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Brains, Brawn And Amazon
Amazon’s next biggest competitor is … CVS?
Amazon is placing bids on home health services provider Signify Health just one month after it bought One Medical Clinics for $4 billion, which CVS also had its eye on.
Apparently, the more than 800,000 patients One Medical serves isn’t enough for Amazon, and it’s willing to pay big bucks. Signify could go for more than $8 billion at auction, WSJ reports.
Physicians and other providers use Signify’s technology systems for real-time analytics that help with in-home care, not unlike Amazon’s Store Analytics designed to help retailers monitor product sales.
But groceries and patient care are two totally different animals – and a sales-driven tech titan breaking into health care could be a bit, well, concerning.
The Markup exposed Amazon last year for unfairly preferencing its own branded products in search results.
Regardless – and despite the risks of dabbling in patient health data – Amazon has been quietly building up a market presence in pharma since 2018, when it acquired PillPack and turned it into Amazon Pharmacy.
For now, though, Signify remains up for grabs. Amazon is still just a deep-pocketed suitor.
Beggars Have To Be Choosers
HBO Max is getting desperate.
Warner Bros. Discovery has been busy slashing original content previously destined for HBO Max in the lead-up to a planned relaunch of the service as a bundle offering with Discovery+.
Meanwhile, Discovery+ hasn’t been experiencing cuts.
And now Warner Bros. Discovery is also slashing subscription prices for HBO Max in the form of a 30% discount to anyone who prepays for an annual subscription from now until October 30, Variety reports.
The discount comes just as the newly merged company was pouring money into a days-long campaign to promote the “Game of Thrones” spinoff “House of the Dragon” over the weekend on Roku TV home screens. Gotta keep those subs.
That’s the nature of the beast when it comes to streaming – everything starts with subscribers. Even Netflix’s decision to launch ads is more about curbing subscriber churn than funneling ad revenue into its coffers.
Dangling the next “Game of Thrones” at a steep discount seems to be HBO Max’s best bet to keep subscriber loss at bay. And the effort might not be in vain. The “House of the Dragon” premiere drew in more day-one viewers than Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” according to Samba TV, which ain’t too shabby.
Is This An Ad?
Microsoft’s deal with Netflix to support the streamer’s advertising ambitions seems to have inspired it to add ads, too.
On Outlook, users can choose to split their inbox into “Focused” and “Other.”
In the past, Microsoft would only serve ads into the “Other” tab for its free users. Recently, though, Microsoft has been incorporating more ads into Outlook for iOS and Android, and those ads have started to sneak into the single-inbox mode. Now, the only way to avoid ads is to pay for a Microsoft 365 subscription.
While Outlook app users can still opt to filter ads into the “Other” tab, they remain stuck with ads as long as they’re using the free version, Microsoft spokesperson Caitlin Roulston told The Verge.
Native ads can be a good way to reach people when they’re leisurely scrolling through a social media feed. But you could argue that being forced to distinguish important work emails from ads is pretty disruptive, to say the least.
The people of Twitter certainly aren’t pleased about it.
But Wait, There’s More!
How marketers are reaching viewers who insist on paying for no ads. [Marketing Brew]
Ad spend slows down, but retail media stays optimistic. [Digiday]
What the public actually thinks about privacy. [Axios]
YouTube is focusing on podcasts. [TechCrunch]
Why do small businesses like TikTok? [Ad Age]
The ad tech hiring freeze continues. [Insider]
