September 2014

Modern advertising is not far from the world of “Minority Report”.

Internet ads now account for around a quarter of the $500 billion global advertising business, and the confluence of mobile devices and social networks allows advertisers to track and target people to a degree once reserved for fiction. As people spend ever more time online, thousands of firms are invisibly gathering intelligence about them, as our special report explains. By monitoring the websites people visit, these companies can infer their location, income, family size, education, age, employment and much more. One data firm has compiled a billion profiles of potential customers, each with an average of 50 attributes. Consumers are lumped into “segments” such as “men in trouble”—presumed to have relationship problems because they are shopping for chocolates and flowers—or “burdened by debt: small-town singles”. When people visit websites, advertisers bid to show them precisely targeted ads. The auctions take milliseconds and the ad is displayed when the website loads.

An increasing number of health care providers offer new electronic tools to patients, but are patients interested in engaging online with their health records? At the same time, the Blue Button Initiative, the meaningful use requirements in the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) all set the stage to get health information into patients’ hands to fuel greater patient engagement. But does enough patient demand exist to justify requirements for health care providers to offer patients the capability to access their health information online?

A Q&A with Eglon Simons, president of the National Association for Multi-Ethnicity in Communications.

About three months into his term, Simons is beginning to leave his mark on the diversity organization. Ahead of NAMIC Conference in New York, the former Cablevision Systems and CBS executive spoke about his vision for NAMIC, as well as the industry’s diversity efforts.

A ruling in May by a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit held that regional power grid operator PJM Interconnection LLC and other regional grid operators around the country don't have the legal authority to purchase “demand response,” the formal name for negawatts -- paying industrial firms and other big consumers of electricity to curtail their demand.

Only states can do that, the court ruled in a challenge brought by an association of power generators that includes Chicago-based Exelon. The decision has significant pocketbook ramifications. Eliminating negawatts to meet peak demand would tend to raise prices because it would force consumers to buy from less-efficient, higher-cost power plants that otherwise wouldn't qualify for capacity payments. The independent market monitor for PJM, which plays a market-referee role for the power grid stretching from Chicago across all or parts of 13 states to North Carolina's Outer Banks, estimated that -- if the court ruling stands -- the annual cost to reserve enough power capacity to meet demand during peak periods would rise as much as 124 percent from today's levels. Those capacity costs -- paid by all business and residential customers -- are embedded in the overall energy price reflected in their electric bills. The cost for energy would increase 1.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, or 20 percent above the 7.5 cents currently charged by Commonwealth Edison, according to an analysis by Mark Pruitt, former director of the Illinois Power Agency. That would inflate the revenue for power plants selling into northern Illinois, including Exelon's five nuclear stations in the northern part of the state, by about $1.3 billion.