Month: November 2023

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. A Zero-Sum Game Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two Interactive, the video game developer that makes Grand Theft Auto, bemoaned the lack of pricing power for gaming properties during the company’s earnings report this week, eXputer reports. Zelnick believes video games should be priced […]

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For McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, gaming is still an experimental playing field going into 2024.

Despite the rise of gaming and esports as an entertainment channel in recent years, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola are still determining exactly which key performance metrics signal success among the gaming audience. For now, they’re leaning on tried-and-true KPIs such as brand awareness and brand loyalty — when they’re scrutinizing the numbers at all, that is.

“At this point, everything is a test — so I might have liked the numbers, but did I have anything to benchmark against? Not necessarily, because it’s so new,” said Patricia Chambers, a vp at Davis Elen Advertising, who handles esports partnerships for the firm’s local McDonald’s clients. “As a marketer in the gaming space, you don’t have decades of Nielsen data, the same level of back data to have a realistic expectation. Sometimes, you have to do it and read it on the back end.”

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the NFL are hoping a new game will resonate with Gen Z, winning them over with generative AI-powered stats.

In a joint effort, the two companies created “Playbook Pass Rush,” an online game that can be downloaded from the app store or on its website, allows players to create plays for offense and defense based on real-time NFL data, using a predictive functionality called pressure probability. The game launched on Nov. 9 and was developed by AWS with Amazon Titan technology. The financial and data sharing agreement between the two parties was not disclosed.

Generative AI is playing a pivotal role in shaping and refining marketing strategies for sports organizations, including the NFL, the NBA which is using AI to draw users to its app and the Los Angeles Rams which is using it to bolster advertising.

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Threads could be the missing link between brands looking to scale to new audiences and the untapped communities of the fediverse. But until Threads follows through on its commitment to join the fediverse, and marketers have a better understanding of what the fediverse is, that remains to be seen. 

The fediverse, otherwise known as the federated universe, is basically a group of social media networks that operate independently while still being able to communicate with one another. Thus far, it’s home to apps like Mastodon, PeerTube and Lemmy. (Read Digiday’s explainer here or tune into the fediverse episode of the Digiday Podcast here.)

Backed by Meta’s infrastructure, Threads saw unprecedented growth when it first launched over the summer, surging to over 100 million sign-ups in the first week. Around the same time, the platform promised to join the fediverse, potentially connecting the flood of brands active on Threads to what could be the next frontier of social media. 

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In mid-September, what is arguably the most impactful trial in the history of the internet kicked off with the Justice Department taking aim at Google’s market-dominating search empire, and after this week’s proceedings, some think the government will emerge victorious.

The stakes are very high for Google, with the government alleging that it violated U.S. antitrust laws as it rose to dominance in the search market through its distribution agreements with a string of fellow large corporations, including Samsung and Verizon.

What has generated the most column inches has been its relationship with Apple, with the initial estimates pegging Google payments to remain the default search engine on the iPhone in the region of $20 billion.

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With government officials exploring ways to rein in generative AI, tech companies are looking for new ways to raise their own bar before it’s forced on them.

In the past two weeks, several major tech companies focused on AI have added new policies and tools to build trust, avoid risks and improve legal compliance related to generative AI. Meta will require political campaigns disclose when they use AI in ads. YouTube is adding a similar policy for creators that use AI in videos uploaded. IBM just announced new AI governance tools. Shutterstock recently debuted a new framework for developing and deploying ethical AI.

Those efforts aren’t stopping U.S. lawmakers from moving forward with proposals to mitigate the various risks posed by large language models and other forms of AI. On Wednesday, a group of U.S. senators introduced a new bipartisan bill that would create new transparency and accountability standards for AI. The “Artificial Intelligence Research, Innovation, and Accountability Act of 2023” is co-sponsored by three Democrats and three Republicans including U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn), John Thune (R-S.D.), and four others.

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During News Corp’s and IAC’s latest earnings calls, the publishers reiterated their anger toward generative AI companies and their scraping of publishers’ content without permission or payment.

Publishers have taken a few different protective measures to protect their content from those companies, from one-off revenue share deals (like the Associated Press’ licensing deal with ChatGPT creator OpenAI) to coalitions negotiating for payments (such as a consortium of publishers led by IAC chairman Barry Diller). And most large publishers are blocking generative AI web crawler bots from scraping their sites for content too.

Media execs revealed during their earnings calls that some of those efforts have been more successful than others.

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A choice screen to designate a search engine and a browser could be on the horizon for U.S. device manufacturers when consumers power up a new phone, computer, laptop and tablet.

Lawmakers are in a hurry for victory, but the tortoises have a better approach.