In a deal said to be reshaping the global advertising industry, Omnicom has reached a definitive agreement to acquire a major rival, the Interpublic Group (IPG), in a stock-for-stock transaction. If the deal receives regulatory approval, the New York-based ad giants will combine to form an agency that will be the largest in the world, bringing together ad legends TBWA Worldwide and McCann Worldgroup for what CNBC estimates will be more than $26 billion in annual revenue. The merger joins “world-class, highly complementary data and technology platforms” at a propitious time, thanks to seismic, AI-driven advances in marketing and adtech. Continue reading Omnicom Will Acquire Interpublic in Major Ad Industry Merger

Last week, a federal appeals court upheld a law that would force the sale of popular social platform TikTok in order for it to remain operational in the United States. Beijing-based parent company ByteDance is vowing to fight on with a petition for a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law, passed in April, invokes existing federal code that prohibits access to sensitive material by adversarial foreign nations of which China (along with Russia, Iran and North Korea) is one. Barring further court action, ByteDance will have to sell TikTok by January 19 or face bans at app stores. Continue reading TikTok Aims to Resist Divestment, Remain Operational in U.S.

Hangout is a new service that wants to make enjoying music more of a social experience. The platform, from Turntable Labs, is available on iOS, Android and the Web. At launch, Hangout offers more than 100 million songs, available to stream globally as a result of deals with Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group as well as indie rights group Merlin. Users can select an avatar and invite friends to their personal ‘hangout’ space, taking turns playing songs from their favorite artists in the virtual DJ booth. Continue reading Hangout Is a New Social Platform with Music Listening Rooms

Meta Platforms revenue was up 19 percent to $40.6 billion in Q3 compared to the same period one year earlier. Profit rose to $15.7 billion — a 35 percent increase from 2023. The company believes that its years of investments in adtech, artificial intelligence and the metaverse are starting to pay off. In Q3, Meta reported $23.2 billion in expenses and capital expenditures of $9.2 billion. And the company isn’t taking its foot off the accelerator, having increased its annual spending forecast by $1 billion to a minimum of $38 billion. Additionally, Meta’s advertising revenue for Q3 was just a tick under its high-end spend projection of $40 billion. Continue reading Meta’s Investments in Adtech, AI, the Metaverse Yield Results

Netflix wants to make viewing a more memorable and interactive experience with Moments, a new mobile feature that makes it easy to save, relive and share favorite scenes from movies and series. Launching globally on iOS and coming soon to Android, Moments not only allows you to revisit pivotal plot points, but also lets you restart the film or episode right from that bookmark. Sharing Moments on Instagram, Facebook and other social platforms is reportedly just as easy. You can share a Moment as you create it or, from the My Netflix tab, you can select a scene and tap to share it across all of your platforms. Continue reading Netflix Enables Bookmarking, Sharing of Scenes with Moments

Marking its first news deal in years, Meta Platforms entered into an agreement with Reuters to use its content to answer user questions posed to its Meta AI chatbot. The arrangement comes as Meta has been minimizing news content on its services in response to publisher demands for revenue sharing and regulatory criticism over misinformation. Terms of the partnership were not disclosed, nor were details provided as to whether Meta plans to use Reuters content for model training. Meta AI is available across its Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram and Messenger services. Continue reading Meta, Reuters Sign Multi-Year AI Content Licensing Agreement

Reddit is expanding its keyword targeting advertising program, introducing it in more places and adding AI-powered recommendations to help ads appear in the most relevant environments across the platform. Keyword targeting is now available for feed ads in addition to conversations, which were previously the only placement available. Reddit is also launching an AI feature called dynamic audience expansion that works with keyword targeting to place ads before a wider range of viewers based on the objectives of the campaign. Since going public on the NYSE in March, Reddit has been under pressure to increase ad revenue. Continue reading Reddit Drives Precision in Conversation Keyword Ads Using AI

Meta is rolling out new generative AI advertising tools for video creation on Facebook and Instagram. The expansion to the Advantage+ creative ad suite will become widely available to advertisers in early 2025. The announcement, made at Advertising Week in New York last week, was positioned as a way for marketers to improve campaign performance on Meta’s social platforms. The new tools will allow brands to convert static images into video ads. The company also announced a new full screen video tab for Facebook that feeds short-form Reels with long-form and live-stream content. Continue reading Meta Announces New GenAI Video Tools at Advertising Week

Meta Platforms has unveiled Movie Gen, a new family of AI models that generates video and audio content. Coming to Instagram next year, Movie Gen also allows a high degree of editing and effects customization using text prompts. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated its abilities last week in an example shared on his Instagram account, where he sends a leg press machine at the gym through transformations as a steam punk machine and one made of molten gold. The models have been trained on a combination of licensed and publicly available datasets. Continue reading Meta’s Movie Gen Model is a Powerful Content Creation Tool

Meta’s Llama 3.2 release includes two new multimodal LLMs, one with 11 billion parameters and one with 90 billion — considered small- and medium-sized — and two lightweight, text-only models (1B and 3B) that fit onto edge and mobile devices. Included are pre-trained and instruction-tuned versions. In addition to text, the multimodal models can interpret images, supporting apps that require visual understanding. Meta says the models are free and open source. Alongside them, the company is releasing “the first official Llama Stack distributions,” enabling “turnkey deployment” with integrated safety. Continue reading Meta Unveils New Open-Source Multimodal Model Llama 3.2

Meta has secured rights to the voices of actors Judi Dench, Kristen Bell, John Cena and others for its Meta AI chatbot, a ChatGPT-like digital assistant that is part of the plan for conversational AI as part of the multimodal Llama 3.2. Also revealed at Meta Connect this week was Orion, “the most advanced glasses the world has ever seen,” queued up to become Meta’s “first consumer full holographic AR glasses,” though they won’t be available anytime soon. A low-priced Quest 3 mixed reality headset, the $299 Quest 3S, will be arriving in time for the holidays, however. Continue reading Meta Reveals Orion Concept Glasses, Celeb Voices, Quest 3S

Canadian generative video startup Viggle AI, which specializes in character motion, has raised $19 million in Series A funding. Viggle was founded in 2022 on the premise of providing a simplified process “to create lifelike animations using simple text-to-video or image-to-video prompts.” The result has been robust adoption among meme creators, with many viral videos circulating among social media platforms powered by Viggle, including one featuring Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker mimicking the movements of rapper Lil Yachty. Viggle’s Discord community has four million members including “both novice and experienced animators,” according to the company. Continue reading Viggle AI Raises $19 Million on the Power of Memes and More

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek have joined forces to express displeasure with the European Union’s regulations on artificial intelligence, claiming they are suppressing innovation. That is the opposite of the stated goals of EU lawmakers in passing the regulations. In a joint statement first published in The Economist and then on the Meta and Spotify websites Friday, the duo took aim at alleged EU obstruction to the development of open source AI, suggesting that Europe’s “fragmented regulatory structure, riddled with inconsistent implementation, is hampering innovation and holding back developers.” Continue reading Meta, Spotify Issue Statement Criticizing EU’s AI Regulations

Meta Platforms has expanded its licensing deal with Universal Music Group, which now covers users sharing songs from the UMG library across Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp and Horizon without fear of copyright violation. As part of a multiyear partnership, Meta and UMG will work together to address “unauthorized AI-generated content that could affect artists and songwriters.” This could encompass everything from users experimenting with voice copying or scraping songs for AI mashups to enterprise level crawling and theft for model training, and suggests Meta will be implementing a filtering system to detect infractions. Continue reading Meta, UMG Music Deal Emphasizes the Responsible Use of AI

YouTube is testing an integration with parent company Google’s Gemini AI. Called Brainstorm with Gemini, it invites creators to ideate with video, titles and thumbnails. The limited test makes the feature available to a handful of creators whose feedback will be used in strategizing how and whether to introduce the feature more broadly. In May, YouTube began testing another AI tool, renaming its “Research” tab “Inspiration.” The Inspiration tool provides topics that its algorithm detects a creator’s audience might find interested, supplying an outline and talking points. Brainstorm is similar but supports Google’s AI branding. Continue reading YouTube Invites Content Creators to ‘Brainstorm with Gemini’