TWW 050

Friday 28th January

January 27, 2022

Things you may have missed🏖

Things You Should Know 👀

The creator economy is alive and well, by that I mean Big Tech is still pulling in the dollarydoos & giving the crumbs to, you know, the people who create the content. Before I spiral into a web3 use-case, here are some big stories this week from social/video platforms…

Interesting to see the different, yet similar approaches the platforms are taking. Instagram is breaking away from its poor name & doubling down on influencers, TikTok is making the platform more creator-friendly (& less innovative) and Twitter is going all-in on its ‘WAGMI’ crypto audience.

Get FLOC’d! Google has seemingly replaced its Federated Learning of Cohorts, for the equally catchy Topics API. I look forward to a bird acronym in the coming months…Oh wait, it’s going to be Google TAPI & Facebook CAPI isn’t it. FFS

Let’s take a moment to examine it.

When a user lands on a site that supports Topics API for ads
Users browser shares 3 topics per user (or interests i.e /Politics /Weather /News)
This is selected RANDOMLY from your top 5 topics of each week.
Data is then shared with advertising partners to decide which ads to show.
The user is then shown ads based on their topics.

So a far broader method than FLoC. Yes, it protects user identity and aligns with their advertising preferences tool, but this doesn’t necessarily feel ‘targeted’. 2022 the year of Contextual? Certainly feels that’s the way we’re headed.

Cool Stuff😎

“Meet Natalia! She’ll be leading the training sessions for the next couple of days, she’s 30 days old, can quote Aristotle and likes long walks on the beach. Oh, and she’s a virtual human.” Dermalogica has utilised Unreal Engine to build a virtual human to train their 100,000 strong workforce.

This is COOL. The gaming engine from Unreal is well, unreal. This is an ingenious way to ensure there’s a consistent level of training globally and will also be made into a hologram. 2022 is wild.

What we’ve learned📚

You’ve heard of Attention, with such hits as ‘why viewability is pointless’, why not try Contextual? With the up and comers delivering future classics like ‘targeted ads in a world of no cookies’. This combined study measures the attention of contextual ads, making sense of GumGum’s recent acquisition…

Not sure I’d get the role on Triple J. Anyway, a good study from GumGum and Lumen Research. A precursor to what’s going to come I’d imagine! I’d love to see the site list on where this ran…46s is a very high dwell.

Delaying GIFs - Get the best GIF on GIPHY

AHHHHH here goes! Google snaps back, claiming that the Anti-trust lawsuit filed by the Texas AG is ‘incorrect & inflammatory’. This one is going to carry on more than a vegan cross-fitter that does Wordle.

Google has shut down claims, saying that they don’t tie any publishers to their technology, they love header bidding and everyone knew about the Facebook deal…So simply put, Texas AG was so close yet so far. Delay & obfuscation here we come…

The Nerd Corner🤓

It’s only taken a couple of years, but it seems the US Democrats have just seen the Social Dilemna and read about Cambridge Analytica. As they look to enforce a bill that will ban surveillance advertising…

Okay, a very serious matter. This bill looks to stop targeting ads to users (geotargeting and contextual are excluded for now), which could have HUGE effects on the AdTech world.