Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
No Mo’ CMO!
The past five years (or even more) have seen a general dwindling of the traditional CMO role.
But these changes, surprisingly, can actually be a good thing for the marketing org.
Take the recent news that Starbucks dropped its global CMO role, according to Adweek. Instead, the company will have regional CEOs who oversee marketing and the entire P&L for their markets.
The former global CMO, Brady Brewer, will become international CEO.
And the company is hiring for a CMO-ish role for someone it describes as a “global brand creative leader.”
Marketers had traditionally been at the kids’ table of the C-suite. But the trade is better at connecting its performance to sales. And people coming up through marketing are increasingly the ones who know which levers really move the business – something that once fell to a COO or CFO as the obvious choice to act as CEO.
Two-thirds of Fortune 500 brands no longer have the traditional CMO position – the latest departure being Starbucks.
“Elsewhere, CMOs like Brewer are moving up the ranks.”
The Church Of Shrimp Jesus
MFA publishers have a new Facebook hook: baffling AI-generated images.
Many AI images are outlandish enough to get some engagement on their own – take the recent Shrimp Jesus trend.
But Facebook’s algorithm seems to promote generative AI art, 404 Media reports. It’s the latest example of scammers gaming Facebook’s feed.
Facebook reworked its algorithm to deprioritize posts with outbound links. However, it still prioritizes posts with images.
So MFA sites generate dozens of posts per day, all with wild AI-generated imagery and with the links in the comments instead.
Researchers from Georgetown and Stanford suggest Facebook’s feed is actually promoting these posts. And, according to 404 Media, burner accounts that engage with some form of AI-generated imagery get suggestions for unrelated posts with AI photos.
This apparent algorithmic change has prompted Facebook profiles associated with MFA to pivot to AI imagery to generate traffic. But the end result is the same: Users land on a page choked with ads and little else.
Facebook and Instagram have deprioritized the news, claiming it’s inappropriate for the feed. But Shrimp Jesus cannot be stopped.
Manifest’s Destiny
Apple is crystal clear about its philosophical opposition to device fingerprinting. But its real-world enforcement standards are fuzzier.
The company’s policy language could justify wide-scale disassemblage of ad tech SDKs, but in practice, it polices fingerprinters on a more haphazard, case-by-case basis.
Apple’s new Privacy Manifest, a system for developers and SDK operators to list their data collection purposes, should pull the rug out from a lot of fingerprinting use cases. Disrupting fingerprinting is an explicit goal of the new program, according to Apple’s presentation to developers and per Eric Seufert at Mobile Dev Memo.
But there is still ambiguity in Apple’s wording. For instance, according to the updates released last week, a third-party SDK might theoretically call another intermediary without being required to list that vendor’s tracking purposes in the Privacy Manifest.
Apple manages the master list of what it calls “tracking domains” – those that must attest they use tracking data for monetization purposes – and its fingerprinting crackdown would likely target those workarounds.
However, under the new system, responsibility for anti-fingerprinting enforcement falls much more heavily on developers, who must audit and assert the quality of vendors in their chain.
But Wait, There’s More!
Ad execs enter a crucial phase of Google’s Privacy Sandbox experimentation. [Digiday]
Instacart secures Media Rating Council accreditation for impression, click and viewability metrics. [release]
Google AI on the iPhone could draw regulators. [Axios]
MrBeast strikes a deal with Amazon MGM for rights for the biggest competition series in TV history. [THR]
You’re Hired!
Chris Cheevers and Christina Kim join Exverus as paid social manager and ecommerce manager.
