Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Plus Or Minus
All the retailer “pluses” – programs like Walmart+ that aim to replicate what Amazon has done with Prime – need reasons for people to join and renew those memberships.
Walmart has a new benefit, of a sort, Bloomberg reports.
Walmart is currently testing in a few hundred stores a mobile app that would open the locked plastic barricades that are now commonplace on many convenience stores and pharmacy shelves. Shoppers hate these gates – and in an earnings report earlier this year, Amazon cited in-store barricades as a driver of its online pharmacy.
Back to Walmart+: The news within the news is that Walmart is also considering extending the gate-unlock app feature to loyalty program members.
Walmart did not comment on the report.
If the tech works and is app-based, it’s fairly easy to extend the digital key to Walmart+ subscribers. But it’s a strange way to capitalize on frustration it created to begin with.
Twitter, now X, has done things like remove two-factor authentication for accounts that don’t subscribe – thus creating a privacy and security risk. (Most platforms want users to use two-factor authentication.)
Hopefully, it does not become a common tactic.
Training Deals
Generative AI tech requires more web-scraping of premium publishers than previously thought, Axios reports.
Publishing company Ziff Davis recently analyzed the publicly available training data sets for popular generative AI solutions and found that, in some cases, content from a few big-name publishers accounts for a large chunk of the training data.
For example, 10% of the URLs included in the training data set for OpenAI’s GPT-2 model came from just 15 publishers, according to the Ziff Davis study.
The study also suggests that the preponderance of premium publisher content in training sets for generative AI’s older models could be even higher than in current models.
Meanwhile, newer models rely more on these older models for training than AI companies indicate in their disclosures.
In other words, once a publisher’s data is in an AI’s training set, it’s probably going to stay there and be used to train future models. That’s why publishers prefer to shift from striking one-time deals toward longer-term licensing of specific content that informs generative AI responses to queries about current events.
“It’s The Economy, Stupid”
To find out what issues really animated each presidential campaign, look no further than the ads that ran the most.
One common knock against Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign was its focus on painting former President Donald Trump in a negative light, while ignoring household economic issues. But the Harris campaign outspent the Trump campaign on ads that centered an economic message, The New Republic reports.
Since July 21, when President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, the Harris campaign and Democrat-affiliated groups spent nearly $225 million on ads about the economy, according to research by AdImpact, which tracks political advertising. The Trump campaign and Republican-affiliated groups spent about $155 million.
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign and its allies spent at least $215 million on ads attacking transgender Americans.
Harris’s economic messaging seemed to shift voter perceptions, based on polling by The New York Times and Siena College. The latest polling indicated that Harris moved voter sentiment in the final weeks, especially on which candidate would be best for the economy, although Trump still led on the issue.
But Wait! There’s More!
Why Reddit’s explosive growth could last. [The Information]
Netflix will remove almost all of its interactive series on December 1. [TechRadar]
Meta extends Facebook’s ban on running new political ads in the week before the election beyond Election Day. [Axios]
The W3C forms the Sustainable Web Interest Group. [release]
The betting website Polymarket also poured money into political social media ads. [NBC News]
United Airlines’ ad network is flying high. [Marketing Brew]
