To Your Health
Nineteen of America’s 20 state-run health insurance exchanges use advertising trackers from platforms, including Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Snap and Google, Bloomberg reports.
Many trackers were found to share personal insurance applicant data, including ZIP codes in Virginia, some race and ethnicity markers in Washington (which the TikTok tracker apparently tried and failed to block from being collected) and information about incarcerated family members in New York.
The only state that didn’t appear to use any pixel tracking was California, which underwent a similar investigation by The Markup and CalMatters a year ago.
State exchange officials defend the online pixels as being meant to measure their own marketing campaigns and to advertise their health portals to users on other parts of the internet.
That logic makes sense in a vacuum; it’s what everybody in the digital advertising industry does, after all. But an important aspect of Bloomberg’s reporting is that the insurance exchange operators don’t thoroughly understand how online tracking tools work in practice or how data might be put to use in the ad ecosystem.
Some states already have removed the pixels after Bloomberg reached out for comment.
Check back next year, though, to see if any of them fall back on old habits when the journalistic spotlight disappears.
Booze In The Feed
The booze brands are coming to TikTok.
Age-gating features introduced last year and new tailored rules for alcohol advertisers have led to an explosion in TikTok campaigns featuring celebrities and influencers, Fast Company reports.
The targeting play makes sense, with TikTok claiming 80% of US adults over the age of 21 as active users.
TikTok’s collaboration with alcohol advertisers kicked off in 2024, when it started working with the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, which creates protocols for responsible liquor ads on TV and other media.
In July 2024, TikTok began allowing alcohol brands to create branded accounts and let them target ads to users over age 25. There are a few restrictions: Brands can’t feature influencers under 25 or depict excess drinking or intoxication, and they have to disclose their products’ alcohol content and include a responsible drinking disclaimer.
Of course, distillers are having to adapt to TikTok’s quirks, such as the need to quickly produce content and use viral effects like the “mouth zoom” to stand out in the algorithm.
Notably, alcohol brands can’t sell their wares in the TikTok Shop, which makes attribution tricky. So they’re working with e-commerce platforms like ReserveBar to measure sales impact.
“If we have great campaigns, but we aren’t getting new purchase intent,” says Davin Nugent at Suntory Global Spirits, “then we’re just creating new work and making people smile.”
Scrape-onomics
Forget about the creator economy – we’re talking about the scraper economy.
AI data brokers that scrape information from publisher sites could become a $1 billion industry, forecasts media analyst Matthew Scott Goldstein. (As if AI overviews weren’t bad enough for publishers.)
The services are sometimes branded “agentic infrastructure,” Goldstein says. And he names Parallel Web Systems, Perplexity Sonar, Brave and Firecrawl among the companies taking part in the malfeasance. Although all the major LLMs have already unabashedly scraped everything from the open web, including paywalled content.
Like athletes in a steroid era, the only way to keep up with the market is by participating in the transgression.
On the other hand, the existence of data-scraping AI antagonists makes programmatic vendors look … okay, I guess?
Publishers tolerate programmatic middlemen so long as they add value to the supply chain. But intermediary partners that generate great value for themselves while returning essentially nothing is pretty clear-cut.
“With scrapers, they’re taking 100% of the content, paying 0% and then in some cases using that content to create competing products that remove the publisher entirely,” Chris Dicker, CEO of Candr Media, tells Digiday.
Guess “resellers” are no longer public enemy number one.
But Wait! There’s More!
Rival trade bodies emerge to contend programmatic’s future. [Digiday]
Ask.com, which originally started as Ask Jeeves, has shut down after 30 years. [Search Engine Journal]
AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are pumping tens of millions of ad dollars into linear TV. [Morning Brew]
Meanwhile, a dark-money nonprofit called Build American AI – linked to a SuperPAC funded by many of those same AI companies – is paying influencers to stoke fears about Chinese AI development. [Wired]
Instagram will stop recommending accounts that post primarily other creators’ content. In short, “clippers,” accounts that splice segments from shows, movies and other content without the original owners’ approval or license, will be stifled. [Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri]
You’re Hired!
Operative appoints Dang Ly as chief product officer. [release]
Samba TV promotes Jaya Aswani to CTO and appoints Ramzi Nasr as VP of engineering. [release]
