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

Capitulating to outside pressure, after a barrage of media reports citing unsafe conditions for minors, Roblox is implementing new safeguards. Parents can now access parental controls from their own devices in addition to their child’s device and monitor their child’s screen time. New content labels and improvements to how users under age 13 can communicate on Roblox are additional protections that are now baked into the platform. “We’ve spent nearly two decades building strong safety systems, but we are always evolving our systems as new technology becomes available,” explained the Roblox. Continue reading Roblox Tightens Child Safety Guidelines Amidst Media Outcry

Reports indicate that Meta Platforms is preparing to introduce advertising to Threads, perhaps as soon as January. Threads is the year-old social platform it launched to compete with Twitter in July 2023, the same month Elon Musk was rebranding that platform as X. Meta is looking to begin Threads’ transition to ad support by initially allowing only a small group of advertisers to create and publish ads before opening the platform to the ad industry at large later in the year. Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri, who also runs Threads, has said Meta is “definitely” planning to open ad inventory on Threads. Continue reading Meta Readies Year-Old Threads for Advertising in Early 2025

In a move that may appeal to music fans as well as marketing professionals, ByteDance-owned video platform TikTok just announced the availability of a new promotional feature called “Share to TikTok” that enables users to share music, podcasts and audiobooks from Apple Music and Spotify to TikTok, directly from the share menus of the streaming services. Content shared to TikTok will feature links directing users to the original sources to foster discovery and engagement on the partnering services. The new feature follows the launch of “Add to Music App,” a tool for users to save songs they discover on the TikTok app to their streaming service of choice. Continue reading TikTok Introduces New Feature to Share and Promote Music

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

Actors Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield are guests this week on digital-first series “Celebrity Substitute,” debuting with host Julian Shapiro-Barnum. The 25-year-old comedian is best known for his work on the viral online series “Recess Therapy,” in which he interviews young children playing in New York City for Instagram and YouTube videos. The new series, designed for mobile platforms, features celebs serving as substitute teachers in 5- to 8-minute episodes released on YouTube, with clips also shared via TikTok and Instagram. Amazon serves as a sponsored partner of the series as part of the tech giant’s push into branded entertainment. Continue reading Branded Content Series Challenges Celebs to Teach Classes

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

Adobe is introducing a free, web-based Content Authenticity app that lets creators “sign” their work with the aim of protecting rights and controlling attribution against unwanted AI attention. It allows creators to assign “do not train” tags to images, video or audio. Batch designation is another convenience those with voluminous output will appreciate as a time saver. Users can select the Generative AI Training and Usage Preference options in the Adobe Content Authenticity app to set preferences, whether or not the work was created using Adobe Creative Cloud apps. Continue reading Free Adobe Content Authenticity Web App Shields Against AI

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

TikTok is updating its Live subscription offering, renaming the monetization offering simply “Subscription,” opening it up to eligible non-Live creators in regions including the U.S., Japan, Brazil, France, the UK and Germany. Like the third-party subscription platform Patreon, TikTok’s Subscription allows fans to pay creators for exclusive content and other perks. In participating regions, creators can offer fans monthly subscriptions at three price tiers, each with its own parameters and perks. TikTok launched Live subscriptions in 2022 and announced in March that it would be revamping the feature to allow more users to monetize. Continue reading New TikTok Live Subscriptions Help More Creators Monetize

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