Adam Morton, managing partner of client services at creative media agency UM London, leads us through just what happened over the last few weeks when Australia lost news from Facebook.
As crowds returned to Melbourne Park to watch powerful tennis heats at the Australian Open, another battle down-under stole the headlines (literally). Facebook, in response to the ACCC News Media Bargaining Code looking to tax tech giants for publishing links to news sites, suddenly removed news content from its platform in Australia.
This long-running contest over online news is complex, with money, power and the fundamentals of the internet all part of the game. It’s a difficult one for all players to manage, which might explain some of the questionable tactics that have been employed throughout the match to date.
Facebook has joined Google in blocking news articles from being shared on its news feed in Australia as a form of protest against the country’s proposed mandatory code of conduct for tech platforms.
By John McCarthy-18 February 2021 13:00pm
What if the keywords blocking scandal was just the tip of the iceberg in the brand safety debate?
In 2020, many of us were inundated with well-intentioned social good marketing campaigns. But audiences of publishers talking about race, gender, sexuality or even coronavirus were less likely to see these ads. It emerged that over-zealous brand safety protections
disproportionately restricted ads from web pages deemed risky, which also deprived marketers of historically underserved audiences. The blocklist scandal s now well known but The Drum asks experts if that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Big brands have big marketing budgets to plaster ads across an almost incomprehensible amount of web pages. On the open web, they typically side-step porn and piracy domains. But in split-second bids, it is audiences, not environments, that are bought. So, brand safety vendors, with complicated machine learning tech, try to under
By John McCarthy-18 February 2021 13:00pm
The Drum s senior reporter and media correspondent John McCarthy rounds up the latest media trends and developments. Also available in your inbox every Thursday as The Drum s Future of Media email briefing. Sign up here.
This is an extract from The Drum’s Future of Media briefing. You can subscribe to it here if you’d want the full thing in your inbox once a week.
Happy media Thursday. John McCarthy (Twitter, Linkedin, email) here. We re halfway through February which means The Drum Online Media Awards is approaching fast. In this briefing we ve documented how demanding the last year has been for media. For the media owners, publishers and journos among you, you, and your colleagues, deserve an event, some recognition, a few drinks, and even maybe an award after an AWFUL year. You can enter here. The virtual show will be Friday 30 April 2021.
By Alexandra Bousquet-Chavanne-15 February 2021 08:00am
Klarna partnered with influencers to create a virtual shopping experience in Animal Crossing
Alexandra Bousquet-Chavanne, creative strategy manager at Essence, wonders how digital experiences will look once the physical world opens back up to the public post-Covid-19 vaccination.
Over the last five years, ‘experience‘ has become a catch-all term to cover everything from websites and applications to in-person cocktail events in a Breaking Bad themed mobile meth lab and branded islands and storefronts in Animal Crossing. Everything that can be experienced is an ‘experience‘. But when the pandemic hit a year ago, classical experiential marketing as we knew it took a hit. Travel and tourism halted, brick and mortars closed their doors and pop-ups disappeared. For the first time, brands and marketers had to consider what an experience really means. In 2020, experience became virtual-first for the very firs