Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Opt Out Or Copped Out?
Facebook and Instagram users in the EU will be able to opt out of personalized advertising, except for broad segmentation for gender and country, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Ireland’s data protection regulator fined Meta roughly $423 million in January and ordered the company to cease using its terms and conditions agreement as a basis for ads personalization. Meta is floating this concession, but it may prove inadequate for privacy advocates and some regulators.
Facebook and Instagram users must fill out a form describing their objection to the use of in-app data for advertising, which Meta then evaluates. So it’s still an opt-out, rather than an opt-in, situation.
The ruling is important, though, because unless successfully appealed, it establishes that Meta must have consent even to use first-party data based on app activity, such as the videos users watch, articles they share or accounts they follow.
“We believe that our previous approach was compliant,” Meta said (unsurprisingly) in a statement. “It is important to note that this legal change does not prevent personalized advertising on our platform.”
It’s AI, Not ‘May I?’
Publishers have become accustomed to making Faustian bargains with Google.
But at least publishers knew they were making a deal with the devil when they allowed Google to freely crawl their pages and dish back traffic to their sites.
What about chatbots?
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According to Bryan Goldberg, CEO of BDG Media, which owns Bustle, Elite Daily, Mic and other sites, chatbots that digest search queries and return text responses could “nuke many corners of the open web.”
Guess Google is planning to drink the news industry’s milkshake yet again. (“Drainage!”)
Although hope springs eternal for publishers looking for a symbiotic relationship with Google.
The alternative is that chatbot AIs absorb publisher content and simply recreate their own plagiarized or original “enough” versions as brief text responses.
Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch believes chatbots could prove beneficial to well-known publishers, because chatbot search users will default to trusted sources.
Microsoft’s Bing penned a blog post this week to reassure publishers that its ChatGPT search tools will not cut them out of search traffic.
“The early progress is encouraging,” writes Microsoft consumer CMO Yusuf Mehdi. “Based on our data from the preview, we are driving more traffic from all types of users.”
The Parasite And The Hosts
Airbnb may launch a marketplace to connect hosts with vendors for tasks like cleaning, household prep and cooking.
There’s no time frame, but that kind of marketplace would be a new revenue opportunity for Airbnb, Catherine Powell, global head of hosting, told the Skift Future of Lodging Forum in London this week.
Why does this matter to advertising?
Because Airbnb is getting into advertising. Bank on it.
Competitors like Expedia and Booking.com already are, and they earn $1 billion or more per year apiece from ad revenue and services.
Airbnb’s reluctance to step into advertising could be that the margin is extracted from hosts. Expedia earns ad money from airlines, cruises and hotel companies. Nobody’s crying for them. Someone renting a bedroom as a side hustle on Airbnb doesn’t have a marketing team.
But with the strength of Airbnb’s data, an ad biz could still pan out.
“I think it’s a massive opportunity,” Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said about a potential ad business during a Morgan Stanley tech conference this month. “You could imagine easily adding a few equivalent percentage [points] of take rate if you were to scale that over time.”
But Wait, There’s More!
Google Cloud says it will launch an off-the-shelf data clean room solution in Q3, with LiveRamp and Habu as the first partners. [release]
Were newsletters a zero-interest-rate phenomenon? [The Rebooting]
How BuzzFeed’s “Creator Score” is grading the impact of its creator network. [Digiday]
National TV advertising revenue will sink 4.4% this year, a steeper drop than predicted in a previous projection, according to S&P Global Ratings. [MediaPost]
You’re Hired!
Mars Petcare promotes CMO Leonid Sudakov to president of growth, digital and platforms. [Campaign]
Amazon Ads veteran Ed Dinichert will join TripleLift as CRO. [release]
