities, and how users respond to these activities

Profiling the Sport Blogosphere

The purpose of this study is to provide primary research regarding how sports blogs utilize the social media and generate revenue for their blog. This study begins with a literature review of the blogging world with a special emphasis on the sports sector of the blogosphere. The literature review is followed by a discussion of the research method of content analysis, which was employed to examine the selected sports blogs. Furthermore, recommendations are made concerning sampling methods and how future statistical sampling of the sports blogosphere could proceed to improve the representativeness of samples and data collection in this research topic

Disinformation and propaganda – impact on the functioning of the rule of law in the EU and its Member States. Study Requested by the LIBE committee. CEPS Special Report, February 2019

This study, commissioned by the European Parliament’s Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs and requested by the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, assesses the impact of disinformation and strategic political propaganda disseminated through online social media sites. It examines effects on the functioning of the rule of law, democracy and fundamental rights in the EU and its Member States. The study formulates recommendations on how to tackle this threat to human rights, democracy and the rule of law. It specifically addresses the role of social media platform providers in this regard

Digital Marketing in the Business Environment

Promotion of products has become an increasingly important component in the new digital age, mostly thanks to digital marketing. The traditional form of marketing is lagging behind digital marketing, which offers users new opportunities like personalized messages or answers to a search query. There are several ways to advertise on the internet, and in this paper, ways and tools will be presented that allow digital advertising as well as their advantages and disadvantages. Specifically, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, display advertising, social networking marketing and e-mail marketing will be discussed. Also, the goal of the paper is to enable more efficient creation and implementation of similar contents in new business environments through an insight into internet advertising, social and business networks