Month: January 2025

Apple TV+ engaged in some dystopian performance art to promote the second season of its hit show Severance. On Jan. 14 at Grand Central Terminal in New York, actors Adam Scott, Britt Lower, and Zach Cherry appeared as their Severance characters in a pop-up glass cube resembling an office cubicle. They caught people’s attention as…

A new report, shared exclusively with WIRED, shows how an AI content mill with hundreds of sites managed to pull big-name advertisers into their schemes.

Pump.Fun raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in its first year in operation. Despite some growing pains, its creators say this is just the beginning.

Coors Light is throwing its latest Super Bowl party like it’s 1999. That year, Mike Judge released the dark comedy Office Space about a software company employee enduring the bleak monotony of day-to-day cubicle work. When one of the lead’s more chipper coworkers diagnoses his workplace complaints as “a case of the Mondays”–a phrase that…

By any metric, ByteDance’s TikTok is nothing less than a phenomenal success. Launching abroad in 2016, then stateside in 2018–a latecomer to the social media platform landscape, in fact–its current 1.8 billion monthly active users (MAU) make it the fifth-largest social media platform worldwide, and by some reports the most engaging platform as measured by…

The social platform Nextdoor named executive Michael Kiernan as its new chief revenue officer on Wednesday, part of a broader bid from the company to reinvent itself and its advertising business under refreshed leadership. Kiernan, who first joined Nextdoor in 2018, has served as CRO on an interim basis since April. In his newly official…

This week’s Future of TV Briefing reports on the meetings that Netflix held with ad buyers during last week’s Consumer Electronics Show, during which it discussed its advertising road map for the year.

• Nextflix
• Venu’s shutdown, creators’ AI deals, TikTok’s ban likelihood and more

Nextflix

If Netflix’s Christmas Day games were a touchdown — and they were in ad buyers’ minds — then the company is now going for a two-point conversion.

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As of today, Jan. 15, Walmart has doubled down on its push into the metaverse by launching Zepeto’s first-ever e-commerce experience for physical goods.

Zepeto is a digital avatar creation platform that allows its user base — which skews female and is roughly 70 percent Gen-Z, per Walmart and Zepeto — to create and share virtual experiences using digital representations of themselves. Now, Zepeto app users viewing virtual Walmart clothing items can use the app to log into their Walmart accounts and order physical versions of those items to be shipped directly to their doorsteps. Additionally, purchases of select physical garments in brick-and-mortar Walmart stores will also come with free downloads of their virtual equivalents on Zepeto.

The launch is Walmart’s third metaverse e-commerce experience, evidence that the retailer is playing the long game in its approach to virtual worlds. In April 2024, Walmart partnered with Roblox to open that platform’s first e-commerce experience for physical goods; in May 2024, Walmart opened its own virtual world platform featuring e-commerce opportunities, Walmart Realm.

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This story was originally published by sister site, Modern Retail.

Last July, the period care brand Viv saw its monthly traffic spike by 400%, which “came out of nowhere,” according to Viv’s marketing and design director Kelly Donohue.

After some digging, Donohue discovered that the jump in traffic was driven primarily by Google Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT search recommendations for non-toxic period care. At the time, a study by the scientific journal Environment International came out that found that many popular tampon brands contain heavy metals like lead and arsenic. Many people were asking the AI assistants about toxins in tampons and searching for sustainable period products, which led them to Viv’s blog.

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The copyright infringement trial between The New York Times and OpenAI kicked off in a federal court hearing on Tuesday.

A judge listened to arguments from both parties in a motion to dismiss brought by OpenAI and its financial backer Microsoft. The New York Times — as well as The New York Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting, which have filed their own lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft — claim OpenAI and Microsoft used the publishers’ content to train their large language models powering their generative AI chatbots. Doing so means the tech companies are competing with those publishers by using their content to answers users’ questions, taking away the incentive for a user to visit their sites for that information and ultimately hurting their ability to monetize those users through digital advertising and subscriptions, they claim.

OpenAI and Microsoft say what they’re doing is covered by “fair use,” a law that allows the use of copyrighted material to make something new that doesn’t compete with the original work.

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