Advertising

Television advertising is caught in the crossfire of the country’s political battles. When TV stars such as Roseanne Barr, Samantha Bee and Laura Ingraham get into trouble, advertisers retreat rather than risk having their brand names become collateral damage in the highly charged partisan atmosphere enveloping the media landscape. By the time a comedian or commentator is forced to apologize for a tweet or joke that goes too far, many sponsors want their commercials out before they can become the target of angry social media protests.

Aleksandr Kogan, the academic researcher who harvested personal data from Facebook for a political consultancy firm said that the idea the data was useful in swaying voters’ decisions was “science fiction.”

Facebook is sending a signal to Capitol Hill that it's taking the integrity of its social network seriously during the US primary election season. One of the main messages aimed to be delivered to Capitol Hill: Facebook is taking serious steps to protect its network, flush with 2.2 billion users, from misinformation and other political ploys on the platform.

Facebook, Google, and Amazon all have business models that require them to scoop up large amounts of data about people to power their algorithms, and they derive their power from this information. Like the oil barons at the turn of the 20th century, the data barons are determined to extract as much as possible of a resource that’s central to the economy of their time. The more information they can get to feed the algorithms that power their ad-targeting machines and product-recommendation engines, the better. Their dominance is allowing them to play a dangerous and outsize role in our polit

Several major acquisitions have helped Google and Facebook on their way to unprecedented dominance over the advertising supply chain, antitrust analysts argued at the Open Markets Institute forum. There are six acquisitions that experts cited as missed opportunities by regulators at the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission to curb the advertising market dominance of Google and Facebook.

AT&T will soon offer a new streaming video service thanks to its acquisition of Time Warner, and it will be buying more companies in order to beef up its advertising platform, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said. The streaming service will be free for AT&T mobile customers who subscribe to unlimited data plans and $15 a month for everyone else. AT&T will announce more acquisitions soon to improve its advertising system.

The House Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection Subcommittee drilled down on targeted digital advertising. Subcommittee Chairman Bob Latta (R-OH) said the idea behind the hearing was to look at the benefits as well as the "emerging, high-profile challenges" of digital advertising, including the Russian election influence ads that have drawn calls, and some action, for better identifying who is placing those digital ads. The use of the word "challenges" was telling. Other legislators have labeled them "scandals" or "problems" in need of government fixes. Subcommittee 

The Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees rleased nearly 500 pages of information Facebook provided concerning more than 2,000 questions from lawmakers on topics including its policies on user data, privacy and security. Yet much of the information that Facebook included was not new and the social network sidestepped providing detailed answers, in a move that may embolden some of its critics.