Behavioral targeting has been a topic of great interest here at Tuesdays with Tukaiz, as we continue to cover the evolution of digital advertising and the associated issues around tracking, targeting, and data privacy. While marketers continually strive to deliver more relevant advertising and messaging with the growing use of big data and social media, on the other side of the equation there are consumer and privacy advocates that are pushing for giving consumers more transparency and control of how their information is collected, analyzed, and utilized for the purposes of behavioral targeting and advertising.

The latest battle in an ongoing saga between the digital advertising industry and consumer & privacy advocates came from Firefox web browser maker Mozilla, which announced toward the end of February that it added code to the nightly builds of its future browser versions being developed to block third-party cookiesfrom visited websites by default (in other words, the block will be on when a user downloads and uses the browser for the first time). While first-party cookies originate directly from a website being visited-often for the purposes of tracking, remembering login credentials, and personalization-third-party cookies are used by... you guessed it, third-parties such as advertisers to collect and track visitor information across websites to enable and deliver more targeted advertising.

With the wired workforce of today, more employees are working remote out of home offices than ever before. According to a 2011 study by the Telework Research Network, a consulting and research firm focusing workplace flexibility, working remotely increased by 73% from 2005 to 2011 in the United States. Technology advancements have been a major contributor to this shift by enabling employees to securely connect to their companies' networks a few days a week or even full-time from virtually anywhere in the world with an Internet connection.

The opportunity to telecommute is appealing to many. First and foremost, the types of jobs being performed in the United States today have changed.  While jobs in manufacturing and the service industry require a physical presence to perform work tasks, so-called "knowledge" workers that primarily rely on computers to do their jobs are becoming much more common. These types of employees can sometimes be more productive when they're not in a corporate office culture, and those with young children can benefit from having a lot more flexibility in raising them when working from home.

Walt Disney once said, "Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends." Disney's entertainment empire-especially its amusements parks-are laser-focused on delivering a great, enchanting experience to all of its customers. As we highlight last year on Tuesdays with Tukaiz, delivering an exceptional experience cultivates trust, loyalty, and advocacy among customers, which ultimately drives greater profits. One of the core elements of delivering great experiences is having a strong company culture, and one of the keys to a strong company culture is keeping employees happy. Happy employees = happy customers.

In a recent blog on the Wall Street Journal, entitled "Ways to Be Happy and Productive at Work," writers of the WSJ and the iOpener Institute for People and Performance, published their findings from their study on happiness in the workplace. They concluded that employees who are most productive at work are also the happiest: happier employees are more willing to assist their colleagues with everyday troubles, and their performance typically exceeds that of employees deemed as "not happy." Furthermore, happy employees are expected to achieve goals and maintain higher levels of motivation than those that are not happy.

Last week on Tuesdays with Tukaiz, we covered how Super Bowl ads are transforming to include social elements that help marketers listen, measure, and engage with their audience in real-time. One specific campaign we mentioned was Oreo; its "Whisper Fight" ad was the only one that prompted viewers to engage with them on photo-sharing network Instagram. What we didn't mention was Oreo's response to the now-infamous power failure that killed half the lights in New Orleans' Superdome and delayed the game for 34 minutes.

Just minutes after the power went out, the cookie brand pushed out an ad to Twitter and Facebook with the teaser text of "Power out? No problem" that linked to an image of a halo-effect Oreo cookie with the tagline "you can still dunk in the dark" on the bottom-right corner. While's Oreo's actual television ad ranked in the middle of the pack in terms of overall buzz, its extremely responsive and relevant social media ads were a hit. The ad generated over 16,000 retweets on Twitter, as well as over 19,000 likes and 5,500 shares on Facebook.