Platforms

Zitron argues that the internet is being ruined by the Big Tech players that control it and that advertising needs to lose its sense of entitlement over everyone’s data.

So, the Linda Yaccarino/Elon Musk interview happened at the Possible conference in Miami. We went so you didn’t have to.

After more than two years of building and testing, Meta is releasing brand suitability controls and third-party verification for its feed environments.

Based on TikTok CEO Shou Chew’s appearance before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on Thursday, Congress isn’t buying TikTok’s claims of independence. And US legislators have no faith in any of TikTok’s proposals for safeguarding US user data.

Yahoo pulling the plug on its SSP demonstrates how difficult it’s become for supply-side platforms to prove their value in a commoditized marketplace.

Hopefully you aren’t sick of news headlines about generative AI technology in the ad industry just yet. On Tuesday, mar tech entrepreneur Omar Tawakol announced the public launch of Rembrand, a virtual product placement platform to monetize influencer and creator content.

Advantage+ didn’t come up during Meta’s Q4 earnings call on Wednesday, but it’s the ad product Chief Business Officer Marne Levine says she’s most excited about.

2022 was a no good, very bad year for Meta’s stock. It was the year that Meta reported its first-ever revenue decline – yet shares soared by more than 30% in after-hours trading on Wednesday following Meta’s Q4 2022 earnings report.

The photo messaging app reported $1.3 billion in revenue in its Q4 2022 earnings report on Tuesday, which represented flat YoY growth.

Video creators are in a period of “rapid experimentation,” said TheSoul VP of content distribution Victor Potrel. Some are pursuing commerce, some are getting into CTV and others are going all-in on short-form vertical video, where views counts are like monopoly money but the payouts are more like cents than dollars.

The Department of Justice wants to break up Google’s ad tech stack. But how would separating Google’s publisher technology into a standalone entity affect the ad ecosystem? There are pros and cons.

Most data clean rooms pitch themselves as being interoperable – except for the biggest ones. And this leads to confusion. Whereas independent data clean rooms focus on interoperability, walled garden ad platforms have very little interest in it. And walled garden-based clean rooms are where the money goes, namely, Google’s Ads Data Hub (ADH), the Amazon […]

Ready, set … sue. On Tuesday, the antitrust division of the Department of Justice formally sued Google over its alleged (ahem) monopolization of the digital advertising market.

Microsoft Advertising is getting more serious about retail media. On Tuesday, Microsoft Advertising launched an off-site audience extension product and kicked off a testing phase for in-store activations.

The European Commission just left Meta a lump of coal in its stocking. On Monday, European regulators charged Meta with antitrust violations for “distorting competition in the markets for online classified ads,” including through unfair access to advertising data pulled from its competitors. Specifically, the commission issued what’s known as a “statement of objections,” which […]

Meta had a rocky third quarter and the market reacted accordingly. Its metaverse division, Reality Labs, lost nearly $3.7 billion. But the metaverse (whatever that ends up meaning) is still five to 10 years out, and Nicola Mendelsohn, VP of Meta’s global business group, told AdExchanger that Meta is still investing heavily in its core, including ad performance.

Musk’s promises to overhaul Twitter’s content moderation and user verification policies have caused brands and agencies to rethink their budgetary commitments to the platform. Plus, Musk’s seemingly disingenuous tone shift on advertising and his tweeting of fake news may make brands more inclined to pull budgets from a platform that was never seen as a must-buy anyway.

Meta reported $27.2 billion in ad revenue in its Q3 earnings report on Wednesday. That represents a 4% drop year-over-year (YoY). Net income for Q3 was $4.4 billion, down 52% YoY. And Meta is projecting another revenue dip for Q4. As a result, the company will implement layoffs and hiring freezes throughout 2023.

Media standards are needed to help guide buyers on where to invest and help publishers and platforms do better themselves. The “onus is on advertisers” to drive change,” said Eli Harris, EVP of global digital partnerships and media responsibility at MAGNA Global, presenting the fourth annual edition of the company’s Media Responsibility Index (MRI) at an event in New York City earlier this week.

Meta has many pots on the boil right now, and for good reason. The advertising industry is bubbling like a pan of oil. Meta has announced major new initiatives to support the metaverse (natch), AI, brand safety and suitability controls and third-party verification for the feed, automated ad products, business messaging, privacy-enhancing technologies, creator tools […]

Meta is struggling to get its wheels turning on Reels. But Meta has seen more success with business messaging. Click-to-message ads are “one of our fastest-growing ad products,” Dan Levy, VP of business messaging at Meta, tells AdExchanger.

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. “We have all seen that in digital markets, monopolies self-sustain,” he said.

Bill Watkins, a 9-year Pinterest veteran in sales who was named CRO this year, says the company is focusing on three main pillars: its creator ecosystem, facilitating shopping and ad-based monetization.

Waze, which was acquired by Google in 2013, now has 140 million monthly active users across the globe. Waze does serve ads based on real-time location, but the company refers to this as contextual because the ads are based on wherever a given device is in the moment, rather than any meaningful connections or patterns about a particular user.

Meta has released new products available within Meta Advantage, its newly consolidated suite of automated advertising tools, and the global rollout of Advantage+ shopping campaigns, which was in beta since earlier this year, with additional features to support Advantage+ app campaigns.

If another war breaks out, if Apple tightens the screws even more on targeted advertising, if shopping shifted: Amazon would still report strong and healthy earnings. Q2 this year is no exception. Earlier this week, Facebook reported its first-ever drop in year-over-year ad revenue and Alphabet hosted a defensive investor call, during which the C-suite […]

If revenue falls in the metaverse, does it make a sound? For the first time in Meta’s history, it reported a year-over-year decline in total revenue, down 1% in the second quarter, to $28.8 billion – missing analyst estimates of $28.94 billion.

Microsoft’s selection as Netflix’s ad sales partner of choice single-handedly set the stage for Netflix’s last quarterly earnings report. But Microsoft hardly brought up the deal at all when it closed out its 2022 fiscal year on Tuesday. It attributes a good chunk of its current growth to its cloud business.

The onset of the digital media recession, if not the global economic recession, has struck Google. But Google’s doing just fine, though, thanks for asking.

How should brands think about advertising in the metaverse? The question is a little hard to answer when there’s no consensus about what exactly the metaverse is or what it might become