Morning Update: strategist jailed over $269m agency fraud; Youtube videos go DIY; Apple introduces facial recognition
Ad Week: Ad Strategist Sentenced to 5-7 Years in Prison for Faking $269 Million in Client Contracts
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C.—”There are certain politicians in this country who could probably take notes from this man. … I’ve never seen anything quite like this.”
With those words, North Carolina Superior Court Judge John O. Craig sentenced former senior strategist and agency partner William John “Bill” Grizack to serve 57 to 81 months in state prison for defrauding ad agencies McKinney and The Variable (formerly known as Pave Advertising) with fake contracts from Coca-Cola and Brown-Forman worth an estimated $269 million.
https://youtu.be/5Pc7wCHGtHU
AdWeek: YouTube Is Introducing New Ways to Help Small Businesses Make Better Video Ads
Youtube wants to turn video ads on its platform into a DIY possibility for small- and medium-sized businesses.
Today, Google is launching three ways for SMBs to create video ads for YouTube that are—at least for the most part—free. With a new app called Youtube Director, the video juggernaut is helping businesses with little or no marketing budget create commercials on their own. The app includes a number of templates, music and editing tools and is free to use.
The Verge: Apple’s new facial recognition feature could spur legal issues
This week at WWDC, Apple announced a new facial recognition system — although if you weren’t watching closely, you might have missed it. It came as part of an upgrade to Photos, which will soon catalog your pictures according to the faces in them.
“The big news in Photos this year is Advanced Computer Vision,” Federighi told the crowd. “We’re applying advanced deep learning techniques to bring facial recognition to the iPhone.”
Ad Week: Eye Tracking Shows Mobile Video Ads Embedded in Articles Perform Better Than on Social
A new report that used eye tracking to understand user engagement with mobile video suggests certain types of video ads on publishers’ websites perform better than those on social media.
According to a study by Teads, a video technology platform that works with many of the world’s top publishers, users spent 24% more time watching video ads within premium content on websites than they did watching video ads in social feeds. The results showed that ad recall was twice as high for in-article video as it was for skippable preroll and drove purchase intent 27% higher than skippable preroll ads or video ads in social feeds.
Digiday: With a 70% open rate, Lenny Letter looks to video and beyond
Lenny’s staff is small, but its ambitions are huge. The plan is nothing short of world domination, half jokes Laia Garcia, the deputy editor of Lenny, created by ‘Girls’ star Lena Dunham and show-runner Jenni Konner.
Garcia is part of a full time staff of five and a stable of freelance writers that fill the year-old twice-weekly newsletter and website that’s headquartered in a Brooklyn co-working space, naturally. The newsletter has grown to 500,000 subscribers, 97 percent of them, perhaps unsurprisingly, are women, Garcia told Digiday.
Digiday: Intel becomes the first brand to publish on Facebook’s Instant Articles
The distinction between marketers and publishers is getting increasingly blurred. Facebook, which created Instant Articles a year ago to make publishers’ articles load faster, is now giving that tool to brands. Intel is the first to take advantage, posting content from its digital tech-focused publication, iQ, as Instant Articles starting last week.
Founded in 2012, iQ is now is translated into 17 languages with editions around the world. In the U.S., it’s staffed by three Intel employees with help from contractors. The U.S. edition posts seven to 10 articles a week and reaches 1 to 5 million readers a month, mostly through paid social distribution, according to Intel.
Spoiler Alert: Ad blocking is a serious problem, and new research is painting a clearer picture of just how bad it really is.
The 2016 Reuters Digital News report, which surveyed more than 50,000 online news consumers across 26 countries, shows ad blocking is most common among those who get news online and under 35s, the research showed. Smartphone users aren’t huge on ad blocking yet, with only 8% admitting they use it, however a third of interviewees said they plan to use an ad blocker in the next year.
The Philippines telco giant PLDT and its subsidiary Smart have introduced a new logo, but the brand revamp has been criticised by social media users who say the change does not come with improved services, particularly a faster internet connection, while others have said the logo is suspiciously similar to that of a British design company.
The new logos are designed to better represent the transformation into a more data-driven business, and are shaped like a triangle to represent the company’s business pillars – exceptional people, meaningful innovations, and our valuable customers, the company explained in a Facebook post.
WWD: Ex-More Editor Lesley Jane Seymour on Losing Her Job in the Digital Age
In late February, the magazine media industry buzzed about its latest closure: More magazine. Despite a recent redesign and lowered rate base, More parent companyMeredith Corp. cited the recession of the late Aughts, and its inability to continue to support the magazine, which was founded in 1997.
The closure of the women’s lifestyle title left another well-known editor in chief, Lesley Jane Seymour, out of a job after eight years at the helm. Since then, Seymour has kept a relatively low profile, but like other editors who fell prey to the volatility of today’s media environment, she is now sharing her thoughts.
