Dashed Off
On Tuesday, The Artist Formerly Known as Dotdash Meredith rebranded as People Inc. to reflect its best-known legacy brand.
There are a number of reasons for the shift, including the fact that the previous name was simply “too clunky and cumbersome and weird,” Neil Vogel, People Inc.’s chief executive, tells The Wall Street Journal.
Rebranding as People Inc. also pays homage to one of the company’s greatest successes: People’s monthly desktop and mobile visits more than doubled between June 2020 and June 2025, the WSJ reports. By comparison, some now former DDM publications, like Vanity Fair, saw a more than 50% decrease in monthly visits.
The new name also reflects that “we are people making content for people,” Vogel tells The Hollywood Reporter. In an era of media marked by what Vogel referred to as “synthetic and artificial and amalgamated and mashed up” content, People Inc. will apparently put the “people” in, well, you get it.
With print sales declining and media strategies shifting to new channels like TikTok, “we’ve learned that not all of our brands are going to have a future, and that’s okay,” Vogel tells THR.
Instead, People will focus its attention on the channels seeing the most success – which, like People magazine, are those with “the history and the gravitas,” according to Vogel.
Influence In The Aisle
Fortune 500 consumer product brands like Unilever and Estée Lauder are suddenly all in on influencer marketing. Unilever’s new CMO, for one, vowed to spend as much as half of its paid media on influencer marketing.
Procter & Gamble, the world’s highest-spending CPG advertiser, provided another example of this trend during its earnings report this week.
For the new Swiffer PowerMop launch, P&G brought in TikTok and social media influencers to review the mop and speak with the execs who designed the product, CEO Jon Moeller told investors. The Swiffer team’s footage, together with the content created by influencers, is what P&G used to develop its TV and online video ads, he said.
Moeller credited the PowerMop launch with kickstarting 40% growth for Swiffer’s portfolio and driving 35% of category growth, “making it the No. 1 growth driver in the category.”
Bite Of The Apple
Apple’s iOS 26 is slated to go live this month.
One much-ballyhooed feature is the automatic filtering of unknown callers and text message senders to a new folder akin to spam.
Politicians and political campaigners are alarmed because those messages are the meat and potatoes of political fundraising, Business Insider reports.
Patrick Ruffini, a conservative pollster, notes in a Twitter thread that polling will be deeply affected. Online polls are not reliable and cannot be localized. The best, most reliable polling, like the NYT/Siena poll, relies on the exact methods being targeted by iOS 26.
On the other hand, people universally hate the practice and will applaud Apple’s update.
And, to be fair, political campaigns brought this on themselves. In 2020, all of the mobile wireless networks promoted their new anti-spam and scam policies, which affected some political messaging practices. A few weeks later, the Trump reelection campaign’s text fundraising campaign was suspended, because all the new systems identified it as spam, if not a scam.
This precipitated vast congressional blowback, and the wireless networks later relented on those rules.
But Wait! There’s More!
Roblox beat expectations for revenue and users in Q2, surpassing 100 million daily actives for the first time. Its stock price jumped to an all-time high. [Bloomberg]
Meta is on the prowl for potential AI-generated video partners and deals. [The Information]
What media buyers say they need to accelerate ad spend on Netflix. [Digiday]
Google and other search engines are indexing public ChatGPT queries, some of which contain personal information. [TechCrunch]
You’re Hired!
BlueConic expands its executive team, appointing Mihir Nanavati as GM of product and technology and Grace Bacon as CMO. [release]
