Last week I was scrolling through my bookmarks, when I found a curious addition - "Breaking News".

I didn't remember adding that bookmark. I suppose I might have done it by mistake...? Let's take a look at where it goes.

Oh. An advert. Shoved into my bookmarks by Opera.

I use an adblocker, so I couldn't see the content - but other people weren't so lucky:

It goes to a South African based "shock news" site. No news - well, unless you consider "woman wears bikini" to be news.

I complained, but this was the non-apology that I got.

Opera

@opera

Replying to @caryhartline@caryhartline @edent Hi, with new updates we sometimes add new bookmarks to the browser's speed dials. Better suggestions? Let us know :)

---

Here's a suggestion - don't put adverts in people's browsers! Seriously. You can't release a browser which blocks obnoxious adverts and then engage in the same scummy behaviour.

Now that Opera has lost its most passionate advocates, I'm deeply concerned that it will continue down this dark path of user hostility.

I'm switching to Firefox for Android. I've found an extension which does text-wrapping properly and I'm happy to be back in the land of Open Source.

Goodbye Opera, I've loved you for so long - but it's clear you don't respect users any more.

Hello you Foxy thing!

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

OMG! Genuine celebrity at #MozFest pic.x.com/fzhu4iolnw

---

This morning, I glanced bleary-eyed at my phone.

OH FUCK! THE HOUSE IS ON FUCKING FIRE AND MY FUCKING NEST ISN'T WORKING!

I sniffed the air. I couldn't smell anything strange. Perhaps it is deadly Carbon Monoxide.

I frantically clicked the email to see if I was about to be incinerated or gassed to death.

Oh. It's a marketing email. Nest wants me to buy another of their crappy products.

Now, perhaps I should have been more alert - but when I see an email which says "Nest. Smoke Alarm. Critical. Only if working" my first thought isn't "Golly! I sure could do with a few more smoke alarms!" My first thought, genuinely, was that there was an emergency.

To say that I'm upset with Nest is an understatement. The company has a troubled history with their products and their repeated inability to deliver a competent experience is leading me to junk their smoke alarm.

If you are making domestic IoT devices, remember you are being invited into someone's home. You are a guest and must behave with respect. To send a deliberately sensationalist email in the early morning is a gross breach of trust.

In this case, Mark's account has been hacked and the spammers are tagging lots of his friends. The post then shows up on my feed as "look what your friend is up to!"

Annoying. So, here's how to stop it. There's a slightly obscure FB privacy setting called: Review posts that friends tag you in before they appear on your Timeline?

Timeline Review controls whether you have to manually approve posts you're tagged in before they go on your timeline.

That means, you'll always be asked before people can tag you in a post. It's meant to be used so that people can't tag you in embarrassing photos - but it has the nifty side effect of stopping spammers posting their rubbish all over your friends' walls.

Visit https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=timeline&section=review&view and enable the setting to kill off the spam.

Tell your friends!

This is a trend I've recently started to see on Gmail - here's what it looks like and how it works.

So, what's going on here? How have they got an animated image into the subject line?

Here's the raw text of the message's subject line:

Subject:=?UTF-8?B?876tqQ==?==?utf-8?q?__=79=6f=75=27=76=65=20=62=65=65=6e=20=63=68=6f=73=65=6e=20=66=6f=72=20=33=30=20=66=72=65=65=20=73=70=69=6e=73_?==?UTF-8?B?876tqQ==?=

Let's take a look at the code sequence at the start and end of the subject: =?UTF-8?B?876tqQ=

As all good geeks know, characters outside the ASCII range are encoded as Base64 in emails.

The resultant character is U+FEB69 - a "Private Use" character which has no defined representation in Unicode.

For most of us, the character "󾭩" doesn't display as any meaningful symbol - but on the web version of Gmail, it shows up as: , a flashing star.

WTF?

Ok, here's what's going on...

Way back in the midsts of time (well, about 2009) there was no standard for Emoji. Each company made use of Unicode's private use characters in a different way. If you had a phone from Google and sent a message using the "Glowing Star Emoji" to a phone made by another manufacturer - the symbol would either not display properly, or show up as a completely different character!

Obviously, in an interconnected world, such a situation is untenable - so Google and several other companies set up the Emoji4Unicode project.

Google uses Private Use mappings to represent Emoji ("picture character") symbols in Unicode text. These characters are commonly used by Japanese cell phone carriers. This project makes these mappings available.

Google and other members of the Unicode consortium are also developing a proposal for the addition of standardized Emoji symbol characters to Unicode.

The Unicode consortium banged some heads together (in a friendly way) and everyone agreed on a new standardised set of characters.

The new Unicode standard has "Glowing Star" set as U+1F31F and looks like this: 🌟. (If your computer doesn't support Unicode 6.0 you can take a look at the official reference chart.)

But the old version lives on! The animated GIF lives at https://mail.google.com/mail/e/B69 where it is used for the web version of Gmail. (You can alter that end number to get all manner of odd characters.)

Modern Android phones still recognise this relic - although, in Google's typically slapdash fashion, Android's Gmail app won't display the animation in the subject line, only in the body:

The same happens with the iOS version of Gmail. Animated in the body, not in the subject line,

Try it yourself by sending an email with the subject and body "Star 󾭩 vs Animated 🌟".

It doesn't seem to work in Google Hangouts - or any other Google apps, just mail.

Interestingly, when sending this characters from the web or Android version of Gmail, it adds an "X-Goomoji-Subject" header and automatically converts the characters to GIFs. The Unicode is completely stripped away from the message.

So there we have it. An ancient form of Emoji, probably all but forgotten, has been resurrected by spammers in the hope that you'll notice their wares.

What a load of 💩!

IMDb was one of the earliest success stories for the UK Internet industry when, in 1998, Amazon.com bought them.

Given its proud heritiage, why don't Amazon care about the British users of its site? If you visit the site on your phone, this is the advert you see.

Oh! Cool! The new Kindle tablet. Why, I just gotta get me one of those! Let's click the link...

Oh...

Yup, the advert is for the American tablet. The price is listed in US Dollars and, once I'm on the Amazon.com website, there's no obvious way to get to the .co.uk version.

This is madness! The IMDb is consistently ranked in the top 50 most visited sites worldwide. Over 60% of its visitors are from outside the USA. Why are Amazon ignoring all those customers?

Mobile advertising really isn't that hard. You find a way to match a user to a product. One of the simplest ways to do that is to determine the country the user is in. You show Indian adverts to people living in India, and Japanese adverts to people living in Japan. That's not rocket science.

If, for some strange reason, you can only afford to design a single advert - your back end services should redirect the user to the website which is most appropriate. Most of the French people clicking on your link are going to want a site which is written in their language and priced in their currency.

It's unlike Amazon to leave money on the table like this. They have a vast international audience and yet they're simply ignoring their needs.

Why?

His argument was - and I paraphrase...

I don't mind the occasional advert - between the Farmville notifications and "inspirational" quotes, I barely notice them.

For me, this was quite the shocker. I don't see game invitations. I rarely see "spiritual" messages, or ill-informed racist rants. Why? Not because my friends are better than his - but because I make judicious use of the block button.

Look, we all have a friend / relative / former lover who we have to follow on Facebook. Just because we want to see photos of their new kitten, doesn't mean we have to share their taste in "LOL FUNNY FORWARD TO EVERYONE!!!11!!" posts.

Here's how I do it.

A good friend - otherwise sensible in all her endeavours - has taken to posting nonsense from a site the I personally cannot stand.

No need to break our friendship. See that ˇ in the corner? Give it a tap!

Right, let's get rid of everything from that site.

Why yes, yes I am sure that no good will come of reading "10 dogs who totally look like celebs (number 7 will blow your mind!)"

A fair question.

You can opt to feed the machine or not. Either way, the content will never blight you again.

Suppose you feel like you have made a tragic mistake and you won't be able to bond with your friends without having consumed the same memetically infested tripe as them?

On the main Facebook site (this won't work on mobile) you can edit everything you've blocked.

You can then click the little X to restore them.

Note, this setting lists all the Friends, Groups, and Pages you've blocked.

Bizarely, it only lists some of the apps that you've blocked. The rest live at https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=blocking

And, just like that, you can pretend that the people you're friends with on Facebook are normal and well adjusted members of society.

Of course, filtering reality like that may make life interesting when you meet them outside of Facebook...

I reported the company - Media Discovery - to the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) who, after a perfunctory investigation, decided not to prosecute. They bought the unlikely story that Media Discovery had a rogue employee trying to entice bloggers into breaking the law.

Well, the constant stream of visitors finding my blog by searching for "Media Discovery Blog Spam" would indicate that the ASA's investigation had no real impact on Media Discovery's behaviour.

In November, the ASA had the cheek to warn bloggers about accepting sponsored posts without revealing their origin.

We’re reminding bloggers who are paid to write positive reviews or comments about a product or service that they must be up-front with their followers by making clear that it’s advertising. Not only will this help bloggers avoid misleading people and breaking the ad rules, it will also stop them from potentially breaking the law.

Why are we doing this? We’ve received a steady stream of enquiries from bloggers wanting clarity on this issue and how the rules apply to their blogs. Some have also raised concerns with us, as well as via their own blogs, about social media and PR agencies who’ve apparently offered them money to advertise on their behalf while encouraging them not to declare that they’re doing so.

ASA - Blurring advertising and blogs – why it pays to know the ad rules

It's quite right that the ASA reminds bloggers of the law - but I think it's a bit hypocritical that they aren't going after the firms who are promoting this fraudulent method of advertising.

If you search through the ASA's recent rulings, you won't find any investigations into "sponsored posts" on blogs.

If you're a blogger and you've been contacted by someone who wants to run one of these dodgy adverts on your site - please make a complaint to the ASA.

A few weeks ago, I received this rather annoying message:

I'm not a gambler - and I've never had a business relationship with Coral. So why are they sending me this tripe? I took to Twitter to find out.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Hey, @Coral - SMS spam is not cool. Ever heard of opt-in consent? pic.x.com/zrtmcuyrkn

---

Coral

@Coral

Replying to @edent@edent Hi Terence. We're sorry to hear this wasn't of interest. Opt-out using the info provided and you won't recieve any future messages.

---

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Replying to @Coral.@Coral why did you spam me in the first place? I never gave you my number, not have you received permission to use it.

---

Coral

@Coral

Replying to @edent@edent Hi Terence. Rest assured your number has been lawfully obtained by us, through a third-party you have consented to.

---

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Replying to @Coral.@Coral no, it hasn't. When I submit a Data Protection request, are you going to be able to explain which 3rd party you got it from?

---

Coral

@Coral

Replying to @edent@edent Our twitter team can't provide any additional info on this unfortunately. You'll need to speak to Coral customer care on 0800 440011.

---

I spoke to customer care who were utterly bemused as to why I'd received this. They promised to look into it.

DBS

A few days later I got a voicemail from Martin Johnson of DBS Data. Run out of a small industrial estate in Chelmsford, DBS Data offers bulk SMS services as well as junk mail and email.

DBS finally got back to me about how my number ended up with them.

Following your recent communication I can confirm that we have removed your details from our systems and, following any pending client campaigns within the next 28 days, your details will not be used again by DBS for any of our clients. Your information was provided to us by the below organisation who you may wish to contact. USM Digital 2, Greswolde House 197b Station Road Knowle Solihull West Midlands B93 0PU Tel: 0156 482 2633 http://www.usmdigital.co.uk/

Right, onwards!

USM Digital

As far as I can tell, USM Digital is a very small business run by Mark Reohorn, Mark was quick to answer the phone, and promised that he'd get back to me that afternoon.

Two days later I received a phone call from "Dana" from USM. You can take a listen to a excerpt:

According to Dana, my number had been gathered by them in August 2007. That's six-and-a-half years ago. I didn't think to ask if they knew I was still using the number. Most people would change numbers several times over that time period.

I've no real way of knowing if I did opt-in or opt-out of sharing my numbers in that glorious summer of old. I'll be generous and say that it is entirely possible that I gave my phone number to what I thought was an insurance company - but I don't think that means the number should be spammed over six years later for unrelated goods.

Back To Basics

It should be incumbent on all of these parties to check the data they're using.

Coral told me they bought the data in good faith from DBS. I assume they said "give us verified numbers of men aged 24-32 who met criteria X, Y, Z."

I imagine that DBS - not having a suitable quantity of data - then went off to another supplier and said "Give us something vaguely suitable - the mugs at Coral will never know the difference."

USM Digital, it would appear, dragged out data from half a decade ago, dusted it off, and then spun it as numbers who had adequately given consent.

And, with that, Coral end up spamming people who never asked to have their numbers shared with a company which helps drug dealers launder money.

SMS marketing can be a powerful tool in the right hands. In this case, Coral comes across as indiscriminate spammers who don't care about the provenance of their marketing data. DBS are a broker who have to rely on dodgy 3rd party suppliers. USM's data is so out of data that it may as well be useless.

Remember, if you receive spam SMS please report them to the Information Commissioner's Office. If you can find who has supplied your number, ringing them up and having a friendly word with them about their spamming practices is very cathartic!

It strikes me that large companies simply don't realise that buying your way into a conversation is an admission of failure. It's like being that kid who no one likes but, hey, we'll play with him because his parents buy him loads of toys. It's not friendship, it's not authentic, it doesn't create anything more than the most transient of relationship.

This is best summed up in this quote from Mike Arauz:

Buying a sponsored post on Facebook or Twitter is the equivalent of winning a prize when you've bribed the judges. Unsurprisingly, people react negatively to it. I've already written about the backlash against TomTom's advertising. In this post, I want to focus less on the argument about whether social media should have advertising, and more on why advertisers need to be worried about how they position themselves and respond to critical content.

Here is the latest Facebook sponsored post from Coca Cola. By most lazy metrics, it's a success - 32 thousand likes and over a thousand comments. What's not to love?

Once we dive in to the comments, and see what people are talking about, we get a very different impression.

At first, we see a mix of banter - praise and disparagement.

Some people think it's too early for a Christmas campaign and react in a humorous fashion.

But it turns sinister very quickly.

Some users are clearly very upset about the presence of Coke on their wall.

Others want to talk about Coke sponsoring the homophobic Winter Olympics.

Spammers quickly jump aboard.  After 7 hours, it's clear no one from Coke is monitoring these posts.

The vitriol begins to grow.

The dirty tricks of Coca Cola begin to be discussed.

As do the health effects.

The "Good Deeds" theme is quickly exposed as corporate greenwashing.

I haven't even mentioned the posts promoting competitors, the racist language, or the repeated calls for them to stop avoiding tax.

Without realising it, Coca Cola have created that most valuable of things - a Social Object. Essentially, it's the nexus of a social network - a thing that people want to talk about.

...[H]ere we all are gathered here tonight around this Social Object. The network builds itself around it. The money, therefore... is in the object. Not the network. If you build it they will come.

James Whatley on Social Objects

This advert is a fantastic Social Object! They've got people talking about their advert - the only voice missing from the conversation? Theirs!

Yup, they've built a Social Object and completely failed to capitalise on it. They could be talking about the good work they're doing, refuting the health claims, talking seriously about workers rights, sharing insights into why they made this advert rather than use their old one - the list is endless.

Instead, they've chosen the laziest way imaginable. Release an advert, force it into people's social networks, then sit back and relax.

If one of the world's largest companies, employing the best advertisers, working in conjunction with the top social network, can't get this right, we might as well call game over for social advertising.

I understand and accept that a free service is paid for by advertisers. But do the advertisers understand how to use this medium? After all, Facebook has only been open to the public for 7 years - we can't expect advertisers to understand how the medium works - not with the amount of coke they "drink".

If companies can't figure out how to engage with their audience in an authentic manner, they will face a backlash of their own making.

To those who say "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product", I'll let my wife rebut this lazy generalisation:

Facebook might not like this attitude, but they made the decision to design a business which sells rational, self interested agents in the first place. If they didn’t want their "product" to rebel against them they shouldn't have gone into the business of selling something which has a brain.

Liz Eden

sigh Yet again someone has shoehorned Microsoft Windows into a product it is completely unsuitable for. Why does a screen which displays a fairly basic set of information need to be running on an expensive Windows licence? Moreover, why is such a machine connected to the public Internet?

For bonus points, take a look at the program which has automatically loaded. Yup, they're running a program to prevent Windows kicking off its screensaver. Why? Why not just disable the screensaver? Or, even better, run the whole thing from a Raspberry Pi loaded up with Linux?

I've been ranting about this for years.

My good friend Kai Henry runs a company called Webconverger - a simple and free Linux based kiosk display system. Why on earth pay Microsoft over the odds for a buggy, crash prone, Operating System which isn't very good at kiosk displays?

Dave Addey

@daveaddey

The next train to tag value departs from platform tag value. (Also more disk space on drive C plz thx.) pic.x.com/gytrgfdqjm

---

Suddenly, a stranger walked over to us in the graveyard and said, "Friends, have you tried the great taste of the Big Kahuna Burger? With its mouthwatering blend of herbs and spices, you're sure to have a Big Kahuna Day! High-five me if you agree!"

Needless to say, we each gave him a high-five in the face and spent the rest of the week telling everyone how crappy Big Kahuna are.

That's where we are with Social Media Marketing today. The Prophets told us that "Markets Are Conversations" - but, somehow, the people doing the marketing didn't realise that conversations are bi-directional.

Part of the problem is just laziness. Vice magazine have done an excellent round up of all the faux-interactive marketing messages which are being pumped out by major companies every day.

The other part is that we don't like our private and personal spaces invaded by those we haven't invited. We use Facebook to woo, to reminisce, to love, to share, to play, and to argue - and we do it all with our friends and family. So when a brand tries to muscle in on that conversation, it cheapens the experience and makes us angry. Properly angry.

Go up to a couple kissing in the park, or a parent playing with their child, and start talking to them about the benefits of of a cordless drill and see how long it is before they tell you to piss off. Why should it be any different online?

Actually, online it's far worse; your positive message can be fatally undermined by the people you have angered.

Take this example from Tom Tom on Facebook. It's unbelievably lazy (and sexist) and it doesn't fit in with a social network. Unsurprisingly, users revolted. Below are a selection of comments left by angry users. Each one visible to anyone commenting on the advert. Warning - some strong language ahead. I've trimmed out a number of people who engaged positively with the advert - no doubt sharing their sentiment with their friends.

Is this what social marketing is? Shoe-horning your tone deaf messages into personal spaces? Ignoring the conversation? Refusing to acknowledge to legitimate complaints? Subjecting social media managers to a torrent of vile abuse?

James Whatley has asked some really important questions about how advertising will work in social spaces. I think he's missed the most important question of all - what do you do when people start rejecting your advertising and begin to sabotage your message?

I complained to the Advertising Standards Authority who have confirmed that they are looking into this company and their business practices.

I'll let you know if anything comes of it.

I've been tracking the rise of QR codes in advertising for several years now. People keep asking me when NFC will take over for "boring" QR codes - based on the few live NFC examples I've seen in the UK, NFC will be trailing QR for several more years.

Let me talk you through TAP4offers' latest "effort".

The poster is fairly clear about what to expect - although I initially thought that I'd have to stretch to the top of the carriage to scan the NFC tag!

Thankfully, that's not the case. Beside every exit were these combined NFC / QR / SMS stickers. The NFC tag and QR code each had a unique tracking URL, so the owner of the service (Gunars Vucens) can see which method is being used the most. Judging from the URL and the printed information, I would guess each train carriage has a unique code.

Once the code is scanned - this happens.

What - as the kids say - The Fuck? I've no idea how much it costs to do a deal with South West Trains - but someone has wasted their money!

This is the same mistake that Clear Channel made on their QR/NFC posters.

Why bother with this? Seriously? What's the point of installing all these codes? They've been there for months - disappointing everyone who interacts with them.

Despite the advertiser's promise of a relaunch, nothing seems to be happening with these codes.

Gunars

@gunnars_v

New and upcoming #TAP4offers is due to change and expand rapidly in following weeks, keep and eye out! #nfc #tap4 #offers

---

Logo Problems

As well as the general uselessness of the destination, there is another flaw with the service.

Firstly, there's yet another NFC logo! Proxima's report to the GSMA already identified half a dozen common logos. GSMA NFC Logo, NFC Forum's N-Mark, ClearChannel's NFC Mark, etc. etc.

So, overall, a pretty pathetic effort.

If NFC is to overcome its significant obstacles - price, hardware requirements, lack of public awareness - the campaigns underpinning it must be better than this.

Anyone who has ever run a blog is probably familiar with these sorts of email - I get one or two a week.

Hi Terence,

I recently sent you an email about hosting an advertisement on your site. I hope you received it, if not it may have ended up in your junk folder.

I believe we offer a very attractive system of advertising. You would be paid a yearly-renewable fee for placing a text-based advertisement that is appropriate to the topic of your site.

Please get back to me if you are interested in placing an advertisement on Shkspr.mobi?

Kind Regards,

Jesse Morgan

jesse.morgan@mediadiscovery.com

I rarely reply to such spam, however, having heard of Media Discovery's shady practices in the past, I thought I'd respond and find out more.

This is what I got back:

After reviewing your website, we think that a new blog post would be the best and least intrusive option for you. We have two ways of doing this:

A) You are free to come up with the content of the article or blog post, but we do ask that it is in some way relevant to our client and is composed of roughly 300 words.

B) I can ask our copywriters to craft an article to fit your site.

To see an example, kindly visit: http://www.mycarreviews.co.uk/citroen-c4-review/. The advert can be found within the third paragraph - 'J.D. Power'.

We’ll pay you an annual upfront payment and we will endeavour to make sure that you are paid within two working days, using PayPal or Moneybookers. Working with a telecommunications, beauty, health, tourism or finance client would ensure you would get 130 EUR per year, while working with an online gaming client (poker, casino, bingo etc) would ensure you would get 140 EUR per year.

Please let me know if you're interested, so I can have your site assessed by our Technical Team. I can then send the advert details and client information.

Alternatively, if you have any more questions about this advert type, then please do let me know.

Thanks,

Jesse

This is what the "advert" looks like: The eagle-eyed among you will notice that this doesn't look like an advert. The site carries no mention of the fact this is a sponsored article. (I've no way of verifying whether JD Power paid for this advert, or even if the blog's author is working with Media Discovery.)

I queried this - surely it's not right that advertising should be displayed in such a manner. Their response?

Thank you for your message.

We prefer it if our adverts are not marked out as such. They tend to be more successful when they look as natural as possible.

Many thanks.

This is, as far as I can tell, an illegal practice.

There are various laws and regulations governing advertising in the UK. The Office of Fair Trading specifically calls out the following practice as illegal under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations, the following is an offence:

Being honest about advertorials

Using editorial content in the media to promote a product where a trader has paid for the promotion (advertorial) without making that clear in the content or by images or sounds clearly identifiable by the consumer.

Can A Blog Get In Trouble For This?

There are two potential risks for bloggers who don't acknowledge the providence of their sponsored content. Firstly is the issue of legal liability. I am not a lawyer - but I would be very wary of publishing content like this. Regulation 18 states:

Innocent publication of advertisement defence

18.—(1) In any proceedings against a person for an offence under regulation 9, 10, 11 or 12 committed by the publication of an advertisement it shall be a defence for a person to prove that—

he is a person whose business it is to publish or to arrange for the publication of advertisements;

he received the advertisement for publication in the ordinary course of business; and

he did not know and had no reason to suspect that its publication would amount to an offence under the regulation to which the proceedings relate.

I spoke to the ASA who confirmed that it was unlikely an individual publication would get in to trouble - they'd much rather go after the advertiser.

Secondly, major search engines - Google in particular - can completely remove you from their results if it suspects you have been spamming.

In the above JD Power example, the link doesn't use the nofollow attribute which further contributes to its spammy nature.

What Can Be Done

In the UK, the regulator is the Advertising Standards Authority. Unsurprisingly, they take a keen interest in the online space. After having a chat with their advisers, I have lodged a complaint with the ASA using their online form.

I don't fundamentally disagree with the notion of advertising on blogs - I use Amazon's affiliate scheme to earn a few coins, and I have occasionally run campaigns from ebuzzing. Crucially, I always explicitly say if a post is sponsored and who the sponsor is.

How can you trust a publication if they refuse to tell you where their interests lie?

If you're a blogger and have been approached by company trying to engage in deceptive practices, I strongly suggest you file a formal complaint against them with your local regulator.

Spotted all over London are these bus stops with built in advertising poster. Look on the right hand side, and you'll see the interactive element.

It's pretty well designed, although the disclaimer "standard network rates apply" seems a little redundant - and weirdly placed. The QR code is oddly rotated, but that's just my personal preference.

The QR code is large enough to scan easily in broad daylight. If the code was integrated with the poster, it would also been backlit which would have been helpful when it is dark. The NFC scanned easily - once I'd flipped my phone's settings on.

Using a call to action of "Tap" and "Scan" assumes that the users will know what to do - and how to get an app if they need it.

The QR and the NFC both go to unique URLs - helpful for Clear Channel to see from where the hits are coming.

But what happens when you scan the hybrid QR/NFC?

This abomination....

What The Juddering Fuck? Why on Earth would you deploy dozens of these interactive adverts and then not point them anywhere useful? Even if the campaigns aren't ready, couldn't Clear Channel point to their YouTube Channel, or their Twitter feed, or anything!

Some people are going to interact with this poster and come to the conclusion that there's nothing worthwhile to be gained by attempting to scan again.

Clear Channel are really shooting themselves in the foot by deploying this before their technology is ready.

Even when someone releases "official" statistics, they're usually hard to verify independently, and even harder to analyse by region.

Benedict Evans - who I've had the pleasure of meeting at Mobile Monday - published some very interesting official stats on Facebook's mobile usage. The statistics show that roughly 44% of Facebook use is "not mobile".

How does that chime with reality?

I've talked before (incessantly!) about how leaky bit.ly is - they allow anyone to view detailed statistics about your marketing campaigns. Why people continue to use them, I've no idea. But, luckily for us, it allows us to get a fairly balanced view of Facebook's userbase.

UK supermarket Tesco have been running this "sponsored story" on Facebook. I assume that it is being pushed out to a large and broadly representative sample of UK Facebook users.

Using Bit.ly we can see the clickthrough statistics. You can click on the image for a live view of the stats.

Having run my own tests, it appears that clicks on a Bit.ly link from the Android or iOS app appear as though they come from m.facebook - as do clicks from the mobile web site. So we can't break down the stats any further. That said, it's always useful to get a secondary data point.

People are sharing your links on Facebook. Over half the people clicking on them will be doing so from a mobile phone. Does your site provide a great mobile experience? If not - it's time to up your game.

Facebook have been spamming my wall with all sorts of rubbish - dodgy share trading deals, timeshare scams, PPI reclaim cons, malicious Android apps - really bottom of the barrel stuff.

So, as I'm too weak-willed to abandon Facebook, I've started retaliating. At a basic level, I block the stories as spam. That, hopefully, blocks them from appearing again. I file abuse reports which, hopefully, take up a little bit of Facebook's time.

Mainly, though, I complain to the company - especially if it's a UK one. I write on their wall saying that I don't appreciate them spamming me. I leave "interesting" links on their posts letting others know what think of them. For example, when overpriced smoothie maker "Innocent" started spamming me, I reminded their followers that - far from being innocent - they had taken substantial investment from Coca-Cola. A company with business practices which don't exactly fit Innocent's image.

When BP spammed my wall, I contributed to theirs with videos about people protesting BP's greenwashing of the arts. I also shared the videos and articles with my friends.

I'm not alone in this, it seems. People love telling companies that they don't like their product or their spamming attitude.

This is what happened to Innocent when they started promoting their posts to people who didn't want to see them. (I've edited out some of the positive comments - but Innocent deleted my disparaging comments and blocked me from their page - so I think that's fair.)

It's often said that customers prefer telling each other bad news about a company rather than good. What happens when every supposedly positive "sponsored story" gets users telling their friends just how much they despise a spamming brand?

The meme-du-jour is "If you're not paying, that means you're not the customer; you're the product." We are the product being sold and some of us don't like it.

That's the premise of my wife's most recent blog post.

It asks a rather simple and quite unnerving question. What happens when the "product" starts rebelling?

Facebook might not like this attitude, but they made the decision to design a business which sells rational, self interested agents in the first place. If they didn’t want their ‘product’ to rebel against them they shouldn’t have gone into the business of selling something which has a brain. Liz Eden

I've been told that Facebook won't offer people a way to pay to opt out of advertising. The people who can afford to pay are the ones which advertisers are desperate to target. Will there, I wonder, come a time when the negative publicity generated by resentful products offsets the gains from selling us?

Facebook has, in its infinite wisdom, decided that I would be interested in adverts for cancer. Or, perhaps, AXA have decided that 30 something males are a prime market.

The creator of the advert was Equator's Fiona Dow who, judging from her bitly profile just loves posting about cancer.

As I have mentioned several times before, bitly links are a great way to (unintentionally) share your stats. If we look at the clickthrough stats for this advert, we can find some interesting nuggets.

Here's the biggie - referrers shows where people where when they clicked on the link:

In total, nearly half of all clicks came from the mobile site.

Perhaps this is why Facebook hasn't jumped into bed with any dedicated mobile advertiser? It would seem that users are equally willing to click on Facebook's "Sponsored Stories" on mobile as well as web.

(This assumes that AXA targetted both platforms equally).

The only fly in the ointment is, you guessed it, AXA don't have a mobile friendly site.

I've been banging on about mobile-friendly advertising for years - and still advertisers don't get it! Not everyone has an iPhone. Not everyone who has an iPhone is on WiFi or 3G. Not every one want to have to pinch and zoom. If the first impression you're giving your customers is that you don't care about their needs - don't expect them to stick around too long.

So based on this datum, Facebook users are willing to click on mobile ads - all it now requires is Facebook to show them at appropriate times and advertisers to create mobile-dedicated campaigns.

sigh A non-mobile site. With an Adobe Flash plugin in the top right which won't work on any iPhones. Why on Earth do marketing companies insist on pointing phones to non-mobile sites. It really bemuses me. Stations rarely have good signal (too many people leads to local network congestion) and, besides, large sites are a right pig to use on a small screen.

Stats

I've blogged several times about using Bit.ly links in QR codes. With a little bit of hacking (adding at + character to the end of the URL) we can see how many people have been scanning the code.

I don't know how many of these tickets have been printed. That might be a really good conversion rate - but I doubt it. I only noticed the QR code because someone had dropped their ticket and it landed face-down. Realistically, how many people look at the back of their tickets?

The best campaign in the world would fail if it's not put in front of an audience.

Dave! Dave! I've got a brilliant idea!

What is it, Fred?

Let's make a QR code... right... but make it really hard to scan!

Brilliant idea, Fred! How?

We can stick it on a Taxi, so that you have to wait until it stops at a traffic light before you can scan it!

Ok, Fred, but I'm still concerned that the code will be too easy to scan.

Aha! That's why we invert the colours!

Fred, you're a genius. Let's go and club some baby seals to death.

I... just.... WHAT?

Did no one test this campaign? It's completely unreadable on the half dozen QR scanners I tried. Perhaps there is a mythical phone which can render it, but I doubt it. The campaign (for an event in October 2011) had a total of fifteen clicks.

Of those clicks, only 10 were from the QR code. Ten!

I took the liberty of inverting the code back to the correct colour layout. Unsurprisingly for such a hopeless code, IPEXPO's website isn't mobile friendly.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to bang my head against a brick wall.

If you need a professional QR code consultation - please contact me. PLEASE!