TikTok’s On The Clock
Nine more days until Christmas? Please. Real heads know the most important countdown to keep track of is the deadline until the TikTok ban, which hits 34 days from now.
As Digiday reports, marketers are already beginning to prepare for a world without the popular social media platform, including making contingency plans for any campaigns booked past the January 19 end date.
Luckily, TikTok’s performance and CPMs aren’t too different from others in the social media space, which would make a post-ban reallocation relatively simple for agencies.
Other platforms are already trying to sweeten the deal for migrating advertisers and users – including Snapchat, which will roll out an expanded creator monetization program in February, and Pinterest, which announced new automated campaign features for advertisers back in October.
The ban still isn’t a 100% done deal, by the way. Although a federal appeals court ruled against TikTok earlier this month, the Supreme Court may choose to take on the case; it’s also possible that the app will find an American buyer and be granted a deadline extension.
However, the closer we get to January, the more unlikely those options seem.
Hard Times For Hardware
“If you’re looking to buy a TV in 2025, you may be disappointed by the types of advancements TV brands will be prioritizing in the new year.”
That’s the first line of an article that ran on Ars Technica yesterday, and, yep, you guessed it – the reason behind those disappointing advancements relates to advertising.
Rather than better sound or crisper picture, the TV manufacturing industry is more focused on user tracking and monetizing with ads.
Vizio, for example, is now a Walmart company. The roughly $2.3 billion deal closed on December 3, and the main rationale behind it is for Walmart to own Vizio’s data collection capabilities, which come courtesy of its SmartCast OS.
Walmart will no doubt use Vizio’s data to fuel its advertising business.
And that brings us to the “OS wars.” Those who own the TV operating system own monetization, which is why we’re seeing TV manufacturers developing the software for their own hardware.
That makes sense. But we’re also starting to see companies that previously had zero involvement with consumer tech do more than flirt with the category. Consider The Trade Desk, which just launched its own streaming TV OS late last month.
But what does all this mean for regular people who just wanna buy a new TV?
“I do fear that the pressure to make better TVs will be lost,” Paul Gray, research director of consumer electronics and devices at Omdia, ruefully tells Ars Technica.
Optional Out
YouTube is rolling out a new setting that allows creators to opt into having their content used for AI model training.
According to TechCrunch, the new setting will sit within the creator dashboard and lets users see a list of 18 companies – including Adobe, Amazon, Anthropic, OpenAI and Perplexity – that they can select to give authorization for AI training purposes.
YouTubers who don’t want their content used for AI training will presumably be opted out by default, which is a refreshing change of pace considering how many other companies in this space automatically opt their users in without telling them.
Whether those YouTubers will actually be protected from AI companies that don’t care about getting permission, though – that’s another story.
Technically speaking, YouTube’s terms of service already prohibit third parties from using bots or scrapers to lift content from the website without “prior written permission.” But that didn’t stop companies like Anthropic, NVidia and Apple from using a data set full of almost 174,000 videos worth of YouTube subtitles, as Proof News and Wired uncovered back in June.
For the 48,000 channels that got swept up in this data set, a toggle to allow third-party scraping probably feels like too little, too late. But it’s certainly better than nothing.
But Wait! There’s More!
News programs are great for ad recall, a new study suggests. [Variety]
These are the media deals industry insiders think could be next. [Business Insider]
Havas is officially a publicly traded company. [Adweek]
WPP CEO Mark Read tells staffers that the Omnicom-IPG merger is “good news” for them. [Ad Age]
Not to be outdone by OpenAI, Google DeepMind releases its own text-to-video AI generator a la Sora. [TechCrunch]
Cryptocurrency advertising has reenergized after Trump’s election victory. [WSJ]
