Advertising

Here are five fights the tech world will be watching closely in 2018:

1. Net neutrality
2. Election transparency
3. AT&T-Time Warner merger
4. Cryptocurrency
5. Sex-trafficking

The ability of advertisers to deliver their message to the precise audience most likely to respond is the cornerstone of Facebook’s business model. But using the system to expose job opportunities only to certain age groups has raised concerns about fairness to older workers. Several experts questioned whether the practice is in keeping with the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, which prohibits bias against people 40 or older in hiring or employment.

Political advertisements on Facebook would have to include disclaimers showing who paid for them, under legal opinions the nation’s federal election regulators are taking up Thursday. If the Federal Election Commission (FEC) votes to adopt the requirement at its Dec 14 meeting, it would mark the first federal move to formally regulate political advertising on social media following revelations that Kremlin-tied groups used ads on Facebook and other platforms in an effort to sway the 2016 presidential election.

Russian disinformation isn’t the only deceptive political advertising on Facebook. The pitch designed to lure President Donald Trump’s critics is one of more than a dozen politically themed advertisements masking consumer rip-offs that ProPublica has identified since launching an effort in September to monitor paid political messages on the world’s largest social network.

News Corp is taking aim at the digital-ad dominance of Google and Facebook with a new platform to let advertisers reach audiences across all of its online properties. The new platform, called News IQ, will pull audience data from sites like The Wall Street Journal, New York Post and Barron's and give advertisers a way to reach specific audiences around safe content.  News Corp is the latest publishing company to launch a data-based advertising network to win back digital ad dollars from Google and Facebook. Disney, NBC and Vox Media, and Verizon and Oath have all similar steps.

Google and Facebook are set to attract 84 percent of global spending on digital advertising, excluding China, in 2017, according to a forecast from GroupM, the WPP-owned media buying agency, underscoring concerns that the two technology companies have become a digital duopoly. The research predicts that total global ad spending will increase by about $23 billion, or 4.3 percent, in 2018.

In February, Facebook said it would step up enforcement of its prohibition against discrimination in advertising for housing, employment or credit. But our tests showed a significant lapse in the company’s monitoring of the rental market. Last week, ProPublica bought dozens of rental housing ads on Facebook, but asked that they not be shown to certain categories of users, such as African Americans, mothers of high school kids, people interested in wheelchair ramps, Jews, expats from Argentina and Spanish speakers.

[Commentary] 1. Presidential election hangover: Advertising revenue comparisons can often be a drag on earnings, but nothing stings quite like a quarter that has to stack up with a presidential election, particularly one as contentious as the 2016 race.

2. Mobile future: It might be hard for programmers to continue to grow their affiliate revenue. But Viacom CEO Bob Bakish sees mobile content as a potential growth driver in the future.

3. Retransmission express: The retransmission revenue train just keeps on chugging along.

AT&T’s former Mobility Chief Glenn Lurie says the wireless pure-play is on its way out. “I do think, long term, you’re going to see less single-play players and more double- and triple-play players, and more bundling. Because without question the customer expectation is going to change, and it is changing. Their expectation is around having everything on their device, having their video on the device, being able to do the things around social on the device. So, I just think that for carriers to continue to grow, they’re going to have to diversify.

The Federal Election Commission moved a step closer to placing tighter regulations on Internet ads published on major Web platforms, marking a significant shift for an agency beset by partisan dysfunction and another sign that regulators are seeking to thwart foreign meddling in U.S. elections. All five members of the commission voted to start a rulemaking process to require disclaimers for small, character-limited political ads that run online on places such as Facebook, Google and Twitter.