Europe, You’re Down
Netflix announced the European expansion of its programmatic beta platform last week, allowing ad tech vendors like The Trade Desk, Google DV360 and Magnite to traffic ads in the UK and EU.
But the product is a tough sell in Europe.
About 16% of British households are Netflix subscribers, per Digiday. That compares to an outright majority of Americans who have Netflix.
Considering Netflix has relatively few ad-supported subscribers and is dear with its ad impressions, there’s an awfully finite pool of inventory. Which isn’t bad, except agencies can’t scale up when there isn’t much supply.
Also, Netflix wants high CPMs and offers advertisers little to bid on. (ZIP codes, show genres, time of day and device type are the targeting parameters.)
“Amazon’s very competitive compared to Disney and Netflix,” says one agency buyer.
By “competitive,” he means Amazon is cheaper.
There is immense downward pressure on Netflix’s ad prices because Amazon and other streamers have fairly large audiences and they show more ads than Netflix. Netflix could sharpen its curation tech or concede some level of transparency, but the scale and pricing matter most.
Call It What It Is: The S*per B*wl
As sports gambling goes mainstream, a web of awkward euphemisms can make marketing a real problem.
Take Robinhood, a stock trading and investing service, which for a few hours this past weekend advertised an “emerging asset class” involving “sports events contracts,” as Bloomberg reports. Any normal person would call it what it was: betting on the Super Bowl.
Robinhood’s short-lived sports betting program was tortuously described partly because the NFL is, like, cuckoo bananas about companies using the words “Super Bowl.” (Robinhood probably even used lower-case letters for “the big game,” because the NFL once tried to trademark “The Big Game.”)
But there’s also bizarre financial language involving derivatives and new asset classes, which camouflage straight-up sports betting.
“Our mission is to democratize finance for all,” as Robinhood puts it. But that “would be an absolutely incredible slogan for an online sportsbook, or a casino, or for that matter an old-time Mafia bookie,” quips Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine.
“Sports are sports, and entertainment is sports, and politics is sports, and crypto is sports, and stocks are sports,” he writes. So democratizing finance might not mean broadening access to wealth to more Americans, so much as “letting them make the bets that they want to make.”
Money Where Your Mouth Is
A score of lobbyists and business leaders are quietly trying to convince the Trump administration not to move forward with mass deportations, Business Insider reports.
The campaign – known as “Make America Wealthy Again,” or MAWA – appears to be targeting members of Congress, as well as Department of Agriculture nominee Brooke Rollins and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, to get President Trump to rethink his immigration policies.
So many businesses rely on cheap immigrant labor, they argue, that forcibly removing this workforce will drive prices up even higher, potentially crippling the US economy in the process. (And as we all know from when Trump recently threatened Chinese imports with tariffs, higher prices means less spending, which means less money put into advertising.)
Why in secret, though? The administration already promised to investigate companies that haven’t rolled back diversity initiatives, so it seems pretty likely that no one’s interested in sticking their neck out, whether it’s an economic (or even moral) good or not.
But Wait! There’s More
Meta will curb the internal sway of its privacy team to speed up the pace of product releases. [The Information]
A recent study by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon argues that workers who rely more on generative AI see their critical thinking skills “atrophied and unprepared.” [404 Media]
These brands spend the most money on Super Bowl ads. [Adweek]
A New York state senator has introduced two bills intended to curb social media’s effect on mental health, one that requires warning labels and one that requires ways for users to opt out of algorithmic feeds, notifications and autoplay. [release]
Ye’s website is selling swastika shirts after boosting its profile with a Super Bowl ad. [NBC News]
You’re Hired
Chase Media Solutions hires Lauren Griewski as its new head of sales and partnerships. [LinkedIn]
