Social Media

One of the DraftKings founders now leads HardScope, parent of FaZe Clan, aiming to bring FaZe’s content and distribution magic to creators beyond gaming.

For the uninitiated, “Glitchmas” is our name for what’s become an annual tradition when, from between roughly late October through November, Meta’s ad platform just seems to go bonkers.

For many advertisers and agencies, returning to TikTok this week felt a bit like remote working through a natural disaster: Business as usual, except not really.

As a brand, the social media platform TikTok has only existed for about seven or eight years. Yet during that short time, it’s completely taken over the minds of users, business owners, advertisers, and, most notably, elected officials. And now, despite generating billions of dollars in annual revenue, it might be on its way out.

Now that ad-supported streaming models are becoming more profitable, Vevo’s Rob Christensen predicts that social video will be the next big frontier to cross – or, more specifically, where “social and television converge.”

With signal loss on the rise, many advertisers are giving first-party data more of a shot. Not scotch whisky brand Dewar’s, though.

Snapchat probably isn’t the first thing you think of when you hear “CRM,” but Snap is trying to change that.

The online advertising industry is staring down the barrel of not one but two potential shutdowns that could radically change where brands put their ad dollars in 2025, according to Madison and Wall’s Brian Weiser and Olivia Morley.

Ad startup Biddeo.io announces its expansion to the US. Its MO is to help advertisers secure social video inventory more cheaply than they can through direct campaigns on social platforms.

We asked the experts what marketers and media buyers should do to prepare for a possible ban of TikTok in the US.

The IAB projects digital video ad spend will rise to $63 billion in 2024, representing a 16% increase from last year. Of the three video ad categories the report breaks out (social and online video and CTV), the clear winner is social video.

YouTube announced a new feature that allows advertisers to buy ads within YouTube Shorts specifically for particular content categories.

LinkedIn has new connected TV ad placements to help its B2B marketers target audiences off-platform, while they’re streaming shows and movies.

Brands are more interested in marketing on YouTube Shorts because YouTube has finally been addressing their biggest ask: to unbundle Shorts from other YouTube inventory.

Munch, a startup that uses AI to turn long-form video content into short-form video clips for social media, announced $7.2 million in seed funding on Tuesday.

We asked agency experts: With TikTok under the microscope and a potential US ban looming, what are you advising brands do?

Team Whistle says TikTok’s programmatic ad offerings pale in comparison to YouTube’s more robust, Google-supported ad platform. But while YouTube Shorts’ new revenue share and creator funds can offer meaningful revenue, Team Whistle prefers the predictability of sponsored content.

El Pollo Loco began as a small restaurant chain in the 1970s, first in Mexico and later in Southern California. The brand only started leaning into digital ad channels in 2019, and today, it spends half its media budget on digital – a huge portion of which is reserved for TikTok. Last month, El Pollo Loco launched its latest campaign, “Abuela Approved” – its first TikTok-only campaign.

When customer experience software company Sprinklr went public in June of last year, it joined a veritable stampede of ad tech companies that hit the public market in 2021. And then … 2022 happened. The market might be tough right now, but Ragy Thomas, Sprinklr’s CEO, isn’t letting it shake him.

Seven months ago, TikTok surpassed one billion worldwide users, breaking into a club that previously consisted only of Google and Facebook apps. Since then, TikTok has been on a massive ad platform expansion campaign as it tries to both follow in the footsteps of apps like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, and differentiate itself from the old guard of the billion-strong walled gardens.

Piano is tuning up its plan to become a bigger player in the social media sphere. On Thursday, Piano, which provides analytics and subscription services for publishers, announced its acquisition of social media revenue optimization platform SocialFlow.

Banner ads? More like background noise. Social display has become an attractive option for publishers trying to get around banner blindness, and there are now multiple startups on the market that help brands repurpose their social creative to run across the open web. Growth in the sector is catching the attention of investment firms. On […]

Snapchat is growing up. Well, its ad tech is, at any rate. The youthful makeup of Snapchat’s user base is still one of its biggest selling points for advertisers. But competing against Facebook, Google and even Twitter for direct response dollars requires a big investment. DR spending was up during the pandemic across most large […]

This time last year, Facebook CPMs were a bargain. Well, they’re back to where they were and then some. The cost of Facebook advertising is up overall by 30% compared with mid-March 2020, according to data from digital agency Aisle Rocket. Rain the Growth Agency, a DTC-focused performance shop, is seeing Facebook CPMs of between […]

TikTok offers fertile ground to build a media brand. Ten weeks after launching on TikTok, fashion-focused media brand Rag Report is posting twice a day and seeing its audience grow 200% each week.  The Wednesday I scheduled the interview, it had 170,000 followers. But by the time we spoke, the numbers were already out of […]

Bucking the consolidation trend, creative ad tech company Polar is spinning out its buy side-focused programmatic offerings into a standalone business. The new entity, called Nova, launched on Monday with Polar CEO Kunal Gupta as its chief exec. Gupta will serve as CEO of both Polar and Nova with Leah Malone as CRO and GM […]

Marketers funnel money into Facebook because Facebook can prove ROI. Put $1 in, get more than $1 out. It’s a simple narrative. But Apple’s iOS 14 changes are chipping away at Facebook’s ability to measure and demonstrate performance. And Facebook is reacting by “making wholesale changes to what kind of data and reporting they will […]

The ad boycott against Facebook this past summer had little impact on its bottom line. But the boycott did appear to create an opportunity for second-tier social media platforms, such as Snapchat and Pinterest. “A large share of the accelerated growth we saw from those companies in the third quarter [of 2020] was almost certainly […]

NBCUniversal and Twitter announced a new global partnership on Monday that will make it easier for marketers to reach global audiences by expanding worldwide social inventory and integrating premium content into trending conversations. The multi-year deal expands a national partnership that began in 2013 and will deliver NBCU’s premium digital content to Twitter, allowing marketers […]

Facebook rejected millions of ad submissions in the months leading up to Election Day for failing to complete its required authorization process. In a call with reporters on Thursday, Facebook outlined its recent efforts to protect the integrity of the 2020 election and shared a status update on its ongoing battle to stop the spread […]