Advertising

Perhaps the biggest news of the week was the agenda for the Federal Communications Commission's July 10 Open Meeting, which FCC Chairman Ajit Pai laid out in a blog post on June 18, 2019. I'm traveling to New York this week; below is a shorter-than-usual weekly that takes a look at how Chairman Pai plans to take education out of the Educational Broadband Service -- and broadcast television.

The Department of Justice has reached settlements with CBS, Cox, EW Scripps, Fox, and TEGNA Inc. to resolve a Department lawsuit brought as part of its ongoing investigation into exchanges of competitively sensitive information in the broadcast television industry. All five companies are alleged to have engaged in unlawful information sharing among their owned broadcast television stations. Cox also owns Cox Reps, one of two large “Rep Firms” in the industry that assist broadcast stations in sales to national advertisers.

Google has been treating Beto O'Rourke's campaign ads as if they weren’t political content, raising questions over whether Google is capable of keeping its already anemic promise of transparency for political ads. Google has promised to put ads it receives from candidates for US federal political offices in its political ad archive, for transparency’s sake. But the Beto ads were missing from the archive. Google’s own rules don’t allow any political content in Gmail ads, but Beto’s campaign ads kept showing up there.

The newspaper industry has crawled up Capitol Hill once again to beg for an antitrust exemption it believes would give the business needed in its fight with Google and Facebook for advertising dollars. Currently, Google and Facebook collect 73 percent of all digital advertising. Members of the news industry believe that the two tech giants have exploited their dominance of the Web to unfairly collect digital dollars that rightfully belong to them.

$4.7 billion is the amount that Google made from the work of news publishers in 2018 via search and Google News, according to a study by the News Media Alliance. That $4.7 billion is nearly as much as the $5.1 billion brought in by the United States news industry as a whole from digital advertising in 2018 — and the News Media Alliance cautioned that its estimate for Google’s income was conservative. For one thing, it does not count the value of the personal data the company collects on consumers every time they click on an article like this one.

5G mania has swept the wireless industry, regulators and tech enthusiasts — but the hype may be getting ahead of the market demand for it. When 4G launched, the US wireless market still had plenty of room to grow and revenue margins were relatively high. So the telecommunication industry's promotion of 4G service was more measured and less hyped. Now the wireless market is mature and has little subscriber growth (around 1%), so telecom companies are searching for ways to bring new revenue from current subscribers.

Behavioral advertising, which involves collecting data about readers’ online behavior and using it to serve them specially tailored ads, often through bits of code called cookies, has become the dominant force in digital advertising in recent years.

Digital advertisements used to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election lacked disclaimers stating who paid for them. This was deliberate on the part of the platforms: Facebook and Google actively sought exemptions from mandatory disclaimer requirements that are standard for print and broadcast media.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about data privacy and competition policy, GOP senators signaled they are divided over whether to pursue antitrust enforcement against the country's largest tech companies.

President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign has spent far more than any single Democratic presidential candidate on Facebook advertising, reprising a strategy that was central to his 2016 victory. Since entering the race late in April, former Vice President Joe Biden has pumped more than $1 million into Facebook ads, outspending President Trump’s campaign for three of the past four weeks. Much of President Trump’s spending on Facebook advertising in recent weeks has gone toward ads that have been seen by older Americans, particularly women 55 and older.