Friday, October 20th, 2023 – 12:03 am

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.

For Reels?

Meta is struggling to convince advertisers that Reels can be a valuable marketing channel, The Information reports.

Since Reels is more of a branding play, it doesn’t fit neatly within the broader Facebook and Instagram flywheel, which primarily centers on direct response ads that convert attributable sales.

Meta has also stopped pushing Reels to agencies. “That pitch has taken a backseat of late as Meta shifts its focus toward getting more advertisers to use its artificial intelligence tools that decide where to deliver ads,” according to The Information.

Of course, that’s just another way to say that Meta fired hundreds of account execs. And the chatbot AI assistant that handles basic customer queries isn’t picking up the sales slack.

Another challenge is that Meta can’t simply crank up Reels the way YouTube can with Shorts, its TikTok clone, by highlighting them atop the homepage or force-feeding them into a user’s next-up video carousel. Meta needs users to click into Reels and hang around before it can advertise effectively.

Also, Facebook’s algorithmic ad-serving product, called Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, doesn’t seem to like Reels, to the frustration of the company’s own salespeople. 

Competition, Meet Privacy

Didier Reynders, the EU commissioner who took over the antitrust regulatory portfolio of outgoing Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, is calling attention to the interwoven nature of consumer competition and data privacy.

In July, the European Court of Justice, the bloc’s top court, decided against Meta in a case brought by antitrust regulators based on their authority to investigate and fine businesses for data protection and privacy violations. 

Data protection can be a “parameter of competition,” Reynders said this week in a speech at the ICN Annual Conference in Barcelona, which covers market competition topics.

Without considering privacy and antitrust concerns in tandem, it would be impossible to fairly regulate companies like Google and Apple, which create lucrative search and advertising markets for themselves, largely through the nuances of their data privacy policies.

Data privacy is a fundamental right in Europe, Reynders said, so it’s within scope for competition regulators – but they should also care for another reason: “Data protection and privacy concerns are becoming more important to Europeans when choosing the services and products they buy.”

Musk’s Misinfo Mess

X is a hotbed of misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war.

During the first week of the war, NewsGuard found that 186 out of the 250 most widely shared posts containing misinformation about the conflict were posted by X Premium (formerly Twitter Blue) users, Adweek reports. Only 79 of the 250 posts were flagged by X’s Community Notes feature, a crowd-sourced content moderation service that has largely replaced the old curation and moderation team.

Blue checkmarks formerly identified verified users, such as public figures and journalists. But, at owner Elon Musk’s insistence, X started instead selling them to anyone who would pay $8.

The spate of Israel-Hamas war misinfo “is another nail in the coffin for X in terms of deteriorating advertisers’ trust,” says Ruben Schreurs, chief strategy officer at Ebiquity. The “absolute overwhelming majority” of Ebiquity’s 75 advertiser clients have serious concerns about the fake news propagating on the platform, Schreurs says.

Marketers had hoped that Linda Yaccarino, NBCU’s former global advertising head, would rein in the misinfo when she took over as CEO. But “it quickly became clear,” says Christopher Spong, social media lead at ad agency Collective Measures, “that Musk [is] still running the show.” 

But Wait, There’s More!

Expedia’s former COO says that ad fees jumped after Google overhauled Search. [Bloomberg]

How Instacart is working with The Trade Desk to expand programmatic ads for brands. [Ad Age]

Self-checkout is a failed experiment. [The Atlantic]

How the NBA plans to remake its TV and streaming deals. [WSJ]

You’re Hired!

UM’s former media leader, Joshua Lowcock, takes a new role at Quad Media. [Campaign]