Month: April 2024

Amazon Prime’s “Fallout” television adaptation has struck a chord with streaming viewers, becoming the second major live-action video game adaptation to break through to a wider audience after 2023’s “The Last of Us.” As film and TV studios race to adapt popular video games to the big screen, post-apocalyptic fiction could be the secret to mainstream success.

Amazon has not shared official viewership figures for its “Fallout” series, but social platforms have been awash with buzz about the show, which depicts an alternate future America desolated by nuclear war. Critics have lauded “Fallout,” landing it a 94 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Given the show’s reported production budget of $153 million, at least one Prime Video executive is likely breathing a sigh of relief as they scroll through all the effusive praise.

Amazon is going full throttle on the marketing of the series. It’s previewing it at movie theaters, blasting out ads to users of its cloud gaming service and even prompting every user who visits the Amazon storefront homepage to “Watch the new show ‘Fallout.’” It’s Amazon Prime’s first major video game adaptation, and the company is leveraging the full power of its worldwide network to help it succeed.

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The second installment of marketing, media and tech tentpole aspirant Possible 2024 wrapped up last week, and for all intents and purposes it appeared to avoid the sophomore slump that often accompanies year-two efforts.

Attendance was up more than 1,000 over 2023 to hit 3,600, and by and large attendees felt they were able to network and catch up with colleagues and clients just as, and in some cases more, effectively there as other tentpoles – be it CES, Cannes Lions, Dmexco or Advertising Week.

Some people in the know at Possible said they see the potential of the conference taking a bite out of Cannes’ attendance, most acutely by U.S.-based marketers who could save money by staying on this side of the Atlantic. Others, meanwhile, believe the event may move to earlier in the year, as a possible competitor to CES’ C Space attendance (which, given Kassan’s current contract spat, would be a jab at Medialink).

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For nearly a decade, brand safety has been the ad world’s white whale — constantly evading the harpoon of those looking to steer clear of dangerous or salacious content. But the proliferation of generative AI has conjured up an even scarier kind of monster: a multi-headed hydra.

The fight is already on. To boost its efforts around brand safety, IPG is adding more tools for identifying harmful content while also helping advertisers avoid appearing near it. One way is through an expanded partnership with Zefr, a brand-safety startup that tracks content across Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Along with new ways to pre-block high-risk social content, the companies are creating custom dashboards to help advertisers avoid user-generated content in sensitive categories across text, images, video and audio. Sensitive categories include AI-generated content and misinformation related to U.S. politics, climate denialism, health care and brand-specific content.

“We already have a lot of tools in the programmatic space to help manage misinformation, manage brand safety [and] suitability, but there has always been a void when it comes to UGC in walled gardens,” said Ruowen Liscio, vp of performance investment at IPG’s Magna unit.

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As Earth Day 2024 is marked today, finger pointing is still prevailing over taking action in the effort to make digital advertising more sustainable. 

Publishers say there is only so much supply path optimization they can do before it impacts their revenue. Meanwhile advertisers and brands say they can only shift budgets so far towards greener media until the data exists to prove lower-carbon campaigns perform just as well as traditional campaigns. And DSPs are held to the KPIs that their clients are demanding, though some are working to push dollars into greener avenues. 

What results is a stalemate of sorts, waiting for someone to jump first and take the blow so that the rest of the digital advertising industry can follow when a revenue hit is no longer a risk. 

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Interactive campaign presents intimate black-and-white portraits of 100 different people, who reflect on the possibilities inherent in each new morning.

A federal appellate court has sided with President Joe Biden and social media companies in a lawsuit brought by face-mask critic Justin Hart, who alleged his First Amendment rights were violated when
he was suspended from Facebook and X.

Taylor Swift has partnered with TikTok to launch a new in-app campaign to promote her new album, “The Tortured Poets Department.” The partnership comes days after the artist uploaded her music catalog
onto TikTok.

Even after DoubleVerify’s correction of X’s brand-safety rating, the social messaging platform continues to display harmful and offensive content alongside brands’ promotions. The Hyundai account had
held a blue checkmark for months as a paid Premium subscriber with over 55,000 followers.