Connect with execs from Axios, The New York Times, Paramount and more.
There was a time when Madison Avenue was obsessed with the threat from Google. The idea was Google, with its near limitless financial resources and engineering might, was hell-bent on automating the ad industry and cutting out agencies in the process. That didn’t happen. Now it’s Facebook’s turn to feel the concerns. Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, has a piece up on Harvard Business Review that makes a credible case for why Facebook is moving in a direction that will irrevocably change with media-buying agencies do. Media agencies tend to buy commoditized “nouns” (impressions, clicks, etc.) while Facebook wants to move to sell “verbs” (likes, shares, etc.) Like the Google threat, this one probably won’t materialize to much. Facebook needs agencies to convert its enormous attention into a similarly large media business. There will be room for media agencies to tap into Facebook’s enormous trove of data to do impression-and click-based buying, as Schafer himself notes. Read the full post here.
More in Media
Media Briefing: Declared ‘good bots,’ mixed-use crawlers, gray scrapers – how AI accesses publisher content
The Cloudflare’s latest AI settings reshape how compliant crawlers behave, yet the biggest leakage for publisher content remains a gray scraping economy that doesn’t bother to play by those rules.
In Graphic Detail: The state of streaming highlights the power of creators
“Just Chatting” is the driving force behind views on major streaming platforms, thanks to the appeal of personality-driven creators
Hot Ones creator Sean Evans on YouTube vs. TV, the interview boom and what comes next
Hot Ones host and TIME 100 top creator Sean Evans chats about the creator economy’s past, present, and future