AdAge

YouTube ran a series of secret ad tests to help brands get a sense of what works in digital video and what grabs people's attention for the most amount of time. The Google Creative Lab ran the experiment using 16 different videos with variations on pacing, sound and other factors, including whether vertical video was important. Those with longest view-through rates were obviously the most compelling, and could be used for coming up with best practices in online video.

The point of the tests was to see how ads might perform creative choices are made with mobile environments in mind as opposed to desktop, or even TV. The average completion rate for the average video ad on mobile devices is 22%, according to Google. On desktop, it's 28%. The best-performing video in the test, one in which fast pacing was the dominant factor, achieved a 33% "view-through" rate on mobile., Google said.

As more people watch content across a variety of platforms and devices, and on an increasingly delayed basis, AT&T and Time Warner believe they can better tackle the changes in viewership behavior together. When it comes to advertising, the thinking is that combining the vast troves of data from a telecommunications giant and the TV programmer behind shows including HBO's "Game of Thrones" and TBS's "Full Frontal with Samantha Bee" will allow for greater audience targeting and ad relevance.

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said the deal would allow for "more innovation in advertising" where the ads will become "more effective and of interest to you in one house versus someone else in a different house." Bewkes went on to say that people like advertising so long as it is relevant to them. Time Warner's Turner division has been helping to lead the TV industry when it comes to audience targeting. Its portfolio of data products, while still in its infancy, allow advertisers to buy inventory based on specific consumer targets rather than on the traditional Nielsen age and gender demographics. Still, the combination of the two isn't expected to meaningfully advance addressable advertising, said Brian Wieser, senior analyst at Pivotal Research. "I think there aren't many implications on the ad sales angle in any practical way, as AT&T AdWorks is pretty small, but I can imagine they would try to establish some ad products that are similar to some that NBCU/Comcast has announced, which include some bundling of VOD and addressable units into AT&T/DirecTV inventory," he said. "Again, as a practical matter, that's not going to be very meaningful."

[Commentary] While Waze leads us to our destinations via the quickest route, our dependence on this kind of decision-support system may also be the quickest route to a monocultural society. As Artificial Intelligence and machine learning improve, more people are going to benefit, and through our interaction with the machines, the AI systems will make better decisions for us and in turn become more and more popular. And then it will happen: a small number of AI systems (most likely the aforementioned "Partnership on AI" group) will be making most of our decisions for us. We might not even notice that in the process, we devolved our diverse, multicultural world into a collection of distinct digital monocultures. AI will sort our news feeds (it already does), our entertainment choices (it already does), our way-finding (it already does), and the energy efficiency of our homes and offices (it already can, but it is not widely deployed); make our financial decisions (it mostly does); make our medical decisions; make our business decisions; and probably make our political decisions too. The list of potential AI applications is bounded only by need and imagination.

[Shelly Palmer is President & CEO of Palmer Advanced Media]

[Commentary] An open letter to the algorithm in charge of TV news. Dear NewsBot, I've got a bone to pick with you, whatever gender you may be. I gave up on TV news a long time ago. Broadcast, cable -- it doesn't matter. The only benefit broadcast has over cable in this regard is there's so much less of it -- and by it, I mean the brain-cell-killing noise pollution that is the bulk of what you program. The only time I tune in is when something big is happening, a massive live pop-culture or political event. And something was unfolding in Louisiana.

It started last week and continued into this week. A natural disaster of historic proportions. A low-pressure system parked itself over the southern part of my home state and the rains began and didn't stop for days. And you, NewsBot, were programming Donald Trump or whether or not Adele was going to be the entertainment at next year's Super Bowl. The people of Louisiana noticed you weren't covering. And that matters, too. Putting aside ratings and viewers -- and for the broadcast networks, your federally mandated duty in exchange for airwaves -- you're actually feeding into the divide you make your anchors pretend to care about. Some people are worth covering. Others aren't. In fact, your lack of hyperventilating coverage has become a partisan issue. This is one of the reasons you're seen not as a harmless bit of infotainment, but as part of some almost-sinister tool of an elite establishment. Perhaps if you spent less time giving Trump breathless coverage and more time covering actual people, those people wouldn't be so predisposed to side with him.

[Ken Wheaton is the editor of Advertising Age]

Cambridge Analytica has a mixed reputation in Washington (DC).

Several Republican strategists who have worked with or met with Cambridge in the past year see the company as a curiosity, an intellectually-advanced interloper that never really "got" American politics. Sources say the company bit off more than it could chew and failed to deliver some of the technology and analytics services it sold or meet crushing election-season deadlines. Even so, it has been widely-reported that Cambridge Analytica now is working with Donald Trump, whose GOP presidential campaign has been woefully devoid of a serious data team. GOP insiders affirm recent reports that Cambridge now has staff embedded with Donald Trump's campaign.

"I think they're not Americans, and they have a little bit of trouble understanding the American political systems and how things work," said a GOP political consultant. The consultant believes Cambridge's voter-data modeling is sophisticated and effective, but also complained that the firm is more focused on its sales and marketing efforts than actually fulfilling core analytics work promised to clients.

Forget bloatware. Brandware may be the next extraneous app software coming to Verizon customers' smartphones. The wireless carrier has offered to install big brands' apps on its subscribers' home screens, potentially delivering millions of downloads, according to agency executives who have considered making such deals for their clients. But that reach would come at a cost: Verizon was seeking between $1 and $2 for each device affected, executives said.

The Democrats have made a choice that could dictate how technology for campaigns and groups on the left is developed and disseminated for years to come.

The party has decided on a top-down approach to the way in which local, state, congressional and presidential campaigns employ and share voter data for everything from door-knocking to targeted TV advertising.

Apparently, Google has come up with a way to overcome the ad-targeting gap between mobile web visitors and mobile app users.

Google is set to begin testing a new method of targeting tablet and smartphone users that connects the separate tracking mechanisms that follow what people do on the mobile web and in mobile apps respectively. Until now, advertisers have usually been forced to treat individual mobile users as two unconnected people, depending on whether they are using a mobile browser or apps.

A 21st Century Fox acquisition of Time Warner would create a high concentration of the all-important 18-to-49 TV viewing demographic within one media conglomerate, giving the joined entity significant pricing power over advertisers.

The new company would command 27% of total-day TV viewership across the top 15 cable networks, and 24% of it among the 18-to-49 demo, said Kannan Venkateshwar, analyst at Barclays.

TV networks' apparently total victory over Aereo at the Supreme Court isn't necessarily a long-term win for the broadcasters, observers and analysts said as the implications of the ruling settled in.

By solidifying broadcasters' ability to demand retransmission fees from any new technology that seeks to carry their signals, the Court may have also reminded Congress about an increasing complaint from constituents: out-of-control cable fees.

Leaders of the House Commerce Committee have already responded to the Supreme Court's decision, saying it underscores the need to rewrite communications laws.

"While the court ruled that Aereo had overstepped, invention and innovation are at the heart of America's global leadership in communications and technology development," said House Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI). "This case underscores the mounting need to modernize the 80-year-old Communications Act, which serves as an important, yet outdated, framework for the communications industry."