Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

Facebook appears to be working on some new ways to check IDs. Confirm, which developed technology that enabled verification of government-issued identification, such as driver’s licenses, announced that it will be acquired by Facebook. The agreement covers the company’s technology and employees, and Kurt Wagner of Recode reported that the Boston-based startup will join the…

Olympic athletes chase gold, silver and bronze. But for their everyday spending needs, Visa’s fantastic blue plastic sure comes in handy. Almost all of the 54 members of the company’s Olympic and Paralympic endorsement roster, representing 21 countries and 15 sports, pull together for a global campaign ahead of the Winter Olympic Games in PyeongChang,…

There will be no controversial Super Bowl ads from domain provider and cloud platform GoDaddy this year, but that hasn’t kept the company out of the news. GoDaddy announced an agreement to acquire Main Street Hub, a full-service marketing platform aimed at enabling small businesses to optimize their social media marketing. The deal is valued…

Publicis Groupe has hired Shenan Reed as president, chief client officer for VM1, a’ dedicated Verizon unit housed within Zenith. Reed will be tasked with leading strategic activity across Publicis Groupe’s Zenith, SapientRazorfish, Moxie, Rokkan and The Community units for the client. “I’m excited to join the team,” Reed said in a statement. “I look…

Read key facts about the small, yet growing, black immigrant population in America.

YouTube launched Official Artist Channels in 2017 in an effort to make it easier for fans to find content from their favorite artists, including music videos, lyric videos, covers, unplugged sets, live performances and backstage footage. Now, the Google-owned video-sharing platform will begin combining subscribers from across multiple channels into artists’ Official Artist Channels. In…

Tubi, which is free and ad-supported, has a library of more than 7,500 movies and TV shows that cycle each month. As part of the deal with TEGNA, Tubi will also distribute localized content from
TEGNA’s local TV station, including news and other content. Tubi, in turn, will expand the relationship it has with the Premion network, which serves local and national ads to OTT networks.

The subscription video service plans to grow marketing costs to $2 billion this year from $1.3 billion in 2017. However, TV is still a tiny part of Netflix’s marketing revenues.

Netflix has been a disruptive, revolutionary force in many ways, but what’s particularly interested me from a PR perspective is how it’s refused to play the old “bragging rights” game. You know how
that works: The networks deploy an army of in-house publicists to brag about their ratings, which are dutifully reported in the TV columns the next day.

When data-driven analysts prognosticate about industries like mobile advertising, they tend to be very … well, data-driven. They look at increases in ad spend in certain areas, movements from big companies in the space or investments in certain technologies. While there is certainly a place for data in understanding what’s next for mobile creative, some…