Author: rssmasher

Reddit has hired a former Time Inc. exec as its new chief operating officer. Jen Wong, who joined Reddit today, was Time’s COO and president of digital from 2016 until leaving the company earlier this year after it was acquired by the publishing conglomerate Meredith Inc. Prior to Time Inc., Wong spent four years as…

For the first time in Amazon Prime’s 13 year history, the membership numbers are in CEO Jeff Bezos’ annual shareholder letter, along with other statistics around the Prime business that show the company’s dominance in ecommerce. Amazon Prime’s 100 million (and counting) worldwide members shipped more than 5 billion products with the service in 2017….

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson testified on Thursday in defense of the company’s $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner, which is being contested as an antitrust violation by the Justice Department. Stephenson reiterated AT&T’s defense that without strong content to incorporate into its mobile, streaming and linear distribution, the telco is being left behind by online… Continue reading »

The post AT&T’s Stephenson Takes The Stand In DOJ Suit, Citing Need For Data-Driven Ad Business appeared first on AdExchanger.

The advertising industry M&A market was red-hot in the first quarter of 2018. It just didn’t come from the usual suspects. A new report from consultancy R3 found that the global value of such deals soared 126 percent in the first three months of the year, led by “non-traditional buyers” like the consulting behemoths disrupting…

CVS Health made headlines in January when it announced a plan to stop altering images used on CVS Pharmacy products and in CVS marketing online and in stores by 2020. Unaltered images now include a special “CVS beauty mark” somewhere on the image to show that “a person’s shape, size, proportion, skin or eye color,…

Jason Kint, chief executive of publisher trade group Digital Content Next, joined Digiday+ members for a Slack town hall on April 19 to talk about how the Facebook-Google duopoly affects publishers, the impending enforcement General Data Protection Regulation and more.

The full conversation is available exclusively to Digiday+ members, but lightly edited excerpts appear below. Click here to join Digiday+.

Here are Kint’s views on:

DCN vs. the duopoly
“It started with a recognition that what we called ‘intermediaries’ — as in not the advertiser, not the publisher and certainly not the consumer — were benefiting more than the rest of the ecosystem. We started crunching numbers in 2014, and then in 2015, started focusing in on how much of the growth was going to [Facebook and Google]. We used the word ‘duopoly,’ and it took on a life of its own. If the first goal was to make certain the industry understood there was a problem, then I think that’s been accomplished. It’s allowed us more direct response from [Google and Facebook] so they consider other stakeholders beyond their advertisers and maybe their consumers. We’ve seen more attention to publisher brands, protecting value of media, other business models, including subscriptions.”

The GDPR’s impact
“In the medium term and long term, I stand by GDPR (and coming ePrivacy Regulation) [being] a significant risk to Facebook and Google. I don’t buy into the narrative [that] it will just make them stronger as they have direct audience relationships, at least not if they follow the law. We’ve already seen Facebook working to use design tricks to protect the status quo and Google using legal ticks. We don’t support GDPR simply to weaken the duopoly. We believe raising the bar on consumer (and advertiser) trust with our brands is critical to our economic interests (and fortunately, also good for media and society). … But it will likely weaken the aspects of Google and Facebook that make them so dominant: their ability to collect and share data across the web and app ecosystem.”

Advertising privacy concerns going mainstream
“I think there is a larger mainstream understanding thanks to recent data breaches. I also think antitrust law in the EU and possibly here in the U.S. is starting to connect the dots between data ownership and advertising dominance. Just because a product is free, it doesn’t put a halo on it and make it void of any consumer harm in antitrust analysis. That’s starting to be discussed.”

The post GDPR is ‘a significant risk to Facebook and Google’: A Digiday+ Slack town hall with DCN’s Jason Kint appeared first on Digiday.

Is the Frankenstein we created a terrible beast – or, at heart, a gentle giant? Because for now (until AI really arrives) the Internet is simply a series of cable, routers and computers, and there is
nothing inherently evil about it. My elder son, Will, likens it to a car – which in itself is not a dangerous object, until you put an idiot behind the wheel. But that is the point of the argument
now: Have we put too many idiots behind too many wheels?

In the fourth decade of the digital media and advertising revolution, too many industry voices still insist on making a commotion about the zero-sum game in advertising, where some can win only as others lose. That in-built media assumption remains, even though it belies our own experience in the digital age. We all know the…

Hello from 1966! The TV’s reign over American households is in full swing. An actor named Ronald Reagan has been elected governor of California. Families crowd around the television set, grab a newspaper and turn on the radio to catch the breaking news of the day together. Meanwhile, an advertising pioneer named Eugene Schwartz is…

When it comes to accurate ad targeting, agencies and publishers say there is still room for improvement, even as the strict privacy regulations going into effect soon in Europe threaten to upend the way data is used and collected. During a breakfast discussion on Wednesday in New York, Ed Gaffney, director of implementation research and…