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Super Bowled Over

I hope you didn’t wait for your 2025 budget to be approved to buy Super Bowl ads – apparently they’re almost sold out.

Accordingly diversityAccording to Fox, only “a handful of ad slots” are available for the 2025 Super Bowl, costing more than $7 million per 30-second spot (not to mention commitments for advertising on other Fox channels).

But don’t worry: Some advertisers might get cold feet. Or maybe no one will secure the last few slots, like happened in 2023 when the economy was in a dire slump. But if that happens again, people obviously have other problems to worry about — besides Fox, of course.

There may also be less room for ambitious, up-and-coming brands that put their marketing budgets into Super Bowl commercials to significantly increase their awareness.

Most importantly, it may be that a more sophisticated group of advertisers are sponsoring the most American event (perhaps even the election). Two years ago, cryptocurrency companies, including FTX, were the big advertisers at the Super Bowl. Last year, Temu, a Chinese shell company and a scourge for American businesses and consumers, received six commercials.

Timmy Apple Seeds

It’s strange to think of Apple, the largest company in the world, as an underdog in any way. But it’s the underdog in advertising technology that nobody and everyone sees coming at the same time.

As Digiday As he notes, the antitrust ruling against Google has had a significant impact on the acceleration of Apple’s advertising technology. After all, Google offered to pay Apple to become the default search engine, even though it would have voluntarily received most of the traffic for free. These payments partly discouraged Apple from entering the advertising business.

One possible outcome of the lawsuit could be that Google stops all standard payments for the search engine and Apple faces a severe revenue loss of about $25 billion annually. (However, since Apple makes more than $380 billion annually, this is still a single-digit revenue loss.)

Apple also recently introduced a new iOS feature called Distraction Control. It is not designed as an ad blocker, but it primarily functions as one.

Industry observers might interpret Apple’s dismissive attitude toward advertising—that ads are a “distraction” and attribution tracking is “surveillance”—as a sign that the company won’t get into the same business. Longtime Apple watchers know that a major iOS update that severely hampers one piece of advertising technology is actually a harbinger of Apple planning to release its own version of that product—in this case, perhaps an extension of the ad network—to fill the gap.

Political Views

Progressive and political news Instagram accounts have steadily lost reach in recent months. Bloomberg reports.

The timing is consistent with Meta’s decision in February to limit the amount of political content it distributes to users’ feeds unless those users specifically opt in to political posts via their “Content settings” Page.

Some of the accounts affected are obvious (Hillary Clinton, for example), but given how vague Meta is in defining what makes something “political,” it’s possible that the change will also affect indirectly related accounts – similar to bans on sexual content censorship Women’s health and Wellness Brands.

For example, the LGBTQ advocacy organization GLAAD is now reporting fewer views for its content.

And what about a small business owner that specializes in queer-themed clothing? Or a news organization that covers anti-trans legislation? If this new study is any indication, these types of businesses or organizations may need to completely rethink their digital marketing approach.

But wait, there’s more!

X receives eight formal privacy complaints over its use of EU users’ data to train its Grok AI. (TechCrunch)

The White House’s new “Time is Money” initiative is designed to make it easier to cancel subscriptions. (Business Insider)

How did the Wall Street Journal survive the media apocalypse of 2024? (New York Magazine)

You are hired!

Popeyes hires Bart LaCount as marketing director. (Ad age)

Charter Communications Inc. appoints Simon Cassels as Senior Vice President and Chief Creative Officer. (Share)