What you need to know in advertising today
As Business Insider reported a few weeks ago, AT&T has some bold plans for the TV ad industry. The telecom giant, following its recent acquisitions of Time Warner and AppNexus, wants to build a TV ad hub that is used by the entire industry.
That includes competing cable and satellite companies as well as TV networks that aren't part of the Turner family.
To read more about why TV executives are torn over whether rival media giants will ever be able to collaborate on such an effort, click here.
In other news:
The business model for giant ad agencies is under fire - but IPG says its $2.3 billion bet on Acxiom gives it a massive advantage over other firms. Arun Kumar, chief data and technology officer at IPG MediaBrands, said that he is not "very concerned about other agency holding companies turning off the taps" with Acxiom because the bulk of the firm's business deals directly with brands.
LADBible was once the poster child for Facebook video - now it's expanding its distribution to Instagram and Snapchat and ditching its bro-ey tone for social good content. The publisher's monthly video views on Facebook have decreased from 3.2 billion to 1.3 billion since October, according to CrowdTangle data, and it is now focused on Snapchat and Instagram and is eyeing more long-form content.
Deals site Groupon is looking for a buyer, according to Recode. The company has reportedly contacted several public companies over the last few months in the hope of a takeover.
Timehop, a service which reminds people of their social media histories, said it's detected a hack that has affected 21 million users. The company said it the data affected included names, email addresses, and some phone numbers.
At a recent town hall event for around 150 HBO employees, longtime AT&T executive and Warner Media chief executive John Stankey warned that change is coming for the network, the New York Times reports. HBO has long opted for quality over quantity in regard to its programming, but Stankey's vision involves increasing its current market size (around 40 million in the U.S.) to becoming a "much more common product."
Check out Business Insider's annual list of The 25 most innovative CMOs in the world in 2018.