TOP 10 FACEBOOK OUTRAGES OF 2019
2019 was the year Facebook cemented its position as the world's most despised company. And here's the fun part -- you get to pick the top 10 most disgusting things they did to earn that honor! It's an interactive festival of fun!
Here are 29 ways the "move fast and break things" jerk-offs soiled our lives in 2019. Pick your top 10, stick 'em in an old sock and light 'em on fire. 1. January: It was discovered that Facebook-owned WhatsApp was being used to spread illegal child pornography.
2. January: Researcher Aaron Greenspan, former running mate of Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard, said that Facebook's claim of reaching 2 billion people is a lie and said Zuckerberg "may be the greatest con man in history."
3. January: Zuckerberg writes a Wall Street Journal op ed defending Facebook and gets roundly roasted for it.
4. January: British health minister threatens to close down social media after 14-year-old girl commits suicide after seeing disturbing content on Facebook-owned Instagram.
5. February: It was discovered that Facebook was paying kids as young as 13 to install spyware on their phones.
6. February: A committee of Parliament in England denounced Facebook as "digital gangsters" and said, "Democracy is at risk from the malicious and relentless targeting of citizens with disinformation and personalised ‘dark adverts'..."
7. February: The Wall Street Journal discovered that people were entering private information into apps and, unknown to them, the apps were feeding the info to Facebook.
8. March: Federal investigators summoned a grand jury to investigate criminal implications of Facebook's agreement with over 100 tech companies to provide them with information about 100s of millions of FB users without their knowledge or consent.x
9. March: Facebook leaves hundreds of millions of user passwords unencrypted.
10. March: The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) sued Facebook for allowing "advertisers to exclude people from seeing housing ads based on their race, religion, background and other characteristics"
11. March: In the wake of the massacre of 50 people in New Zealand which was live-streamed on FB, the Prime Minister of Australia threatened to jail social media execs.
12: April: It was discovered that a Mexican company had stored over 500 million Facebook records in plain site on the Amazon cloud for anyone to access.
13: April: Bloomberg reported that almost 400,000 crooks have been using Facebook for as long as eight years as a marketplace to buy and sell criminal materials.
14: April: The Daily Beast reported that "Child Brides in Africa Are Advertised on Facebook and Sold to Old Men."
15. April: The New York Times reported that "Regulators on four continents are preparing for a long-awaited showdown with Facebook..."
16. May: In an article in the NY Times, Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook, called for its breakup.
17: July: FTC fines Facebook $5 billion for Cambridge Analytica scandal.
18: August: Netflix airs "The Great Hack" about the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal. PBS airs "The Facebook Dilemma," savaging the company and claiming it has blood on its hands.
19: September: TechCrunch found another unprotected data base online which contained the phone numbers and user IDs of 419 million Facebook users.
20: September: The BBC reported that a study by Privacy International determined that "Intimate data, including when people have had sex, is being shared with Facebook."
21: September: Massachusetts attorney general found that Facebook lied when they said they suspended 400 apps to remediate after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In fact, they suspended 69,000 questionable apps.
22: September: A study conducted by researchers at Oxford University found that "Facebook remains the No. 1 social network for disinformation...Organized propaganda campaigns were found on the platform in 56 countries."
23: October: Facebook agreed to pay a group of advertisers $40 million to settle a suit which claimed that Facebook had inflated its video metrics by as much as 900%.
24: October: Zuckerberg gave a speech at Georgetown University defending Facebook's policy of airing political advertising they know to be false.
25: October: BuzzFeed reported "How A Massive Facebook Scam Siphoned Millions Of Dollars From Unsuspecting Boomers."
26: October: P&G's announced that they had built their own data base of 1.5 billion people because they don't trust the numbers of Facebook or Google.
27: November: Aaron Sorkin, writer of the movie "The Social Network," savaged Zuckerberg's "free speech" hypocrisy in a NY Times op ed.
28: December: CNET reported "more than 267 million Facebook user phone numbers, names and user IDs were exposed in a database that anyone could access online."
29: December: In response to an inquiry from two U.S. Senators, Facebook admitted it can track peoples' location even if they opt out of tracking.
Meanwhile, in 2019 Facebook's share price increased over 50%. Would someone please explain to me again about the critical importance of "brand purpose?"
Top Ad Spenders of 2019 Advertising is not dead again. Despite the chorus of dimwits stuck in the "advertising is dead" time warp, ad spending grew about 2.5% in 2019 (CNBC). Leading the pack in the U.S. was Geico who spent over $1.5 billion. It was the third year in a row they were the largest ad spender in the U.S. according to a report in AdAge. Here's the top 10 list for the U.S.
When you consider all spending on marketing including advertising, marketing, and promotion, Comcast led all spenders in the U.S. at over $6 billion. Worldwide, P&G led the list of advertising and marketing spenders with over $10 billion in total marketing spending. Samsung was second, also spending over $10 billion. Other big worldwide spenders included L'Oreal, number 3 at $9.6 billion, and Unilever which spent $8.5 billion. The numbers here are not apples-to-apples. U.S. numbers represent ad spend only. Worldwide numbers reflect total marketing spending. Other ad spending highlights... - The
world's top 100 advertisers spent almost $300 billion on advertising.
- Globally, "internet age" companies (e.g., Amazon, Uber) are spending like crazy. Of the top 100 global ad spenders, the 12 "internet age" companies increased their spending an average of 26%. The remaining 88 companies increased less than 2%.
- In the U.S., the average increase of the top 100 spenders was 4.5%, while the average increase of 11 "internet age" companies was 24%.
- With the election and Olympics coming in 2020, ad spending is projected to grow 6%.
Garbage That Takes Itself Out
Tired of 5G horseshit yet? Every year has to have a "thing that will change everything" (it's the law) and 5G was last year's. Check out this idiotic baloney.
Only problem is, as usual, the thing that's gonna change everything has thus far been a lot of hot air. According to a headline in The Wall Street Journal this week, "5G Underwhelms in Its First Big Test." The article goes on to say 5G hasn't lived up to its hype -- shocked I tell you! "Currently, few, if any, 5G apps have emerged that would justify an upgrade by consumers," says the Journal. Using a 5G network often requires buying a new phone and subscribing to a top-tier, unlimited data plan. One guy
in South Korea was given a 2/3 subsidy to buy his new $1,000 5G enabled phone from his carrier. But he turned off his 5G feature because he kept losing connections. If the situation doesn't get better he says he's going back to 4G. I think I know how to fix the 5G problem -- virtual reality or blockchain or some other "thing that will change everything."
This Week's Self-Serving News... On New Years Day, The Ad Contrarian blog passed the 10 million pageview mark. Now, if I charged a dollar a view...
Media Person of the Year (Blushing) ID Comms is a company that consults to some of the world’s largest advertisers on media strategy, effectiveness, and efficiency. According to the World Federation of Advertisers, ID Comms is the #1 most used media consultancy among their members.
Last week, ID Comms anointed your humble blogweasel as Media Person of the Year, and added "...possibly going to be seen as the most influential person of the decade when it comes to media." Sheesh! Maybe I should charge $1.50 a view. Click here to watch.
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