Advertising

The former head of search at Google told colleagues in February 2019 that his team was “getting too involved with ads for the good of the product and company,” according to emails shown at the Justice Department’s landmark antitrust trial against the company. Google maintains a firewall between its ads and search teams so that its engineers can innovate on Google’s search engine, unsullied by the influence of the team whose goal is to maximize advertising revenue.

The major online platforms are breaking up with news. Some executives of the largest tech companies, like Adam Mosseri at Instagram, have said in no uncertain terms that hosting news on their sites can often be more trouble than it is worth because it generates polarized debates. Others, like Elon Musk, the owner of X, have expressed disdain for the mainstream press. Publishers seem resigned to the idea that traffic from the big tech companies will not return to what it once was.

Some of the nation's top cable operators have begun to ramp up promotions focused on smartphone subsidies. These cable-led promotions mark a shift in the dynamics of the US mobile market, according to MoffettNathanson. Analyst Craig Moffett said this new wave of mobile promotional offers from operators such as Comcast, Charter, and Cox illustrates that they're indeed needed in today's competitive market. "Cable's emergence as a promotional discounter was entirely predictable, notwithstanding their early protests to the contrary," Moffett explained. However, he tempered predictions on how we

California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D-CA) resolved a $93 million settlement with Google over allegations that its location-privacy practices violated California consumer protection laws. The settlement follows a multi-year investigation by the California Department of Justice that determined Google was deceiving users by collecting, storing, and using their location data for consumer profiling and advertising purposes without informed consent.

California lawmakers passed a bill known as the Delete Act (Senate Bill 362) that would allow consumers, with a single request, to have every data broker delete their personal information. Data brokers include a variety of businesses that gather and sell people’s personal information, such as their address, marital status and spending habits.

Following nearly a year of sustained pressure on brands from the #StopToxicTwitter coalition, showing the dangers of advertising on Twitter (now “X”), Elon Musk is now singling out coalition members to blame for the company’s extensive revenue losses.

When Microsoft unveiled an AI-powered version of Bing in February 2023, the company said it could add $2 billion of revenue if the revamped search engine could pry away even a single point of market share from Google.

For all the stock that brands and their agencies put on the value of consumer mentions in social media, it actually ranks relatively low among the modes of communication people use to express their sentiment about brands to others.

From its inception, LinkNYC – the public WiFi kiosks that are run by a consortium of companies including Google subsidiary Sidewalk Labs – has always posed a threat to privacy. But after nine years of operation and a recent audit, it’s fair to say LinkNYC represents a barely mitigated privacy disaster.

T-Mobile will appeal several decisions made by the National Advertising Division (NAD) of BBB National Programs to challenges brought by AT&T. The decisions involved “Phone Freedom” ads that appeared in television commercials, radio advertisements, and on T-Mobile’s website. The good news for T-Mobile is that NAD found at least one claim made in the “Phone Freedom” campaign to be supported. The bad news for T-Mobile is that some claims were not found to be supported.