Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
The Kids Aren’t Alright
Is advertising to kids on social media as bad as advertising cigarettes to kids?
Not necessarily (although inhaling X would be inadvisable either way). But recent governmental concerns about children using social media are almost certain to draw more comparisons to that effect.
Per The Washington Post, 42 state attorneys general (out of 56, including US territories) have urged Congress to place warning labels on social media platforms, in line with a recent proposal by Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.
On the other side of the world, AP News reports that the Australian government has proposed a minimum age requirement for kids to access social media – although they haven’t quite figured out how verification would work. (One can’t help but be reminded of all the tweens who got around Myspace’s restrictions by claiming they were 101 years old.)
To that last point, most social media networks already have their own policies against allowing children under the age of 13, and it’s not technically possible to target those audiences directly (although “stealth advertising” is still very much a concern).
But as The Drum posits, warning labels – and negative health associations with social media in general – pose a larger brand safety issue that drives even more advertisers off platforms and onto other media instead.
Better Than A Breakup?
Judge Leonie Brinkema, the 80-year-old woman presiding over the Google antitrust case, stunned Ari Paparo, a spectator of the trial reporting for Marketecture, by interjecting during the testimony of The Trade Desk CRO Jed Dederick on Wednesday to ask, “If scale is critical and Google is ‘blown apart,’ would that make it more difficult for buyers?”
Tough to say, but it sounds like someone is already considering what a decision against Google would look like.
If Google enjoys such advantages of scale from its publisher, advertiser and search engine footprints, then mightn’t it reduce publisher revenue and advertiser efficiency for Google to be broken up by regulatory fiat?
One option at the DOJ’s disposal would be remedial, not just breakups and divestment. For the separate search antitrust case, which was decided against Google, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg makes the argument in a blog post that Google should open that scale up by API.
Google derives immense value from seeing macro-search trends over time and being able to experiment at scale, Weinberg writes.
DuckDuckGo doesn’t want Google’s scale to go away. It wants scale for itself to sharpen its own search algorithms.
And the power of scale is also being considered in the “open web display advertising” market – this second Google antitrust case.
Can RMNs Earn It?
Programmatic shopper marketing creates weird tensions, because the programmatic half of the equation doesn’t mesh with the shopper-marketing half of the equation.
Before the internet existed, Walmart, Macy’s, Target and grocery or department stores of all stripes required brands to recommit a percent of sales to marketing. If store sales go up 50%, brands must commensurately increase marketing.
“Retail media networks are asking brands to spend substantially more year over year,” one aghast agency exec tells Digiday. “They’re using that implication, that perception without actually saying straight up tit for tat, ‘If you don’t spend, you’re going to suffer the consequences.’”
To date, online retail media has consisted almost entirely of product placement ads on search pages or retailers’ own sites. Those are straightforwardly attributable, akin to coupons, with great ROI. If they work, it’s easy to increase spend.
What’s new is retail media networks (RMNs) serving brand marketing CTV and social media ads, which are more upper-funnel mediums and don’t have the same direct purchase intent.
This type of online retail media spend comes with higher attribution scrutiny, because it’s further away from the sale. More and more, RMNs are being asked to prove it.
But Wait, There’s More!
This historic newspaper relies on AI-generated newscasters rather than human journalists. [404 Media]
A peek into the NFL’s AI strategy. [Ad Age]
Meta has trained its AI with just about everything you’ve posted publicly since 2007. [The Verge]
More than six million users have signed up for Max in the past quarter, Warner Bros. Discovery says. [Variety]
Consulting firms’ hiring conundrum ahead of Harris-Trump election. [Axios]
You’re Hired!
Raptive appoints Tom Critchlow as EVP of audience growth. [release]
