Here are your top news stories from eWEEK. Today’s topics include Google giving advertisers more control over ad placements after a recent furor; Red Hat rolling out Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 with improved security; LinkedIn adding PointDrive to Sales Navigator; and Adobe consolidating several marketing functions into its Adobe Experience Cloud.
Google has announced expanded safeguards for advertisers on YouTube and the Google Display Network days after a senior executive promised changes in reaction to an outcry from advertisers in the United Kingdom and elsewhere over misplaced ads.
The new safeguards are focused on the company’s ad policies, its enforcement of the policies and new ways for advertisers to control where their ads are placed by Google’s automated ad placement system.
The changes include more effective measures for removing ads placed next to content that attacks people based on race, religion, gender and other factors.
“The changes put Google in a better position to rein in a wider set of sites where advertisements sometimes end up getting inadvertently placed,” Google’s chief business officer Philipp Schindler said on the company’s The Keyword blog this week.
Red Hat on March 21 launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9, providing users of its older operating system with an incremental update boasting improved security capabilities.
Although the leading edge of Red Hat’s enterprise platform is currently the RHEL 7.x branch, Red Hat continues to bring new features to RHEL 6.x as well.
The company first released RHEL 6 in November 2010, and today’s 6.9 update will usher in what Red Hat refers to as Production Phase 3. An RHEL subscription allows a customer to select any supported version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for each workload.
LinkedIn bought PointDrive in the summer of 2016 with plans to integrate the content- and presentation-sharing app with its Sales Navigator software for salespeople.
Now those plans have come to fruition with the March 21st announcement that PointDrive is part of Sales Navigator. LinkedIn also announced improvements to the way Sales Navigator integrates with customer relationship management systems such as Salesforce.com, making it vastly easier for salespeople to bring their Sales Navigator activities into their CRM platform.
The announcements build on LinkedIn’s goal of making Sales Navigator a system of engagement that leverages traditional CRM systems that function as the system of record.
Like so many other things in the IT world that are converging—meaning cramming more and more computing, networking and storage functionality into servers and mobile devices—Adobe as a software and services provider is finding itself on a similar path.
The creative-content and marketing product and service provider has combined a flotilla of cloud-based marketing functions into what it calls the Adobe Experience Cloud, which it debuted March 21 at its Digital Marketing Summit in Las Vegas.
Adobe, which had developed a large but disparate number of content-creation, digital marketing, advertising and campaign-building services, has brought all of them together onto a centrally managed cloud platform.
In this way, content creators can use one suite of tools to design documents for various types of deployments such as web advertising, email, broadcast and video, as well as create marketing campaigns across those channels, turn dials on all the controls, then collect analytics data on everything that happens in order to determine the level of success it renders.