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TikTok failed to stop most misleading political ads in a test run by researchers, reports NYT

General

Oct 21, 2022

TikTok failed to catch 90 percent of ads featuring false and misleading messages about elections, while YouTube and Facebook identified and blocked most of them, according to an experiment run by misinformation researchers.

The test, run by the watchdog group Global Witness and the Cybersecurity for Democracy team at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, used dummy accounts to submit 10 ads in English and 10 in Spanish to the social media services. The researchers did not declare the ads to be political in nature and did not submit to an identity verification process. They deleted the accepted ads before they were published.

Each ad, which included details like an incorrect election date or information designed to delegitimize the voting process, violated policies established by Facebook’s parent company, Meta; YouTube’s owner, Google; and TikTok, the researchers said. In one ad, researchers wrote: “Already voted in the primary? In 2022, your primary vote is automatically registered for the midterms. You can stay home.”

TikTok rejected only one ad in English and one in Spanish, in what the researchers called “a major failure.” TikTok banned political advertising in 2019.

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Snap Inc Q3 Earnings Report +6% YoY Revenue Growth, Adjusted EBITDA Down -58%

+ 6% YoY Opinions

Earnings

Oct 20, 2022

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Study claims widespread collection of unconsented data, reports Digiday

General

Oct 19, 2022

A report claims that companies are unknowingly in breach of global data protection laws, including in Europe and the Americas, with consent management platforms a particular area of concern.

The audit was published by a company called Compliant, an outfit that claims to offer brands full transparency over their data supply chain, in a whitepaper dubbed “Data Privacy: The Compliance Illusion.”

It contains a Data Safety Index in which Compliant asserts that publishers in the region are placing themselves at risk of censure with a number of findings. Among them:

92% of European publishers operate a CMP
81% of these publishers pass user data to third parties before consent is gained
The average European publisher website contains 27 piggybacked tags

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Uber to Let Marketers Target Riders by Destination, reports WSJ

General

Oct 19, 2022

Ride-hailing company Uber Technologies Inc. wants to help marketers target consumers with ads based on where they have been and where they are going.

Uber announced the new capability as it rolled out its mobility media division, offering ads across its ride-hailing app for the first time. These ads will be available in select markets at launch. The company sees huge potential for revenue growth in the new ad-targeting product, though some experts say it could raise concerns about consumer privacy.

Uber has been building its ad business for several years, though most of its growth to date has come from ads placed on the Uber Eats food-delivery app, said Mark Grether, general manager of Uber Advertising. The ride-hailing ad business could grow far larger, Mr. Grether said, especially when self-driving cars become more common.

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Marketing budgets fall under heavy scrutiny as risk of prolonged slowdown in 2023 rises, reports Digiday

General

Oct 19, 2022

Come next year things are going to go from bad to worse. Senior marketers know it and are already making contingency plans. Read: rationalizing ad dollars.

Less than a third (29%) of the world’s largest advertisers plan to slash ad dollars next year, according to a study of 43 multinational companies from the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and Ebiquity. Three quarters of the sample “agree strongly” or “agree” that 2023 budgets are under heavy scrutiny.

It’s not all doom and gloom. Some of those marketers surveyed (28%) claim they will invest more next year, per the study. Which really reinforces one overriding aspect of economic downturns: they affect everyone, but some more than others.

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Data-management company InfoSum has laid off staff as its tech struggles to gain traction in the US, reports Insider

General

Oct 19, 2022

Data-management company InfoSum had a recent round of layoffs, the company confirmed. The layoffs, which happened this month, come as it faces a gloomy economic outlook and as the company has struggled to hit its revenue targets, according to people familiar with the matter.

The layoffs earlier this month were across areas including engineering and sales, the people familiar with the matter told Insider. Prior to that, the company had clamped down on costs, such as marketing, those people said. Another person familiar with the matter estimated the layoffs hit 12% of Infosum's staff, or about 20 employees.

The company's founder, Nicholas Halstead, also left the company this week, according to an announcement on his LinkedIn profile. His post said that he had "been transitioning out of the company for a while" and that he planned to spend more time pursuing his motorsport career.

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Retailers, Brands and Tech Platforms Bet Big on Live-Streamed Shopping in the US, reports WSJ

General

Oct 18, 2022

Despite becoming a major sales driver in China, live shopping has yet to break through in the West. But some predict that’s about to change.

A number of retailers, brands and tech platforms are convinced that it can, despite a slow start. The practice, which adapts the QVC model of televised home shopping to the digital era, grew popular in the Asia-Pacific region before exploding in China during the pandemic as businesses rushed to connect more directly with homebound consumers.

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Microsoft becomes latest tech firm to cut staff, reports Axios

General

Oct 18, 2022

Microsoft announced layoffs across multiple divisions. Microsoft declined to say how many jobs had been cut, but a source said the layoffs numbered under 1,000. The cuts occurred across a variety of levels, teams and parts of the world.

“Like all companies, we evaluate our business priorities on a regular basis, and make structural adjustments accordingly. We will continue to invest in our business and hire in key growth areas in the year ahead,” Microsoft said in a statement to Axios.

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Meta will be forced to sell GIF platform Giphy after a groundbreaking ruling by UK regulators, reports Insider

M&A

Oct 18, 2022

UK competition regulators have ordered Facebook parent company Meta to sell GIF database Giphy. The CMA said that Meta's takeover of Giphy "could allow Meta to limit other social media platforms' access to GIFs, making those sites less attractive to users and less competitive."

Meta completed its purchase of Giphy in May 2020, with various news outlets putting the deal at between $300 and $400 million. The CMA started probing the deal in June 2020 and in October 2021 it fined Meta $70 million, accusing it of not reporting all required information about how it was continuing to compete with Giphy.

The month after it ordered Meta to sell Giphy, which the social-media giant appealed. In July, the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) upheld the CMA's decision on five of the six challenged grounds. The CMA said that it was now issuing its "final decision."

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Netflix Q3 Earnings Report +5.9% YoY Revenue Growth, +4.5% YoY Subscribers

+ 6% YoY Opinions

Earnings

Oct 18, 2022

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OpenAP Gets Investment From Advertising Outsider Snowflake, reports AdExchanger

General

Oct 17, 2022

Investment Rounds

Snowflake announced an investment in OpenAP, an advertising identity data company co-owned by Comcast’s NBCUniversal, Fox, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery. Terms of the investment were not disclosed.

Snowflake was already OpenAP’s data clean room infrastructure provider, since OpenAP debuted its clean room solution at Cannes in June. But when that commercial partnership started to produce, both companies realized the opportunity for a partnership to become an investment.

This is not a new tactic for Snowflake, which has taken ad tech by storm since the company officially launched a Media Cloud business exactly one year ago. Last November, Snowflake and Habu, another data clean room tech provider, announced a partnership to integrate Habu’s tech with Snowflake for joint customers. A week later, Snowflake became a minority investor in Habu.

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Kroger to Buy Albertsons in $24.6 Billion Deal, reports WSJ

M&A

Oct 14, 2022

Kroger Co. said it is buying rival Albertsons in a deal that values the company at $24.6 billion, one of the biggest deals in the history of the U.S. grocery industry. Combining would give Kroger and Albertsons—the largest and second-largest U.S. supermarket operators—greater scale and increased leverage in negotiations with vendors.

The deal would also bolster the grocers’ market share and technology to compete better with Walmart Inc., the top U.S. grocery seller by sales, and Amazon.com Inc., which has been expanding its food operations.

Together, Kroger and Albertsons could command about 13% of the food-retail sales in the U.S. following divestitures for regulatory approval, according to J.P. Morgan analysts—smaller than Walmart’s 22%.

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Big Tech accused of shady lobbying in EU Parliament, reports Politico

General

Oct 14, 2022

Big Tech companies like Google, Meta and Amazon have deceived lawmakers by lobbying through smaller front organizations, leading lawmakers claimed, asking for the firms to be banned from engaging with European Union institutions.

Leading Social-democrat lawmakers Paul Tang, René Repasi and Christel Schaldemose on Thursday submitted complaints against eight companies and lobbying groups to the EU's lobbying body, the EU transparency register, according to documents seen by POLITICO.

The MEPs asked for an investigation into Google, Facebook's parent company Meta and Amazon, as well as large lobbying groups including tech trade association the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) and advertisers' group IAB Europe. Three other lobbies representing small and medium-sized companies — SME Connect, Allied for Startups and Connected Commerce Council — are also targeted by the complaints.

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Netflix will charge $6.99 a month for new ad-supported tier starting Nov. 3 in US, reports CNBC

General

Oct 13, 2022

Netflix will charge $6.99 per month for its new advertising-supported tier, which the company will roll out in the U.S. on Nov. 3.

Netflix’s “Basic with ads” tier will include an average of four to five minutes of commercials each hour and won’t give users the ability to download movies and TV series. A limited number of TV series and movies will initially be unavailable due to licensing restrictions.

Ads will be 15 or 30 seconds in length and will play before and during Netflix’s content. Companies will have the ability to prevent ads from appearing on content they deem unsavory or unsuitable. To help advertisers understand its reach, ratings company Nielsen will use its standard digital audience measurement, Digital Ad Ratings, in the U.S. beginning in 2023.

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Netflix to get Nielsen ratings as streaming giant rolls out ad-supported plan, reports CNBC

General

Oct 13, 2022

Netflix announced Thursday that will start using Nielsen’s digital audience measurement in the U.S. to give advertisers an understanding of its reach. It said the Nielsen ratings will start sometime in 2023, marking the first time the streaming giant will have the ratings available for its content.

The move comes as Netflix prepares to roll out a plan with ads that costs $6.99 a month in countries including the U.S. on Nov. 3. The streamer is looking for other ways to grow its revenue after losing subscribers in recent quarters.

Nielsen is the go-to ratings agency for broadcast and cable-TV shows, allowing the advertising industry to have an idea of the size of the audiences reached by various programming. Live sports, especially events such as the NFL’s Super Bowl, and news programming, are often among the top-rated moments on television.

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Google faces EU antitrust charges over its adtech business, reports Reuters

General

Oct 13, 2022

Google could face EU antitrust charges next year over its digital advertising business, putting the company at risk of its fourth fine in the EU of more than a billion euros, people familiar with the matter said on Thursday.

Google's ad business, which generated over $100 billion in sales last year, is Alphabet's biggest moneymaker. It accounted for about 80% of annual revenue, despite efforts over the past decade to push into selling hardware, subscription services and cloud computing technology.

The European Commission launched an investigation into Google's adtech business in June last year, concerned that the U.S. tech giant may be getting an unfair advantage over rivals and advertisers. The EU competition enforcer is likely to issue the charges early next year although the timing may still change, one of the people said.

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TikTok Eyes Performance Budgets With New Pay-if-You-Engage Tool, reports Adweek

General

Oct 13, 2022

TikTok is letting brands only pay if people actually watch their ads. The platform is launching Focused View Thursday, where brands only pay for ads when users voluntarily watch them for at least six seconds or interact with the ad during its first six seconds—whichever occurs first.

The announcement is part of a slew of updates, including improvements to its TikTok Creator Marketplace and new tools for creators and entertainment brands, that the social platform is showcasing later at its second annual TikTok World, a global product summit for brands.

While TikTok will lose some upfront money with Focused View, performance tools tend to make platforms stickier for marketers and increase the number of brands willing to spend on the platform, especially as research shows that brands are favoring lower-funnel tactics as they head into 2023’s choppy economy. Focused View is a move out of YouTube’s playbook, which only requires advertisers to pay if users don’t click “skip ads,” an option it introduced more than a decade ago.

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UFC partners with Meta for live and on-demand events in VR on Fight Pass

General

Oct 13, 2022

Gaming / Metaverse

The UFC announced a partnership with Zuckerberg’s company Meta, offering live and on-demand MMA events through Meta’s Horizon’s Worlds app for use on their Meta Quest 2 headset.

“We are excited to offer an unprecedented level of engagement for Fight Pass subscribers and MMA fans around the world by producing a live MMA event in virtual reality,” Crowley Sullivan, Fight Pass vice president and general manager is quoted as saying. “With Meta providing the VR platform and YBVR lending their production expertise, we’re confident this will be a great experience for fight fans.”

This announcement comes just days after Meta announced their new Meta Quest Pro headset, which it called “the first in a new line of advanced headsets built to expand the possibilities of virtual and mixed reality.” The new headset will retail at $1,499.99.

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Netflix signs up to ratings body BARB, reports BBC

General

Oct 12, 2022

Netflix has signed up to the TV ratings agency Barb, which means its audiences will be measured by an external, independent body for the first time. The move makes Barb the first industry-owned ratings service in the world that Netflix has joined.

Previously, the streaming giant has only released snapshots of its viewing data, highlighting the success of its most popular shows. Barb will begin reporting Netflix's viewing figures from November.

It is a significant move for the streamer, and will see the data being used by advertisers, competitors and journalists to ascertain the success or failure of Netflix properties. Netflix is not the only streamer being included - any service which accounts for more than 0.5% of total identified viewing will be listed too. This means content from services such as Disney and Amazon is also likely to be included.

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Fox, Innovid Strike New Pact to Track Cross-Screen Audiences, reports Variety

General

Oct 12, 2022

Fox Corp. is expanding its efforts to track viewers who might toggle between its Tubi video-streaming hub and its mainstream broadcast outlet.

The media company has struck a multi-year deal with Innovid that will utilize the ad-tech and measurement firm’s technology to push Fox’s efforts to find new ways to gauge the performance of commercials placed on its media properties, no matter the venue.

Fox is one of several traditional media conglomerates that have worked to expand the types of audience measurement they provide advertisers. While Fox and others continue to work with Nielsen, arguably the best-known player in the audience-measurement sector, they are broadening options as consumers establish new kinds of behaviors the networks believe need to be monitored quickly.

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Bloomberg Media Is Shutting Off Its Open-Market Programmatic Advertising, reports Adweek

General

Oct 11, 2022

The business news publisher Bloomberg Media will stop serving open-market third-party programmatic display advertising on both its website and mobile app, beginning Jan. 1, 2023, according to chief executive officer Scott Havens.

The publisher will also discontinue its use of vendors whose recommendation products divert traffic away from the Bloomberg website, such as Taboola, its current content recommendation vendor.

The decision aims to improve the user experience, as open-market programmatic display ads undergo few quality assurance processes, meaning the creative or product they market could be misaligned with the Bloomberg Media brand. While open-market ads only represent about 5% of the publisher’s inventory, the decision will mean turning away short-term ad revenue for longer-term gains.

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Apple is quietly pushing a TV ad product with media agencies, reports Digiday

General

Oct 11, 2022

Apple’s growing designs on the ad industry are already well-documented with the iPhone maker’s media unit already generating $4 billion per year on search. But now it would appear it is further stepping up its efforts by serving ads on even more screens.

Apple, Digiday has learned, is preparing a more serious push into monetizing its original video content with an ad play, according to several media agency sources that held separate exploratory discussions with the digital giant.

While Apple did not respond to Digiday’s request for comment on the nature of its meetings with holding company executives, separate sources noted that Apple, led by vp of ad platforms Todd Teresi, has been making the rounds with network executives. During these meetings, Teresi described what the agency sources characterized as an unusual approach to selling ad time on Apple TV.

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Netflix Strikes Measurement Deals Ahead Of New Ad-Supported Tier, reports AdAge

General

Oct 10, 2022

Netflix has recognized the need for independent measurement when it starts running ads in the coming months, and it will work with Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify as its first partners, according to people familiar with the arrangement. Netflix picked those two third-party firms in order to give advertisers assurances that ads will run where they are supposed to and to confirm ads are viewed according to industry standards, these people said.

The ad industry is watching Netflix closely to see how it develops its first advertising products. Netflix has been asking for high prices for its ad inventory, at least $60 CPMs while only offering limited targeting possibilities and no third-party measurement, according to people familiar with the situation.

Advertisers have been concerned about that lack of independent measurement, and DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science could fill in some blind spots, advertisers said.

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Biden signs order to implement EU-U.S. data privacy framework, reports Reuters

General

Oct 7, 2022

U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday signed an executive order to implement a European Union-United States data transfer framework announced in March that adopts new American intelligence gathering privacy safeguards.

The deal seeks to end the limbo in which thousands of companies found themselves after Europe's top court threw out two previous pacts due to concerns about U.S. surveillance. The framework addresses the concerns of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which in July 2020 struck down the prior EU-U.S. Privacy Shield framework as a valid data transfer mechanism under EU law.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Microsoft welcomed the executive order, but digital rights activist group Access Now and European consumer organization BEUC said it did not appear that people's rights were being sufficiently protected.

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Political ad spending on connected TV is 5x what it was in 2020, reports Marketing Brew

General

Oct 6, 2022

As voters shift their attention away from linear television, CTV platforms are becoming crucial for campaigns looking to reach audiences in the tight windows between primaries and Election Day. Media buyers who spoke to Marketing Brew said they’ve seen CTV spending nearly quintuple compared to the 2020 election cycle.

This midterm season, investment in CTV and over-the-top platforms is expected to reach $1.4 billion, according to a September estimate from Kantar Media. That’s more than digital platforms like Facebook and Google, and nearly as much as the amount campaigns are expected to spend on cable and satellite TV; overall, it accounts for about 15% of all advertising dollars projected to be spent in the lead-up to the midterms, which is slated to reach $9 billion this fall, Kantar estimated.

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TikTok Parent ByteDance Sees Losses Swell in Push for Growth, reports WSJ

General

Oct 6, 2022

TikTok parent ByteDance Ltd. saw its operating losses more than triple last year to above $7 billion as it spent heavily to continue its torrid growth, according to a financial report shared with employees that offers a rare look inside the private company’s closely guarded finances.

ByteDance also produced an operating profit in the first quarter of 2022, the report showed, indicating one of the world’s most valuable startups could be turning a corner after years of incurring large losses.

As a private company based in Beijing, ByteDance has closely guarded its finances and doesn’t publicly disclose results. The report—sent to employees in August and that covers the full years for 2020 and 2021 as well as the first quarter of 2022—provides one of the most detailed looks at how it is performing and is planning for the future. The report shows a company rapidly increasing its revenues, accumulating a massive war chest of cash and other investments, but with net results weighed down by tens of billions of dollars in unrealized market losses on convertible securities.

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The Trade Desk CEO rips Google for selling 'the most deceptively named product in recent adtech', reports Insider

General

Oct 6, 2022

The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green called out Google for engaging in what he views as "unfair" and "draconian" practices during an investor day conference. During that conference, Green showed a slide insinuating that in "more regulated markets," Google's tactics could be called "front running, obfuscation, and shill bidding."

Green, a frequent Google critic, specifically criticized Google's Open Bidding tool, which helps publishers sell ads, as "the most deceptively named product in recent adtech." "It doesn't create transparency or price discovery," Green said. "It's not built on fairness."

During the investor day, Green said that header bidding had moved the ad market towards "competition and greater transparency" and that Open Bidding squashed header bidding. Google's attempt to subvert header bidding is part of an antitrust investigation from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

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Google to pay Arizona $85M in privacy suit that alleged deceptive location tracking, reports USAToday

General

Oct 5, 2022

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich has entered an $85 million settlement with Google LLC for allegedly tracking the users' location with "deceptive and unfair" practices to sell advertisements, his office announced Tuesday.

Brnovich started investigating Google after a 2018 Associated Press article said the company was misleading consumers on how they were tracking and using their location data, according to a news release.

In May 2020, Brnovich sued Google for allegedly tracking people's location with deceptive practices and coercive design tactics that were built into its software – even if they were told to stop. The suit accused the tech giant of taking users' location to amplify ad revenue, invading user privacy and not giving users a clear way to cancel location tracking.

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Political Advertisers Are Spending More Than Ever, But Not On Local News, reports AdExchanger

General

Oct 5, 2022

US political ad spending is exploding in the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, with an estimated $8 billion to $13 billion up for grabs this election cycle. But, while CTV and streaming video are seeing an infusion of political ad cash this year, local news publishers aren’t seeing a dramatic change in their bottom lines.

While local news seems like a perfect fit for political campaigns looking to target their messages to politically engaged voters in specific towns and cities, digital channels like connected TV (CTV) and streaming offer more sophisticated targeting capabilities than local newspapers or linear local TV news.

These days, political ad dollars don’t flow to local newspapers like they may have in the past. “Newspapers were No. 2 in political advertising behind TV for several decades. Now they seem to be not even an afterthought,” said Gordon Borrell, CEO of media and advertising analyst firm Borrell Associates.

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Musk Proposes to Buy Twitter for Original Price of $54.20 a Share, reports Bloomberg

M&A

Oct 4, 2022

Elon Musk revived a bid to buy Twitter Inc. at the original price of $54.20 a share, backtracking on his effort to quit the deal and potentially avoiding a contentious courtroom fight.

Musk made the proposal in a letter to Twitter on Monday, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that confirmed a Bloomberg report. San Francisco-based Twitter said it received the letter and intends to close the deal at the agreed-upon price, without commenting specifically on how it will respond to Musk.

For Twitter, proceeding with Musk’s plan augurs a future under a mercurial billionaire who has spent months publicly criticizing its management, questioning its value and changing his mind. It also means that his contested claims -- that Twitter was lying about which percentage of users were bots, for instance -- are not likely to be scrutinized in a court of law.

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How Bots Corrupted Advertising, by Wired

General

Sep 29, 2022

When Aleksandr Zhukov went on trial last year, he stood accused of defrauding US companies, including The New York Times and pet care brand Purina, out of millions of dollars. According to the court, the then 41-year-old set up a company that promised to show online adverts to humans, but he instead placed those adverts on an elaborate network of fake websites where they were seen only by bots.

Yet Zhukov’s defense did not center around his innocence or his remorse. Rather, he said he was giving the online economy exactly what it wanted: cheap traffic, whatever the source. The federal courthouse in Brooklyn disagreed and, in November 2021, Zhukov was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Bots are polluting the internet. Fake online users make up as much as 40 percent of all web traffic, according to some estimates. Researchers specializing in advertising fraud describe a Kafkaesque system where businesses pay millions to advertise to bots and research their “opinions.” Yet the digital advertising industry has grown so accustomed to working with inflated numbers that few are willing to unmask the fake clicks powering large swathes of the online economy.

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Google is shutting down Stadia, reports The Verge

General

Sep 29, 2022

Gaming / Metaverse

Google is shutting down Stadia, its cloud gaming service. The service will remain live for players until January 18th, 2023. Google will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchased through the Google Store as well as all the games and add-on content purchased from the Stadia store. Google expects those refunds will be completed in mid-January.

Google detailed some of the finer points of the shutdown in an FAQ. Refunds will automatically be made through the Google and Stadia stores, and you won’t have to return any hardware. Stadia Pro subscriptions will not be eligible for a refund, but you will not be charged during the shutdown period and can access games you might have redeemed as a Pro user until everything is wound down. Google has closed the Stadia store, so you can’t buy games or in-game transactions.

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Twitter is telling advertisers their ads mistakenly ran on profiles selling and soliciting child sexual abuse material, reports Insider

General

Sep 28, 2022

Twitter informed advertisers on Wednesday that it had discovered ads running on profiles that were soliciting or selling child sexual abuse material.

In emails to advertisers and advertising agencies, viewed by Insider, the company said it had banned accounts that violated its rules and it was investigating what had happened. Twitter told some advertisers it had suspended all ads on profiles.

The company also said it had "updated its systems" in order to better detect accounts linked with child sexual abuse material and to prevent ads being served next to this content. The company said it was now investigating how many people the ads may have reached.

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Epix Rebrands to MGM+ Following Amazon Acquisition, reports Adweek

General

Sep 28, 2022

Epix is rebranding to MGM+ in January. The streamer and premium cable network was initially jointly owned by Paramount, MGM and Lionsgate, but MGM eventually bought out the others in 2017. Earlier this year, Amazon completed an $8.5 billion purchase of MGM, adding more than 4,000 films, including the James Bond and Rocky franchises, and more than 17,000 hours of TV, including The Handmaid’s Tale, Shark Tank and Survivor, to its enterprise.

The new brand, MGM+, will debut on Jan. 15, 2023. The company said the branding aims to embody MGM while also pivoting the network towards the future.

In addition to rebranding, the newly-formed MGM+ also announced a slate of upcoming original content. Hotel Cocaine, from showrunner Chris Brancato of Narcos and Godfather of Harlem, will premiere next year, as well as Belgravia: The Next Chapter, a follow-up to the 2020 limited series.

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Podcasters Are Buying Millions of Listeners Through Mobile-Game Ads, reports Bloomberg

General

Sep 27, 2022

Podcasters are always hunting for new, flashy places to promote their shows, ranging from billboards to floats in parades to airplane banners. Some networks, though, have uncovered a less-glamorous, yet highly effective way to gain millions of bankable listeners: loading up mobile games with a particular kind of ad.

Each time a player taps on one of these fleeting in-game ads—and wins some virtual loot for doing so—a podcast episode begins downloading on their device. The podcast company, in turn, can claim the gamer as a new listener to its program and add another coveted download to its overall tally.

The practice allows networks to amass downloads quickly by tapping into a wellspring of hyperactive video-game users. But it also calls into question who a legitimate podcast listener is and what length of time should be required to count as a download.

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TikTok Seen Moving Toward U.S. Security Deal, but Hurdles Remain, reports NYT

General

Sep 26, 2022

The Biden administration and TikTok have drafted a preliminary agreement to resolve national security concerns posed by the Chinese-owned video app but face hurdles over the terms, as the platform negotiates to keep operating in the United States without major changes to its ownership structure, four people with knowledge of the discussions said.

The two sides have hammered out the foundations of a deal in which TikTok would make changes to its data security and governance without requiring its owner, the Chinese internet giant ByteDance, to sell it, said three of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the negotiations are confidential.

If completed, an agreement with the Biden administration is likely to be highly scrutinized, as TikTok has become a symbol of the Cold War-like atmosphere in relations between Beijing and Washington. As part of the tit-for-tat, the nations are battling over primacy in technology and digital data. Skepticism toward China is a built-in feature of U.S. politics, and the talks are taking place just weeks before November’s midterm elections.

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European telecoms chiefs call on tech firms to share internet network costs, reports The Guardian

General

Sep 26, 2022

The bosses of Europe’s biggest telecoms operators including BT, Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom have called for tech firms such as Netflix an Amazon to pay for some of the soaring costs of data fuelled by the global streaming and internet boom.

The call from the 16 chief executives comes as the European Commission prepares to launch a consultation into whether technology companies such as Google, Facebook, Netflix and Microsoft should be made to pay some of the soaring costs for the huge amount of global internet traffic they carry on their telecoms networks.

More than half of global internet traffic takes place through six Silicon Valley companies – Google, Facebook, Netflix, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft – according to ETNO, a lobby group for European telecoms operators. The proportion rises to as much as 80% when gaming giants such as the Call of Duty maker, Activision Blizzard, are included.

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As the economy wobbles, advertisers and publishers at the top end of the market go more and more direct, reports Digiday

General

Sep 26, 2022

Publishers appear to be having success pulling more dollars into the deals they have direct control over. In the first half of the year, private marketplaces and programmatic guaranteed accounted for 35% of the total money spent globally on programmatic (including in the open exchange, according to Ebiquity. The year before that percentage was 31%. As ever, demand drives prices. The cost per thousand impressions in these curated deals was up 240% in the first half of the year compared to those prices in the open exchange. The year before that increase was 188%.

Commercial execs from The Athletic and Minute Media are going after ad dollars directly, not via independent ad tech vendors. They wouldn’t be making those moves if they thought marketers weren’t interested. The same goes for publisher alliances.

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Publishers fret over alternative ID overload hurting site performance, reports Digiday

General

Sep 26, 2022

User Identifiers

As publishers continue to deal with the demise of the third-party cookie, they are feeling compelled to adopt virtually every identity technology seeking to replace the cookie, but they are increasingly concerned about how overloading their sites with IDs will impact page-load speeds and search rankings.

“[Site] performance issues is death by a thousand paper cuts. Every single one of those adds up,” said a publishing executive during one of DPS’s closed-door sessions, in which publishers were granted anonymity in exchange for candor.

Publishers have yet to see adopting alternative IDs significantly impact their ad revenue. “At a certain point, it becomes the fastest way to make $300 a month: You can set up a deal, do all this tech work and then you sit and stare at the ticker and it slowly moves,” said a second publishing executive.

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Netflix is building its own game studio, reports Engadget

General

Sep 26, 2022

Gaming / Metaverse

Netflix is no longer relying exclusively on third-party teams to bolster its game catalog. The streaming giant is forming an in-house game studio in Helsinki, Finland to create "world-class" original games without ads or in-app purchases. While it's too soon for details of the games themselves, Zynga and EA alumnus Marko Lastikka will serve as director.

Helsinki is a good fit as the home to some of the "best game talent" on the planet, according to Netflix. This includes The Walking Dead mobile developer Next Games (which Netflix bought in March). Netflix has purchased multiple developers, including Boss Fight and Oxenfree creator Night School Studio, but hasn't built a developer from scratch until now.

You won't see the first fruits of this internal studio for "years," Netflix says. Still, this and recent acquisitions show how the company's gaming strategy is evolving. Where Netflix initially depended on outsiders' games, including slightly tweaked versions of existing titles, it's increasingly focused on truly unique projects you won't find elsewhere.

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Investigation finds that nearly 90 apps have been committing ad fraud, reports Marketing Brew

General

Sep 23, 2022

Today, the cybersecurity firm Human (formerly called White Ops) revealed that it had pulled the rug out from under what it has called an “ad fraud scheme” present in apps that had been downloaded nearly 13 million times.

An investigation spearheaded by Human found 80 Android apps and nine iOS apps committing fraud “through a variety of tactics,” like pretending to be other apps to skim off programmatic advertising dollars (a strategy that’s known as “spoofing”), running ads where users couldn’t see them, or faking clicks.

These apps try to mimic popular apps in an attempt to get users to download them and advertisers to advertise on them. The 89 apps included titles like Loot the Castle, Run Bridge, Parking Master, Corn Scraper and Billionaire Scratch, Human noted in its release.

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Senate Committee Advances Bill Aimed at Helping Small Publishers, reports WSJ

General

Sep 23, 2022

A Senate committee approved a bipartisan bill allowing smaller news publishers to band together to negotiate payments from big tech companies for their content, overcoming conservative objections that it could further empower the online platforms.

The Thursday vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee was 15-7, with only Republicans opposing. Supporters included Democrats and a handful of Republicans, including Sens. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and John Kennedy (R., La.).

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Teads breaks into CTV, aiming to reach 2 billion users, reports Digiday

General

Sep 22, 2022

Programmatic platform Teads on Wednesday enhanced its media offering by adding connected TV ad inventory, allowing brands potential access to some 2 billion unique users. Digiday has learned.

During beta testing, Teads partnered with various brands across different categories and said it saw positive outcomes up and down the purchase funnel, including high attention to brand awareness and purchase intent. The CTV service is launching in the U.S. first, with additional markets getting rolled out later this year.

Teads runs a cloud omnichannel service for programmatic digital advertising, providing a one-stop shop of sorts for advertisers and agencies to buy inventory from publishers and content providers. After testing the addition of CTV for one year, the company is aiming to tap into this new channel across every screen.

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Amazon’s first-ever exclusive NFL game drew big numbers, reports Axios

General

Sep 22, 2022

Roughly 13 million people watched last week's Thursday Night Football game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Los Angeles Chargers, an impressive figure considering it was the first game ever streamed exclusively on Amazon.

On average, 11.87 million watched the game exclusively via streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Another 1.16 million watched the game via local over-the-air broadcasts. Amazon partnered with DirecTV to air their games in over 300,000 sports bars, restaurants, hotels and other venues outside of homes, as a way to ensure that those without high-speed broadband can access games.

The average viewer of its broadcast last Thursday was 46-year-old, compared to the average viewer of NFL games during the same week this year on linear television, which was 53 years old.

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Meta Sued for Tracking iOS Users Even If They've Opted Out, reports PCMag

General

Sep 22, 2022

Last year, Apple changed the rules for iOS app developers by forcing them to ask a user's permission before their apps are allowed to collect tracking data. The Facebook app on iOS must therefore ask for permission from each user, but as Bloomberg reports, this lawsuit (Willis v. Meta Platforms Inc., 22-cv-05376) accuses Meta of circumventing the rules and tracking a user regardless of their choice.

The lawsuit explains how Meta's Facebook app opens links in an in-app browser rather than the user's default browser. By doing so, the activity of the user can easily be tracked while skirting around Apple's app privacy rules.

Back in August, researcher Felix Krause discovered multiple apps were using in-app browsers to inject JavaScript into websites to allow users to be tracked. Both the Facebook and Instagram apps have been proven to inject JavaScript, with Meta stating in a comment forming part of the JavaScript code it uses that it was, "developed to honor people's privacy and [App Tracking Transparency] choices."

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Health apps share your concerns with advertisers, HIPAA can’t stop it, reports WaPo

General

Sep 22, 2022

Facebook has been caught receiving patient information from hospital websites through its tracker tool. Google stores our health-related internet searches. Mental health apps leave room in their privacy policies to share data with unlisted third parties. Users have few protections under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) when it comes to digital data, and popular health apps share information with a broad collection of advertisers.

What we learned was that several popular Android health apps including Drugs.com Medication Guide, WebMD: Symptom Checker and Period Calendar Period Tracker gave advertisers the information they’d need to market to people or groups of consumers based on their health concerns.

The Drugs.com Android app, for example, sent data to more than 100 outside entities including advertising companies, DuckDuckGo said. Terms inside those data transfers included “herpes,” “HIV,” “adderall” (a drug to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder), “diabetes” and “pregnancy”. These keywords came alongside device identifiers, which raise questions about privacy and targeting.

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The Trade Desk Adds Salesforce To Its Roster Of CDP Partners For UID2, reports AdExchanger

General

Sep 21, 2022

User Identifiers

Salesforce quietly introduced a new app in its App Exchange on Wednesday that was developed by The Trade Desk as a way to convert CDP identity data to Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) IDs. These IDs can be used to buy programmatic ads.

Salesforce isn’t the first CDP or cloud database to link with The Trade Desk via UID2. In March, Adobe and The Trade Desk announced a similar integration to convert emails and phone numbers stored in the Adobe CDP into targeted audience segments.

UID2 has a unique role as both The Trade Desk’s go-to identity solution and as an open-source industry initiative. Although the UID2 repository is open to all, the real-world applications for audience activation built around it are mostly proprietary to The Trade Desk.

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Meta And Alphabet Quietly Reduce Staff in Cost-Cutting Push, reports WSJ

General

Sep 21, 2022

Meta is planning to cut expenses by at least 10% in the coming months, in part through staff reductions, as the social-media giant confronts stalling growth and increased competition, according to people familiar with the company’s plans.

The company has begun quietly nudging out a significant number of staffers by reorganizing departments and giving affected employees a limited window to apply for other roles within the company, according to current and former managers familiar with the matter, in a move that achieves staffing cuts while forestalling the mass issuance of pink slips.

The reductions are expected to be a prelude to deeper cuts, according to people informed of the company’s plans. While some savings will come from cuts to overhead and consulting budgets, the people said, much of it is expected to come from reduced employment.

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Meta Suffers Setback in EU Attack of German Antitrust Order, reports Bloomberg

General

Sep 20, 2022

Competition authorities probing a company over alleged abuses of a dominant position are justified to also consider other rules, such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation in the course of an investigation, an adviser to the bloc’s top court said on Tuesday in a non-binding opinion. Such a ruling would hit at the heart of Meta’s appeal.

Tuesday’s case is viewed as a test of how far antitrust regulators can go to make sure Silicon Valley firms don’t mishandle massive data sets gleaned from users to cement their market power. Meta told the EU Court of Justice in a May hearing that Germany’s Federal Cartel Office conflated data protection and antitrust law in violation of its actual powers. Its decision was flawed and the authority’s approach “misguided,” it said.

The case was referred to the EU court by judges in Germany who sought the EU court’s guidance on whether a violation of data regulations can be cited in an antitrust case. It’s one of several challenges the tech firm is facing in Europe, including from privacy watchdogs.

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Walmart Connect Announces Innovation Partner Program With TikTok, Snapchat, Firework, TalkShopLive and Roku

General

Sep 20, 2022

Walmart Connect recently announced the evolution of its Partner Program strategy to create a robust, diverse ecosystem that will expand advertiser support, increase services and deliver access anywhere advertisers need to have it. Today, we’re building on that strategy by announcing our Innovation Partners. As the media funnel continues to collapse, advertisers are realizing the opportunity to reach shoppers on leading platforms where they are increasingly spending their time.

These strategic partnerships provide ‘Test and Learn’ opportunities with social, entertainment, t-commerce and live streaming throughout the entire holiday season. The newly expanded offering includes additional touchpoints and channels to reach customers wherever they are with new ad formats. Together, we will work with each partner to more deeply connect advertisers with customers throughout key moments in the shopper journey in order to provide the best solutions for advertisers.

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The DOJ Antitrust Enforcer Says No More Easy Vertical Mergers For Digital Platforms, reports AdExchanger

General

Sep 19, 2022

Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, who leads the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, is pressing a tougher interpretation of American antitrust law to meet the requirements of a new digital economy.

For one thing, he said the DOJ is rethinking its reliance on enforcement based on horizontal or vertical merger status. (Buying a company in a new category is a vertical deal, such as AT&T’s one-time acquisition of WarnerMedia, whereas a horizontal merger, like T-Mobile and Sprint’s recently rejected merger, fuse direct competitors.)

“We have been too limited by a self-imposed requirement that we use our most powerful microscopes to examine an exclusionary act before intervening to stop it,” Kanter said. “We need a wider lens, and a greater willingness to pursue and remedy all of the harmful behaviors that make up an exclusionary course of conduct.”

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Variety Surveys News Consumption On Social Media

General

Sep 19, 2022

Close to half of those 15-29 report that social media accounts are one of the ways they get their news (for a full list of news sources, refer to the report). This falls to two out of five 30-44s, one in four 45-59s and one in ten of those 60 or older.

Interestingly, there is an inverse relationship between getting news from social media accounts and thinking that social media helps rumors to spread. Younger demos are the least likely to agree that this is the case, whereas more than half of those 60+ think misinformation is easier to spread in the age of social.

A key statistic to note is that around one in seven consumers between 15 and 29 get their news only via social media, a much greater proportion than all other age groups. Fact checking is rare on social, with it an obvious concern that over half of those under 45 get all or some of their news via the medium.

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The $300bn Google-Meta advertising duopoly is under attack, reports The Economist

General

Sep 18, 2022

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Scams are showing up at the top of online searches, reports The Washington Post

General

Sep 16, 2022

Nasty scams and malware are preying on your trust by hiding behind the ads that sit on top of search pages. Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing are being paid to put them in front of us, and they haven’t figured out how to stop it. There are ads for fake banks, fake sites for the IRS and other government agencies, as well as fake crypto wallets, just to name a few.

The core issue is that many search ads are sold through self-service systems, where advertisers don’t necessarily need to be authorized or have their links checked by humans. The bad guys sometimes try to create thousands of accounts simultaneously, in the hopes that a few get through. The companies claim they are on top of the problem.

In 2021, Google says it blocked or removed 38.1 million ads for “misrepresentation” and 58.9 million ads for violating its financial services policies, both before and after they ran. Microsoft would not say how many scam ads it removes.

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6 adtech companies have reached $1 billion valuations in the last 12 months, reports Insider

General

Sep 15, 2022

Investment Rounds

Since September 2021, six adtech companies have reached unicorn status — a distinction given by financial data company PitchBook to venture-backed companies that raised funds at a valuation of $1 billion or more.

VideoAmp ($1.4B)
MediaLab ($1.1B)
MNTN ($2B)
Cheq ($1B)
CommerceIQ ($1B)
iSpot.tv ($1B)

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YouTube Appears To Be Ramping Up Ad Load, With As Many As 10 Unskippable Ads Per Break, reports 9To5Google

General

Sep 15, 2022

For some users, YouTube is showing as many as 10 unskippable ads during a single break. Over the past month or two, some YouTube viewers have noted that advertisements on the platform have been expanding greatly in length and quantity, especially in unskippable formats.

Statement from Youtube:

"At YouTube, we’re focused on helping brands connect with audiences around the world, and we’re always testing new ways to surface ads that enhance the viewer experience. We ran a small experiment globally that served multiple ads in an ad pod when viewers watched longer videos on connected TVs. The goal is to build a better experience for viewers by reducing ad breaks. We have concluded this small experiment."

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MediaMarktSaturn Partners with Criteo to Power their Retail Media Solution

General

Sep 15, 2022

Criteo announced a retail media advertising partnership with MediaMarktSaturn, Europe’s leading consumer electronics retailer. Criteo will be the exclusive partner of choice for Sponsored Product Ads across all European markets MediaMarktSaturn operates in, allowing brands to buy exclusive on-site inventory, utilizing the retailer’s first-party data.

Criteo’s Retail Media platform technology will be integrated across MediaMarktSaturn’s 15 European labels as part of a three-year partnership agreement. Advertisers will be able to promote their products via native product ads on MediaMarkt and Saturn.

As part of the agreement, Criteo will drive incremental brand & agency budgets through its client solutions teams across Europe, working collaboratively with MediaMarktSaturn’s in-house marketing, trade and sales teams.

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S.Korea fines Google, Meta billions of won ($72 million) for privacy violations, reports Reuters

General

Sep 14, 2022

In a statement, the Personal Information Protection Commission said it fined Google 69.2 billion won ($50 million) and Meta 30.8 billion won ($22 million).

The privacy panel said the firms did not clearly inform service users and obtain their prior consent when collecting and analysing behavioural information to infer their interests or use them for customised advertisements.

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Netflix Estimates Ad-Supported Tier Will Reach 40 Million Viewers by Late 2023, reports WSJ

General

Sep 14, 2022

Netflix estimated that an advertising-supported version of its streaming service would reach about 40 million viewers globally by the third quarter of 2023, according to a document reviewed by The Wall Street Journal that Netflix shared with ad buyers.

In preliminary projections, Netflix told ad executives it expects to have 4.4 million unique viewers worldwide at the end of the year, with 1.1 million coming from the U.S. The company estimated that would grow to over 40 million unique viewers by the third quarter of 2023, with 13.3 million from the U.S.

The metric the company has shared, “projected unique viewers,” is expected to be higher than the number of subscribers for the advertising-supported Netflix plan, since more than one person in a subscribing household will likely be able to watch the service.

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Amazon To Let Brands And Merchants Send Marketing Emails To Shoppers, reports AdAge

General

Sep 14, 2022

Amazon.com Inc. will let brands and merchants send marketing emails to shoppers, a risky bid to boost sales that could inundate inboxes with spam.

Merchants will be able to send free emails to recent shoppers, repeat customers and their biggest spenders through a new “Tailored Audiences” tool, which will also let sellers monitor the results. The tool has been in testing this year and will be available to all US sellers in early 2023.

Customers will have to unsubscribe if they don’t wish to receive the marketing emails.

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Google’s $4bn fine shows the antitrust 'floodgates have opened', reports The Drum

General

Sep 14, 2022

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Layoffs have been hitting the ad industry as marketers trim spending amid a softening economy, reports Insider

General

Sep 14, 2022

Insider is tracking which ad companies are cutting staff and how many. They are listed in order of when layoffs occurred, with the most recent first.

Taboola (6% of staff)
Permutive (12% of staff)
Hootsuite (30% of staff)
Oracle (thousands potentially impacted)
Nextroll (3% of staff)
Applovin (12% of staff)

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PubMatic to Acquire Martin to Further Accelerate Supply Path Optimization Product Innovation

M&A

Sep 14, 2022

Pubmatic today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Martin, a media measurement and reporting platform, deepening the company’s investment in supply path optimization (SPO).

The acquisition is in response to growing demand from PubMatic’s buy-side customers for enhanced tools to take advantage of PubMatic’s global omnichannel inventory, including market-leading addressability solutions like Connect and innovative technology to enable SPO.

The transaction will be fully funded from existing cash on PubMatic’s balance sheet, and is expected to close in mid-September 2022, subject to customary closing conditions.

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Texas Beats Google’s Push to Toss Out Ad Tech Antitrust Suit, reports Bloomberg

General

Sep 14, 2022

An antitrust suit by state attorneys general accusing Alphabet Inc.’s Google of monopolizing the technology underlying online advertising can move forward, a New York federal judge ruled.

Attorneys general for 16 states plus Puerto Rico sued Google in 2020 for monopolizing the advertising technology market. The states, led by Texas, alleged that Google entered into a secret deal, nicknamed Jedi Blue, to give Meta Platforms Inc. advantages on the exchange it runs to buy and sell online ads. In exchange, the social media company abandoned plans to adopt a new type of technology that would have undercut Google’s online advertising monopoly.

The states also alleged that Google manipulated the auctions held on its exchange in ways designed to ensure its own products nearly always won.

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Meta Audience Network Debuts In-Game Rewarded Interstitial Ads

General

Sep 14, 2022

Gaming / Metaverse

The mobile monetization platform said in a blog post that rewarded interstitial ads are a new, user-friendly, skippable format that lets game developers reward players in-game for completing actions such as video views, encouraging longer sessions.

The ads are placed at gameplay moments when rewarding players is appropriate, and players can choose to opt out after five seconds, but they will only receive in-game rewards, such as coins or extra lives, for viewing the full video.

Suggestions for implementing the new ad option include reviewing the in-game economy and thinking strategically about placement in order to avoid cannibalizing other ad formats, as well as testing performance with a pre-prompt screen at the beginning of the video explaining what type of reward players will receive.

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Paramount Considers Discontinuing Showtime Streaming Service, Merging With Paramount+, reports WSJ

General

Sep 13, 2022

Paramount Global is considering discontinuing its Showtime streaming service and shifting its content into Paramount+, according to people familiar with the situation, a move that would streamline the company’s offerings amid a crowd of competitors.

Showtime’s $10.99-per-month service features programming from the premium channel including “Billions” and “Yellowjackets.” Discussions inside the company to fold that service into Paramount+ are still early, the people said.

For Paramount, combining the two streaming services may require complex negotiations with cable and satellite TV providers who carry the Showtime TV channel. Paramount has broached the idea of closing the stand-alone Showtime service in conversations with at least one major pay-TV partner, some of the people said.

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Layoffs coming to Warner Bros. Discovery, reports Axios

General

Sep 13, 2022

Hundreds of people, about 30% of the combined ad sales teams across WarnerMedia and Discovery, are expected to be laid off on the business side of Warner Bros. Discovery, via a round of layoffs that will begin Tuesday, sources tell Axios.

Executives have warned for months that the merger between WarnerMedia and Discovery would yield roughly $3 billion in synergies. Rising interest rates and a weak macro-economic climate has put pressure on media companies to be more disciplined about costs.

Inside the company, employees are bracing for steep cutsnow-defunct and some teams have already experienced layoffs. Hundreds of employees from CNN's now-defunct streaming service CNN+ were already laid off in April. More than two dozen HBO Max staffers were laid off in Europe last month.

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Google Is Backing Cookieless ID Solution Seller-Defined Audiences, reports Adweek

General

Sep 13, 2022

User Identifiers

Google is helping publishers more easily share their first-party data with advertisers in the open exchange by integrating with the IAB Tech Lab’s seller-defined audiences taxonomy solution, as the digital advertising ecosystem braces itself for cookie deprecation in 2024.

One solution to scale the transaction of publisher first-party data in the open web is the content taxonomy seller-defined audiences. Google is facilitating this process via a new tool called publisher provided signals, which lets publishers share their first-party data with advertisers according to the seller-defined audiences protocol, the company announced today in a blog post.

The tool, which is currently only available in beta mode on Google Ads and DSP Display & Video 360 and not third-party ad tech, is a shot in the arm for seller-defined audiences. Unlike many cookie alternatives, SDA gives power to publishers to define their own audience segments instead of third-party ad-tech firms.

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Google faces €25bn lawsuit in UK and EU over digital advertising, reports The Guardian

General

Sep 13, 2022

The UK law firm Humphries Kerstetter is planning to bring a case to the competition appeal tribunal over the next month, although the process could take years to reach a conclusion. The UK competition watchdog is also investigating Google’s power in the digital advertising technology market.

Toby Starr, a partner at Humphries Kerstetter, said the claim, which aims to recover advertising revenue lost due to Google’s allegedly anticompetitive behaviour over a period of years, would not just be aimed at benefiting news sites. The combined suits are seeking total compensation that, according to estimates from legal representatives, could reach €25bn.

“This important claim will represent a class of victims of Google’s anti-competitive conduct in ad tech who have collectively lost an estimated £7bn. This includes news websites up and down the country with large daily readerships as well as the thousands of small business owners who depend on advertising revenue – be it from their fishing website, food blog, football fanzine or other online content they have spent time creating and publishing.”

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Apple plans new spots for ads in App Store by the end of the year, reports CNBC

General

Sep 13, 2022

Apple plans to release new ad “placements” as soon as the holiday season, according to a message sent to developers on Tuesday inviting them to an online session to encourage them to buy ads.

The new spots represent a significant expansion in Apple’s advertising inventory, which is focused on its App Store. In recent years, Apple’s advertising inventory has been limited to one unit in the Search tab on the App Store and one on the search results page.

The message to developers didn’t specify where the new ad placements will be offered, but in July Apple announced it was planning to expand its menu with an ad unit on the Today tab, which is the front page of the App Store, and another sponsored unit on app product pages under the banner “You Might Also Like.”

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AppLovin abandons effort to acquire Unity after $20 billion bid was rejected, reports CNBC

M&A

Sep 12, 2022

After Unity shareholders rejected the $20 billion bid last month, AppLovin said on Monday that it won’t submit another proposal to acquire the video game software company.

In early August, AppLovin offered to buy Unity for $58.85 per share, which was a premium of about 18% to the prior day’s closing price. Unity responded by saying the deal was “not in the best interests of Unity shareholders.” Instead of taking that offer, Unity recommended that shareholders vote in favor of its own $4.4 billion proposed acquisition of mobile advertising technology firm IronSource, which was agreed upon in July.

With AppLovin’s proposal, Unity would have had to abandon the IronSource deal. It also would have made Unity CEO John Riccitiello the CEO of the combined company.

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Kroger Opens Data Marketplace For Connected TV and Streaming Ads

General

Sep 12, 2022

Kroger Precision Marketing is expanding its private programmatic marketplace to include video and connected TV inventory, fueling a convergence of three dominant media trends—CTV, programmatic buying and retail media.

With the expansion, which recently went live with packaged goods brands and agencies, advertisers can use sales data from the largest supermarket retailer loyalty program—with around 60 million households—to reach targeted households via premium inventory suppliers that include Magnite, OpenX, PubMatic and Xandr. The video and CTV expansion expand the self-service private marketplace for agencies and brands that Koger launched last year.

Kroger data previously had facilitated CTV buying and performance measurement via a relationship with Roku, but this expansion opens a much wider array of high-quality inventory for use. Creating a marketplace that’s demand-side platform-agnostic opens it up for the widest possible array of advertisers.

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Activist investor Dan Loeb backs off from asking Disney to sell ESPN, reports Reuters

M&A

Sep 12, 2022

Billionaire activist investor Daniel Loeb backed off from pushing Walt Disney Co to spin off ESPN, saying he has a "better understanding" of the sports television network's potential for growth. This comes after Disney Chief Executive Bob Chapek reaffirmed the value of ESPN to the media company.

The investor said in a tweet on Sunday that he looks forward to seeing ESPN Chairman James Pitaro execute on the growth and innovation plans, "generating considerable synergies as part of" Disney.

Disney has received numerous inquiries from companies seeking to buy ESPN earlier this year. The company has spent the last year laying plans to reignite growth at ESPN, and to position it for the future as part of Disney's bundle of streaming service.

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Netflix partners with Ubisoft to bolster fledgling gaming division, reports FT

General

Sep 11, 2022

Gaming / Metaverse

Netflix will launch three new mobile games next year based on Ubisoft’s games; including its most successful title Assassin’s Creed, Mighty Quest, a castle-building and monster-looting game, and the historical puzzle adventure game called Valiant Hearts.

The move comes as Netflix attempts to accelerate growth of its new gaming arm amid a slowdown in the company’s streaming business. The streaming group has lost more than half of its market value since April when it revealed its decade-long subscriber growth had ended.

The games will be made available exclusively to Netflix subscribers, with no ads or in-app purchases, allowing Ubisoft to tap into new audiences and experiment with fresh formats for existing titles. No details of the deal value have been announced.

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Microsoft’s New Multi-Platform Feature Allows Users To Run Ads Across Leading Platforms, reports DIW

General

Sep 10, 2022

Microsoft Advertising announced a new multi-platform feature that enables different users to run their advertisements across top social media apps. Facebook, Instagram, Google and Twitter are mentioned as compatible platforms.

The new all-in-one benefit is a part of the company’s Smart Campaign. It allows ads to run through the Microsoft interface and onto different apps. It’s not being rolled out for all advertisers yet, but there is a waiting list sign up. The company claims an AI tool will optimize budgets that best suit high performance.

Microsoft's audience network will supposedly be available, and ads can be produced with relevant searches online and specific keywords.

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Procter & Gamble is inadvertently funding Steve Bannon’s War Room, reports CheckMyAds

General

Sep 9, 2022

WeatherNation and Steve Bannon's Real America’s Voice are the same company, as they are both owned and operated by Performance One Media LLC, founded by Robert Sigg. The two companies present themselves as separate entities in order to obtain ad revenues. Behind the scenes, they pool the revenues into a single production house.

When Check My Ads watched WeatherNation on Roku, P&G took up at least half the spots on every commercial break. Performance One Media uses Seller IDs interchangeably across its properties, making it nearly impossible for P&G to track their ad dollars to Real America’s Voice.

Pubmatic, Lemma technologies, and Unruly have been found to misrepresent or hide ownership of the different properties.

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EU regulators widen Google adtech probe to include Portuguese case, reports Reuters

General

Sep 9, 2022

EU antitrust regulators have broadened the scope of their investigation into Google's digital advertising business by taking over the Portuguese competition watchdog's probe into the same issue. The Portuguese Competition Authority (AdC) opened a probe in May this year following a complaint.

AdC said its investigation focused on the market for publisher ad servers and the market for supply-side platforms, which allow publishers to manage the advertising space on their websites and to sell it through auctions or agreements with advertisers.

"There are indicia that Google has used information not accessible by competitors on online advertisement auctions in order to change the outcome of those auctions in Google's favour, and has possibly limited the development of competing auction technologies, among other competition restricting behaviours in the context of negotiations with publishers," AdC said.

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Marketers Still Aren’t Sold on Social Shopping, reports Adweek

General

Sep 9, 2022

Capitalizing on pandemic-induced behavior, platforms tested a raft of new social commerce features last year. Not only could social media companies earn a cut of the transaction, but they could accrue valuable purchase data. But now, some platforms have aborted their social commerce efforts.

Meta is phasing out its shopping page, removing the button that sends users to the existing page by next March, after introducing the Shop tab in November 2020. Instagram canned its native affiliate marketing program, which let creators earn a commission on tagged products on Instagram posts, last month, a little more than a year after launch. Facebook said it was shutting down its live shopping tool on October 1. And TikTok nixed an expansion of its own live shopping program into the U.S. and Europe, after struggles with a trial in the U.K..

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Spotify exec says the company will begin testing audiobooks very soon, reports TechCrunch

General

Sep 9, 2022

Audio Advertising

Spotify CFO Paul Vogel says the music streaming platform will begin testing and trialing audiobooks “very soon.” The Spotify executive said the company plans to continue to expand its portfolio of products, as it sees opportunities for growth in both its established markets and its developing markets.

Vogel said the company sees its foray into audiobooks as similar to its entrance into the podcasts market. He noted that Spotify was able to offer users an enhanced UI for listening to podcasts and that the company will do the same for audiobooks.

Last fall, the company acquired audiobook distributor Findaway for an undisclosed sum. At the time, Spotify said it planned to build on Findaway’s existing investments in the audio industry.

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Roblox jumps into online advertising, reports CNBC

General

Sep 9, 2022

Gaming / Metaverse

Roblox is announcing plans to debut ads next year, marking the company’s first significant effort to diversify its business beyond virtual goods in games. Prior to the rollout, Roblox said it will be testing ads with unspecified developers and brands by the end of this year.

In August, Roblox reported second-quarter financials that missed on both the top and bottom lines, and revenue growth slowed to 30% from more than 100% a year earlier. The company said in its quarterly filing that it generates “substantially all of our revenue” from the sale of Robux - its in-game currency. Advertising and 3D immersive shopping are cited as potential areas for growth.

Roblox describes its upcoming ad offering as immersive ads, though there’s not yet a standard format for how they will appear. In the portal ad tests, when users interact with the brand, they can be automatically transported to the company’s virtual Roblox community.

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The FT Says Open Exchange Programmatic Isn’t Worth Its Attention, reports AdExchanger

General

Sep 9, 2022

The Financial Times has long avoided chasing open web programmatic ad revenue. Instead, its focus has been on cultivating long-term direct deals with advertisers using first-party audience data and publishing editorial that is contextually relevant to in-demand audience segments, like business leaders and high-income earners.

Ninety-six percent of the FT's digital revenue is direct, and the remaining 4% is mostly programmatic direct or programmatic guaranteed, with the rest being PMPs. The FT tends to sell out, or at least have an 80% to 85% success rate, for high-demand segments like financial advisors, high-net-worth audiences, institutional investors and luxury buyers.

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The Global Disinformation Index Releases Report On Ad Tech Policy and Enforcement Gaps

General

Sep 8, 2022

To help contextualise and propose concrete recommendations, The Global Disinformation Index analysed current ad tech policies and their enforcement across the present policy landscape. For this study, GDI’s analysis of 44 ad tech companies in its database focused on 15 different adversarial narrative topics.

Most supply-side platforms (SSP), ad exchanges and ad networks are lacking publisher policies that would enable them to demonetise the full spectrum of adversarial narrative topics;
17 companies do not have policies covering any of these 15 narratives;
Some of the ad tech companies studied have no policies at all making it hard for them to tackle even the most basic disinformation content;
26 companies’ policies adequately address at least 1 narrative. However, in most instances policy wording is vague and attempts to cover multiple different types of disinformation under the one policy;
Only three ad tech companies (Google, OpenWeb and Magnite) have a policy for each of the 15 selected disinformation narrative topics;
By monitoring ads displayed on disinformation websites and identifying which ad tech company served each ad, GDI has recorded numerous instances of publisher policy infringements;
GDI has found evidence of 25% of the ad tech companies analysed infringing at least one of their own policies;
33% of studied ad tech companies either did not have policies publicly available or included coverage of adversarial narratives tracked by GDI.

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The Facebook button is disappearing from websites as consumers demand better privacy, reports CNBC

General

Sep 8, 2022

Companies like Dell have been removing Facebook login functionality from their websites. Logging in with Facebook credentials used to be available across the web, but reputational issues and stagnant user growth has dampened the social network’s influence.

In the past year, the company’s business has been beset by Apple’s iOS privacy change, which made it harder to target ads, a deteriorating economy, competition from short-video service TikTok, and reputational damage after a whistleblower leaked documents showing Facebook knew of the harm caused by many of its products.

The Facebook login is by no means extinct. Numerous websites from media outlets and news organizations still use it as an option, as do mobile game developers.

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Meta To Deter Scraping By Protecting Facebook Identifiers

General

Sep 8, 2022

"Most companies use unique identifiers within the URLs of their website. Identifiers are a way to uniquely reference people or content such as posts, pictures and videos. Within Facebook, these identifiers are known as FBIDs and we use them to load content for people.

We created Pseudonymized Facebook Identifiers (PFBIDs), which combine timestamps and FBIDs to generate a unique time-rotating identifier. As we phase out the ability to access the original identifiers, this helps deter unauthorized data scraping by making it harder for attackers to guess, connect and repeatedly access data.

These identifiers are not designed to prevent browser tools from removing tracking components from the URL. We use this process to better protect people’s privacy from certain types of enumeration and time-delayed attacks while preserving the ability to have long-lived links. "

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Private-equity firm Bridgepoint is set to take a majority investment in MiQ, reports Insider

M&A

Sep 8, 2022

Sources familiar with the deal said the investment, which is expected to be announced in the coming days, would value the adtech company between $900 million and $1 billion and that MiQ's management have retained a sizeable stake in the business.

Founded in London as "Media IQ" in 2010, MiQ offers a product that helps advertisers capture data from various sources to figure out where to target their ad spending and to improve the performance of their campaigns. It also buys and re-sells ad inventory from larger demand-side platforms and is growing its business in new areas such as advanced TV advertising.

The company reported $464 million in revenue and an operating profit of $45.3 million in 2021, according to its latest financial filing. Around two-thirds of its revenue is derived from the US. The investment from Bridgepoint would come around five years after the private-equity firm ECI took a minority stake in MiQ — timing that reflects normal private-equity investment cycles.

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Facebook Engineers Admit They Don’t Know What They Do With Your Data, reports Vice

General

Sep 7, 2022

A transcript of the engineers’ testimony was included in a newly unsealed court document. The Facebook’s engineers testimony was first reported by The Intercept.

The hearing was part of a years-long lawsuit over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The hearing featured Zarashow and Steven Elia, a software engineer manager who’s also worked at Facebook since 2011, according to his LinkedIn profile.

“It would take multiple teams on the ad side to track down exactly where the user data flows,” said Eugene Zarashow. “I would be surprised if there's even a single person that can answer that narrow question conclusively,” Zarashow added, referring to the question of exactly where personal data may be stored within 55 Facebook subsystems, which were the subject of the hearing.

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Landmark GDPR decision against IAB TCF to be heard at Europe’s highest court, reports ICCL

General

Sep 7, 2022

This afternoon, the Brussels Court issued a judgement in IAB Europe’s appeal opposing the landmark decision of 28 EU data protection authorities against its “Transparency & Consent Framework” (TCF) consent system, which plagues Europeans on 80% of the European Internet.

In the judgement, the Court dismissed various procedural arguments of IAB Europe. In addition, acknowledging the importance of the case, the Court agreed to refer our proposed preliminary legal questions to Europe’s highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union.

"That the Brussels Court of Appeal has refered our questions to the European Court of Justice shows the importance of this case. Today’s judgement is the next step in our effort to put an end to the consent pop-ups that have harassed Internet users in Europe for years", said Dr Johnny Ryan of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. "We now look forward to the answers from the European Court of Justice and subsequently a judgement on the merits of the Brussels Court of Appeal”.

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Big Tech’s $95 Million Spending Spree Leaves Antitrust Bill on Brink of Defeat, reports Bloomberg

General

Sep 6, 2022

A high-profile push by Congress to rein in the nation’s biggest internet companies is at risk of failing with time running out to pass major legislation ahead of midterm elections.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. and their trade groups have poured almost $95 million into lobbying since 2021 as they seek to derail the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which has advanced further than any US legislative effort to address the market power of some of the world’s richest companies.

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Instagram fined €405M for violating kids’ privacy, reports Politico

General

Sep 5, 2022

The Irish Data Protection Commission has fined Meta-owned social media platform Instagram €405 million for violations of the General Data Protection Regulation. The Irish DPC has at least six other investigations into Meta-owned companies in the pipeline.

The fine, which is the second-highest fine under the GDPR after a €746 million penalty against Amazon, is the third for a Meta-owned company handed down by the Irish regulator.

The penalty, currently the highest for a Meta-owned company — after a €225 million fine for WhatsApp and a €17 million fine for Facebook — is aimed at Instagram's violation of children's privacy, including its publication of kids' email addresses and phone numbers.

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Apple plans to double its digital advertising business workforce, reports FT

General

Sep 5, 2022

Apple plans to nearly double the workforce in its fast-growing digital advertising business less than 18 months after it introduced sweeping privacy changes that hobbled its bigger rivals in the lucrative industry.

The digital ads industry has been on edge about Apple’s advertising ambitions since it launched privacy rules last year that disrupted the $400bn digital ads market, making it difficult to tailor ads to Apple’s 1bn-plus iPhone users.

Apple's ad business has grown from just a few hundred million dollars of revenue in the late 2010s to about $5bn this year, according to research group Evercore ISI, which expects Apple to have a $30bn ads business within four years.

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Brands Risk Being Caught in the Crossfire of New EU Political Ad Regulations, reports Adweek

General

Sep 2, 2022

The impending regulations from the European Union (EU) regarding political advertising messages could have repercussions for brands who risk their marketing messages getting caught up under the loose—and overlapping—definitions, industry bodies have warned.

The EU is in the process of drafting regulations around political communications. The proposals are expected to be agreed early next year and to become law by 2024, ahead of the next European Parliament elections. The latest meeting on the definitions will be held in Brussels on the evening of September 5 by The European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE).

The new regulations will have a direct impact on major tech platforms such as Facebook and Google, as well as local political parties, who will be forced to reveal details on how they target voters.

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Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US, reports FT

General

Sep 2, 2022

Apple has overtaken Android devices to account for more than half of smartphones used in the US, giving the iPhone maker an edge over its rival as it pushes into sectors including finance and healthcare.

The 50 per cent landmark — the iPhone’s highest share since it launched in 2007 — was first passed in the quarter ending in June, according to data from Counterpoint Research. Some 150 devices using Google’s Android operating system, led by Samsung and Lenovo, accounted for the rest.

As Apple chief executive Tim Cook prepares to unveil the iPhone 14 on Wednesday, the milestone suggests the company has never been in a more competitive position despite persistent criticism that it has lost its innovative edge.

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Comcast Looks to Cut Up to $1 Billion From Budgets at Its TV Networks, reports Bloomberg

General

Sep 1, 2022

Comcast is looking to cut as much as $1 billion from the budget of the TV networks in its entertainment division, NBCUniversal, money it can use to boost other parts of the business.

Reallocating money from profitable but slow-growing TV networks could allow Comcast to invest more resources into its streaming service, Peacock, as well as its theme parks. Comcast also explored a merger with video-game maker Electronic Arts.

Peacock, at 13 million subscribers, showed no growth in the most recent quarter. It lost close to $500 million. To make matters worse, Comcast, the largest US cable TV provider, also reported no new customers for its internet access business.

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Pelosi expresses reservations about bipartisan privacy bill, reports Politico

General

Sep 1, 2022

Pelosi raised issues with the American Data Privacy and Protection Act (HR 8152) preempting state laws, specifically the ones in her home state of California. Without Pelosi’s support, the bill likely won’t make it to a floor vote in the House, despite making it through the Energy and Commerce Committee by a decisive 53-2 vote.

“California’s landmark privacy laws and the new kids age-appropriate design bill, both of which received unanimous and bipartisan support in both chambers, must continue to protect Californians — and states must be allowed to address rapid changes in technology,” Pelosi said in her statement, which also commended the committee for its work on the bill.

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UK Competition Body Scrutinizes Microsoft Deal to Buy Activision Blizzard, reports Adweek

General

Sep 1, 2022

Britain’s competition watchdog has identified “potential concerns” around the $68.7 billion deal agreed by Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard and how it may hurt the U.K. industry.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has claimed that the acquisition could “substantially lessen” competition in the gaming sector around gaming console sales, multi-game subscription services and cloud gaming.

Both parties now have until September 8 2022 to respond with a remedy, which might be accepted by the CMA. Phase 2 will see the CMA appoint an independent panel who will consider the deal. Following the second phase, the CMA will decide whether the merger will lead to a substantial lessening of competition, which could impact whether it completes.

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Ad ID Tool Offers Police Mass Surveillance On A Budget, reports AP News

General

Sep 1, 2022

Local law enforcement agencies from suburban Southern California to rural North Carolina have been using an obscure cellphone tracking tool, at times without search warrants, that gives them the power to follow people’s movements months back in time.

Police have used “Fog Reveal” to search hundreds of billions of records from 250 million mobile devices, and harnessed the data to create location analyses known among law enforcement as “patterns of life,” according to thousands of pages of records about the company.

Sold by Virginia-based Fog Data Science LLC, Fog Reveal has been used since at least 2018 in criminal investigations ranging from the murder of a nurse in Arkansas to tracing the movements of a potential participant in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

The company was developed by two former high-ranking Department of Homeland Security officials under former President George W. Bush. It relies on advertising identification numbers, which Fog officials say are culled from popular cellphone apps such as Waze, Starbucks and hundreds of others that target ads based on a person’s movements and interests, according to police emails.

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Paramount+ Combines With Showtime In Single Streaming App, reports Deadline

General

Aug 31, 2022

Paramount+ and Showtime have combined into a single streaming app. The full bundling follows an initial move last year to unify the billing of the two, with significant discounts, as Paramount Global was looking to give an extra boost to Paramount+. Formerly known as CBS All Access, the streaming service rebranded in 2021.

New subscribers will be able to sign up for Paramount+ With Showtime for $7.99 a month for the basic, ad-supported service and $12.99 for the ad-free version. Current subscribers can upgrade to the bundle within their app.

After the introductory discount ends October 2, the bundle will cost $11.99 with ads or $14.99 without them. Subscribers interested in having only Showtime, without Paramount+, will still be able to get it for $10.99 a month as a stand-alone offering as well as through third-party distributors. Likewise, those wanting Paramount+ but not Showtime can continue to pay $4.99 a month with ads or $9.99 without them.

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Disney Explores Amazon Prime-Like Membership Program to Offer Discounts and Perks, reports WSJ

General

Aug 31, 2022

Walt Disney Co. is exploring a membership program that could offer discounts or special perks to encourage customers to spend more on its streaming services, theme parks, resorts and merchandise, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The program would be somewhat akin to Amazon Prime, which offers advantages such as free shipping, discounts at Whole Foods and a complementary streaming video service for a monthly or annual fee, the people said. Internally, some executives have referred to Disney ’s initiative as “Disney Prime,” although that won’t be the name of the program, one of the people said.

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Judge Approves $92 Million TikTok Settlement, With Illinois Claimants Receiving Biggest Share, reports NBC

General

Aug 31, 2022

A federal judge in Illinois has granted final approval for a $92 million class-action lawsuit settlement between the social media network TikTok and users of the platform, with Illinois residents set to receive the largest share of the payout.

According to a press release, the lawsuit was filed over claims that the video-sharing app violated both federal law and Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act, with the site allegedly collecting biometric data from users and then disclosing it to third-party companies without the consent of those affected.

“In this class action suit, we alleged that TikTok’s technological sophistication enabled them to collect billions of user attributes, ranging from eye color to people’s facial expressions and physical gestures and use that data without disclosure to the consumers," Elizabeth Fegan, co-lead counsel representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement.

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Netflix Seeking Top Dollar for Brands to Advertise on Its Service, reports WSJ

General

Aug 31, 2022

Netflix is seeking to charge advertisers roughly $65 for reaching 1,000 viewers, a measure known as CPM, or cost per thousand. That is substantially higher than most other streaming platforms.

Netflix wants to cap the amount any brand can spend annually on its platform at $20 million, in order to ensure that no brand advertises too much on the service and people end up seeing the same ad too often. Netflix wants brands to commit to a year-long upfront ad buy by late September.

Ad buyers said Netflix is offering advertisers the ability to target specific sets of users, but said it is less granular than what they have grown accustomed to with online ads. The options Netflix is offering include targeting people that are watching Netflix’s top 10 shows in the U.S.; allowing brands to target people that are watching a specific genre of show such as comedy or drama; or the ability to target ads to a specific country

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