The Great Convergence
Warner Bros. Discovery isn’t the only merger that Paramount Skydance has up its sleeve.
Business Insider reports that Paramount’s ad tech and product teams are consolidating under newly hired EVP and former Google leader Hugh Williams, according to a memo sent to employees in June.
There will be five divisions to the new grouping: product management, led by a team of four executives; engineering, led by new hire Rich Orne; advertising solutions, led by longtime Paramount exec Dayna Wasilefski; a small client relations team led by new Field CTO Travis Scoles; and data, which doesn’t yet have a head honcho.
The reorganization is part of CEO David Ellison’s overarching goal to update Paramount’s ad tech offerings, which have lagged in comparison to competitors like Netflix, NBCUniversal and, yes, even WBD.
Paramount also recently converged the teams responsible for unifying the Paramount+ and Pluto TV ad tech stacks, a project that leadership has been talking about since the 2025 merger with Skydance.
So, a silver lining for Ellison: On the off chance that the UK regulatory challenge to Paramount’s acquisition of WBD gums up the works and Paramount can’t acquire WBD’s NEO ad platform, at least Paramount won’t be completely bereft on the ad tech front.
Meta’s Facebooker Marketers
Meta, as a brand, is dealing with the same issue as thousands of other marketers. Which is to say, it’s trying to navigate how to use AI in its own day-to-day.
That’s the narrative through line for two C-suite appointments the company announced this week. Longtime Meta CMO Alex Schultz becomes the company’s first-ever chief data officer and is replaced as chief marketer by Denise Moreno, Adweek reports. Between the two of them, Schultz and Moreno have more than 35 years of experience at Meta, each joining long before Facebook went public.
Both execs teased using AI to evolve Meta’s data-based marketing. Not that they said anything concrete.
“The teams that win won’t be the ones that hand everything to the machine,” writes Moreno in a LinkedIn post announcing her promotion. “They’ll be the ones that pair AI’s speed and scale with human judgment and taste.”
Writes Schultz in his own “news to share” missive: “I’ve become increasingly convinced that data, research and experimentation are going to continue [to] be some of the most important strategic capabilities for every company, but they need to be transformed.”
So, just like everyone else, it sounds like Meta’s still figuring out the whole AI thing.
Never The Twain Shall Meet
FIFA and World Cup sponsor brands are leaning on social influencers to boost their investments.
One tailwind for creators is that brands have moved beyond gameable social metrics like clicks, likes and views. Nowadays, marketers attribute influencer campaigns based on “more nebulous” factors, as Digiday puts it, such as a brand’s online share of voice during a major cultural moment.
Influencers also report that FIFA has a refreshingly laissez-faire attitude toward what people can post during the World Cup. It’s allowed access to stadiums, provided pre- and post-production at the venues and even facilitated interviews with players. That’s a big difference compared to, say, the Olympics.
On the other hand, soccer creator campaigns remain in a separate universe from the actual TV broadcasts.
Fox Sports, the US World Cup broadcaster, has a whole influencer setup in Times Square with two creators watching every match from a transparent cube. They’re getting paid $50,000 each. But, anecdotally, that influencer campaign hasn’t come up during Fox’s broadcasts. Likewise, the battalions of FIFA influencers throughout the stadiums are never put to use during live programming.
While influencers are starting to earn their share within marketing, the next step is becoming a part of the production itself.
But Wait! There’s More!
Fandom FOMO: What it is and how to catch the fun before it waddles away. [PR News]
The rise of pharma ad tech. [Digiday]
How DuckDuckGo turned AI backlash into a winning marketing strategy. [Ad Age]
Companies continue to beg their employees not to use so much AI as costs spiral. [404 Media]
Budgets are tight, and “mid-sized” packages of food are disappearing as consumers opt for smaller budget packs or mega value packs – sorry, Goldilocks. [WSJ]
South Africa’s grocery giants are competing for AI conversions, and the challenger is leaning on Google Gemini. [Bloomberg]
$250 used to get you a lifetime membership to Plex’s streaming media server. Now it’ll get you a five-year subscription, while the lifetime plan costs $750. [The Desk]
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
