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Facebook Ends ‘Tragedy & Conflict’; P&G Wants New Media Supply Chain; Walmart Buys Ad-Tech Startup
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PHOTO: ALAN DIAZ/AP
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First up, Amazon and Walmart traded subtweets yesterday, with Jeff Bezos needling his “top retail competitors” over employee pay and a Walmart exec firing back that unnamed rivals should consider paying taxes. (Amazon’s challenge came in a shareholder letter that it filed with the SEC, to be precise, but I say subtweets are bigger than Twitter now.)
More importantly, Walmart also agreed to buy the ad-tech startup Polymorph Labs. The acquisition will improve the ad targeting that Walmart can offer other brands, it said. Walmart recently brought its digital ad business in-house, part of a renewed push to turn its data about shoppers into big ad revenue. An earlier effort didn’t lead to much, however, and it still has a long way to go. Amazon became the No. 3 seller of digital ads last year, according to eMarketer, but Walmart was too small to track.
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Not to Put Too Fine a Point on It
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PHOTO: NIALL CARSON/ZUMA PRESS
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Facebook has been offering advertisers a menu of pretty specific content types they can choose to avoid: Debatable Social Issues, Mature, Dating, Gambling, and Tragedy & Conflict. Combined, they sound like the adult-viewing warnings before all my favorite TV shows.
Now the menu is going in the trash, to be replaced by a trio of filters called Limited, Standard and Full. “We found that advertisers who used our category controls would tend to exclude all categories or none of them,” Facebook told Marketing Land. “This product change aligns with that behavior, helping to simplify the experience.”
The new filters also sound very vanilla. That could make it easier for the exclude-everything crowd to experiment with Standard—that must be safe—or even the whole debatable-dating/gambling-tragedy spectrum being rebranded as Full.
Related: YouTube is developing two new metrics that could help swing the pendulum away from conspiracy-theory clips and other problematic videos, Bloomberg reports.
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“It’s not acceptable to have brands showing up where opioids are being offered, where illegal drugs are promoted, where abhorrent behavior is present or where violence is seen.”
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— Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard in a speech to other marketers, repeating his previous criticism of digital platforms but adding a call to create a “new media supply chain”
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$1.3 billion
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Uber’s advertising expenses last year, up from $1.1 billion in 2017 and $693 million in 2016, according to the IPO papers made public Thursday
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After Kind Snacks opened a two-day pop-up in New York City to knock rivals’ sugar content, Clif Bar posted a team outside to offer free products and try to counter the messaging.
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Disney priced its ad-free streaming service coming this November, Disney+, at $6.99 a month or $69.99 per year, nearly half the cost of Netflix subscriptions. [WSJ]
Streaming TV bundles like YouTube TV are meanwhile looking more and more like the big, expensive cable bundles they were designed to disrupt. [WSJ]
Missouri-based Hostess Brands plans to move its marketing department to Chicago, a bid to tap the city’s talent pool, and named Chad Lusk senior vice president and CMO. Mr. Lusk had been CMO at Chamberlain Group. [Food Business News]
The Indiana Pacers are using AI to predict what proportion of email recipients will open and take action on a message, letting them tweak distribution lists and tailor messages to fit. [WSJ Pro]
Moschino and Electronic Arts introduced a capsule collection of pixelated “Sims”-themed fashion. [IGN]
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We bring you the most important (and intriguing) marketing news every day. Write me at nat.ives@wsj.com any time with feedback on the newsletter or comments on specific items. We want to hear from you.
And follow the CMO Today team on Twitter: @wsjCMO, @natives, @alexbruell.
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