Morning Update: Hearst CEO departs; Facebook to track offline purchases; Droga5 gets ‘Into HBO’; how LinkedIn failed
Campaign Live: Duncan Edwards departs as Hearst International chief executive
Duncan Edwards, the chief executive of Hearst International, the publisher of Cosmopolitan, Elle, Harpers Bazaar and Good Housekeeping, is departing after 27 years.
The group did not immediately name a replacement, saying it plans to reorganise its global structure, and it was not clear if Edwards, who is aged 52, has planned a new role. He will remain an advisor until the end of the year and Hearst wished him “the very best in his next endeavour”.
Ad Week: Facebook Will Track Whether Ads Lead to Store Visits and Offline Purchases
Facebook is introducing ways to measure just how effective online ads are at increasing in-store visits and offline sales while also making it easier for users to find businesses closest to them.
Today, the social network is adding several new measurement tools that will allow stores to see how many people visit a store location after seeing a Facebook campaign.
Ad Week: Droga5’s First Work for HBO Is This Byzantine Instagram Contest for Hard-Core Fans
Exactly how obsessed are you with Game of Thrones, Silicon Valley and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver? HBO tests the depths of your nerd knowledge in a new campaign from Droga5—the agency’s first work for the paid cable network—that sends you down a rabbit hole on Instagram, where you answer trivia to solve clues leading to fun prizes. The Game of Thrones contest came first, rolling out last Friday, but you can still take the quiz, which works like this…
The Verge: How LinkedIn failed
Most big social networks are fun to use but tough to turn into businesses. Facebook struggled mightily before finding its fortune in mobile advertising; Snapchat’s television-like ad business is an open question; Twitter is in turnaround and likely headed for a sale.
For a long time the work-centered social network LinkedIn, which was acquired by Microsoft yesterday for $26.2 billion, had the opposite problem: it was a reliable generator of cash, but is disdained by a large swathe of its user base.
ORLANDO, Florida — The televisions attached to wide columns throughout the newsroom ran the press conference Sunday just after 10:20 a.m.
Roger Simmons, director of digital audience at the Orlando Sentinel, stood with colleagues in front of one of them. Lisa Cianci, local news editor, got up from her desk to watch. Christal Hayes, a breaking news reporter, watched a Periscope livestream from reporter David Harris at her desk.
Criteo, the France-based ad tech company, filed a lawsuit on Monday that alleges rival firm SteelHouse ran a “counterfeit click fraud scheme” that led to “substantial injury and damage” to its business and reputation.
US-based SteelHouse and Criteo directly compete in the online advertising space. Criteo is a huge public ad tech company that crossed $1 billion in revenue in 2015, while SteelHouse is a private firm that is far smaller than Criteo in terms of top website market share.
Digiday: Confessions of a publisher: Rebates ‘drive a lot of buying decisions’
Last week, the ANA dropped its much-anticipated report on the practice of rebates, or kickbacks, that media sellers pay agencies for steering clients’ dollars their way — without fully disclosing it to the clients.
While the report focused largely on non-transparent practices by the agencies, for this Digiday Confessions, we talked to a veteran publisher who says media sellers aren’t helping, because their outdated way of doing business hampers already-squeezed agencies.
Campaign Live: P&G and Warner Bros first to use Snapchat Stories ad slots
Procter and Gamble, Warner and Verizon are the first US brands to use the new ad format, which displays a 10-second ad between collections of users’ public Snapchat images, or Stories.
Snapchat is keen to emphasise that it is not just dumping ads on users, after disavowing advertising in its early days. While it is slowly up to advertising, only these select few brands will be able to advertise in user Stories. In total, ten brands are testing the new format, though Snapchat hasn’t named all of them.
Campaign Live: Charlie Sheen promotes new condom that delivers greatest innovation for 70 years
Hex is constructed of a series of hexagonal panels of latex, which allow it to be thinner and more flexible than normal condoms but maintain the same strength.
The brand has signed up controversial actor Charlie Sheen to front the launch campaign. Sheen, who revealed last November that he was HIV positive, appears in an online video speaking frankly about his past reluctance to use condoms.
