Apple’s latest privacy-themed ad makes you guess what a woman is laughing about on her phone for 60 uninterrupted seconds because “not everyone needs to be in on the joke.” Now venture capitalist Mary Meeker is out with her annual mega-deck on internet trends and driving home the case that privacy may be a headwind for Facebook, but it’s better to make it a selling point if you can. Some 87% of global web traffic was encrypted in the first quarter of this year, she said (on slide 168 out of 333), up from 53% three years earlier.

Other key findings from her report include:

• Americans again increased their time with digital media, to 6.3 hours a day in 2018, up 7% (slide 41)
• But the mix of that media is changing to include fast-rising formats like podcasts (slide 50) and playing  videogames as a form of social media (slide 89) 

Check out the rest yourself. We’ll wait.

One year after Unilever used the annual Cannes ad festival to warn that fraud was spoiling influencer marketing, its Unilever Ventures investment arm has bought a stake in CreatorIQ, a software company that helps marketers manage influencers.

“We very much love working with influencers,” says Vasiliki Petrou, group chief executive at Unilever Prestige, which is steadily complementing traditional influencers with micro- and nano-influencers. Unilever criticizes because it cares.

Other marketers are navigating a rising tide of influencers as well: Calvin Klein works with hundreds of influencers at any given time, like the 350 who promoted its Instagram-friendly pop-up house at Coachella this year.

Now it’s monitoring social media to find fans who might help amplify its messages without being paid. It plans to enlist some 3,000 such advocates this year and have 7,500 in hand by next year.

As Nestlé and Tyson Foods join the competition to sell meatless burgers, Beyond Meat is out with something “even meatier.” (Hat tip to Sizzlean, I suppose.)

The company’s new burger is still vegan, but now uses cocoa butter and coconut oil to create “marbled juiciness,” plus apple extract to  turn it brown from red when cooked. The new recipe also uses pea, mung bean and rice proteins, Vox reports, to provide more fiber and complete protein.

It’s a timely introduction—J.P. Morgan downgraded the stock yesterday to “neutral” from “overweight.” The downgrade was purely about the soaring stock price, J.P. Morgan said, saying investors have now fully priced in Beyond Meat’s “extraordinary revenue and profit potential.”

Harsher take: “Beyond Meat Mania Is LaCroix on Steroids.”

Pity take: Think of the companies selling veggie burgers right now.

Facebook is getting its own taste of video fakery less than two weeks after the company was slammed by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for refusing to take down a video of her doctored to make her slur her words.

An altered video of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has surfaced on the company’s Instagram app, where he appears to question his company’s data practices, the Journal reports. In the video, created by Israeli advertising agency Canny AI, Mr. Zuckerberg’s mouth and voice are manipulated to show the CEO briefly discussing Facebook’s power in a negative tone. 

“Imagine this for a second: One man, with total control of billions of people’s stolen data, all their secrets, their lives, their futures,” the faked Zuckerberg says.

Of course, if Facebook continues to leave the video up, it may give the company some inoculation against criticism for the Pelosi incident: See, we can take it, too.

Financial-tech products are catering to millennials by offering investment portfolios with themes such as ethical supply chains or women in leadership, plus easy options to drop offending stocks with a tap of the screen. [WSJ]

Snapchat’s daily downloads doubled after it introduced gender-swap and baby filters. [OneZero] 

Ad-tech firm Hudson MX introduced a tool to automate still-manual-in-2019 local-TV buying. [Ad Exchanger]

Neiman Marcus is offering more discounts to move luxury merchandise, as a highly promotional retail environment offsets the benefits of a strong economy. [WSJ] 

China is racing toward the next stage in cashless payments, installing facial-recognition payment systems in stores all over the country. [WSJ]

Facebook is replacing two criticized and now-shuttered research programs with a new market-research app that will pay users for their data. [TechCrunch]

This account of a former Rolling Stone writer’s time on the road with Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder tour has a walk-on role for ad veteran George Lois (most recently spotted saying he hopes the big agency holding companies go out of business). [LA Times] 

Amazon can’t win at everything: It is closing restaurant delivery service Amazon Restaurants after four years of failing to gain ground on rivals like Grubhub and Uber Eats. [WSJ]

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.

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