Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
High Voltage Media
Last week, we mentioned Volta, a company that manufactures electric car charging stations, in our new weekly Commerce Media newsletter as an apt example of the strange inventory grab-bag that sometimes exists behind a retail media platform. For Volta Media, that means offering digital out-of-home impressions to retailers if they allow Volta charging stations in their parking lots.
On Friday, the company’s ad sales story took an interesting twist with the news that the company is being acquired by Shell, the gas station and energy industry giant. And the Volta Media biz was an upfront part of the appeal.
As EV adoption grows, charging stations “will play a key role in meeting people where they spend a great deal of time: the store, the gym, and everywhere in-between,” writes István Kapitány, EVP of Shell Mobility, in a release. “Beyond providing a charging service, Volta specializes in generating advertising revenues from screens embedded into the charge point, adding a source of non-fuel revenue from sites.”
More Buzz Than Feed
BuzzFeed enjoyed a recent stock bump when it announced it would use OpenAI’s ChatGPT to produce content, like quizzes with infinite possible answers.
At the time, CEO Jonah Peretti stressed he wanted to avoid the “depressing path” of using AI “for cost savings and spamming out a bunch of SEO articles.”
But BuzzFeed is already heading down that depressing path, Futurism reports. Throughout March, BuzzFeed quietly published about 40 AI-written travel guides that are likely to give readers a whiff of the content farm.
All of the articles feature hackneyed writing, calling nearly every destination a “hidden gem” and using the expression “Now, I know what you’re thinking” in nearly every writeup. Basically, they read like SEO spam.
The articles, which BuzzFeed insists are not sponsored content, are bylined “As Told To Buzzy.” Above the article text, a member of BuzzFeed’s sponsorship or design team receives credit as a collaborator. BuzzFeed apparently created the travel guides by emailing questionnaires to non-editorial employees asking for travel recommendations and using those questionnaires to generate travel listicles.
Bundles Of Joy
Amit Zavery, Google Cloud GM and head of platform, vented his spleen to Reuters that EU regulators have taken a light touch on Microsoft, which he says “definitely has a very anti-competitive posture in cloud.”
Microsoft Azure avoided an antitrust investigation by making one-off concessions to companies that levied complaints. Zavery says those deals only tie companies preferentially to Microsoft and that the terms should be available to all, not just individual businesses that filed complaints.
He also alleges Microsoft uses its on-premise tech offering and Office and Windows businesses to lock in cloud accounts and bar competition. (Though, Google Cloud does the same wherever it can leverage Google Advertising’s ubiquity.)
For the biggest consumer tech companies, upselling their own bundled services does not register as an antitrust issue.
If Programmatic IO was promoted in the paid client interface of Looker, Google’s cloud product, it would be a shocking ad placement. But promoting Google conferences with pop-up ads in Looker is just the way it is. Apple operates the same way, promoting its apps and subscriptions with any bit of canvas on an Apple device. Plus, its services use allow-tracking language that would get any other company kicked out of the App Store.
But Wait, There’s More!
A new ChatGPT feature being tested by brands could turn the AI bot into an app store for marketers. [Ad Age]
TikTok’s uncertain future: the issues marketers should (and shouldn’t) fret over. [Digiday]
Elon Musk tried to meet with the FTC chief about Twitter but was rebuffed. [NYT]
The campaign to save TikTok has been years in the making. [Politico]
You’re Hired!
The Knot, the wedding planning marketplace, promotes Angel Llull to CRO. [release]
Zenith appoints Emerson J. Sosa Ponce to lead its cultural convergence practice. [release]
