1. Crypto lender Genesis, an arm of Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group, filed for bankruptcy, CNBC reported late Thursday night. The report said Genesis listed over 100,000 creditors with liabilities of between $1.2 billion and $11 billion. Those include a loan made by Gemini, founded by the Winklevoss twins
2. Tesla CEO Elon Musk's trial over his "funding
secured" tweet began in San Francisco on Wednesday. In their opening arguments, Musk's lawyers said that the billionaire entrepreneur was simply mistaken when he tweeted that he had secured funding to take Tesla private at $420 a share. They argued that Musk believed Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund was serious about doing the deal, which priced Tesla at a premium to where it was trading on the public markets. Tesla shareholder Glen Littleton filed the lawsuit against Musk and the
electric car maker, seeking billions of dollars in damages for his losses from the volatility that followed Musk's tweet. Littleton's lawyers argued that Musk's claim that he had secured funding for a buyout was a lie. Littleton testified Wednesday that he was distressed by his financial losses, the effects of which he compared to going to war. A nine person jury will decide whether or not Musk committed securities fraud by mid-February.
3.
Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings has stepped down as CEO, replacing himself with COO Greg Peter and Ted Sarandos. The video streaming service reported 7.66 million extra subscribers in the fourth quarter, finishing the year with 230.75 million subscribers. But revenue rose only 1.9% year over year to $7.8 billion, while net income shriveled to almost nothing from $607 million a year earlier thanks to an unrealized loss related to Euro-denominated debt. The average revenue per subscriber
fell, compared to the third quarter, in every region of the world, a sign that growth in subscribers was driven by the lower-priced ad-supported tier. Hastings will become executive chairman while COO Greg Peter was promoted to co-CEO with Ted Sarandos, a move that comes two and a half years after Hastings elevated Sarandos to be co-CEO with him. At that time, Hastings said he would stick around for a decade, although he didn’t specify whether he would retain the co-CEO title for that
period. Netflix shares are down more than 8% following their earnings report on Monday morning; they closed at $315 on Friday before trading was halted ahead of their earnings release and have since
4. For those of you who don’t know, Google is slowly rolling out its experiments feature to the most powerful tool of them all: Performance Max campaigns.Users have started seeing new experiments on the “Overview” sidebar in the Ads
Manager, under the “Performance Max experiments” menu. Right now you have two options: Test uplift from Performance Max. Test vs. Shopping Campaign. Basically it allows you to draft a test campaign and run it with a fraction of the original campaign’s traffic and budget for a specific testing period. We know that advertisers have long been hoping for this feature, so we can only imagine how excited you are!
5. PubWise, the programmatic ad management
platform, is offering its bidding tool on a self-serve basis. This means that publishers can access programmatic demand without having to enter into a technical services agreement. The bidder facilitates direct sales of PubWise inventory and can lead to increased programmatic advertising revenue and yield, the firm claims. It supports web and mobile display AMP, CTV and video formats. Registration is free for publishers who can implement the PWBid adapter via any Prebid.js or compatible
third-party wrapper. PubWise's Smart Path Optimization Technology uses machine learning to optimize dynamically across the programmatic supply chain. In addition, PubWise has the authority to grant qualified publishers access to Google Ad Exchange (Google AdX). The company's header bidding code is in place on hundreds of sites, logging hundreds of billions of data points and direct access to demand through its DSP and DMP.
6. Advertisers can
now activate their first-party customer data with The Trade Desk's new product, Galileo.With Galileo, advertisers can optimize digital media buys and measure business outcomes.Galileo incorporates integrations with all major customer relationship management (CRM), customer data platform (CDP) and other data and clean room providers to allow users to 'instantly' match audiences across publishers, platforms, devices and channels, including connected TV. Samantha Jacobson (pictured), Chief
Strategy Officer at The Trade Desk, said: 'The infrastructure of the Internet is embracing new identity solutions built for today's digital media consumption across different devices and apps such as Unified ID 2.0. With Galileo, we will help the world's major advertisers take advantage of this by unleashing the value of their most valuable customer data.'
8. Anheuser-Busch has announced it will have three minutes of national air time in this
year's Super Bowl after ending its exclusivity deal with the Big Game last year. The beer giant's decision in June to not renew opened the door for other alcohol brands to advertise during the game, and now Anheuser-Busch is taking full advantage. "We are the biggest advertiser," said Benoit Garbe, chief marketing officer at Anheuser-Busch. "The reality is that there was no true exclusivity." As competitors were able to buy regional ads, Garbe said Anheuser-Busch spent 3.5 times more
than its competitors. Fox is reportedly selling 30-second ad spots for $7 million.
9. GroupM, WPP’s media investment group, today announced that Josh Krichefski will serve as GroupM CEO for EMEA and the U.K., effective February 1.Krichefski will succeed Demet Ikiler and Karen Blackett OBE, who served as GroupM’s U.K. CEO until her elevation to a new role as president of WPP in the U.K. in September 2022. In this newly created role,
Krichefski will be responsible for managing GroupM’s business strategy, operations, and growth across EMEA and the United Kingdom. GroupM is the leading media investment organization in both EMEA and the U.K., representing $23 billion in advertising investment in the region and 32 percent market share. The company employs more than 16,000 individuals across 42 markets in EMEA through its agencies Mindshare, Wavemaker, EssenceMediacom, and mSix&Partners; its investment division Motion Content
Group; and GroupM Nexus, the world’s leading community of performance marketing experts
10. Twitter's ban on third-party clients has been in effect since October 20th, 2022. After that date, all apps that "create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications" were banned by Twitter. The ban was buried in an update to the developer agreement on Thursday, and came a week after several
popular third-party clients stopped working without any explanation from Twitter. The new clause in the developer agreement also appears to have been added since the developer rules were last updated on Oct. 20th, 2022, per an archived version of the site.
11. TikTok CEO Shouzi Chew is facing some tough questions from EU officials about the app’s compliance with EU law. EU Commissioner Thierry Breton told Chew during a video call Thursday that
TikTok needs to step up its efforts to comply with the Digital Services Act, which is set to take effect in September. “We will not hesitate to adopt the full scope of sanctions to protect our citizens if audits do not show full compliance,” Breton said, according to Reuters. Breton’s comments come at a time when TikTok, owned by Chinese internet giant ByteDance, is also coming under intense scrutiny from the U.S. government due to national security concerns. In Washington, some
lawmakers are calling for a ban on TikTok based on concerns that China’s government could gain access to American users’ personal data and influence the app’s content.
12. Amazon is adding Len Blavatnik’s international sports streaming service DAZN to the roster of streaming channels available through Prime Video, giving DAZN access to Amazon’s audience. DAZN streams European football leagues including the Bundesliga and English
Premier League.Amazon offers a wide array of streaming services owned by other firms through its Prime Video service. The feature makes it easy for Prime Video subscribers to subscribe to the channels, while Amazon takes a cut of the subscription price. In this case, DAZN will be available on Amazon in Germany and Spain starting on Thursday, with more countries to come later this year, according to the companies.
