January 23rd-January 28th // Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. We’re using the lightning round format this week so we can hit on a bunch of headlines quickly. Starting with the end of a decades-old industry measurement standard…

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Top Stories 👁️ 

Nielsen to End Panel-Only Ratings That Have Measured TV for Decades🔒 - Nielsen's standalone panel-based TV ratings will be discontinued in the fourth quarter. The news comes just a week after Nielsen received accreditation from the Media Rating Council on its new “Big Data + Panel” product, which aggregates panel-based data with streaming TV data from streamers and smart TV manufacturers.

Nielsen wants ad buyers to start using Big Data + Panel in this year's upfront, but that will take some heavy lifting for both buyers and sellers, who will have to recalculate pricing models and adjust plans. Although Nielsen still has the most market share, it struggled during the pandemic and now faces new competition from companies like VideoAmp and iSpot. It's also still dealing with a messy dispute with Paramount, its longtime client that chose not to renew its contract with Nielsen because of its pricing.

Opinion: Nielsen lost credibility during the pandemic and has been clawing its way back ever since. It will be interesting to see if Nielsen will be able to convince the industry to adopt Big Data + Panel as the de facto currency during this upfront. Pretty gutsy of them to cut the cord on the legacy panel-based product, which is still widely used, and fully move to Big Data + Panel. Could the move loosen Nielsen’s stranglehold on TV measurement further and leave more of an opening for digital-first challengers to steal market share? 

Threads is officially getting ads - Meta is working with brands in the US and Japan to test ads in Threads. Meta launched Threads in July 2023, hoping that the copycat version of X would lure advertisers away from X, which continues to struggle with brand safety issues. Since Threads is tied to Instagram and its massive user base, it was able to grow quickly, reaching 100M users within just five days of its launch. Now, ads will appear as images in Threads' home feed, and they will be personalized based on various user signals, such as Threads and Instagram activity, email addresses, and “your activity from off Meta technologies”. Users will be able to control and customize the ads served to them through their account center.

Opinion: We weren't impressed by Threads when it launched, and not much has changed. Still, new advertising opportunities are good for marketers, especially as platforms like X and TikTok get riskier, and Threads does have growing scale.

In October, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Threads had more than 275M monthly active users, and the platform picked up 35M new users after the election, when many X users left the platform. Meta knows how to run an advertising business and has tons of demand already, so we expect ads on Threads to scale relatively quickly.

TikTok Tells Advertisers They Are Not Breaking the Law By Running Ads🔒 - The TikTok roller coaster continues. Some brands had worried that advertising on TikTok could run afoul of Congress' law—upheld by the US Supreme Court—forcing TikTok to sell or be banned in the US. President Donald Trump's executive order postponing the law by 75 days doesn't offer real legal protections, according to legal experts. Violating the law could theoretically generate fines of up to $5K per user, which could total $850B for TikTok's 170M US users. But TikTok is trying to comfort advertisers, saying the law only applies to app stores like Google Play that enable downloads of the app or service providers like Oracle. TikTok still isn't available in the Apple and Google app stores. Companies like Perplexity AI and others continue to jockey to acquire TikTok.

Opinion: There are billions of ad dollars at stake with TikTok—and loads of uncertainty. Brands are right to take a cautious approach to the platform, but we certainly can’t blame them for wanting to continue advertising on TikTok. That’s where the eyeballs are, and they’re not likely to go anywhere until the ownership question is decided. Or until TikTok is banned. Or until Elon Musk buys it and merges it with X… 🫣

Meta’s Free-Speech Shift Made It Clear to Advertisers: ‘Brand Safety’ Is Out of Vogue🔒 - A few weeks ago, Meta announced it would loosen the company's restrictions on speech on its platforms. That worries advertisers, who are concerned that Meta's platform settings won't be able to prevent their ads from showing up next to unsavory content. Brand safety has been under fire from Elon Musk and conservative lawmakers, who say it has been used to boycott conservative voices and publishers. Now, brands and advertising trade groups are staying mum on brand safety to avoid any scrutiny or litigation, even though many agree that it's still necessary to help brands protect their reputations. 

Opinion: It's a sign of the times when something as innocuous as brand safety could be turned into a partisan issue. X’s “free speech” (aka misinformation) shift led to a significant decline in quality on the platform, and that's what will probably happen on Facebook and Instagram with Meta’s new policy. Will advertisers pull back spend?

Influencer Startup ShopMy Raises $77.5 Million to Expand Into New Ad Categories🔒 - Brands use ShopMy's tools to manage their influencer marketing programs, including running their gifting programs and creating commerce links for influencers to share. ShopMy makes money through subscription fees for advertisers and receives a portion of the sales generated through its affiliate links. Already, the 4-year-old company has more than 550 brands with subscriptions, and its customer base of creators tops 100K. ShopMy, which is now valued at $410M, will use the new funding to break into new advertising categories such as wellness, food and beverage, and maternity; it currently focuses on fashion, beauty, and skincare marketing.

Opinion: Influencer marketing is a bright spot in the advertising industry, with spend poised to grow 14.2% this year compared to 2024. With the investment and M&A markets heating up this year, it seems like a no-brainer that we'll see more deals and funds flowing into influencer marketing in the months ahead.

Netflix to launch its in-house ad-tech house in the US in April - Netflix will launch its in-house ad tech stack in the US in April and has already rolled it out in Canada. That timing tracks with the upfronts, when the streamer is hoping to lock down large ad deals. Netflix is taking control over its ad tech after initially launching its ads business with Microsoft. Running its own ad server gives Netflix loads more flexibility and will ideally make it easier for advertisers to buy its inventory. Already, the company saw an increase in revenue after launching its ad tech stack in Canada. 

Opinion: Fresh off better-than-expected Q4 earnings and record-breaking live sports events like the NFL Christmas game, Netflix is on a roll. This year will be critical for Netflix from an advertising perspective. We’ll see how they fare with recently appointed VP of Advertising Nicole Pangis running the show.

Yahoo Is The First DSP To (Finally) Adopt The IAB Tech Lab’s Data Transparency Labels - When the labels were released in 2019, they were compared to the nutrition labels on food products, with information about how audience segments are built, who provided the segments, and where the data components came from. But the labels didn't gain much traction among DSPs, SSPs, and data brokers. Yahoo and the IAB believe that the labels can play a role in the curation trend hitting the industry, while also helping companies comply with data privacy regulations. The IAB hopes that Yahoo adopting the labels will inspire other platforms to get onboard.

Opinion: Data transparency is desperately needed to counteract the loads of crappy, recycled data that’s flying around the programmatic ecosystem. Buyers usually don’t get very much information about what they’re actually buying when layering data segments into their programmatic campaigns, which leads to inefficient spending and unhappy marketers. Hopefully data transparency labels help and become more widely used!

Other Notable Headlines
(that you should know about too) 🤓 

DOJ Lawyer From Google Advertising Case Picked for FTC Job - Daniel Guarnera, who helped file US antitrust lawsuits against Google and Apple, has been tapped to be director of the FTC's Bureau of Competition.

Amazon Brand Awareness Ad Tool Emerges From Beta - The new AI-driven buying tool, which is called “Brand+” and lives within the Amazon DSP, helps advertisers run video and CTV brand awareness campaigns across Amazon's properties and elsewhere. The pitch goes like this: quick and easy to setup campaigns and you get better brand outcomes. The tool mirrors Amazon’s performance-focused AI buying tool, which is called “Performance+”. Great branding!

Publicis Media acquires Dysrupt to ‘supercharge’ performance marketing - A key piece of the deal is Dysrupt’s proprietary Impact Advertising System (IAS), their full-service tech suite that helps advertisers optimize media, creative, and measurement.

China's AI Startup DeepSeek Will Make Advertisers Rethink How They Spend - The news that DeepSeek's open source AI model can run at a fraction of the cost of other AI models from American companies like OpenAI and Anthropic tanked tech stocks, and essentially the US economy, for a day.

Here’s a great take on DeepSeek’s impact from Viant Co-Founder Chris Vanderhook:

That’s It For This Week 👋

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