Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Green Means Go
Privacy and sustainability are critical topics for the future of humanity, and both are top priorities for many high earners in the US and the UK. So, of course, they’re used for cynical marketing purposes and anti-competition skullduggery.
With an intro like that, bet you didn’t expect this to be an item about Unilever’s ice cream recipes – but it is!
The Wall Street Journal reports that Unilever is overhauling its ice creams, including Ben & Jerry’s and Magnum, to maintain their structural integrity and “distinctive mouthfeel” at higher temps. It’s a costly initiative, but Unilever owns millions of freezers that carry its products in stores. If Unilever can sell ice cream at 10 degrees instead of zero, it’ll save between 20% and 30% per freezer. (Those freezers make up 10% of Unilever’s entire greenhouse gas footprint.)
But the move will also be a key marketing plug, of course … not to mention that rival ice creams stocked by bodegas and convenience stores in Unilever-owned freezers will melt. Lol.
Another factor here, however, is ecommerce. Ice cream is a brutal category for delivery or store pickup. When ice cream melts, as it inevitably will do, the brand collects bad reviews. And ice cream companies are punished by algorithms, like Amazon’s, where rankings are tied to how effectively products are warehoused and delivered.
Guess let’s call it sustainability?
The Podded Plant
Is podcast advertising in a slump?
Spotify has been a major acquirer of podcasts and podcast ad tech. But top executives at Spotify, including proponents of podcasting, have exited recently, and the company appears to be pulling back.
Some of its splashiest podcast deals – The Obamas, Joe Rogan, Meghan Markle and Harry Mountbatten Windsor – have turned into perpetual PR migraines.
New podcast launches are way down, and Insider Intelligence halved its forecast for podcast ad growth this year after the category barely grew in 2022.
Another ominous sign is NPR badly missing revenue benchmarks and announcing 10% layoffs. NPR crushes podcasting. No news publisher has as many chart-topping programs. But even compared to flat year-over-year revenue goals, NPR’s advertising – and podcast advertising in particular – is way off the mark, NPR reports (on itself).
That said, the layoffs in NPR’s podcast division might not spread to other units.
“I don’t anticipate that it would be like a haircut across every division,” wrote CEO John Lansing in a memo. “Management is about committing to strategy, making tough decisions.”
State Of Confusion
The American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA), a would-be federal law, has stalled, perhaps permanently. But it’s still a template for the next crop of state privacy laws, Politico reports.
California, Colorado, Virginia, Connecticut and Utah have already passed their own laws – but 16 other states are right behind them. These proposed state laws fall into three camps: those that follow the ADPPA template, those that set tougher restrictions than the ADPPA and those with a more business-friendly framework.
Massachusetts and Illinois, for example, are using the ADPPA to model their proposed laws, while New York and Kentucky fall into the “stricter than ADPPA” camp.
Meanwhile, the business-friendly template is gaining ground thanks (no surprise) to effective state-level lobbying. This set of privacy laws is based on a proposal by Amazon’s lobbyists in Washington state in 2019. Although the Washington law failed to pass, pro-enterprise laws in Virginia and Utah did. And this model has also been taken up by other states, including Indiana, Tennessee and Texas.
However, in an illustration of the ongoing legislative tug of war, Indiana is considering measures to make its law more aligned with the ADPPA. Whether those measures are taken up in the state legislature remains to be seen.
But Wait, There’s More!
Basis Technologies quietly joins a growing list of recent tech layoffs. [MediaPost]
ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, launched a new creator-based media app called Lemon8. [Insider]
How Spotify is using AI. [TechCrunch]
Stagwell adds the digital products and design agency YML to its portfolio of companies. [release]
The Super Bowl featured an above-average percentage of Black performers, according to new analysis by Extreme Reach – but Hispanic representation left something to be desired. [Broadcasting & Cable]
You’re Hired!
Media vet Jon Steinberg is the new CEO of UK-based publisher Future PLC. [Press Gazette]
