Month: August 2018

In 2011, Patagonia ran a full-page ad in The New York Times that featured its best-selling R2 coat below a banner that read “Don’t buy this jacket.” Published on Black Friday, one of the most profitable shopping days of the year in the U.S., the unconventional ad copy continued on to detail how Patagonia’s products…

In the last few weeks the influencer marketing industry has had a particularly important spotlight shone on some of its big issues by Unilever’s Keith Weed. I believe it all comes down to that all-important word: trust. Can brands trust influencers? Can influencers trust brands? Can consumers trust influencers? The answer is yes, however, there…

Amazon.com has an ad-supported TV service in the works that would be free to those who use the company’s Fire TV streaming devices, The Information reported. The service is reportedly being developed by the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), which Amazon acquired in 1998. It will be called “Free Dive.” Spokespersons for Amazon did not immediately…

The Interactive Advertising Bureau has announced the lineup for its NewFronts presentation on the West Coast. The lineup, touted by IAB as the “initial” 14 media companies that are now on board, will include the Los Angeles Times, Snap, Inc., the Ellen Digital Network and The New York Times. Unlike the East Coast version in…

Did you know WhatsApp allows you to turn on two-step verification in order to add extra security to your account? When this feature is turned on, you’ll need to enter a PIN each time you register your phone number with WhatsApp in the future. Our guide will show you how to turn on two-step verification…

One of Facebook’s big hires to improve its relations with publishers is leaving for The Atlantic. Alex Hardiman was head of news products for Facebook, collaborating with news partnerships head Campbell Brown. Hardiman joined in 2016 after a decade at The New York Times, where she led mobile and news products.

At Facebook, one of her big projects was developing a subscription product for publishers, which released some results in June that it called “promising” but were still small and limited to 12 publishers. Her team also was testing a tool to help publishers optimize the performance of their posts on Facebook and developed a “breaking news” label for news. Her exit comes just as she was prominently featured in a CNET article last week heralding women as the people who would solve Facebook’s fake news problem.

Facebook said Hardiman would be replaced and that the work she oversaw would continue to move forward, with her direct reports supported by her manager Tom Alison, vp of engineering at Facebook.

Facebook has hired news organization vets like Hardiman who have tried to be strong advocates for news publishers within the company, but Facebook’s dominant culture is an engineering one, and its record with journalism is mixed.

Facebook has struggled to figure out how to keep fake news off its platform and elevate high-quality news outlets. In January this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the platform would emphasize users’ posts over brands and publishers’, a strategy change that’s resulted in a 25 percent drop in referral traffic to publishers in the past year. Other high-profile journalism hires who recently left Facebook include Aine Kerr, who was manager of journalism partnerships.

The Atlantic has been on a 100-person hiring tear lately with help from investment by Laurene Powell Jobs, and Hardiman will serve as chief business and product officer, signaling an emphasis on digital innovation at the publisher. In her new role, she’ll focus on improving the user experience on all platforms; and work on building its digital consumer business, which includes a paid membership called The Masthead. She’ll report to Atlantic president Bob Cohn. In a memo to staff, Cohn emphasized Hardiman’s news background, calling her a “news junkie” with “journalism in her blood” and praising her work helping the Times evolve into a digital-first news organization.

“Her passion and experience will be a big asset as we, with support and encouragement from [the Powell Jobs-run] Emerson Collective, seek to make The Atlantic an even more indispensable part of our readers’ lives,” he wrote.

The post Facebook head of news products Alex Hardiman defects from Facebook for The Atlantic appeared first on Digiday.

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AdExchanger Talks is a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. This episode of AdExchanger Talks is supported by Tealium. Sometimes an old institution gains new relevance. Take the Media Rating Council (MRC). The nonprofit was born out of the quiz show scandals of the late 1950s, when regulators, after recovering from the initial shock of learning TV… Continue reading »

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The ad formats may seem familiar to viewers of streaming video, but have not been released at scale in the streaming audio world until now. They are dynamic audio, sequential audio, and short-form
audio.

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