Author: rssmasher

Major League Baseball will make 25 weekday afternoon games available exclusively via Facebook Watch during the 2018 regular season. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but sources familiar with the agreement pegged the price tag for Facebook at $30 million to $35 million, Scott Soshnick of Bloomberg reported. The games will be produced by…

Black-ish is usually one of ABC’s most brand-friendly shows, but the network decided not to air a politically charged episode of the sitcom that could have potentially alienated some of those advertisers. The network said it had pulled an episode of the comedy, which had been scheduled for Feb. 27, because of “creative differences” with…

When the International Business Times and its parent Newsweek Media Group were accused in February of buying bots to help win a major ad buy from the Consumer Financial Protection Board, they had a helping hand from PopAds. PopAds, which specializes in pop-unders and didn’t respond to requests for comment, also resells traffic, performs unauthorized… Continue reading »

The post How The Ad Tech Underbelly Helped Newsweek Media Group Buy Bots appeared first on AdExchanger.

This year’s South by Southwest has been a world filled with over-the-top brand activations, surprise visits from Elon Musk and plenty of new products. Quartz took advantage of the atmosphere of the festival and released Quartz for Messenger on March 8. With its new chatbot, Quartz hopes to deliver the news and other content to…

When Melinda Gates was hired at Microsoft, she was the only woman in her hiring class. During orientation, a new colleague picked a fight with a vp at the company–Gates later learned that colleague had been advised to be more aggressive–and that moment, which Gates shared during her keynote at South by Southwest in Austin…

When Martin Sorrell made headlines earlier this month for blaming technology and zero-based budgeting for WPWP’s worst stock drop since 1999, many marketers were surprised by his failure to communicate what many of us deem the real reasons behind their less than stellar year. Sorrell went so far as to state that his traditional agency…

Less than a year ago, agency vet Matt Britton rejoined influencer marketing platform Crowdtap as CEO to help brands make sense of creators and user-generated content. Now he wants to get out of influencer marketing and into data. Britton founded Crowdtap in 2009 when it was incubated inside his Publicis-owned agency MRY. After leaving MRY,…

Scandal hit the London agency world this week as several industry veterans shed light on an apparently common practice in which departing male executives rank female colleagues via “Top 5” and “Bottom 5” lists gauging their physical attractiveness. Word of one particular “Top 5” email began making the rounds at the end of last week…

Gatorade made its SXSW activation slightly deceptive. When attendees walk into the space they enter into the G-Store–a somewhat small pop-up shop filled to the brim with any and every possible Gatorade product you could imagine, from protein powder to classic Gatorade drinks. Attendees are given iPads as soon as they enter the store and…

Nike celebrates its 20-year partnership with F.C. Barcelona, one of the world’s great soccer clubs, in a new 90-second spot directed by Oscar-winning cinematographer Wally Pfister that salutes team’s ability to unite Catalans across the city. The ad, by Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam, is narrated in Catalan (with closed captions in English) by the actor…