Advertising

An advocacy group is launching an ad campaign targeting lawmakers who want to roll back the Federal Communications Commission’s network neutrality rules. Fight For The Future, a pro-net neutrality advocacy group, bought billboards in six states to target Sens John Thune (R-SD) and Roger Wicker (R-MS), as well as Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Reps Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Tom Graves (R-GA). The billboards show the lawmakers’ faces with text criticizing their stance and urging the public to call their offices.

The Federal Trade Commission has announced FY 2018 fees for telemarketers accessing phone numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry. The annual fees will increase slightly from FY 2017, and are set forth in a Federal Register notice. All telemarketers calling consumers in the United States are required to download the numbers on the Do Not Call Registry to ensure they do not call consumers who have registered their phone numbers. The first five area codes are free, and organizations that are exempt from the Do Not Call rules, such as some charitable organizations, may obtain the entire list for free.

Telemarketers must subscribe each year for access to the Registry numbers. The FY 2018 Registry access fees will increase slightly based on a reevaluation, as required by the Do‑Not‑Call Registry Fee Extension Act of 2007. Under the Act’s provisions, in FY 2018 telemarketers will pay $62 for yearly access to Registry phone numbers in a single area code (an increase of $1 from FY 2017), up to a maximum charge of $17,021 for all area codes nationwide (up from $16,714 in FY 2017). The fee for accessing an additional area code for a half year will increase to $31.

Over the past generation, journalism has been slowly swallowed. The ascendant media companies of our era don’t think of themselves as heirs to a great ink-stained tradition. Some like to compare themselves to technology firms. This redefinition isn’t just a bit of fashionable branding. As Silicon Valley has infiltrated the profession, journalism has come to unhealthily depend on the big tech companies, which now supply journalism with an enormous percentage of its audience—and, therefore, a big chunk of its revenue.

Dependence generates desperation—a mad, shameless chase to gain clicks through Facebook, a relentless effort to game Google’s algorithms. It leads media outlets to sign terrible deals that look like self-preserving necessities: granting Facebook the right to sell their advertising, or giving Google permission to publish articles directly on its fast-loading server. In the end, such arrangements simply allow Facebook and Google to hold these companies ever tighter.

In the US, roughly nine-in-ten adults (93%) ever get news online (either via mobile or desktop), and the online space has become a host for the digital homes of both legacy news outlets and new, “born on the web” news outlets. Digital advertising revenue across all digital entities (beyond just news) continues to grow, with technology companies playing a large role in the flow of both news and revenue.

Digital-native news outlets are also adopting other outreach and engagement methods. Fully 97% of these outlets offer newsletters, and 92% have an official presence on Apple News. Three-quarters, meanwhile, release podcasts and 61% allow comments on their articles. These outlets are also highly likely to use social media as part of their outreach. Nearly all have official pages or accounts on Facebook (100%), Twitter (100%), YouTube (97%) and Instagram (92%). Far fewer (25%) have an official channel or account on Snapchat.

Advocates called Aug 4 on the Federal Communications Commission to reject an effort by major media companies to “eliminate or weaken important rules for children’s television.” The NAB, Internet and Television Association (NCTA), CBS, Disney, Fox, Univision and others have asked the FCC to significantly reduce advertising limits on children’s programming. Industry commenters also urged the FCC to reconsider rules that require broadcasters to provide quality educational programming as part of their obligation to serve the public interest.

In comments filed Aug 4, Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and the Center for Digital Democracy called on the FCC to reject such proposals to repeal or modify the current rules. “The Trump Administration and the FCC should stand up for the rights of children and parents and reject this crass campaign by the broadcast lobby,” said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. “The broadcast industry receives billions of dollars in benefits from its free use of public resources, including invaluable rights to the airwaves. It is unconscionable that TV stations and networks want to kill off one of their few remaining obligations to the public.”

Verizon has a new rewards program out, called Verizon Up, which awards users a credit for every $300 they spend on their Verizon bill that can be redeemed toward various rewards. Customers will be able to get rewards such as “Device Dollars toward your next device purchase, discounts on an accessory, or partner rewards,” along with other surprise offerings and first-come, first-serve ticket opportunities, which all seems like a nice occasional thing to get for regularly paying your cellphone bill.

But, the new program comes with a pretty big catch: you have to enroll in Verizon Selects, a program that allows the company to track a huge chunk of your personal data. That includes web browsing, app usage, device location, service usage, demographic info, postal or email address, and your interests. Furthermore, that data gets shared with Verizon’s newly formed Oath combination (aka AOL and Yahoo), plus with “vendors and partners” who work with Verizon. Which is kind of a long list of people who have access to what feels like a fairly significant amount of your data.

Steve Bannon, the chief strategist to President Donald Trump, believes Facebook and Google should be regulated as public utilities, according to an anonymously sourced report in The Intercept. This means they would get treated less like a book publisher and more like a telephone company. The government would shorten their leash, treating them as privately owned firms that provide an important public service.

The plan is a prototypical alleged Bannonism: iconoclastic, anti-establishment, and unlikely to result in meaningful policy change....Americans will have to examine the most fraught tensions in our mixed system, as we weigh the balance of local power and national power, the deliberate benefits of central planning with the mindless wisdom of the free market, and the many conflicting meanings of freedom.

A version of the the New York Times’s Trump bump has materialized across the media landscape, as readers have been galvanized by a man who may well be the most polarizing president in American history. But the boon carries significant risks, especially for the Times. And it highlights some business-model vulnerabilities for a newspaper that is struggling mightily to wade through a brutal media climate: Not only is the company becoming increasingly dependent on Trump for its core subscription revenue, but its print readers are subsidizing the rest of the operation through repeated, and often opaque, price increases—a practice that at some point will have to ease.

Verizon Communications wants to challenge Google and Facebook. So it's reaching out to some of its biggest rivals in the wireless industry for help. Now that the telecommunications company has completed its acquisition of Yahoo and rolled out Oath, a division which includes a wide collection of digital advertising assets, it is looking to ramp up its ability to challenge Google and Facebook in the sector.

The wireless giant is exploring building a data partnership with other top wireless players, including T-Mobile, Sprint, Vodafone and Telefónica, apparently. Specifically, Verizon wants to pool together more wireless consumer data that can be used for ad targeting. A big reason Google and Facebook are so dominant in digital advertising – besides the fact that their platforms reach huge audiences –is that they have powerful, accurate data sets on millions of consumers that can be used by advertisers to target people with more relevant ads.

The April 2 edition of the Sunday New York Times, where the paper features its best journalism, included a six-page special section, “Women Today,” pegged to a summit in Manhattan a few days later. What wasn’t in any of the stories was the fact that the Times itself owned a minority stake in the conference.

Although the paper’s own standards call for transparency in this area, the section didn’t disclose the paper’s financial interest. These sections, often paired with Times-backed live events, are a growing part of the business model of what has been the newspaper of record, and just one example of the extent to which the newsroom and the company’s marketing department now work together in an effort to generate new sources of revenue. The editor of these sections meets once a week with the advertising department to discuss possible projects, while the advertising studio of the Times acts as a matchmaker between reporters and sponsors. In one sense, such initiatives might be seen as the new normal, as newspapers like the Times scramble for creative approaches in an industry whose finances are growing creakier by the day. But the Times is a unique beast, in journalism and within its own midtown Manhattan tower, and a bevy of new initiatives being rolled out to buoy the company’s bottom line worry journalists at a paper that has long maintained a firm separation between its news and business operations. Continuing job cuts in the newsroom, even as the business side of the paper continues to grow, have made those tensions even more acute.