Month: January 2024

Amazon bulldozes into new markets, upending the status quo and challenging rivals. Today, it’s the turn of the ad-supported streaming world, and Amazon is coming out of the gate strong. 

Why, you ask? Because Amazon is serving marketers an opportunity beginning today to reach a whopping 115 million monthly viewers in the U.S. alone, courtesy of its bold move to make the ad tier default for tens of millions of subscribers worldwide.

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In November, some of the top publishers by traffic in the U.K. were alerted by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the legislative department tasked with upholding data privacy compliance in the U.K., that their on-site cookie consent pop-ups do not meet the requirements set by the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The ICO warned upwards of 100 of the top sites in the U.K. that they would be fined if they did not update their third-party cookie consent banners within 30 days to have a “reject all” button that’s of equal prominence as the “accept all” buttons.

But for media companies, adding the “reject all” option is not a simple bit of code. There are significant financial consequences that could come from making that change, according to three publishers who’ve tested what the realistic decline rate will be once that option is presented to their audiences. And the ICO’s notice calls into question how it would enforce the issue to the other publishers operating with a presence in the U.K.

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It’s an unavoidable reality that every few years the art and science of branding changes.

Over the last three years, the changes have felt more tectonic, thanks to a pandemic that changed media consumption habits dramatically. But the rise of DTC companies and the effect of startup culture has bled into mainstream branding to create an altered environment in which agencies — especially media agencies — have had to adapt. 

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Marketers are on the precipice of a new dawn as the biggest company in media prepares to pull the plug on third-party cookies, the cornerstone of the $600 billion online media business, in Google Chrome.  

While this is not exactly “news” and just about every company in the sector has spent the last four years trumpeting their diligent preparations, there’s a widespread (if muted) unease over levels of preparedness ahead of the official year-end 2024 deadline.   

Speaking with Digiday ahead of the IAB’s flagship Annual Leadership Meeting this week, Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, explained how the standards body intends to steward the sector through the trepidus year ahead.

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Regulators looking into the dangers of AI are turning up the heat. Last week, the Federal Trade Commission launched a new inquiry into five major AI players to investigate how their investments and partnerships impact competition.

Along with new inquiries for Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft, the FTC also is investigating Anthropic and OpenAI. Both startups have received multi-billion-dollar investments from the tech giants. As part of the investigation, the FTC is looking for information about investment and partnership agreements, their rationale and the implications for competition, sales, resources and product rollouts. 

During a virtual “Tech Summit” last Thursday, FTC chair Lina Kahn said the agency will look at whether tech giants are using their power to trick the public, and whether the AI investments allow giants to “exert undue influence or gain privileged access” to secure an advantage across the AI sector. Kahn also said the FTC will use findings from previous investigations to guide their strategy, including looking “upstream” at other companies that might be violating U.S. laws. (In 2020, the agency launched a similar inquiry to see if acquisitions by six tech giants harmed competition.)

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The Biden administration is using the Defense Production Act to require companies to inform the Commerce Department when they start training high-powered AI algorithms.