Diem Association, a company Facebook founded as Libra in 2019 to manage its cryptocurrency initiative, will sell its technology to crypto-focused bank Silvergate Capital for $200 million

When Mark Zuckerberg announced the project, he said the cryptocurrency would serve as the foundation for payments across Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Zuckerberg convinced many companies to become founding members, backing the organization. Some include Visa, MasterCard, Uber, Lyft, eBay, Spotify, and Andreessen Horowitz.

The company planned to manage the technology via blockchain, with member organizations processing and verifying transactions. But within months, the association lost Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and eBay.

David Marcus, the Meta executive who oversaw the launch, left the company last year.

Meta also ran into resistance in Washington when officials voiced concerns about the effect of the company's plans on financial stability and data privacy.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said the central bank had serious concerns, and Zuckerberg stood before Congress, where he defended Facebook’s plan.

Silvergate Capital, the bank, had reached a deal with Diem to issue some of the stablecoins backed by hard dollars and designed to be less volatile than bitcoin and other digital currencies, according to The Wall Street Journal. A deal with Silvergate as part of a revamp last year meant to appease regulators.

Zuckerberg, apparently, wants to create his own world with a separate universe -- the metaverse -- and a currency to go along with it.

Meta would have a universe where marketers could only buy advertising with cryptocurrency, and performance would rely on brands paying for every action their avatars took in this virtual world, tying it to real-world actions. 

All these ideas have failed to materialize. Now the sale represents an effort to squeeze the remaining value from the defunct business.

Crackle Plus, part of Chicken Soup For The Soul Entertainment, has entered into a multi-year partnership with APX Content Ventures and Publicis Media. 

Among the first co-produced programs is “Inside the Black Box,” which will showcase minority artists and which is set to premiere on the Crackle streaming service in February. 

The 10-episode series is hosted by Joe Morton and celebrity acting coach, casting director and producer Tracey Moore. The show will have interviews and “performance aspects” and will feature the hosts interacting with celebrity guests. 

The program was brokered via APX Content Ventures, a “next-generation” unit within Publicis Media. The unit says its mission is to amplify diverse voices, empower women and build community, connection and trust. 

“Inside the Black Box” is sponsored by The General, the licensed insurance agency and unit of PGC Holdings Corp., which is a wholly owned American Family Mutual Insurance Company. The General will have unique placement across various layers of the programming, both in and out of the show. 

The sponsorship includes pre-roll ads, QR code integrations,  brand integration within the content and “The General Audience” branded theater section featured in the show, allowing VIP attendees to get a better view of the action and call-outs from the hosts. Outside of the programming “Inside the Black Box” will have a Crackle in-app Jumbotron where branding and voiceover sponsorship opportunities will give viewers a deeper look into The General and its services. 

“Our goal is to ensure the very best programming makes it to air and that featured content embraces diverse voices and accurately reflects today’s society,” said John Nolan, Managing Director, APX Content Ventures. 

The program, he added, “is helping to shine a spotlight on the stories people care about and The General’s commitment to elevating diversity and greater representation is a natural complement to this program, which celebrates the world’s greatest BIPOC artists.” 

The Crackle Plus networks are distributed via 60 touchpoints within the U.S., a number that is expected to grow past 80 touchpoints including RokuTV, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, smart TVs (Samsung, LG, Vizio), gaming consoles (PS4, XboxOne), Plex iOS and Android mobile devices at Crackle.com.

Here's a story that’s near and dear to our hearts at MAD—in fact it’s all about MAD.

Let me clarify, it’s about the creative team at MAD Magazine, led by Bill Morrison, the final editor-in-chief at the humor magazine which ceased publication of regular newsstand issues in 2019 after a nearly seven decade run.

It still publishes archived material via subscription and an annual year-end issue.

But here’s the news: Morrison and his creative team (including Dick DeBartolo, Tom Richmond, Ian Boothby and others) are teaming up with experiential and word-of-mouth marketing firm The Integration Co. The firm was founded by experiential veteran Saul Colt in Toronto in 2008. Colt’s mission: “To shake up the advertising world using humor and satire to create memorable work for deserving brands.”

And if that’s his mission, it looks like he just teamed up with the right folks, given that humor and satire is their sweet spot.

"Advertising has gotten boring,” says Colt. “The bar has been dropped so low that any brand that takes a little chance stands out.”

When MAD stopped producing new material it was a moment in time for many people, added Colt, “because the role of MAD was to hold up a mirror to society and say what everyone was thinking. Advertising is supposed to do the same thing but it isn't delivering on that promise anymore.”

In Colt’s view advertising has become “too safe or the agency is more interested in winning awards than creating real impactful advertising that speaks to the buyer. Brands are afraid of using humor for fear of offending people, but the truth is that people remember humor and share humor more than anything else."

What, killing off Mr. Peanut wasn’t funny enough for you Saul? What about all those hilarious Ryan Reynolds ads for Mint Mobile and other brands?

Whatever. Colt also cites research that found that 75% of a brand’s audience wants humor in advertising and that recall is higher when humor is deployed in ads.

Morrison is kind of a big deal in the funny business. He co-founded Bongo Comics with Matt Groening and worked on The Simpsons and Futurama in addition to his stint as EIC at MAD Magazine.

Morrision said, “To be able to break new ground for brands, to help them outside of their comfort zone to a place where they can connect with their audience through satire and comedy, is something that we're not only ready for, it's a charge we feel best equipped to lead as part of Saul's agency."

Morrison, Colt and the team, are already drumming up new business, so far signing up brands such as Neat, Clearco (co-founded by Michele Romanow of the TV's Dragons Den), and ServiceEcho.

The advertising industry continues to undergo transformation with Google ending its Federated learning of cohorts (FLoC) for Topics and privacy legislation, as advertisers look to cut ties with behavioral targeting and pivot toward more sustainable alternatives such as collecting first-party data.

Contextual advertising awareness has a steep hill to climb. But brands like Frito Lay, which has tackled the challenge, find success, GumGum data shows.

James Clarke, senior director of media strategy and CRM, Frito Lay North America, believes success in contextual advertising is less dependent on the brand being advertised and more so on the strength of alignment between messaging and creative with the surrounding environment in which the ad is placed.

“While many advertisers are aware of contextual capabilities to address the cookieless-future, there is still a great deal of education needed around it,” said GumGum CEO Phil Schraeder.

He said there are two different contextual technologies. The majority of conversations are based on the contextual technology of the past, one only based on keywords. Then there is the next generation of contextual-intelligence technology, which can follow many signals, including video, image, and text. 

Research released today from GumGum, a global technology and media company, and Brand Innovators, a community of brand marketers, shows just how much education marketers need about alternative targeting options like contextual advertising.

The survey found that 49% of brand marketers look to contextual advertising to replace cookies in their marketing efforts. The study, conducted by an independent third-party researcher, also showed most marketing executive respondents expect to increase their digital and mobile ad spends as the advertising industry moves to a cookieless future.

The research found only 27% of respondents were “very familiar” with contextual advertising, with 41% admitting they were somewhere in the middle, neither familiar or overly unfamiliar. This identifies a major gap when it comes to education about contextual targeting in the advertising industry.

The findings also show that 56% of key marketing executives surveyed say they are aware that “contextual advertising is often cited as a key solution to the upcoming post-cookie environment.” Thirty-four percent responded that they were unaware, and 10% were unsure.

Marketers who are knowledgeable in contextual advertising were hopeful that it has the potential to replace traditional cookie targeting.

When asked why, 38% cited the ability to find a brand-suitable environment based on contextual targeting rather than keywords was the most attractive feature. Some 23% said the ability to limit media placement to environments where consumers are open to hearing the brand’s message. In addition, 11% found the ability to run dynamic ad copy depending on the environment to be a benefit.

Privacy is another key benefit of contextual advertising. Contextual engines do not collect user data or track data, and brands do not face privacy concerns they encounter with other forms of digital advertising.

Despite privacy challenges and the learning curve with other options, survey respondents said the difficulty in the transition resides in the fact that cookies have been very important to their marketing efforts, with almost 90% agreeing that cookies had been either “very important” or “somewhat important.”

GumGum has developed its own solution to the challenge. “We believe that digital advertising will evolve to capture the consumer’s mindset though a key combination of creative, context and the consumer’s attention as a driving force behind advertising effectiveness,” Schraeder said. “Each of these components are independently important, but collectively make up what we call the Mindset Matrix, which will be instrumental in understanding and optimizing the advertising campaigns of tomorrow.”

Unlike other targeting solutions, he said, the ability to harness the consumer mindset will drive the impact that contextual advertising can achieve. It will give advertisers a fuller picture to understand the effectiveness of their digital campaigns.

Apple has received most of the attention for its false opens -- the result of pre-fetching and the privacy regime it instituted last September.

But Gmail is also prefetching, leading to marginally inflated email opens, according to Update on the Gmail Web App Prefetching Images, an analysis by SparkPost.

This situation further reduces the efficacy of opens as an email metric. Apple generates roughly 45% of email opens, and Gmail an estimated 30%. But the vast majority of Gmail sends are not being pre-fetched.

One recent study by Litmus found that Gmail has an 89.6% share of webmail opens, and that webmail accounts for 35.6% of email opens.  

Of over 9.8 billion Gmail recipient open events in December 2021, false opens accounted for between 1%-6% of all opens, SparkPost reports.  

“In investigating billions of open events, we can confidently say that these opens are false opens and do not indicate an actual user open event,” Chris Adams writes on the SparkPost Blog.  

Brands can expect their open rates to be inflated by up to 2%. For instance, a company with a 20% open rate in Gmail would in reality be closer to 18%.

Adams says Gmail prefetching occurs when (and we quote):

- A Gmail recipient is ' logged into and has an active session open to the Gmail app (either web or mobile app).'

- An email is sent to this Gmail recipient during an active/open web session.

- Gmail prefetches all images immediately before the web UI displays the email.

- This image prefetch is 'in addition to (and different from) Google Image Cache opens, which occurs when the user opens the email.'

To get technical about it, the image prefetch occurs when the user is logged into the Gmail web application, comes from a Google IP address, and is requested using the following user-agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.246 Mozilla/5.0

Note: these open events are different from user-initiated open events triggered by Google Image Cache, Adams explains.

Unlike with Apple, people do not have to log in to a privacy scheme for images to be pre-fetched--"it just happens," Adams reports. 

The takeaway: “As is the case with Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, senders should treat all open events with care,” Adams concludes. “Opens are just one, and often not the best one, of the many engagement metrics that senders should be monitoring and including when making determinations about user engagement.” 

The three major mobile carriers boast of offering “unlimited” data, but many of the plans they sell are anything but unlimited.

Instead, the fine print in the companies' ads lists all sorts of conditions on service, ranging from the possibility of slowdowns to hard caps on hotspot use. For instance, AT&T reserves the right to throttle customers who sign up for two of the company's three so-called unlimited plans. People who sign up for the third unlimited plan don't face smartphone throttling, but can only use 40 GB of hotspot broadband data per month -- which crimps their ability to tether the phones to laptops or other devices.

Some “unlimited” plans available from Verizon and T-Mobile also allow the company to slow down broadband service -- usually after people exceed a data cap and there's congestion on the network.

The upshot is that consumers who, say, plan to stream video during a long trip might want a different “unlimited” plan than people with access to WiFi connections throughout the day. But sifting through the various policies and their restrictions can be a daunting process.

This situation, however, could soon change.

On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission will vote on whether to craft regulations that would force broadband providers to standardize the information they give consumers. The FCC previously considered issuing rules during the Obama era, but dropped the initiative during the last administration.

The agency's “notice of proposed rulemaking” revives those former proposed rules, which would have required mobile providers to use a standard “nutrition label” format to disclose prices, typical speeds and throttling practices.

“Access to accurate, simple-to-understand information about broadband internet access services helps consumers make informed choices and is central to a well-functioning marketplace that encourages competition, innovation, low prices, and high-quality service,” the agency writes. “It does so by enabling consumers to comparison shop when choosing broadband services and providers that best meet their needs and match their budgets.”

ERGO Content Automation Services -- a platform that automates content for email newsletters -- is now available on Salesforce AppExchange, the company announced on Wednesday. 

The automation product is designed to relieve the tedium of producing email newsletters. 

ERGO Content Automation enables firms to create 1:1 content and steer customers with next-best messages based on individual profiling and behavior, the company says. 

Dynamic content modules are published in Salesforce Marketing Cloud instance. at an individual level, it adds.  

ERGO Content Automation relieves “the arduous task of producing effective email newsletters with limited time and resources,” states John Hendricks, ERGO CEO. 

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration brings “the power of content automation to even more organizations that are looking to drive more engagement and ROI from their email newsletter programs,” Hendricks adds.  

For its part, Salesforce App Exchange sees the product as “a welcome addition to AppExchange, as they power digital transformation for customers," through personalization, says Woodson Martin, GM of Salesforce AppExchange.

Back in December, I was scrolling around on my computer, and I realized just how often there were auto-play video ads and content launched on the pages I was visiting. 

Auto-play video by itself is not that bad, as consumers have become accustomed to seeing it.  The challenge is when you have multiple auto-play video spots on a single page, and they start competing with one another.  That gets cluttered and annoying very quickly.

We really need to be sure we are hyper-focused on the consumer experience in digital advertising.

Auto-play video happens on both desktop and mobile.   Video has become the most important arrow in the quiver of a digital publisher, both for surfacing content as well as generating revenue.  Video runs in the display units, as well as allowing a space for pre-, mid- and post-roll to run in video content. 

I like video, so I’m not getting all curmudgeonly around video for the sake of it.  I’m concerned because as with all good things in digital media, we find something that works well, and we completely overuse it to the point where its value diminishes directly correlative to its annoyance factor. 

One possible solution would be for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, Nielsen or Comscore or some other relatively benign third party to offer a media buyers’ grade for sites that leverage video, which would help buyers understand the consumer-oriented impact of video on the page. 

There would have to be a different score for desktop vs mobile because the real estate you have to work with is simply larger on the desktop and can allow for more video to be leveraged. But a mobile environment should never have multiple video units overlapping and shielding the view of the user to engage with content. 

Routinely when I click on a news story from Apple News, I am delivered to a publisher who is employing multiple popover units with video. Mobile publishers are known for having ads that are ultra-sensitive and will play audio at the merest hint of a click or tap. 

As a marketer, I would want to know if publishers have a jarring and less-than-desirable mobile experience where my ads are simply going to become an annoyance for the user. 

On a desktop environment, the issue appears less often, but it does appear.  As an example, in December I was on a CNN page and was hit with multiple videos playing with auto-audio, all competing with one another.  I did not click them, but audio was still playing.  I assume this was a glitch because I haven’t had it happen since then, but the experience stood out to me because it was on such a reputable site. 

Auto-play video is not to be taken for granted, and auto-play audio should never happen.  Consumers pay more attention than one might originally think to these kinds of negative experiences.

Some form of a media-buyers grade would help determine if you are placing your media dollars in an environment that is beneficial to your brand or not.  It’s not a fraud grade or a content grade. It would be a grade that allows you to suppress or focus on sites through a programmatic buy based on their grade for viewer experience.

When you go direct, it would give you a better understanding of what that experience is like -- and it could be reflected in the CPM as well, with better experiences having a higher price tag. Publishers inherently do that now, but it is implied rather than stated as fact. 

A media buyers experience grade could be valuable in helping to hold accountable the publishers, both desktop and mobile, who abuse the technology -- and, conversely, reward the publishers who think in terms of experience first and revenue second.

I may be asking a lot, and inevitably someone will respond below and tell me this score exists.  If you know a company that truly offers this, let us know in the comments.  I haven’t seen something like this from an impartial source, but would love to know it does exist.

Simpli.fi, which provides workflow software and programmatic advertising solutions, announced the acquisition of CoreMedia Systems to provide direct and brand response analytics, attribution and media management software to advertising agencies and marketers.

This acquisition will enable agencies and brands to buy and analyze linear and connected television (CTV) advertising together, along with other forms of programmatic advertising including addressable, mobile, video, display, native, and social.

CoreMedia adds to Simpli,fi’s agency management software suite with products that cater specifically to performance media management.

Automating workflows and integrating attribution reporting enables performance advertisers to execute and measure media buys more effectively, and drive increased performance from their media placements.

More than 500 employees at the combined company will support more than 1,500 advertising agencies and media buying organizations.

This is Simpli.fi’s third acquisition since its founding in 2010. The programmatic advertising platform now executes more than 100,000 campaigns for more than 25,000 advertisers monthly.

Glenn DeKraker, CEO of CoreMedia, will remain with the combined company, but the company has not yet stated in what capacity, according to Ryan Horn, SVP of marketing at Simpli.fi.

Simpli.fi continues to ramp up its support of advertisers and agencies that buy CTV media. Early in January, the company partnered with Datonics to launch a new CTV data offering in the Simpli.fi platform

Datonics provides Simpli.fi segment data mapped to a continually updated household IP addresses. Each household is set with a unique identifier that allows advertisers to effectively target an audience.

The group of datasets include 1,300 segments of search, intent, life stage, behavioral, business-to-business, demographic, point-of-interest and past-purchase segments.

Datonics also offers an unlimited number of custom segments that can be built from keywords or location visits.

U.S. consumers have become more focused on the physical benefits of fitness rather than mental well-being, according to new research from Future PLC. But they are frequently overwhelmed by fitness technology.

This creates an opportunity for trusted media brands to strengthen their valuable role as intermediaries, says Jason Webby, North American CRO at Future PLC.

In the research, conducted in October 2021 of 1,015 respondents 18 years old and older, Future found consumers are already heavily involved in their fitness and physical activity, and intend to spend more on new gear while doing activities with others beyond their immediate social circles.

The most common activities are walking/hiking (38% or respondents, basketball (29%), athletics (27%), running/jogging (22%), and swimming (20%).

The pandemic has spurred a shift in the rationale for fitness, with 54% or respondents caring more about fitness than in the past. Plus, there was a four-percentage point increase (21% per-pandemic and 26% now) in the emphasis on the physical benefits of fitness. At the same time, the focus on the mental well-being aspects declined by two percentage points, from 11% to 9%.

Thirty-seven percent of respondents work out of their homes, and the vast majority, 80%, said their primary method of exercise was to plan on their own. Another 37% said they use prerecorded videos — the numbers are more than 100% because of overlap — while 32% use a mobile app.

The top types of equipment owned, according to the research, were weights (24%), gym equipment (13%), and exercise bikes (12%).  The main equipment being considered for purchase were rowing machines (15%), ellipticals (15%) and mini-steppers (12%).

All of this and more, says Webby, means audiences need help in demystifying fitness options and purchases, and media companies can help.

“A key point for advertisers taken from the findings is that audiences want help,” Webby says. “They are in the market and looking to buy fitness-tech products, but are having a hard time understanding what is best for them. So there is still work to be done by health/fitness brands to make choices and products clearer to their customers.”

Future is dedicated to simplifying the consumer’s path to purchase, a journey that he says is too complex now. Online audiences are usually looking for specific information. And with all the focus on a content-to-commerce approach these days in media and affiliate marketing, the risk is that media brands start to create lower-value content, content that procures revenue but doesn’t necessarily really help consumers.

“What we seek to do at Future is bring in our expert reviews and recommendations to help guide and make that online journey a truly valuable experience,” Webby says. A proprietary CMS surfaces products consumers want to see, at the best price, while they read expert editorial content. The technology also helps filter products, based on the best price, so consumers don’t overpay.

One key takeaway from the research is that media companies don’t just possess an audience that advertisers want; they can actively assist audiences as they shop for products around their passions.

“Adding value as a publisher is a benefit we give to our audiences that we can then pass on to advertisers — which can then really connect with our high intent audiences,” Webby says.