Month: February 2024

WIRED spoke with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber about the X competitor opening signups to all, how to crowdsource deepfake porn moderation, Jack Dorsey, and more.

To relate with Gen Z, advertisers have to do more than just spend millions on a 30- or 60-second Super Bowl spot. They need to keep up online and social marketing before, during and after the game – and using influencers will help, too.

The post This Year’s Super Bowl Is All About Reaching Gen Z appeared first on AdExchanger.

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

The post Comic: Don’t Cross The Streams appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Real MFA Payday Made-for-advertising is far from a solved problem, but buyers aren’t freaking out about it anymore, Digiday reports. To be fair, they have more pressing concerns. Unlike third-party cookie deprecation, for example, and other intractable technical challenges, MFAs can be […]

The post MFA Mania Is Already Cooling; Why The Big Get Bigger (And Bigger) appeared first on AdExchanger.

With this weekend’s Super Bowl expected to cost some $7 million for a 30-second ad, agencies are turning to influencer marketing and commerce strategies to maximize their dollars.

Some influencer agencies are beefing up their new offerings leading up to the Big Game, while others are trying to strike a balance between household Hollywood names and emerging influencers in their content. Either way, influencers and retail media are playing a growing role in social media feeds during massive live events like the Super Bowl.

This year, influencer Addison Rae made an ad promoting Nerds’ gummies for the brand’s first Super Bowl commercial. (Rae recently made the jump to acting in some Netflix films.) Meanwhile, Dunkin’ and Ben Affleck are back with a Super Bowl spot: This time with the Batman actor trying to become a pop star (with Charli D’Amelio’s help).

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It’s earnings season, and gaming has once again taken center stage. But as tech and media giants take advantage of gaming’s pandemic-fueled rise, they are shaking up the traditional economic pillars of the industry — and leaving the game developers themselves scrambling to keep up with the times.

Disney opened its Feb. 7 Q1 2024 earnings call with a splash, with CEO Bob Iger appearing on CNBC moments before it began to announce the company’s $1.5 billion investment in Epic Games. Disney intellectual properties such as “Star Wars” have already appeared inside Epic titles like “Fortnite,” but Disney’s official statement on the investment made it clear that the presence of Disney characters inside Epic’s digital worlds will increase drastically as a result of the deal, transforming “Fortnite” into something resembling a virtual Disney World.

“This marks Disney’s biggest entry ever into the world of video games, and offers significant opportunities for growth and expansion,” Iger said during the earnings call.

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This year’s Super Bowl is in Las Vegas, where the San Francisco 49ers will face off against the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday. Given the setting, Doritos is rolling out all the stops for new flavors for its relaunched Dinamita rolled tortilla chips brand, including a celebrity-packed in-game spot, digital activations and in-person activities.

Building up to the Big Game, the chip brand has a newly launched TikTok page with more than 149,000 followers, a digital campaign and in-person sampling for those in Vegas. In the third quarter of the game, a star studded spot with Jenna Ortega and Danny Ramirez will run. On-the-ground in Las Vegas, fans can visit the Doritos Dinamita slot machine located on Fremont Street to score free products and merch. 

“While we’ve got a really great linear campaign and we’re using the Super Bowl moment to re-launch Dinamita, we know that it’s incredibly important to be on all those other platforms,” said Tina Mahal, senior vice president of marketing at PepsiCo Foods North America, referring to digital and social components of the campaign.

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Last February, E.l.f. Beauty made its first foray into Super Bowl advertising with a regional spot featuring “White Lotus” star Jennifer Coolidge. This year, the beauty brand is upping the stakes with a national spot with several stars of the moment (Suits cast members Gina Torres, Rick Hoffman and Sarah Rafferty; Jury Duty’s Ronald Gladden) as well as long-time favorites (Judge Judy), among others (influencers like Benny Drama).

The regional approach served as a way for E.l.f. Beauty to add TV to its marketing mix as well as “test and learn” what the Super Bowl could do for the brand, explained Patrick O’Keefe, vp of integrated marketing communications, adding that the brand’s spot last year spoke to an “underrepresented audience” in Big Game advertising. “So this [year] is our opportunity to show up loud and proud and give them entertainment because that’s what we do – we love to entertain and sell a few products along the way,” said O’Keefe. The first foray also helped the brand understand the rarity of the Super Bowl audience with 75% of the audience excited for the ads, explained O’Keefe.

E.l.f. Beauty isn’t alone in recognizing the potential of the Super Bowl for beauty brands. Last year, Fenty Beauty also joined in on reaching the Big Game audience. This year, meanwhile, L’Oreal’s NYX Cosmetics will make its debut with a spot featuring Cardi B; skincare brand CeraVe is taking to the Big Game stage for the first time with its own ad starring Michael Cera; Dove, meanwhile, will return after 18 years. Beauty as a category is starting to show up more at the Super Bowl to cater to the members of the audience who use their products.

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Some AI brand names might sound like cadences and audibles, but the AI ads for this year’s Super Bowl have nothing to do with play calls.

This Sunday, tech giants will use Super Bowl LVIII’s mainstream audience to market new AI features. Meanwhile, other non-tech brands will air ads made with generative AI in an attempt to stand out.

Microsoft’s Super Bowl spot will promote Copilot, a flagship AI platform powering a range of features across various apps, devices and websites. In a new campaign that debuted this week, Microsoft — which recently rebranded Bing Chat under Copilot — aims to show how Copilot can be an “AI companion” across Windows, Android and Apple devices. But rather than bog down football fans with AI jargon, Microsoft’s “Watch Me” commercial shows how Copilot can help people in their everyday lives to create movie storyboards, study chemistry and write code for a new game.

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A genie whose look is more Freddy Mercury than abracadabra grants some “predictable” wishes in a nice execution of a mediocre concept.