AdExchanger’s Daily News Roundup is taking the day off for President’s Day. We’ll resume publication on Tuesday, February 18.
The Meta Trap
Meta is no stranger by now to complaints from ad buyers, particularly ecommerce brands and social agencies, reporting major systemic platform issues, including outright bugs and glitches – not to mention decreased marketing returns at higher CPMs.
Meanwhile, Meta continues growing its ad revenue at a healthy clip.
Meta is also Wall Street’s AI darling, The Information reports. Investors view Meta’s AI products as reliable contributors to ad revenue rather than as a major cost center hanging over its head, as with Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
But advertisers in the trenches of the platform are calling out that Meta has serious problems and is no longer a default destination, alongside Google, for any given online ad dollar.
“It’s not paying out like it used to, but we really don’t know what it looks like not to be on Meta, and we need to have an answer before we shift elsewhere,” says Kate MacCabe, founder and CEO of retail marketing consultancy Flywheel Strategies.
The Ad Budget Is Mysterious And Important
Apple is the latest corporation to resume advertising on X, The Verge reports.
If you’ll remember – and hopefully you will, since it was only 14 months ago – Apple was one of the first major advertisers to ditch X after reports that the platform had featured a not-insignificant amount of white supremacist, Nazi-related and other untouchable content.
Now, many of the brands that initially pulled out of X – Amazon, Disney, Comcast, Warner Bros. Discover, IBM and, of course, Apple, to name a few – are back on the platform, although X is arguably worse off than it was back when it was Twitter. (Case in point: Kanye West recently punctuated his own headline-grabbing, dayslong antisemitic tirade with “i appreciate elon allowing me to vent” [sic].)
X has also aggressively sued brands that halted advertising on its platform over alleged brand safety issues – though some of those issues were fomented by things posted on X by its owner, as the Verge notes.
But maybe there’s one silver lining: One of Apple’s new ad campaigns on X is for the second season of “Severance,” a show about people who are fed a narrow, incorrect view of what the real world is like and end up developing a cult-like devotion to an erratic company CEO. (Sounds familiar.)
Reut-ing Out Corruption
President Trump is demanding that Reuters return a $9 million payment from the Pentagon, The Independent reports.
The line item in the Pentagon budget says the payment was rendered to Thomson Reuters for “Active Social Engineering Defense” and “Large Scale Social Deception.”
Elon Musk took to X to imply that the Pentagon was paying Reuters to promote “Large Scale Social Deception.”
In reality, the payment went to a data analysis firm called Thomson Reuters Special Services, which is a small subsidiary of Reuters’ parent company, Thomson Reuters, for the purposes of studying and defending against online misinformation campaigns.
(Didn’t help this time!)
Also, the contract was issued to Thomson Reuters in 2018, during Trump’s first administration.
Why would Musk level baseless accusations against Reuters?
It probably has nothing to do with Reuters reporting this week on DOGE, Musk’s new government agency focused on cutting federal programs, which prompted Musk to tweet, “I wonder how much money Reuters is getting from the government?”
Reuters also won a Pulitzer Prize last year for its investigation into Musk’s manufacturing empire. On top of that, Thomson Reuters won a landmark copyright case this week that might spell doom for the “fair use” defense deployed by many generative AI firms, including those in which Musk is a heavy investor.
But Wait! There’s More
Reuters isn’t alone. Musk and Trump have also claimed that Politico and The New York Times are being subsidized by government subscription payments in what appears to be a new strategy of discrediting media outlets. [The Wrap]
Also, speaking of Musk, apparently the Duolingo owl (which is not real) died in a Cybertruck hit-and-run. [Instagram]
Outgoing Meta employees put the company on blast for seemingly targeting those who took parental or medical leave for layoffs, despite their actual performance records. [Fortune]
In other Meta news, the platform has expanded its support for third-party ad placement blocklists. [Social Media Today]
Major publishers, including Condé Nast and The Atlantic, have sued Canadian AI firm Cohere for copyright infringement. [Deadline]
The EU’s disinformation code is close to becoming a benchmark for the Digital Services Act. [TechCrunch]
LGBTQ+ ad network Revry removed its audience data from The Trade Desk over disputes about CTV inventory reselling. [Ad Age]
Half of Americans have felt stereotyped by targeted ads, a new study suggests. [Adweek]
You’re Hired
The Shipyard has hired industry veteran William Gelner as its new chief creative officer. [Ad Age]
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