A Drug You Can’t Quit
It’s not just you – there are more pharma ads on TV these days. (Sorry, RFK, Jr.!)
But the explosion of streaming ads for the treatment of rare maladies suggests that CTV ad targeting isn’t actually all that precise, writes Mike Shields at Next in Media.
Here’s what the numbers say about the growth of pharma advertising: Drug ads were up 5.4% on linear TV during January and February, while national pharma spend on linear grew 25% over the past six months, according to iSpot.
It makes sense to air drug ads on linear TV, the realm of over-50 audiences, Shields argues. But last year, streaming ad impressions for pharma brands grew by 88%, according to EDO.
Meanwhile, EDO says the average CTV ad exposure is 64% more effective than linear advertising for cosmetics brands, which include treatments for skin conditions like eczema. The findings suggest that these advertisers are getting more precise with their targeting.
But how targeted are these ads, really? Even the non-sufferers have been bombarded with Skyrizi commercials for dealing with eczema. But, hey, maybe it makes sense to go for scale when you’re promoting a treatment for a disease that affects 10% of the US population.
Which is fine, but what’s Tremfya’s excuse? Less than one million Americans have Crohn’s disease, Shields writes, yet we’re all being told to “Emerge Tremfyant” whenever we turn on our TVs.
Maybe CTV is a reach medium after all.
As TikTok Gone By
In the world of social media, you either die a hero (Vine, anyone?) or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. (Think every other social platform in existence.)
And now that TikTok is six years old, it finds itself firmly in the latter camp.
According to a recent Harris Poll survey, 79% of Gen Z TikTok users say they miss the early days of the platform, while 41% say they miss when there were fewer ads and brands.
This poses a problem for marketers, of course, and not just because there’s more competition for ad space. Gen Z users also reported being less trustful (60%) and more overwhelmed (40%) when using TikTok, neither of which are good for the long-term health of the platform.
“That’s not loyalty – that’s habit,” a source from The Harris Poll tells Fortune. “And habits break.”
In the short term, this is great news for YouTube, which is the clearest competitor to TikTok’s video-based content offering, especially now that Shorts has taken off. But as anybody who’s ever fled from one social network to another knows, it’s only a matter of time before commercialization catches up.
Moltbought
Remember Moltbook, the so-called social network for AI agents that made headlines last month?
Meta certainly remembers, because it just acquired the platform for an undisclosed sum.
The deal is set to close in mid-March, Axios reports, at which point Moltbook creators Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr will become part of Meta Superintelligence Labs.
At the risk of speculating, the acquisition is likely less about the product itself (which, if you’ll recall, has glaring security flaws and was easily infiltrated by humans) and more about acqui-hiring Schlicht and Parr.
Notably, Peter Steinberger, who created the agentic OpenClaw framework that initially paired with Moltbook, will not be joining them. Steinberger took a position with OpenAI last month, although he promised on his blog that the OpenClaw project will remain open source.
The last time Meta and OpenClaw were in the news together it was when Meta AI security researcher Summer Yue recounted her own experience with a rogue OpenClaw AI agent that did a “speedrun delete” of her entire email inbox.
Anyway, guess it’s good to have experts around when you’re tinkering with the plumbing.
But Wait! There’s More!
Meanwhile, Meta’s own internal oversight board criticized the company’s handling of AI-generated content. [The Information]
Agency holdco Stagwell expects this year’s Q1 to be its strongest quarter ever. [Adweek]
YouTube expanded its deepfake detection technology to a pilot group of politicians, government officials and journalists. [TechCrunch]
An anti-porn tracking app called Quittr failed to fix a vulnerability that exposed the intimate data of hundreds of thousands of its users to hackers for months after it was flagged by security researchers. [404 Media]
Using AI is actually making workers more exhausted, not more productive, one study finds. [Fortune]
Desperate, laid-off white collar workers are increasingly scraping by on gig jobs that involve training the very AI systems poised to replace them. [The Verge]
You’re Hired!
Freestar appoints John Ilacqua as EVP of growth and publisher development. [release]
MNTN hires TikTok’s former head of growth, Garland Hill, as CRO, and Peter Blacker, NBCU’s former head of streaming, as global head of premium content. [release]
TikTok and Google vet Kim Farrell joins financial services platform Nu as global marketing director. [release]
Programmatic platform Limelight hires Oshri Raz as VP of USA strategic alliances. [MarTechSeries]
Marketing research and analytics company MarketCast taps Elina Combs as VP of product marketing and Lisette Vitter Williamson as SVP and media business unit leader. [release]
Thanks for reading AdExchanger’s Daily News Roundup. Want it by email? Sign up here.
