Advertising

Imagine if, ahead of HBO’s next “Westworld” premiere, AT&T sent a 5-minute video recap to millions of users it knows watch science fiction. The mobile giant could target young women with the latest trailer of Warner Bros.’s upcoming romantic comedy “Crazy Rich Asians.” Or analyze users’ interests to create customized CNN news clips for customers to watch on their lunch breaks.

During a daylong public hearing, the Federal Election Commission’s four remaining commissioners — two seats are vacant because President Donald Trump hasn’t appointed anyone to fill them — couldn’t find consensus on how to best drag federal political ad regulations into the Internet age. “I don’t think we’ve gotten very far,” FEC Chairwoman Caroline Hunter, a Republican, said two hours into the hearing, which featured testimony from 12 representatives of think tanks, activist groups and legal organizations.

Facebook and Google introduced new privacy settings in order to comply with Europe’s sweeping new privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, but campaigners still aren’t satisfied. Some official complaints on the day the new law went into force, and now others have raised further concerns about how the companies manipulate people into exposing their data.

It started with a cold call from the Ad Council to the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF). In 1996, the Ad Council, with more than $2 billion a year in donated media for public service advertising (PSA), decided to make a ten-year commitment to campaigns on behalf of children as the centerpiece of its work. To launch the initiative, the Ad Council was looking for a partner who could deliver a grassroots network and reinvent fulfillment for PSA campaigns in the digital age (replacing 800 phone numbers and brochures with multimedia websites to provide information and resources for action).

AT&T's advertising chief said the company’s acquisition of AppNexus is part of a strategy to build a first-of-its-kind marketplace for television and digital video advertising and give it more firepower against industry juggernauts Google and Facebook. AppNexus offers technology that helps advertisers buy ads, using automated software, across a range of websites and apps. The company also supplies technology to publishers so they can manage and sell ad space on their websites.

When the biggest platforms seem to be flailing or punting on problems, it’s often because they’re trying to address broad social issues with market solutions. They’re rediscovering, at scale and at great expense to their users, the ways in which a society is more than a bazaar, and the pitfalls of allowing human attention to be sold and resold as a commodity. If a platform is addressing a collective problem in a maddeningly strange way, consider that it might see itself, or only know to govern itself, like an eBay.

Carriers get requests for their customers’ whereabouts from all sorts of places. How they handle them depends on who is asking. 1) Each carrier has a dedicated legal team that evaluates the requests of law-enforcement officers. 2) Emergency calls are routed to public-safety answering points, which can obtain the caller’s location without affirmative consent. 3) Middlemen like LocationSmart and Zumigo can access information on cellphone users’ whereabouts in situations where the company seeking the information might not know which carrier to ask.

Television advertising is caught in the crossfire of the country’s political battles. When TV stars such as Roseanne Barr, Samantha Bee and Laura Ingraham get into trouble, advertisers retreat rather than risk having their brand names become collateral damage in the highly charged partisan atmosphere enveloping the media landscape. By the time a comedian or commentator is forced to apologize for a tweet or joke that goes too far, many sponsors want their commercials out before they can become the target of angry social media protests.

Aleksandr Kogan, the academic researcher who harvested personal data from Facebook for a political consultancy firm said that the idea the data was useful in swaying voters’ decisions was “science fiction.”

Facebook is sending a signal to Capitol Hill that it's taking the integrity of its social network seriously during the US primary election season. One of the main messages aimed to be delivered to Capitol Hill: Facebook is taking serious steps to protect its network, flush with 2.2 billion users, from misinformation and other political ploys on the platform.