AdExchanger’s Daily News Roundup will return on Monday, December 2. Have a happy Thanksgiving!
The SaaS Back
It’s been tough going for enterprise SaaS companies since 2021. But the headwinds have eased, according to The Information.
Public companies like Palantir and Expensify improved their standing with investors this year, while private companies like Ramp, Gong and Airtable are finally seeing green shoots after what The Information refers to as a “brutal slump” in terms of fundraising and pre-IPO interest.
Zoom is another one that felt the squeeze after major companies with SaaS contracts reverted to hybrid or in-office after the pandemic, but is now having itself a bit of a turnaround.
But SaaS subscriptions could falter thanks to the generative AI revolution.
A marketer, for example, could add one single enterprise account to a generative AI model, such as OpenAI, and then prompt it to handle manual tasks that replace the need for other plugins.
Meanwhile, overall growth among SaaS companies is down compared with pre-pandemic levels.
“The days of anyone in an organization buying whatever software product they wanted to are gone,” Matt Murphy, a partner at Menlo Ventures, tells The Information.
Close To The Vestager
The EU’s top antitrust watchdog, Margrethe Vestager, is pulling back from the regulatory beat. Her term ends this month, and she’s feeling reflective in a profile by The New York Times.
When Vestager began taking on Big Tech a decade ago, it was an uphill battle. “People thought that we were crazy because 10 years ago, Big Tech was untouchable,” she says.
But now, regulators around the world have taken up the mantle for anticompetition and consumer privacy enforcement against companies like Google, Apple, Meta and Amazon.
If anything, Vestager says, she wishes her office would have clinched more substantive platform changes, rather than primarily accumulating large fines and courtroom wins.
She calls for regulators to be “bolder” across the board – although she’s encouraged by the US under President Biden, which has taken a heavier hand with US-based giants like Google. However, those gains could be under threat during the incoming Trump administration, Vestager says.
And as much progress as there’s been, there’s still a lot to do, Tommaso Valletti, who was a top economist under Vestager, tells the Times, although he praises Vestager’s commitment to taking on Big Tech when it was considered foolish.
“Have we moved the dial and changed the system? Only at the margins,” Valletti says. “Did we change Big Tech? My answer is no.”
There’s No ‘I’ In Temu
On Monday, President-elect Donald Trump promised to impose an additional 10% import tariff on Chinese goods coming into the US, on top of the 60%-or-higher tariffs he previously campaigned on.
The impact of these tariffs will likely cost American consumers between $46 and $78 billion a year, according to a recent report by the National Retail Federation.
But for the ecommerce advertising industry, there will be knock-on effects as the consequences are felt by Chinese fast-fashion brands Shein and Temu, the latter of which has already seen its stock fall 31% this year, Business Insider reports.
Both brands are known predominantly for their cheap prices and for wildly overspending on advertising, primarily across Meta and Google. (They’re also known for their problematic labor practices and sustainability downsides, but anyway.)
Even Etsy, which hates the rock-bottom ecommerce trend epitomized by Temu and Shein, still counts Chinese third-party sellers from Temu among its largest ad clients.
But Wait! There’s More!
Japanese competition authorities raided Amazon Japan on suspicion of violating the country’s anti-monopoly laws. [TechCrunch]
Meta Threads added 35 million sign-ups in November. [Axios]
Bluesky promises to comply with the EU’s Digital Services Act after being called out. [Bloomberg]
Zoom drops the “video” from its name to rebrand as an AI company. [Business Insider]
Walmart announces plans to roll back its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. [Ad Age]
NBCUniversal cable employees react to the news that their channels are being spun off from Comcast. [Variety]
Screenwriters are incensed that 139,000 TV and film scripts were used to train generative AI. [The Ankler]
A new analysis finds that more than half of LinkedIn posts over 100 words are likely AI-generated. [Wired]
You’re Hired!
Neutronian Co-Founder Lisa Abousaleh joins ID5 as VP of publisher and distribution partnerships. [release]
