Social Media Can Be Hazardous to Your Health. Here’s the Google API You’re Counting On

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The kids are not okay

Is advertising to children on social media as bad as cigarette advertising?

Not necessarily (although inhaling X would be ill-advised in either case). However, recent government concerns about children’s use of social media will almost certainly draw more comparisons in that direction.

For The Washington PostForty-two state attorneys general (out of 56, including U.S. territories) have called on Congress to place warning labels on social media platforms, as recently proposed by Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.

On the other side of the world, AP News reports that the Australian government has proposed a minimum age for children to use social media — although it’s not entirely clear how verification will work. (Not to mention the teenagers who got around Myspace’s restrictions by claiming they were 101.)

Regarding this last point, most social networks already have their own policies regarding allowing access by children under 13, and it is technically not possible to directly target content to this audience (although “hidden advertisement” continues to raise serious concerns).

But as Drum The stances, warnings – and negative health associations with social media in general – are creating a larger brand safety issue that’s causing even more advertisers to abandon platforms and switch to other media.

Better than a breakup?

Judge Leonie Brinkema, the 80-year-old woman presiding over the Google antitrust case, surprised Ari Paparo, a viewer covering the hearing for Marketingeturainterrupting during The Trade Desk Chief Business Officer Jed Dederick’s testimony Wednesday to ask: “If scale is key and Google gets ‘smashed,’ will that make things harder for buyers?”

It’s hard to say, but it sounds like someone is already considering what a decision against Google would look like.

If Google benefits from the scale of publishers, advertisers, and search engines, would breaking up Google based on regulation negatively impact publisher revenues and advertiser efficiency?

One option available to the Justice Department would be a remedial solution, rather than a breakup and sale. In a separate antitrust case involving search that was settled against Google, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg makes the case in blog post that Google should make this scale available via API.

Weinberg writes that Google derives enormous value from observing search trends over time and being able to experiment at scale.

DuckDuckGo doesn’t want the Google scale to disappear. It wants scale to improve our own search algorithms.

The power of scale is also being taken into account in the “open display advertising on the internet” market – this is Google’s second antitrust case.

Can RMNs earn money from this?

Programmatic marketing to customers creates a strange tension because the programmatic part of the equation does not align with the customer-facing part of the equation.

Before the internet, Walmart, Macy’s, Target, and any department or grocery store required brands to put a percentage of sales back into marketing. If store sales increase by 50%, brands must increase marketing proportionally.

‘Retail media networks are asking brands to spend significantly more year over year,’ says a dismayed agency director Digi Day“They use that implication, that perception, without saying an eye for an eye: ‘If you don’t spend, you’ll suffer the consequences.'”

Until now, online retail media has consisted almost entirely of product placement ads on search pages or retailers’ own sites. They are directly attributable, like coupons, with a high ROI. If they work, it’s easy to increase spend.

The new frontrunners are retail media networks (RMNs) that market brands through CTV and social media ads, which are higher-funnel media that don’t have the same direct purchase intent.

This type of online retail media spend comes with more attribution scrutiny because it’s further away from the sale. RMNs are increasingly being asked to prove it.

But wait, that’s not all!

This historic newspaper relies on AI-generated presenters rather than human journalists.404 Media)

Let’s take a look at the NFL’s AI strategy. (The Age of Advertising)

Meta has trained its AI based on virtually everything you have publicly released since 2007. (Edge)

More than six million users signed up for Max in the last quarter, Warner Bros. Discovery reports. (Diversity)

Consulting firms’ recruitment dilemma ahead of Harris-Trump election. (Axial)

You’ve been hired!

Raptive names Tom Critchlow as executive vice president of audience development. (release)