Big Gamesmanship
The midterm elections were a marketing moment tailor-made for prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket. But the next mass attention moment for American media – the Super Bowl – won’t be a friendly environment for these platforms, Adweek reports.
Although the NFL, like most pro sports leagues, enthusiastically embraced sports betting partnerships and marketing, it’s nevertheless sticking with the prediction market ad ban it put in place for last season’s Super Bowl.
The NFL even clarified ahead of this season that its sportsbook marketing partners DraftKings, FanDuel and Fanatics can’t promote their own prediction market offerings during NFL games.
Those same sportsbooks launched Kalshi and Polymarket alternatives this year as competition heated up between unabashed gambling apps and “we swear we’re not gambling” prediction markets. These gambling apps now default to prediction market mode in states that prohibit sports betting. It’s a cheeky move. Gambling apps are now using the same argument as prediction markets to sidestep gambling regulations.
Given the NFL’s ad ban, prediction markets will therefore have to get creative with their Super Bowl marketing strategy.
They won’t be able to partner with NFL players or teams like they have in other leagues, because the NFL kiboshed those deals, too. But that doesn’t rule out deals with creators and celebrities, news publisher partnerships or live activations in the greater Los Angeles area, where this season’s Big Game will take place.
A Bot-ched Plan
Many marketers and entrepreneurs insist that agentic shopping is the future.
And there are already signs that consumers are curious. Just look at Meta’s new personal agent, Muse. Between its Sept. 8 launch and Meta’s third quarter earnings call on Oct. 21, more than 10 million people in the US and Canada set up their own Muse agent and roughly 25% of them now use it on any given day, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
But in order for agentic shopping to really take off, retailers need to be on board – and, so far, the response has been mixed.
Amazon, for instance, has been blocking Muse since shortly after it launched, in part to keep shoppers within its own recommendation and discovery channels. Having an agent do your shopping is bad for Amazon’s ad revenue.
Then, earlier this week, United Airlines announced that AI bots will be prohibited from booking flights, citing data privacy concerns as well as potential violations of Federal Aviation Administration and Transportation Department rules.
As The Wall Street Journal puts it, “An AI agent can’t, for example, attest during check-in that bags don’t contain explosives.”
So much for a frictionless future.
UGC-ing Is Believing
YouTube gives marketers plenty of content to choose from – and plenty of reasons to second-guess their choices.
Should they go for high-production-value video from professional broadcasters and studios? Low-rent, niche creator content? Or highly produced content from well-resourced, big-name creator channels?
Naturally, there are merits to all three, Mike Shields reports at Next in Media.
Creator channels – which run the gamut from MrBeast to the guy streaming his playthrough of the video game you just bought to a few hundred users – tend to have the widest reach on YouTube, accounting for 63% of all viewing sessions, according to TV attention measurement platform TVision. Professional channels, like Apple TV and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, account for the rest.
But TVision found that the professional content drives 34% deeper engagement than the creator stuff.
However, in a weird inversion of that trend, professionally produced large creator channels drive lower engagement than niche channels that only attract between 1,000 and 13,000 viewers.
Marketers could use such third-party insights to curate their own YouTube inventory, Shields notes. But targeting specific creator channels via Google Ads is a convoluted process involving manually pasting in approved channels.
Don’t worry, though. There will be an AI agent for that soon enough.
But Wait! There’s More!
UK broadcaster ITV saw a nearly 8% decline in advertising revenue last quarter and expects a similar 5% to 10% decline in the fourth quarter. [The Hollywood Reporter]
How Kickstarter’s Everette Taylor went from CMO to CEO. [WSJ]
Why are streaming services still trying to become TikTok? [The Verge]
New York or Nowhere says it built its apparel brand on organic social posts and collaborations – without spending a dime on ads. [Business Insider]
