Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Super Bowled Over
Hope you weren’t waiting for your 2025 budget to be approved before shopping for Super Bowl ads – apparently they’re almost sold out.
According to Variety, Fox only has a “handful of slots of commercial inventory” available for the 2025 Super Bowl, going for upwards of $7 million per 30-second commercial (not to mention commitments to advertise on other Fox channels).
But don’t worry: Some advertisers may get cold feet. Or maybe no one will actually snap up those last few slots, which is exactly what happened in 2023 when the economy was in a bad wobble. But if that happens again, people clearly have other problems to worry about – except Fox, of course.
There may also be less room for ambitious upstart brands that pour their marketing budgets into Super Bowl commercials for a chance to massively elevate their profile.
Most importantly, it might mean a more discerning group of advertisers sponsor the most American event (maybe even counting the election). Two years ago, cryptocurrency companies, including FTX, were the big Super Bowl advertisers. Last year, Temu, a Chinese shell company and a plague on American businesses and consumers, was granted six commercial spots.
Timmy Apple Seeds
Strange to think of Apple, the world’s largest business, as a dark horse of anything. But it’s the ad tech dark horse that nobody and everybody simultaneously sees coming.
As Digiday notes, the antitrust ruling against Google has major repercussions in accelerating Apple’s ad tech. Google, after all, proposed its payments to Apple to be the default search engine, even though it would have received the vast majority of traffic for free by choice. Those payments partly deterred Apple from entering the ad biz.
One possible outcome of the trial may be that Google halts all default search payments, and Apple will face a serious revenue hit – something like $25 billion annually. (Though, to be fair, since Apple nets more than $380 billion per year, it’s still a single-digit revenue hit.)
Apple also recently debuted a new iOS feature called Distraction Control. It’s not framed as an ad blocker, but functions primarily as one.
Industry observers might interpret Apple’s derogatory position on advertising – that ads are “distractions” and attribution tracking is “surveillance” – as a sign it won’t enter the same business. Long-term Apple watchers know that a major iOS update that severely hamstrings a portion of ad tech is in fact a harbinger that Apple is planning to release its own version of that product – in this case, perhaps an ad network extension – to fill the gap.
Political Views
Progressive and political news Instagram accounts have been steadily losing reach over the past few months, Bloomberg reports.
The timing lines up with Meta’s February decision to limit the amount of political content it distributes to users’ feeds, unless those users explicitly opt into political posts via their “content preferences” page.
Some of the accounts affected are obvious (Hillary Clinton, for example), but given how vaguely Meta defines what makes something “political,” it’s possible the change is also affecting tangentially related accounts, too – similar to the way bans on sexual content end up censoring women’s health and wellness brands.
For example, the LGBTQ advocacy organization GLAAD now reports fewer views for its content.
What about a small-business owner who specializes in queer-themed apparel? Or a news organization reporting on anti-trans legislation? If this new research is any indication, those types of businesses or organizations might have to rethink their digital marketing approach entirely.
But Wait, There’s More!
X receives eight formal privacy complaints for using EU users’ data to train its Grok AI. [TechCrunch]
The White House’s new “Time Is Money” initiative will make it easier to cancel subscriptions. [Business Insider]
How did the Wall Street Journal survive the Media Apocalypse of 2024? [New York Magazine]
You’re Hired!
Popeyes hires Bart LaCount as chief marketing officer. [Ad Age]
Charter Communications Inc. taps Simon Cassels to serve as senior vice president and chief creative officer. [Release]
