Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
It’s Coming From Inside The (White) House
Over a year ago, the White House released an executive order announcing the creation of a “National Design Studio,” with the stated goal of improving the “usability and aesthetics” of government-owned websites.
That studio, which answers to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and is staffed primarily by former DOGE employees, is using commercially available data-tracking software (from the awkwardly named product analytics startup PostHog, to be more specific) on those websites. Which, okay, but the new sites don’t appear to contain any of the federally mandated privacy disclosures that are required in situations where the government collects information on citizens.
Investigative journalist Audrey Henson first noticed this phenomenon on TrumpRX, a government site similar to GoodRX that offers reduced prescription drug prices to consumers. But, as she writes for The Drey Dossier newsletter, she also uncovered several other NDS-owned sites that have yet to be launched, including a new version of vote.gov and a passports.gov website that is structured, Henson claims, in a way that will ask Americans to upload their passport photos. (Right now, it’s just a blank page that asks for an email address.)
“What this office is doing is taking the parts of the federal government that touch you directly, your prescription, your voter registration, your passport, your federal login, out of the agencies that legally own them and rebuilding them on White House infrastructure,” Henson argues.
A Snowflake’s Chance
The biggest publishers have cut multimillion-dollar licensing deals directly with the big LLMs. But for other news and digital media companies, there’s been a chasm where they don’t have the leverage or unique library of content to capture those budgets, but they do have worthwhile content, and they’re scraped for it anyways.
Snowflake is pitching itself as the middlemen marketplace for these licensing deals, with some publishers telling Digiday that the cloud infrastructure’s product – which Snowflake calls Cortex Knowledge Extensions – has drawn some six-figure licensing deals, presumably among other, humbler totals.
Those aren’t game-changing sums, but it is a promising start. Publishers need all the new revenue streams they can get.
One of Snowflake’s advantages in pitching itself as the interlocutor for these deals is that it doesn’t take a cut of the media spend or licensing deal itself. Snowflake benefits when the media companies and advertisers use its product for data storage and to run their models, and thus consume bandwidth.
It is a cost, but not a part of the rev share.
Inflation Vacation
No one wants to go on a cruise anymore.
In case the looming fear of hantavirus wasn’t enough to put consumers off of sea travel, high costs should do the trick. According to a recent study from NerdWallet, over one-third of travelers who charged last year’s vacation to credit still haven’t paid it off.
Combined with rising inflation costs, it’s no wonder that travel brands needed to revise their strategies this summer.
But many brands are “eschewing words like ‘value’ or ‘staycation’ to avoid the impression of being cheap,” says Ad Age. Instead, they’re leaning into storytelling focused on connection and making family memories, and focusing on advertising domestic travel.
Rental company Vrbo, for instance, launched a campaign called “Summer of Vrbo” that will include content developed through a partnership with America250.org (named for the country’s 250th birthday) focused on small towns and historical sites across the US. The idea is to give travelers “something new to do” that isn’t Disney or Europe, said Nick Gesualdi, Vrbo’s senior director of marketing.
Travel brands are also pulling back on paid media this season, Ad Age notes. But no need for them to worry: According to Craig Compagnone, president of travel marketing agency MMGY Global, “earned is having a real moment now.”
But Wait! There’s More!
Mobile app monetization platform Liftoff announces a planned IPO. [release]
The Pentagon and lawmakers knew for at least a decade about the risk that commercially available location data could be used to track military personnel, and they did barely anything to prevent it. [Wired]
Cybersecurity authorities in the Netherlands dismantled a botnet made up of 17 million devices tied to a Russia-based residential proxy network. [Ars Technica]
CBS Evening News used a common TV-ratings-juicing technique to claim anchor Tony Dokoupil broke his six-week streak of averaging fewer than 4 million viewers during the week ending May 22. It messed with the taxonomy. The Friday broadcast was coded as “CBS-EVENING-NWS” in its Nielsen data instead of “CBS-EVENING-NEWS,” which changed the average to Monday through Thursday, when news viewership tends to be higher. If the Friday numbers were included, the show would have averaged 3.985 million viewers for the week. [Status]
A new study by the Center for Democracy & Technology reveals how chatbots implement “dark patterns” to manipulate users into staying connected – and giving up private information. [404 Media]
There are a lot more tech ads on the New York City subway compared to this time last year. [Semafor]
Anthropic has now surpassed OpenAI in both valuation and business subscriptions. [NYT]
But both companies might see fallout as token costs skyrocket, leading some companies to pull back on AI usage. [WSJ]
You’re Hired!
Former Snap ad exec Chip Kanne joins Comcast’s Universal Ads as VP of North America sales.
Incrementality measurement startup Haus brings on Shiva Nagabushanaswamy as CTO. [LinkedIn]
