Month: November 2023

The conversation about advertising on Netflix has taken a turn down memory lane. 

With its first live sports event coming up next week (November 14), Netflix execs have been talking it up to marketers — and it’s not the usual spiel they might have expected from the streaming giant entering its second year of advertising.

Instead of just being asked to advertise around the ‘Netflix Cup’ global golf match, they’re also being “invited” to sponsor it. All it takes is a $2 million investment to get their branding showcased during the live-streamed event, and then an additional $2 million for ad placements on its ad-supported tier, sources confirmed to Digiday after Bloomberg first reported.

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In an all-hands meeting held on yesterday afternoon, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti told staff that his former strategy to consolidate large media companies — such as BuzzFeed, Complex Networks and HuffPost — into a large conglomerate “has not worked the way we hoped,” according to transcribed notes from the meeting shared with Digiday by a BuzzFeed spokesperson.

According to one current and two former staffers, that’s a bit of an understatement.

After going public via special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in Dec. 2021, every action the company has taken over the past two years has been put on display for all to see: From its growing debt and declining revenue to its multiple rounds of layoffs and the shuttering of BuzzFeed News to an impending stock delisting deadline. BuzzFeed is also reportedly looking to sell Complex, the company it acquired for $300 million in June 2021, as part of its SPAC efforts.

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With the actor’s strike over — Sag-Aftra reached a tentative agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) on Wednesday night — productions will likely start up again for an unusually busy winter. Aside from working quickly to resume production, one immediate shift will be talent’s ability to promote projects.

“The PR/promotional restrictions surrounding the strike — those that prevented talent from promoting any past/current/future TV/film/streaming projects — have been lifted,” said Mary Semling, svp of Platinum Rye Entertainment, the talent and IP procurement branch of The Marketing Arm. “We had celebrity interviews happening just today which went from ‘they cannot talk about work projects’ yesterday to, within hours, ‘they can talk about work projects!’ This makes the PR activities associated with brand deals much, much more workable.”

Other ripple effects of the strike’s end will likely take more time to sort out. In the years following the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) strike of 2007 and 2008, the production of reality TV shows skyrocketed. Networks again leaned on reality TV production as well as live sports throughout the strikes. And marketers shifted ad dollars to reality TV and live sports over the last few months. In the coming weeks, advertisers will continue to lean on reality TV and live sports as production ramps up.

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They refuse to reform programs that everyone knows are unsustainable.

A closer look at the results in close races shows a very competitive GOP.

She is what the GOP needs to take on Trump and Biden: a conviction politician.

Islamism, incubated in the 1920s, belittles Islam’s sacred text for barbaric ends.

Meanwhile, Republicans need to winnow the field to Donald Trump, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis.

Cruise set out to win the autonomous car race by starting with urban driving. After a pedestrian was dragged under a robotaxi, the company and its parent GM are cutting jobs and making other changes.

Disney must face claims that it violated California and Pennsylvania wiretap laws by allegedly allowing Oracle to gather data from visitors to ESPN.com, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.