Hasta La Creative!

A phone call to the agency has confirmed that Graceann Bennett, who has spent the last six-plus years as managing partner, director of strategic planning at Ogilvy Chicago, is no longer with the agency. No official comment from the O&M camp as of yet, but we’re hearing from sources that Bennett’s departure was rather “abrupt.”

Prior to Ogilvy, Bennett led brand planning efforts in the early aughts at Arnold Worldwide before joining up with Leo Burnett in 2004 to serve as EVP/director of brand planning. During her career, Bennett has also worked in the planning departments at the likes of Mullen and TBWA\Chiat\Day. While at Ogilvy, the exec oversaw accounts including Kimberly-Clark and Oscar Mayer and served on the agency’s Global Planning Council.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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London-based startup Spider.io, which helps publishers and advertisers identify legitimate web traffic, has discovered a ring of more than 120,000 hijacked computers that have been flooding websites with fake traffic and in turn costing advertisers more than $6 million per month, the company said in post on its blog. Called the Chameleon botnet, this cluster of computers typically generates more than nine billion illegitimate ad impressions across 202 websites monthly.

Spider.io, which said it has been tracking the Chameleon botnet since December 2012, found that 95% of the machines involved access the internet from residential IP addresses in the United States. Each bot within the network of computers resembles a group of web users concurrently visiting one the 202 implicated websites. In a typical month, the botnet accounts for at least seven million ad-exchange cookies.

The Chameleon botnet is “sophisticated” because its bots mimic human web activity, Spider.io said. Bots in Chameleon click on ads at an average rate of 0.02%, for example. The average click-through rate for humans is between 0.02% and 0.04%. The bots also generated mouse traces that mirrored how humans typically peruse the web.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

This week, Cameran Harman, managing director UK of AD2ONE, plots eBay opportunities, commutes with Morrissey and flies the flag for Northern agencies.