Month: June 2024

After years of trial and error, the esports industry appears to have finally found a path to profitability: Saudi Arabian money.

Over the past two decades, esports companies have thrown a wide variety of spaghetti at the metaphorical wall of profitability, with most of it failing to stick. 

First came esports team streaming payments and esports league media rights deals with Twitch, which dried up a few years ago. Then came esports companies’ flirtation with crypto and gambling money, a source of investment that cratered during the crypto winter of 2022 and 2023.

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LinkedIn’s Wire Program — a program that enables media companies to sell 3- to 15-second-long pre-roll ads on their editorial video — is launching its beta test phase today.

Barron’s, Bloomberg, Business Insider, Forbes, MarketWatch, NBCUniversal, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and Yahoo! Finance are among the publishers taking part in the program, having signed on between last fall and April to start pitching advertisers prior to its launch this month. The Wire Program is part of LinkedIn’s larger investment into news. It will launch internationally, but without EU targeting.

The test period over the past several months has yielded ad revenue for some of the publishers. Prior to its launch in beta, execs from Bloomberg, Reuters, Forbes and The Wall Street Journal all said they sold ads through the program, signing on anywhere from three to 35 clients. There are no concrete plans at the moment for when the Wire Program will open up to more publishers.

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HBO hit’s Gerry, J. Smith-Cameron, is at the helm of a corporate union creating PB-chocolatey goodness.

Seems as if every retailer has its own data and ad targeting business these days. But what they don’t have is scale. So a growing number of retail media networks (RMNs) are partnering with ad tech intermediaries and each other to manufacture national scale and audiences. As of Tuesday, you can add regional grocery chains […]

The post Why Regional Grocery Chains Are Buying Into Co-Ops appeared first on AdExchanger.

The project, a joint venture of Destination Canada, Statistics Canada and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, features a tourism analytics platform.

The IPG Mediabrands’ unit will handle media-buying, will serve as U.S. media advisor, and will partner on ad product development.

Data on how often Google’s new AI Overviews feature appears on search results suggests that the company reduced its visibility even before recommendations like adding glue to pizza sauce went viral.

Reasons for the layoffs have not been confirmed, but both companies reported positive results in cloud services last quarter. It’s not clear if cuts were due to declining business or efficiencies in
generative artificial intelligence.

An open letter signed by former and current employees at OpenAI and other AI giants calls for whistleblower protections as the artificial intelligence rapidly evolves.