کهکشانی

With all the other things 2020 will go down in history for, it has also proven to be a high-water mark for conspiracy theories. And that shouldn’t surprise us. Science has proven that when the going get tough, the paranoid get weirder. Add to this
the craziness multiplier effect of social media, and it’s no wonder that 2020 has given us a bumper crop of batshit crazy. 

As chronicled for you, my dear reader, I kicked over my own little hornet’s nest of conspiracy craziness a few weeks
ago. I started with probing a little COVID anti-vaxxing lunacy right here in my home and native land, Canada.The next thing I knew, the QAnoners were lurching out of the woodwork like the coming of
the zombie apocalypse.

I have since run for cover.

But as I was running, I ...

Twitter has been hit with a lawsuit for allegedly drawing on
users’ phone numbers to serve them with targeted ads.

“Behemoth providers of ubiquitous digital platforms make promises of privacy when they solicit users. Too often, those promises are
not kept,” Washington state resident Darlin Gray alleges in a class-action complaint filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Seattle.

She claims Twitter violated a Washington state law
regarding the unlawful procurement of telephone numbers.

Gray’s complaint comes almost one year after Twitter said it “inadvertently” allowed marketers to target people based on
phone numbers and emails collected for security purposes.

Twitter said the emails and phone numbers were mistakenly incorporated into an ad platform that lets companies use their ow...

Heading into 2020, many predicted Out of Home (OOH) advertising to experience its fastest growth rate increase in over a decade because of its unmatched ability to reach one-to-many at meaningful
scale. While COVID-19 may have changed the growth trajectory in the short term, OOH took center stage during the pandemic by serving as a critical channel for broadcasting health and safety
information to our communities, revising messages from brands to address the moment and support essential businesses and services. 

Though OOH ad revenue contracted in the first half of
2020 due to a reduction in mobility across the country, historically the medium has a strong track record of fast recovery. The flexibility and adaptability demonstrated in OOH, in particular, was
remarkable and has been an as...

Media conglomeration spurs unethical journalism. Corporate-controlled journalists are unable to objectively cover the world while protecting the reputation of their parent companies.
Independent journalism is the only way to ensure true transparency and impartiality. 

Let me explain.

Five months ago, I was hired by CBS News as a fact checker for “CBS
This Morning.” I spent 10 hours a day verifying every word of scripts before they aired. I pointed out each factual inaccuracy, missing source or misused terminology. Though tedious, this job was
crucial in the era of fake news and distrust of mainstream media. Superiors frequently commended my work performance and expressed gratitude for my role. 

Last week, I was laid
off. 

I was told the layoffs were due to the combined impact of the rec...

WPP global production outfit Hogarth has appointed Elyse Epstein Chief Operating Officer for North America.

She was actually hired in April, but the firm waited until now to announce it.
Companies often do that, just to make sure both sides are happy with the arrangement before going public with an announcement.

Six months later, it seems, both sides feel it’s a good
fit.

Previously Epstein was managing director, program management at sibling agency Ogilvy, a role she held for about three years. Earlier she served at Rapp and R/GA in New York and before
that she’s credited with helping to establish R/GA’s London operation.

Hogarth has also promoted Tania Sethi to Chief Production Officer, North America. She’s a six-year
veteran of the company who previously served as global produ...

Oracle on Wednesday will launch Moat Outcomes to provide marketers
with a way to gain business results from their ad campaign within ten days — down from 10 to 13 weeks, providing a solution to one of the biggest challenges advertisers wanted the company to
resolve.

The tool will become available in its Data Cloud division.

“As you can imagine, that was a cross-collaborative product development effort,” said Kevin Whitcher,
vice president of product management at Oracle Data Cloud.

In many ways, Oracle customers helped us build Moat Outcomes, Whitcher said. “… we had the benefit of advice and
feedback from some of the largest brands and agencies in the world as we built this product on the foundation of our same trusted methodology.”

Whitcher said marketers cannot improve
campa...

Discovery Inc. has
acquired the assets of AdSparx, an ad-tech startup, as it prepares to launch its own streaming video service next year.

AdSparx’s cloud-based platform provides server-side in-stream
dynamic ad insertion and on-demand streaming.

The acquisition will enable Discovery to deliver personalized and contextual ads across its global D2C offerings.

“This acquisition
is part of a larger strategy to develop a robust portfolio of digital products, as we continue to scale up our [direct-to-consumer] proposition with locally relevant video experiences in key
international markets,” said Avi Saxena, CTO, global digital, Discovery. 

Discovery also plans to use AdSparx’s DAI solution to deliver viewer-personalized virtual
linear channels.

As part o...

Day Two of the ARF’s virtual AudienceXScience Conference highlighted an investment banker’s view of the future of the media and entertainment worlds post-COVID,
stressed the value of high “gender equality measure” (GEM) in ads for incremental sales lift, provided insights on mobile advertising effectiveness, and, offered “attention”
(noticed) as a possible common cross-media currency metric for consideration by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) in tits proposed technical measurement design draft just
released.  

Laura Martin, partner, Needham & Co, has studied the entertainment business for long- and short-term returns along with associated risk factors for many
years.  Media companies were her focus notably TV/video...

The timing is likely coincidental, but a new drama series
coming to Amazon Prime this week touches on important contemporary topics that are top-of-mind for everybody right now.

The topics are general and international in
scope — pandemics, natural disasters and global warming.

Here in the real world, we are in the midst of a pandemic, while at the same time witnessing a
number of natural disasters including multiple wildfires in the West and so many tropical storms that they ran out of letters in the alphabet to name them with.

In this new Amazon drama series, ironically titled “Utopia,” all of these crises were foretold in a comic book (or series of them).

The comic’s Nostradamus-like predictions were so accurate that the book series has spawned a devoted group of superfans who hav...

Automotive advertising is projected to shrink 21% in 2020 across 10
major markets around the globe, compared to 9% for the ad market as a whole, according to new research from Publicis Groupe media agency Zenith. 

However, spending in the category is
poised to outperform the market in both 2021 and 2022, with 10.5% growth in 2021 and 11.4% growth in 2022. Plus, the worst hit markets will benefit from the biggest recovery next year. U.S. ad spend,
in particular, is down 21.9% for 2020 but is forecast to recover to 11.6% in 2021 and 17.3% in 2022.  

Digital advertising is the only channel forecasted to grow between 2019 and
2022 with Zenith predicting digital will be the only channel in which auto brands spend more in 2022 than in 2019.  

Digital advertising is the most important single ch...