AdWeek

Immediately after Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, some changes were made to the White House's official website and social media accounts. Though the plan to move Barack Obama's tweets as @POTUS to @POTUS44 was already in place, the Twitter account was wiped clean of tweets and followers to prepare it for President Trump (though he will reportedly continue to use @realDonaldTrump). WhiteHouse.gov also saw lightning-fast changes, many of which observant Twitter users pointed out right away. Pages that contained information on issues such as LGBT and climate change as well as many resources on healthcare and civil rights were removed from the site.

The final week of Donald Trump's campaign for president has turned into a question of "will he? or won't he?" like some kind of sitcom romance. The week of Oct 24, it was reported that Trump only donated $31,000 of his own money to his campaign in early October. (By comparison, rival Hillary Clinton shelled out $50,000 of her own cash.) To show them who's boss, he wired $10 million to his campaign that very same day to buy more ad time.

But is it too little too late? Local markets have been consistently reporting that Trump isn't spending what they expected him to, even when compared to previous election cycles. Perhaps that's because he's waiting until the last minute to book ad time, or that his campaign has been more focused on damage control, or maybe it's the free media he garners from his rallies, which just got a shot in the arm from the FBI. Whatever the reasons, according to Strata, a Comcast-owned ad-tech software firm that processes $50 billion in ad transactions a year, many political agencies don't believe he'll ramp up the ad spend.

[Commentary] As a complement to traditional polling, both campaigns can take advantage of the massive scale available via social affinities. Using an algorithm-based approach to measure the engagement behaviors of hundreds of millions of social users—think commenting, photo posting and retweeting—candidates can see which brands, TV shows, movies and celebrities engage their social bases.

Affinity measurement is a perpetual polling mechanism, constantly monitoring millions of preferences and passions. In contrast to social listening tools, measuring affinities identifies which entities will be most receptive by gauging the intensity of engagement between candidates and their potential voters.

[JT Compeau leads client services for AffinityAnswers, the first industry platform for predictive branding.]

It seems counterintuitive that advertisers would be interested in anonymity-based platforms in an age of Facebook hypertargeting.

Vegas.com is the latest in a string of brands to bet on incognito platforms such as smartphone app Anomo, after Whisper, Hulu and Universal Pictures.

Not everyone sees the light on dark social. Harley Block, brand development svp at agency Rokkan, predicted some marketers will wait until there is more scale. But he also hinted that anonymous platforms do have a Vegas kind of appeal.

It’s obvious by now that something has gone wrong in the television advertising world -- upfront dollar volume fell by 6.1 percent to $18.125 billion, including a 4.7 percent hit for cable, which dipped for the first time in four years to $9.675 billion. So, where are those dollars going?

More than one source has suggested that we're finally seeing the advent of digital advertising: With so much inventory on the market, it just makes sense that some TV dollars are shifting to digital video, where it's easy to buy cheaply and in bulk for an ad to run soon.

But even digital video sellers caution against making such a blanket assertion.

Jason Krebs, head of sales at Maker Studios, has seen a "noticiable uptick" in marketer spending but isn't entirely sure where the dollars are coming from. Krebs suggested that the shift may not be from a TV budget to a digital budget, but rather toward an overall video spend that includes everything on the market, given that many of the ads are the same on TV as online.