Tag Archives: Advertising

Technology

Facebook may be in stronger position after Apple iOS 14

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Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the House Financial Services Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill October 23, 2019 in Washington, DC. Zuckerberg testified about Facebook’s proposed cryptocurrency Libra, how his company will handle false and misleading information by political leaders during the 2020 campaign and how it handles its users’ data and privacy.

Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday said he is confident the social media company “will be able to manage through” Apple’s upcoming planned privacy update to iOS 14, which will make it easier for iPhone and iPad users to block companies from tracking their activity to target ads.

“We’ll be in a good position,” Zuckerberg said in a Clubhouse room Thursday afternoon.

Apple’s upcoming privacy changes will inform users about device ID tracking and ask them if they want to allow it. The tracking is based on a unique device identifier on every iPhone and iPad called the IDFA. Companies that sell mobile advertisements use this ID to help target ads and estimate their effectiveness.

Apple has said that the change will roll out early this spring.

Zuckerberg explained that the change could benefit Facebook if more businesses decide to sell goods directly through Facebook and Instagram.

“It’s possible that we may even be in a stronger position if Apple’s changes encourage more businesses to conduct more commerce on our platforms by making it harder for them to use their data in order to find the customers that would want to use their products outside of our platforms,” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg’s comments are the most optimistic statements Facebook has delivered about how the looming Apple changes may impact the company’s advertising business.

In July 2020, Facebook CFO David Wehner said that Apple’s iOS 14 changes could hurt the social media company’s ability to target ads to users, and in August 2020, the company said the changes could lead to a more than 50% drop in its Audience Network advertising business, which represents less than 10% of the company’s net revenue. The company told investors during its fourth-quarter earnings in January that the impact of Apple’s changes could start to affect Facebook’s business late in the first quarter.

Facebook has prepared for the looming Apple changes by introducing more commerce products.

Most notably, the social media company in 2020 introduced Facebook Shops and Instagram Shops. These features make it possible for brands to list their product catalogs directly on Facebook’s most popular apps, and sell goods directly on Facebook and Instagram.

Zuckerberg on Thursday said that already Facebook has 1 million active shops on its services and 250 million people using shops actively.

“Compared to the early conversations we had about how people would use this across Facebook and Instagram and our product, I think this is something that’s well on track to be something that’s going to be increasingly important to people,” Zuckerberg said.

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Technology

Over 5,000 Final Fantasy XIV Players Were Banned For Using Or Advertising Real Money Trading

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Image: Square Enix

Square Enix announced earlier this week that over 5,000 Final Fantasy XIV players were banned after they were caught using or advertising real money in-game.

As spotted by PCGamesN, on March 4 FFXIV publisher Square Enix revealed via a news post on the FFXIV website that 5851 players had been banned for their involvement with real money trading or other “prohibited activities.” 5037 players were banned for directly participating in real money trading. Meanwhile, another 814 players were banned for simply advertising real money trading.

According to Square Enix using real money in-game for trades or other activities is prohibited in the terms of service, which players agree to before creating an account. Even advertising or just trying to use real money is bad enough that Square Enix will bring the banhammer down. These bans all happened between Feb. 25 and March 3.

This isn’t the first time Square Enix has revealed a massive wave of account bans. Back in 2019, the publisher banned over 10,000 players for similar real money trading violations.

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Technology

Google says it won’t track you directly in the future as it phases out cookies

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Google is clarifying its plans for targeted advertising as it phases out the use of browser cookies, saying in a new blog post Wednesday that it won’t use other ways to “track” users around the internet after it ends support for cookies in Chrome.

Last year, the company said it would be ending support for third-party cookies, which fuel much of the digital advertising ecosystem, in its Chrome browser within two years of January 2020. Instead, Google says it will only use “privacy-preserving technologies” that rely on methods like anonymization or aggregation of data.  

The blog post from David Temkin, director of product management for ads privacy and trust, says the company has been getting questions about whether Google will “join others in the ad tech industry who plan to replace third-party cookies with alternative user-level identifiers.” Ad tech players have been working on ways of marketing that balance consumer privacy while maintaining personalization in advertising after they can no longer use cookies. 

“Today, we’re making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products,” the Google post says. 

Cookies are small pieces of code that web sites deliver to a visitor’s browser, and stick around as the person visits other sites. They can be used to track users across multiple sites, to target ads and see how they perform. Google said last year it would end support for those cookies in Chrome once it had figured out how to address the needs of users, publishers and advertisers and come up with tools to mitigate workarounds. The company said its intention was to do that within two years, by early 2022. 

To do so, Google launched its “Privacy Sandbox” initiative to find a solution that both protects user privacy and lets content remain free available on the open web. In January, Google said it was “extremely confident” about the progress of its proposals to replace cookies, and plans to start testing one proposal with advertisers in Google Ads next quarter. That proposal in particular, called “Federated Learning of Cohorts,” would essentially put people into groups based on similar browsing behaviors, meaning that only “cohort IDs” and not individual user IDs would be used to target them.

Google says this is about how its own ad products will work, and not restricting what can happen on Chrome by third parties. The company said it wouldn’t use Unified ID 2.0 or LiveRamp ATS in its ad products but wouldn’t speak specifically about any one initiative.

Unified ID 2.0 is an initiative a number of top ad-tech firms are working on together, which would rely on email addresses that are hashed and encrypted from consumers who give their consent. Public company LiveRamp also has what it calls its “Authenticated Traffic Solution,” which it says involves consumers opting in to gain control of their data, and on the other side, brands and publishers being able to use that data.

Temkin says in the post that other providers “may offer a level of user identity for ad tracking across the web that we will not — like PII graphs based on people’s email addresses.” 

“We don’t believe these solutions will meet rising consumer expectations for privacy, nor will they stand up to rapidly evolving regulatory restrictions, and therefore aren’t a sustainable long term investment,” the blog post says. “Instead, our web products will be powered by privacy-preserving APIs which prevent individual tracking while still delivering results for advertisers and publishers.” 

Google had briefed a number of major advertisers and groups on the post before Wednesday, including George Popstefanov, founder and CEO of digital agency PMG.

Popstefanov said in an email that while this is a dynamic shift “we have been preparing for it for a while.”

“Following last year’s announcement to phase out third-party cookies, many of our clients have been moving swiftly to build their data infrastructures and to invest in their CRM, to better leverage their first-party data,” he said. “The important thing is that consumer behavior isn’t fundamentally shifting, just our ability to track and measure behaviors as we’ve been accustomed to. The importance of strategic planning and insights will be more important than ever for understanding audiences and how to connect at the right times and in contextually relevant ways.”

He added that he believes Google is motivated to design its products and solutions to solve for the new reality.

“Marketers are already diversifying their spending in more areas up and down the funnel, so it will be incumbent on Google for its solutions to appeal to brands and to support marketers’ investments and impact,” he said.

Alec Stapp, director of technology policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, called Google’s news a step in the right direction for user privacy. The group has received funding from Google and other major tech players, Protocol reported last year.

“However, companies — even very large ones — can only do so much on their own,” he said in an email. “Policymakers need to step in and formalize rules that protect user privacy while being mindful of not burying users in an endless series of opt-in screens.”

Jon Halvorson, global VP of consumer experience Mondelez International, said the decision is consistent with feedback from consumers about what they want and expect. He said the company will be doing some testing in “FLoC” and will be building it into business plans for this year.  

“We don’t think that it can be privacy or performance, advertisers need and require both,” he said in an email.  

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Business

Super Bowl will welcome some new advertisers that had great year during pandemic

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Consumers are likely to notice something different when they tune into the Super Bowl this Sunday: a slew of advertisers they’ve never seen before on the game, many of which saw their businesses boom over the last year during the pandemic.

An ever-growing list of newcomers will be shelling out roughly $5.5 million for a 30-second commercial to show their stuff. Among them: trading app Robinhood; freelance worker platform Fiverr; online food delivery company DoorDash; used car company Vroom; resale platform Mercari; gardening supplier Scotts Miracle-Gro; employment website Indeed; online betting company DraftKings; restaurant chain Chipotle; Kimberly-Clark’s Huggies; and mayonnaise brand Hellman’s, owned by Unilever. And more will surface as the game draws closer this weekend. 

Some mainstays like Coke, Pepsi and Budweiser are declining to buy traditional ad time in the game.

Companies that are advertising during this year’s game face risk because of the coronavirus pandemic. Derek Rucker, who teaches advertising strategy at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, said brands that are too serious could be perceived as a downer by consumers, but going too far in the other direction also could be counterproductive.

“There is a possibility that if you’re so irrelevant and so disconnected, consumers might not really like it,” he said. “The stakes are high and some brands will get it right, and I want to see how they manage that.”

Some of the newcomers were useful for consumers at home during the pandemic. The ad from DoorDash, for instance, will feature “Sesame Street” characters highlighting items like paper towels (or yes, cookies) that it can deliver. The company last year began offering more convenience items, household supplies and other health and wellness products during the pandemic, when people were trying to limit their grocery store trips. 

Scotts Miracle-Gro said its Super Bowl ad is meant build on the momentum it gained during the coronavirus pandemic, CEO Jim Hagedorn told CNBC on Wednesday.

“We got about 20 million new customers in Covid time last year, and the goal is to keep them and grow the market,” Hagedorn said on “Power Lunch.” 

Hagedorn added that the Super Bowl is a way to reach those people and persuade them to stay.

“The Super Bowl is a great platform for the big, breakthrough kinds of messages for a company,” said Jim Nail, principal analyst for B2C Marketing. In a year like this, that could mean, “How is the brand relevant in a pandemic-induced world?”

Nail said Indeed is following this route and expects and Fiverr to do the same in their ads. The former said its spot will highlight the journey of looking for a job in a challenging market when people are facing economic distress. Fiverr’s ad will discuss how small businesses have needed to pivot their businesses digitally to survive, and how freelancers from Fiverr could help. 

Fiverr chief marketing officer Gali Arnon said this has been a “landmark year” for the company. 

“All over the world, freelancers [are] joining our platform, because of the situation, because of the pandemic and because of the high rate of unemployment all over the world,” she said.

Mercari’s spot shows a couple receiving two popcorn makers as gifts, then showing as they list one on Mercari, and then shows it in its new home. “Buy or sell almost anything online from home,” the voiceover reads. 

Mercari’s U.S. CEO John Lagerling told CNBC the company started to see an uptick in business beginning in the spring lockdowns.

“People wanted to turn unused things into cash, manage their finances,” he said. On the other side, they wanted to “bling out, or optimize” their spaces while they were at home using secondhand items.  

In a normal year, people may have turned to Craigslist or old-fashioned garage sales to find or get rid of old items, but many people were trying to limit contact. And Lagerling said Mercari was a way for them to do that. 

And because of the pandemic, real-life roommates and a real-life couple were cast in the ad rather than strangers pretending to be living together or married. The company worked with Rain the Growth Agency on the ad.

Another Super Bowl newbie, Vroom launched its IPO in 2020 and said it saw major growth as people chose to shop for vehicles online instead of at a dealership. Though the company said it initially saw disruption to its e-commerce operations because of the pandemic, consumer demand for used vehicles eventually returned to pre-Covid levels because of strong demand for e-commerce and contact-free delivery.

“Particularly in the early stages of the pandemic, some people physically could not get to a dealership because some of them had to close for obvious reasons,” Vroom chief marketing officer Peter Scherr said. “We were an interesting alternative and a new one and an innovative one that really captured the moment for consumers.” 

The spot is part of a campaign with MDC Partners’ Anomaly agency. The campaign pits the company’s offerings against the traditional process of going to a dealership.

“There’s really no bigger stage in the ad world than the Super Bowl,” Scherr said. “We’re excited to reach a mass audience.” 

Companies that execute well may very well launch themselves into the headspace of American consumers for good.

“Some of these are companies that have grown significantly during the pandemic, and they’re looking to take that momentum and use this big Super Bowl moment as a launching point to get to the next level of brand awareness,” said Lee Newman, CEO of Interpublic Group agency MullenLowe U.S. “Traditionally, the Super Bowl has been a vehicle to make that transition into becoming more of a household name, and this year will be no different.”

Consumers may be watching more closely than ever for perceived insensitivity or acting too gleeful after a difficult year for the country. Many are likely to err on the side of showing how they have been, and can be, valuable at this time, said Anjali Bal, a marketing professor at Babson College.

Themes will involve “this idea of togetherness, how we’re surviving the pandemic, kind of how technology has aided this us in the pandemic, those types of things,” she said.

For those sitting out this year’s Super Bowl, that decision can be a PR savvy one as brands try to draw attention even if they’re not on the game.

Coke said last month it won’t be running an in-game spot “to ensure we are investing in the right resources during these unprecedented times” and as it reeled from the financial impact from the pandemic. Pepsi said it’s replacing its traditional Super Bowl ad slot with a new campaign to lead in to its halftime show featuring The Weeknd. And Budweiser, which won’t be running an in-game Super Bowl ad for the first time in 37 years, is focusing on promoting vaccine awareness and distribution efforts.

But PepsiCo sibling brands, including those in the Frito-Lay portfolio like Doritos and Cheetos, are still running spots. Likewise, other Anheuser-Busch InBev brands like Bud Light and Bud Light Seltzer Lemonade, will run spots.

“My perspective is that the headlines aren’t as drastic as the reality,” said Bill Wise, CEO of advertising software company Mediaocean. Budweiser, for instance, is getting plenty of attention for not running an ad, he said. Wise also said it appears Bud is upping its ad spending ahead of the game, including on digital channels.

“They’re complementing that earned media with more paid media, just in other media types [outside] the Super Bowl,” he said. “One could argue Budweiser is actually executing an omni channel campaign better than anyone right now.”

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World

Anti-vaxxers campaign against the COVID-19 vaccines

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As the vaccine rollout continues, anti-vaccine campaigns are on the rise. To end the pandemic, health experts say a large part of the population must be vaccinated. As anti-vaxxer campaigns continue to gain traction, we asked Penn State College College of Medicine Professor Dr. Bernice Hausman if the anti-vaxxer campaigns gain traction, could they impact pandemic response?Dr. Hausman says “A lot of people are concerned. I feel like the concerned is a little bit misplaced.”Hausman has done extensive research on the controversy surrounding vaccination. She tells us it is important to understand the hesitancy. Myth #1: COVID-19 vaccines were developed too quicklyShe tells us, “The most common (myth) is that the vaccine was developed too quickly and there have not been enough studies to demonstrate safety.” Hausman stresses that the efficacy has been proven. Currently, there are two COVID-19 vaccines available and many more are in clinical trials. Each of the vaccines use different types of technology, some method are newer and less common than others. Hausman says, “People may have different comfort levels with different kinds of vaccines depending on how comfortable they are with technology.”Myth #2: COVID-19 data are not real or calculated incorrectlyAnother hesitancy stems from concerns over how COVID-19 data has been calculated. She says that health experts use data from national, county or city numbers and can understand why those numbers do not always connect with people who are skeptical.Hausman tells us, “People don’t experience vaccines at the population level. They experience them at the level of their own body or the body of their children or family member.” Hausman says as the rollout of vaccinations continues, more confidence can be built. Until then, she says the focus should be on the plan for distribution.

LANCASTER, Pa. —

As the vaccine rollout continues, anti-vaccine campaigns are on the rise.

To end the pandemic, health experts say a large part of the population must be vaccinated.

As anti-vaxxer campaigns continue to gain traction, we asked Penn State College College of Medicine Professor Dr. Bernice Hausman if the anti-vaxxer campaigns gain traction, could they impact pandemic response?

Dr. Hausman says “A lot of people are concerned. I feel like the concerned is a little bit misplaced.”

Hausman has done extensive research on the controversy surrounding vaccination. She tells us it is important to understand the hesitancy.

Myth #1: COVID-19 vaccines were developed too quickly

She tells us, “The most common (myth) is that the vaccine was developed too quickly and there have not been enough studies to demonstrate safety.” Hausman stresses that the efficacy has been proven.

Currently, there are two COVID-19 vaccines available and many more are in clinical trials. Each of the vaccines use different types of technology, some method are newer and less common than others.

Hausman says, “People may have different comfort levels with different kinds of vaccines depending on how comfortable they are with technology.”

Myth #2: COVID-19 data are not real or calculated incorrectly

Another hesitancy stems from concerns over how COVID-19 data has been calculated. She says that health experts use data from national, county or city numbers and can understand why those numbers do not always connect with people who are skeptical.

Hausman tells us, “People don’t experience vaccines at the population level. They experience them at the level of their own body or the body of their children or family member.”

Hausman says as the rollout of vaccinations continues, more confidence can be built. Until then, she says the focus should be on the plan for distribution.

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Business

Apple is one of our biggest competitors

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg used the opening remarks of the company’s fourth quarter earnings call to blast Apple over its upcoming privacy changes, and to say Facebook increasingly sees Apple as one of its biggest competitors.

Apple is gearing up for a software change that will more prominently ask iPhone and iPad users if they want to share their information for ad-tracking purposes. The online advertising industry expects to be hit as some percentage of users choose not to share that information.

Facebook, which derives nearly all its revenue from online advertising, has been outspoken about the changes, running newspaper ads, publishing a website and running a blog post outlining its arguments opposing Apple over the change it claims “threatens the personalized ads that millions of small businesses rely on to find and reach customers.” 

Zuckerberg, in his comments, suggested Apple uses its position to help its own services, particularly its iMessage service, which competes with Facebook’s Messenger and WhatsApp services.

“iMessage is a key linchpin of their ecosystem,” he said. “It comes pre-installed on every iPhone and they preference it with private APIs and permissions, which is why iMessage is the most used messaging service in the U.S.”

He said Apple’s business is now depending more and more on gaining share in apps and services.

“Apple has every incentive to use their dominant platform position to interfere with how our apps and other apps work, which they regularly do to preference their own,” he said. “This impacts the growth of millions of businesses around the world, including with the upcoming iOS 14 changes.”

Zuckerberg also reiterated Facebook’s argument that Apple’s privacy changes will make it harder for small businesses ability to reach their customers with targeted ads.

“Apple may say they’re doing this to help people but the moves clearly track their competitor interests,” he said. “We and others are going to be up against this for the foreseeable future.”

Nominations are open for the 2021 CNBC Disruptor 50, a list of private start-ups using breakthrough technology to become the next generation of great public companies. Submit by Friday, Feb. 12, at 3 pm EST.

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