Here’s the digital media news from last week:
General
- the US Treasury Secretary has urged the Justice Department to review the power that companies like Google have over the US economy. The request comes shortly after a 60minute story about Google.
- Evidence of the growing OTT ad market, Roku confirmed that last quarters revenue from software license and advertising exceeded their hardware revenue.
- Instagram now lets users mute posts and stories without unfollowing accounts (and when you mute someone, they don’t know). The change is rolling out over the next couple of weeks so you might not see the impact or it immediately in your app. It’s worth keeping in mind if you see clients Instagram engagement decline (they might be getting muted).
- Snap is putting $1.5M funding towards an accelerator to find the next big media opportunity. The accelerator is called “Yellow” and will invest $150,000 in 10 different companies.
eSports
- Fortnite continues to gain momentum and that looks set to continue, with Epic Games (the developer) announcing a $100M prize pool for the Fortnite competitive season. More details to come, but it is the biggest total prize pool to be ever offered in eSports.
GDPR
- I’ve updated my Privacy Policy…. not really. But you would have seen more than 100s emails like that over the past week. GDPR is now in effect. The European Center for Digital Rights (NOYB.eu – None of Your Business) has filed a GDPR complaint against Google, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. You can read the complaint here (PDF link). Facebook and Google have already been hit with $8.8B in GDPR lawsuits.
- As part of GDPR compliance, Facebook will prompt all users to confirm acceptance of various privacy and advertising settings. The Facebook blog has specifics on the user flow.
- The most ironic of GDPR compliance email failures comes from Ghostery, a company whose purpose is to “block 3rd party tracking“. Ghostery sent their users an email using the To: field, exposing 400+ emails on May 25th, followed the next day by an apology and a promise to “rectify the incident”. Ghostery’s fail is strong reminder to everyone to be extra diligent in a GDPR world.
- A name you will need to get familiar with in regards to GDPR is “Giovanni Buttarelli“, the EU Data Protection Supervisor has warned that Cambridge Analytica scandal is just the top of the iceberg. In a Business Insider article, Buttarelli states how important GDPR will be to restoring trust.
Trust, Safety & Transparency
- Update: Last week I wrote about the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) global media charter principles but neglected to include the link to the charter (thanks to everyone who noticed and asked). Here’s a link to the charter.
- Zuckerberg appeared before European Parliament as part of the ongoing Cambridge-Analytica apology tour. Very little new information came to light. If you’re interested, Zuckerberg’s prepared remarks are here.
- This is something you really need to be aware of, Facebook’s new rules for ads with political content– which impacts even non-candidate advertising. The new verification and disclosure rules (manual full verification of who is the advertiser and ability to see advertiser, spend and targeting for up to 7 years) applies for ads that cover “National issues of public importance“. This includes topics many clients could advertise about in the course of business e.g. health, energy, education, military or values. It’s really important you speak to your Facebook client lead to understand the impact this will have on your Facebook media.
- Apple is making a new tool available so that you can see what data the company has collected about you. The full Apple privacy tool is currently only available to people in the EU but will roll out to the rest of the world in the coming months.
Hope you had a safe Memorial Day weekend.
Joshua
PS. Fun distraction, if you want to learn AI. The University of Helsinki offers an interesting, fun and free online course called the Elements of AI.