Linked List: March 13, 2014

Thursday, 13 March 2014

Businessweek: ‘How Target Blew It’ 

Epic, feature-length cover story for Businessweek:

In testimony before Congress, Target has said that it was only after the U.S. Department of Justice notified the retailer about the breach in mid-December that company investigators went back to figure out what happened. What it hasn’t publicly revealed: Poring over computer logs, Target found FireEye’s alerts from Nov. 30 and more from Dec. 2, when hackers installed yet another version of the malware. Not only should those alarms have been impossible to miss, they went off early enough that the hackers hadn’t begun transmitting the stolen card data out of Target’s network. Had the company’s security team responded when it was supposed to, the theft that has since engulfed Target, touched as many as one in three American consumers, and led to an international manhunt for the hackers never would have happened at all.

It occurs to me that a similar breach is surely one of the biggest risks facing Apple today. Nobody has been trusted with more credit card numbers than Apple, and there’s no company whose shortcomings garner more press attention.

‘Mad Men’ Final Season Artwork by Milton Glaser 

Randy Kennedy, writing last week for the NYT:

On a recent morning in a townhouse office on East 32nd Street in Manhattan, reality was treading closely, and somewhat strangely, in fiction’s footsteps. The client sitting in the conference room, waiting for his real-life ad man, was the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner. And the ad man was not just another bright, creative type from the art department. It was Milton Glaser, who — probably more than any graphic designer of his generation — forged the sophisticated, exuberant advertising look of the late 1960s, the time “Mad Men” is now traversing, and whose work to publicize the show’s new season will begin appearing next week on buses and billboards around the country.

I feel like I should have guessed in advance that they’d turn to Glaser for the final season’s art. That Glaser is still working is obviously due in part to his longevity (he’s 84 years old), but it also goes to show that Mad Men’s timeframe, though it can feel like ancient history, isn’t really all that long ago.

Measuring Attention Instead of Clicks or Pageviews 

Tony Haile, CEO of Chartbeat, writing for Time:

Chartbeat looked at deep user behavior across 2 billion visits across the web over the course of a month and found that most people who click don’t read. In fact, a stunning 55% spent fewer than 15 seconds actively on a page. The stats get a little better if you filter purely for article pages, but even then one in every three visitors spend less than 15 seconds reading articles they land on. The media world is currently in a frenzy about click fraud, they should be even more worried about the large percentage of the audience who aren’t reading what they think they’re reading.

The data gets even more interesting when you dig in a little. Editors pride themselves on knowing exactly what topics can consistently get someone to click through and read an article. They are the evergreen pageview boosters that editors can pull out at the end of the quarter to make their traffic goals. But by assuming all traffic is created equal, editors are missing an opportunity to build a real audience for their content.

Solid piece, and I’m largely in agreement with his main point: measuring advertising value by counting clicks and pageviews has led the entire web astray. But as the CEO of a data analytics company, I think Haile is naturally biased towards advanced analytics as the way out of this mess. It’s hard to measure quality — but that’s what ought to be valued.