Twitter is developing an edit feature that would allow users to change their tweets after posting. While Elon Musk, who recently became Twitter’s largest shareholder, had posted a poll asking users if they wanted an edit button (yes, responded 73.6% of them), Twitter said with a wink it has been working on an edit feature since last year, “and no, we didn’t’ get the idea from a poll.”

Speaking of Elon Musk, the billionaire will not be joining the board of directors of Twitter after all. It was announced last week that Musk, who has a 9.2% stake in the company, would join the 11-person board, but on Sunday Twitter’s CEO, Parag Agrawal, announced that Musk had changed his mind. “I believe this is for the best,” said Agrawal in a note to employees, which he shared on Twitter. “We have and always will value input from our shareholders whether they are on our Board or not. Elon is our biggest shareholder and we will remain open to his input.” As member of the board, Musk would have been prohibited from purchasing more than 14.9% of the company’s stock.

Apple’s annual developer conference WWDC will return as a virtual-only event June 6-10. Apple will host a special event at Apple Park on June 6 for developers and students to watch the keynote and State of the Union videos together, but space will be limited. Pre- pandemic, the conference was held in person.

Meta is forgoing its annual developer conference altogether this year. “We are taking a brief break in programming and will not hold F8 in 2022 while we gear up on new initiatives that are all tailored towards the next chapter of the internet, and the next chapter of our company too: building the metaverse,” said Meta’s Director of Products and Partnerships Diego Duarte Moreira in a blog post. “Similar to the early stages of the web, building the metaverse will be a collaborative effort at every stage — with other companies, creators and developers like you.”

TikTok has created a custom learning program to educate creative agencies on how best to plan and concept for the platform. The Creative Agency Partnerships sessions will be hosted as live webinar sessions. “By now, most TikTok users understand the value of combining advertising, entertainment, and commerce. But one question remains for those who want to utilize the platform to its fullest: Where to begin?”, said the company in a blog post. “Introducing CAP University, a curriculum that will teach you everything you need to know to get started on TikTok—without the midterms or tuition.”

Snapchat has partnered with SignAll to launch a new ASL Alphabet Lens that teaches American Sign Language. The AR lens will teach users how to finger spell their name and practice the ASL alphabet. “We hope that Lenses not only evolve the way we see the world, but help us feel closer to one another,” said the company in a blog post. “For native signers, in a world where linguistic inequity is prevalent, we believe AR can help evolve the way we communicate.”

Meta is working on a plan to introduce virtual currency – dubbed “Zuck Bucks” by employees – to its apps, according to the Financial Times. The currency would likely work as in-app tokens rather than a form of crypto, said FT. “As a company, we are focused on building for the metaverse and that includes what payments and financial services might look like,” responded a company spokesperson.

Dynamic location intelligence company for service provider operations Nrby and AI-driven platform Sisense they have partnered to create Nrby VU, a business intelligence tool that provides visibility into network events, trends, and workforce activities for broadband service providers. Nrby and Sisense have collaborated to create customizable, multidimensional dashboards that increase the operational value of the Nrby platform for operators of wired, wireless, and municipal broadband networks.

ARK Multicasting announced a collaboration agreement with SpectraRep to deploy the Educast service on the ARK Broadcast Internet Network of NextGen TV stations, aimed at bridging the digital divide for rural communities and improve the quality of education. “We can help solve and even eliminate a major pain point for millions of K-12, college students, and teachers in rural America,” said Josh Weiss, Co-Founder & CEO, Ark Multicasting. “This new hybrid broadcast-broadband technology is a complete gamechanger allowing a one-to-many reach which serves as an accretive augmentation to traditional Internet providers struggling with network congestion and last-mile connectivity.”

Visual effects studio W?t? FX announced the opening of its Vancouver office following a $1.6 billion technology deal with Unity late last year. W?t?’s Vancouver presence marks the company’s first dedicated visual effects office outside its home base of New Zealand.

2022 SPORTS MEDIA AWARDS
April 19th, – The NY Athletic Club

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ADVERTISING

Advertising on 22 large retail sites like Amazon, Home Depot and Target, in categories including electronics, home and garden, pharmacy grocery and more, topped $3 billion from May 1, 2021-January 31, 2022, according to MediaRadar. “The retail industry has seen dramatic changes over the last few years, especially during the pandemic,” said Todd Krizelman, CEO & Co-founder of MediaRadar. “As such, companies are advertising on e-commerce sites in hopes that their products will be seen by the right buyer, ultimately ending with a purchase. With online retailers holding the key to tons of shopper data and insights, companies are leveraging these sites to accurately target consumers who are interested in their products at the exact time they are likely to buy.” Over 88% of spend from the sample, from 24,000 companies advertising nearly 38,000 brands, was invested in native ads; Amazon, Target and Walmart were the top retail sites, with ad spend totaling over $2.3 billion.

Comscore and Tremor International have struck an agreement making Comscore’s cookie-free Predictive Audiences available for activation across Tremor International’s end-to-end platform, which encompasses the Tremor Video DSP and the Unruly SSP. The partnership enables Tremor Video and Unruly’s advertising clients to leverage cookie-free pre-bid audience targeting across desktop, mobile and CTV. Advertisers within the platform will be able to reach granular behavioral audiences based on video-level contextual signals, particularly within CTV environments.

Xandr announced the launch of Inventory Library on its Invest DSP, offering a deal discovery and activation workflow with visual navigation and searchability. When using Inventory Library on Invest DSP, buyers have access to curated deals from publishers across multiple sell-side platforms, organized in catalogs. “The premium video ecosystem is fragmented, with most CTV inventory transacted through deals and many platforms developing proprietary deal marketplaces. As such, it is hard for buyers to discover and access relevant inventory in one place to enable their campaigns to scale. This is especially true for CTV and premium video supply,” said Eric Hoffert, SVP, Video Technology, Xandr. “Inventory Library is deal buying the way it should be, as it offers a highly intuitive and visual design with greater visibility into deal inventory than ever before, taking ease of use to an entirely new level.”

Loop Media, the streaming platform that provides curated music video and branded entertainment channels, has selected SpringServe as one of its ad servers. SpringServe’s platform incorporates features including frequency capping, competitive separation, ad volume and creative size targeting for optimal DOOH viewing. The SpringServe platform also allows for measurement of campaign performance and optimization in real-time.

Neustar has struck a strategic partnership with Catalina, which offers shopping behavior insights through its real-time shopper intelligence platform. The partnership enables consumer packaged goods brand advertisers to make on-the-fly optimizations to their marketing mix, campaign tactics, and audience targets based on real-time purchase behavior. “CPG brands now have a solution that enables them to accurately measure and optimize the impact their marketing programs – both online and offline – are having on real-world sales,” said Gary Savoy, SVP of Partnerships for Marketing Solutions at Neustar. “This will ensure CPG brands are ahead of the data-driven marketing and analytics curve.”

Geopath has integrated place-based media into its Impression Variation Dashboard, a component of the Geopath Insights Suite. The addition of this inventory will enable buyers and sellers to analyze how the forecast for their placed-based media is performing compared to observed data. Geopath’s audited place-based OOH inventory currently includes airports, retail stores, shopping malls, health clubs, offices, bars, restaurants and more. “With enhancements such as these, it is our goal to improve not only the accuracy of our forecasts but expand upon the audited inventory formats we measure at Geopath by actively working to ensure our database and the capabilities of our reporting dashboards represent the entire OOH marketplace,” said Dylan Mabin, EVP of Operations and Acting President of Geopath.

Integral Ad Science announced ??new reporting enhancements that provide advertisers with a unified view of their global campaigns. Clients will now be able to analyze data by custom filters created automatically from their unique campaign naming convention. This Unified View will allow clients to slice and dice their data by dimensions such as regions, lines of business and campaign types. Additionally, IAS augmented its Report Builder to now include IAS’s time-in-view insights as well as several new open web video metrics so advertisers can evaluate their performance beyond core verification.

At its upfront event on Wednesday, AMC Networks unveiled TEAL, a product suite designed to help advertising partners access the company’s full range of digital ad products and advanced technologies. TEAL (“Technology Enabled, Audience Led”) builds on the company’s Buyers First and Viewers First strategies. “TEAL creates a central resource and home for our partners’ campaigns,” said Evan Adelman, SVP of advanced advertising and digital partnerships. “TEAL also ensures our viewers have the ultimate and most organic experience when interacting with our partners’ products and brands….TEAL will become a primary focal point for the way we work with our partners and clients from this upfront forward.”

Microsoft Advertising announced open beta for RSA ad customizers, enabling marketers to create numerous ad variations with one set of ad copy. Marketers can either create custom attributes in Microsoft Advertising online or upload a customizer feed.

Upwave, the analytics platform for brand advertising, unveiled its new ability to help brands measure the impact of brand advertising on Facebook and YouTube, to complement measuring web, mobile, CTV, and linear. Brand marketers have access to Facebook and YouTube without person-level ads. “As we approach the final days of user-level tracking, brands need a way to implement accurate and privacy-compliant measurement into their advertising strategy,” said Chris Kelly, Upwave’s CEO. “At Upwave, we’re betting on cohort-level measurement and clean rooms as the future-proof alternative.”

MiQ, the programmatic media partner to brands and agencies, has launched an expanded cookieless toolkit for programmatic campaigns. With Identity Spine, MiQ can connect the growing number of digital IDs available from various tech providers to first-party data, using the data to create privacy-safe non-identifiable cohorts that ad buyers and marketers can use to action their campaigns. This also includes a feature of multi ID translation that already processes and connects over 108 million different IDs on a weekly basis.

Ad platform MobileFuse has updated its CTV targeting and measurement capabilities and unveiled Fusion Video, a new CTV offering providing creative capabilities that bolster its suite of digital advertising products. “It’s now table stakes for digital marketing companies to offer some form of contextual targeting with their CTV offerings,” said Ken Harlan, founder and CEO of MobileFuse. “However, our solution excels as it includes highly granular audience targeting insights; specifically LiFTS, App Affinity, Purchase Data, Mindsets and more.”

LG Ads Solutions has struck an agreement with Omnicom Media Group to bring LG smart TV and cross-screen ad inventory to Omnicom clients. LG Ads Solutions data will be integrated within Omni, Omnicom’s operating system. The integration will enable account teams across OMG to activate advanced targeting segments from Omni across more than 20+ million LG smart TV households in the US. The deal links LG Ads Solutions’ anonymized household-level data through a privacy-compliant process to Omni’s household graph.

DEALS

EDO announced the closing of an $80 million strategic growth investment from Shamrock Capital, aimed at providing EDO with capital to scale its business in outcome measurement for CTV by growing its team, further enhancing its Ad EnGage Convergent TV analytics platform, and expanding its partner network of data sources.

Havas Group has acquired integrated digital agency Search Laboratory. Founded in 2005, Search Laboratory is a Google Marketing partner, with approximately 150 employees that support data-driven marketing campaigns across 35 countries. Search Laboratory will be integrated into Havas Media Group, reporting into the UK business as a core part of its offering alongside Havas Media, Havas Entertainment and Havas Market.

Lego Group and “Fortnite” parent Epic Games are partnering to create a metaverse experience that’s safe for kids and families. Under a new long-term partnership, the companies will build an “immersive, creatively inspiring and engaging digital experience” that will give kids tools to become “confident creators… in a safe and positive space.”

STREAMING

AMC Networks has six new FAST channels under development: Spanish-language AMC en Español; ALLBLK Gems, featuring ALLBLK originals; HIDIVE x ANIME, super-serving anime fans; Shorts and its Spanish-language version, Corts, offering a selection of short films; and sports-focused Overtime.

Allen Media Group’s The Weather Channel, Justice Central, Comedy.TV and Recipe.TV are now live on YouTube TV. In January, Allen Media Group and Google announced a multi-platform strategic partnership that included YouTube TV carriage.

The CW Network has launched a new CW App, combining new original programming from The CW and library series from CW Seed. “The CW was one of the first broadcast networks to fully embrace streaming as a way to serve our core young audience, and the new CW App is the natural next step in our growth and evolution, as we are now the only network with a single unified brand across all of our,” said Rick Haskins, President, Streaming & Chief Branding Officer, The CW. The app is available for free on major platforms.

FuboTV is eliminating its least expensive plan and moving subscribers to its $70/month Pro plan, effective May 1. Subscribers billed via Roku are exempt from the change “for now,” said fuboTV on its website.

Streamer Vidgo added FOX Weather to its lineup, bolstering its roster of news, sports and live content.

NATAS TECH AWARDS

The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences announced the recipients of the 73rd Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards, which will be handed out as part of this year’s NAB Show in Las Vegas on April 25. “This year’s awarded categories and companies are a testament to the technological innovation we continue to see in the delivery, consumption and monetization of television,” said Dina Weisberger, co-chair, NATAS Technology Achievement Committee.
And the winners are:
Video & Audio Search based on Index Feeds Coming from Mutiple Sources: Shadow TV
In Camera Sensor and Software Stabilization: Go Pro; Socinext
Correlated Double Sampling for Image Sensors: Marvin H. White: Northrop Grumman Mission Systems Group
Pioneering Development of an Image-Sensor Array with Buried-Photodiode Structure: Peter J. W. Noble
Standardization of Font Technology for Custom Downloadable Fonts and Typography for Web and TV Devices: MPEG; W3C – WebFonts Working Group
Common Key Technology of OTT Content: Apple; MLB Advanced Media; Microsoft; Netflix
Development of the Event Scheduling and Notification Interface (ESNI): Cable Labs; OATC; SCTE
Cloud Enabled Remote Editing and Project Management: Arvato Systems Group; Editshare; Primestream (Ross)
Pioneering Development of Technologies to collect granular linear TV Viewership Data including STBs, ACR, Connected TV’s for Measurement, Marketing & Advertising: Bell South; Cablevision; DirectTV; NCM Solutions
Standardization of HTTP Encapsulated Protocols: Apple; MLB Advanced Media; MPEG; 3GPP
Management of IP Multicast Video Distribution to Deskstops and TVs in News & Media Production Facilities: Haivision; Vitec.

Cynopsis Team