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On this day in 1912, readers learned that the Rayo Lamp, the best lamp for reading and sewing on the market, cost a mere $1.49. Made by Standard Oil, it came with a chimney and 10-inch white dome shade for…
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Tag: advertising
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How This Family Business Went Viral Using Old School Advertising
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For more than a century, Red Wing Shoe Company has designed and manufactured work boots in the United States with leather sourced from its own tannery. The family-owned, privately held business, which was founded in 1905 in Red Wing, Minnesota, wanted to remind its customers of that commitment to craftsmanship, so the shoemaker decided to add some distinctive texture to its advertising.
Over the past few weeks, Red Wing unveiled two unique billboards. One of the signs, which measures 18 by 40 feet and currently sits over downtown Minneapolis, is made entirely out of wood. The other one is constructed completely from leather. Both the signs have the same message, “Made the hard way” above the company’s name and logo.
That’s more than a tagline for the shoe maker. It’s an all-encompassing strategy for how to operate a business. In that spirit, the company shared behind-the-scenes videos of the meticulous construction process that went into the billboards, showing teams of workers sawing, drilling, buffing, sanding, and nailing together the four words.
The billboards, just like the brand’s American-made work boots, were “built the hard way by hand,” said Aaron Seymour, the company’s head of brand and creative, in a post on LinkedIn that has gone viral in the span of a week. To pull off this unusual approach, Seymour said that Red Wing partnered with Wieden + Kennedy, an independent creative agency based in Portland Oregon.
Red Wing’s leather billboard. Photo: Courtesy Company This is not Red Wing’s first taste of virality. The shoemaker has a history of marketing work boots in creative ways. In 2023, the Minnesota company teamed up with Nintendo to design “a pixel-for-stitch recreation” of Mario’s rounded-heel, leather boots from The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
At the time, Dave Schneider, the company’s chief marketing officer, said of the collaboration, “We’ve been supplying long-lasting, durable and comfortable footwear that protects trades workers on the job site for 118-years. We were excited to deliver that same ambition and energy to Mario’s Boots as one of the most famous plumbers in the world.”
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Ali Donaldson
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Avoid the After-Click Abyss
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Marketers obsess over clicks. We A/B test headlines, refine creative, and squeeze every cent of ROI from media budgets. Yet, most performance collapses right after the click. That invisible drop-off.
The after-click abyss is where customers vanish into a maze of embedded browsers, login walls, and broken attribution. You paid for the audience. But you lost the customer.
The problem isn’t your ad copy or landing page speed. It’s the fragmentation of mobile itself. This challenge isn’t new. I previously explored how smart links became a way to restore continuity across splintered mobile experiences, work that now feels like an early warning for the scale of what marketers face today.
Every major app, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and even email clients, now act as their own mini browsers. Each has isolated cookie storage and no referral data.
To your analytics platform, that means one customer suddenly looks like five different people: one in Safari, one in Facebook, one in TikTok, one in Gmail. To your customer, it feels like starting over with every tap.
When a shopper clicks an Instagram ad and lands inside Instagram’s in-app browser, that session doesn’t recognize her login or past purchases. She’s asked to sign in again. Friction wins, thus you lose.
Or a text message link opens in the wrong browser (outside your brand’s app) where tracking breaks and attribution disappears. The conversion may still happen, but it’s logged as “organic.” Multiply that blind spot across millions of sessions, and your performance data becomes fiction.
Most “broken journeys” aren’t technical failures; they’re context failures.
- A QR code leads to a generic country-selector page instead of a localized offer.
- A paid social link opens in a sandboxed browser that can’t recognize prior behavior.
- A remarketing ad drives a user into a duplicate session that analytics can’t connect.
Each tiny misfire adds friction, erodes trust, and drains return on ad spend. According to Accenture’s 2025 Me, my brand, and AI report, 34 percent of consumers want to feel special, and would switch from a preferred brand to another that does this. Those who experience emotionally engaging interactions are 2.3 times more likely to recommend the brand and 1.7 times more willing to pay a premium. When post-click continuity breaks, so does that sense of connection, and with it, the loyalty that drives long-term value.
The cost of invisible friction
These quiet leaks rarely make headlines, yet they siphon billions in abandoned carts and lost conversions annually. They distort ROI calculations, mislead media allocation, and mask high-performing channels that never get credit.
Worse, they erode digital trust. A customer who must log in twice or reconfirm preferences doesn’t feel “recognized;” they feel unknown. In an age when attention is currency, that’s an expensive first impression to waste.
Most marketers never see it because analytics dashboards stop at the click. The data looks healthy, traffic steady, yet conversion rates are “average.” Beneath the surface, embedded app browsers and cookie silos prevent your measurement tools from seeing where people actually drop off.
Close the abyss with intelligent linking
The solution begins before the landing page, at the link itself.
Smart, context-aware links detect device, browser, and app ownership in real time, then route each user to the most seamless destination:
- Opening the right screen in your mobile app
- Bypassing redundant logins
- Localizing language and currency automatically
These intelligent links capture metadata that traditional analytics miss, such as which app or embedded browser drove the click, which country or language was used, and whether the visitor opened a native app or web view.
Suddenly, marketers regain the missing visibility. Campaigns can be optimized for the after-click experience, not just the pre-click audience.
The bridge to better measurement
In truth, post-click failures are measurement blackouts. When your data ends at the click, every downstream decision from budgeting and creative to attribution is built on partial truth.
By instrumenting the link itself, brands can reconnect those fractured identities and rebuild continuity across channels. That continuity restores both the user experience and the analytics fidelity that modern marketing depends on.
Smart linking doesn’t replace your stack, it strengthens it. It turns the humble hyperlink into a dynamic bridge—one that closes the gap between platforms, browsers, and customer intent.
A ten-minute audit for marketers
If you suspect an after-click abyss in your funnel, run this simple diagnostic:
- Tap your latest ad from Instagram or TikTok.
- Notice which browser opens and whether you’re recognized.
- Try the same link from SMS, email, or QR code.
If any path feels disjointed, so does your attribution.
Fixing the invisible breaks can outperform tweaks in creative or budget reallocation because you’re reclaiming value that already exists and visitors you’ve already paid to reach.
In today’s splintered mobile landscape, the only consistent signal left is the link itself. It’s the thread that ties the ad impression to the conversion, the audience to the outcome.
Marketers who master the after-click experience aren’t just improving UX, they’re reclaiming lost revenue, restoring measurement integrity, and rebuilding customer trust.
Because in the end, performance marketing isn’t about getting the click. It’s about ensuring every click counts.
Go inside one interesting founder-led company each day to find out how its strategy works, and what risk factors it faces. Sign up for 1 Smart Business Story from Inc. on Beehiiv.
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Brian Klais
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Tech Companies Were Everywhere at the Las Vegas Grand Prix. Except One
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If you wanted to understand how much Formula 1 has become a technology story, you didn’t have to look at a single lap time in Las Vegas. All you had to do was walk around.
Google was there, partnering with McLaren, including prominent Gemini, Android, and Chrome branding throughout the weekend. HP is literally in Ferrari’s team name. The same is true for Oracle and Red Bull Racing.
Photo Credit: Jason Aten T-Mobile was the official 5G partner of the Las Vegas Grand Prix, and built out major magenta-branded experiences. Peloton, serving as the race’s official fitness partner, created on-site activations tied to its workout and training content.
Amazon, through AWS, was there. The cloud giant continued its long-standing role as a technology and data partner of Formula 1, powering everything from race analytics to broadcast graphics. Paramount+, the streaming service, had an entire corner painted with its logo. Meta had its logo on the top of the Mercedes helmets. And across the paddock and garages, companies like Salesforce, Siemens, CrowdStrike, Dropbox, 1Password, and Zoom were represented through their team and series-level partnerships.
Everyone showed up. Well, except one.
Apple takes over F1 rights in the U.S. next year
At a race where it seemed like tech companies were everywhere, there was one obvious absence: Apple. And that’s strange, because next season Apple will be the exclusive U.S. broadcast partner for Formula 1—taking over for ESPN, which has held the rights since 2018.
For Apple, it’s the most ambitious sports-rights deal the company has ever done. You would think this would be the moment Apple started telling a story. Something. Anything. But at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Apple was invisible.
There were no Vision Pro racing simulators tucked into the paddock clubs. Unlike the Super Bowl, there were no Apple Music performances. No Apple TV fan zones or “shot on iPhone” installations. No Apple Maps AR activations, even though the event is literally a street circuit.
Expanding the relationship
Sure, technically Apple’s deal doesn’t start until next year, but the companies already have a relationship through F1: The Movie. And, with Formula 1, holding its flashiest U.S. race in front of the largest concentration of tech, media, and entertainment decision-makers imaginable, it seems a little strange that Apple didn’t even bring a banner.
Photo Credit: Jason Aten To be fair, part of that is how F1 works. It’s a maze of sponsorship categories and exclusivities. The commercial rights structure is notoriously rigid. Almost everything inside the paddock is spoken for. If someone already owns the wearable category, Apple can’t just plop Vision Pro units down wherever it wants. If another partner holds streaming rights, Apple TV can’t set up a branded stage.
But here’s the thing: everybody else figured it out. After all, Google managed to turn McLaren’s wheel covers into Chrome logos. If Apple wanted to be seen, it would have figured out a way.
I mean, Atlassian—an enterprise software company—literally wrapped a Formula 1 car in a livery celebrating its AI assistant. If they can find space for Jira on a race car, surely there’s room on the Strip for an Apple activation.
Which leaves the more likely explanation: Apple doesn’t show up until it can control the experience. And right now, it can’t.
More than just logos on a car
The problem is that brand presence in Formula 1 isn’t just advertising; it’s signaling. It tells fans—and executives, and partners, and teams—what you think this sport is worth. And right now, one of the world’s most valuable companies is about to take over the broadcast of the world’s fastest sport, and hasn’t given fans any hint of what to expect.
Obviously, the 2026 season hasn’t arrived yet, and Apple usually waits to show its hand until it’s ready. The company doesn’t do anything that hasn’t been fully considered and intentionally rolled out. When it decides to reinvent an experience—music, phones, payments, fitness—it starts quietly and then rewrites the script.
But if the Las Vegas Grand Prix is a preview of the future of Formula 1 as a cultural event, one thing is clear: tech companies aren’t just attending these races. They’re taking over the grid. This year, it seemed as though everyone was in Las Vegas. Well, everyone except the one company that’s about to own the broadcast.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
The final deadline for the 2026 Inc. Regionals Awards is Friday, December 12, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.
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Jason Aten
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How to Build B2B Trust in the Age of AI
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91% of buyers don’t trust marketing today*.
AI hasn’t just changed how we create content — it has completely reshaped how people judge credibility, authenticity, and intent.
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LIBN Staff
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OpenAI is Reportedly Developing a Music Tool. Here’s How It Could Enhance Your Marketing Strategy
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OpenAI is reportedly developing a generative music tool. While no release date has been announced, it would allow users to create music for videos or vocal tracks based on text and audio prompts, according to a report in The Information.
For founders, marketers, and ad pros, this could mean creating demos for a catchy jingle or moody soundtrack to reflect the voice and tone of their brand in minutes. Think the next “I’m lovin’ it” or “Nationwide is on your side.”
One of The Information’s sources says a group of students at the Juilliard School is helping annotate scores to train the AI model. But training has been a point of contention in AI music. In June of 2024, some of the largest record labels in the world, including Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group, sued Suno AI and Uncharted Labs, alleging that the companies unlawfully trained their generative AI on copyrighted music.
The Recording Industry Association of America, representing the labels, added another complaint to the lawsuit in September. It claimed Suno used stream ripping, a version of music piracy, to download the copyrighted recordings from YouTube.
Spotify has also been under fire recently for streaming AI music and other AI connections. According to AI Magazine, musicians are boycotting the platform after its CEO invested in Helsing, a military AI company. English band Massive Attack objected to artists’ work and fans’ money contributing to funding “lethal, dystopian technologies.”
While AI-generated bands and their creators have faced backlash from fans, like this summer’s Velvet Sundown mess, AI music often celebrated in the ad world. Last year, for example, Red Lobster made a splash by using AI to write 30 songs, across genres, about its Cheddar Bay Biscuits.
Keep Reading:
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Ava Levinson
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Among the Talibros
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Three hostages kneel in front of a camera, their hands tied behind their backs and their heads covered with black plastic bags that obscure their faces. Looming behind them is a group of bearded, glowering militants, dressed in tunics and turbans, some holding assault rifles.
“We have one message for America,” the man standing in the middle says, with one hand resting on the shoulder of the kneeling figure in front of him, the other hand jabbing the air to emphasize his speech. To people of a certain age, this scene is immediately recognizable. The intense stares, the polemical script, the stillness of the kneeling bodies—it was all eerily reminiscent of the videos of Daniel Pearl and James Foley being beheaded by Islamic figures.
Thankfully, this video took a different turn. The speaker removes the bag from the face of the man kneeling before him, who then proceeds to flash a Hollywood smile and give an emphatic thumbs-up. “Welcome to Afghanistan!” he says straight into the camera, after which a montage of Westerners posing for pictures in mountain glens and doing pullups on the barrels of tank guns starts to play.
Yosaf Aryubi, an Afghan American in his late twenties, made the video as an advertisement for his travel agency, Raza Afghanistan, which organizes tours of the country. Aryubi, who splits his time between Afghanistan and California, plays the role of would-be executor, while Jake Youngblood Dobbs, an American travel influencer who was on a tour with Raza at the time, is the ersatz victim whom Aryubi unveils. The video is simultaneously a provocative advertisement for Aryubi’s company—as well as an encouragement for tourists to visit Afghanistan. The pro-Taliban social-media account @afghanarabc shared the post, indicating at least a bit of an official imprimatur for Aryubi’s stunt. (The account has also shared other English-language videos, including a clip from Tucker Carlson’s show, in which he positively contrasts Afghanistan’s punitive drug-treatment programs to those in America.)
I hate to admit it, but when I first saw this video a couple of months ago, it made me laugh. The tonal whiplash gave it a nonsensical, dark irony, like something an especially cynical Tim Robinson would create. Youngblood and others even have an affectionate nickname for their hosts: Talibros. The dudes-rock montage that followed the execution sketch had some genuinely funny bits. Some guys are fooling around with an assault rifle that has “Property of U.S. Govt” etched on its side. “It’s an American souvenir,” someone jokes. “Oh, it’s not even on safety right now,” the white tourist holding the gun says before the entire group bursts out in the familiar laughter of a group of guys who are doing something stupid and dangerous and, therefore, hilarious.
Still, the opening scene stuck with me, and, in the weeks that followed, I began to interpret it as something less funny and more sinister. Filmed beheadings were indelible images of the wars of my childhood and adolescence in the two-thousands, graphic pieces of contraband we sought out on bootleg websites. I felt queasy thinking back to those videos, a vivid response that I suspect was the goal of this crop of young influencers. Aryubi’s irreverent references to years of violence in Afghanistan are part of a growing library of irony-soaked travel content that simultaneously asks viewers to stop believing everything the mainstream media tells them about the country while also instructing them not to take what the influencers say too seriously. Call it Frommer’s for edgelords. Several other content creators have spent time travelling through Afghanistan, glowingly sharing stories about how men can still be men, given the Taliban’s preservation of traditional values. A few poke fun at Western assumptions of how women are treated in the country. The wildly popular American YouTuber Addison Pierre Maalouf—better known as Arab to his nearly two million subscribers—toured Afghanistan last winter. In one video, he and his companions visit a women’s market.
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T. M. Brown
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The NFL Knows Exactly What It’s Doing With Bad Bunny
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So far, the mainstream business world has avoided clashing with the socio-cultural agenda of the second Trump administration. Many companies have backed away from diversity and climate efforts, capitulated on score-settling lawsuits, and muted objections to everything from tariff schemes to aggressive immigration policies.
It might seem surprising, then, that one of the most mainstream businesses in existence—the National Football League—chose as the star of its Super Bowl LX halftime show Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny, who performs mostly in Spanish and has been openly critical of President Trump. Notably, he recently declined to tour the continental U.S. out of concern over ICE deportation efforts, instead performing a 31-night residency in San Juan, Puerto Rico, that was a massive commercial success.
Certainly the MAGA commentariat behaved as if not just surprised, but triggered, and the backlash in that corner of the culture was immediate and intense. “This isn’t about music, it’s about putting a guy on stage who hates Trump and MAGA,” conservative filmmaker Robby Starbuck declared on social media. “He’s just a terrible person,” said a Newsmax host, calling for a boycott. One administration official suggested Bad Bunny is divisive and pledged “ICE will have enforcement” at the big game. “Massive Trump hater; Anti-ICE activist; No songs in English,” Benny Johnson, a right-wing podcaster, chimed in, adding: “The NFL is self-destructing.”
In reality, it’s hard to argue with Bad Bunny’s popularity, and his decidedly mainstream status. He is among the most-streamed artists of all time. The final show in his San Juan residency was livestreamed on Prime Video and Twitch, setting an Amazon Music viewership record. This weekend the Grammy winner will be host Saturday Night Live for the second time. His wide appeal—particularly among younger fans—is proven. Moreover, there was some similar conservative grousing over rapper Kendrick Lamar being chosen for the slot, and that ended up being the most-watched Super Bowl halftime show of all time, with 133.5 million viewers.
The NFL is not really in the business of being a cultural arbiter, and presumably the decision emanated more from event co-producer Roc Nation (which recently re-upped its NFL deal for the next five years) and halftime-show sponsor Apple Music. But all three entities have the same goal: creating a major cultural event that lives up to the game itself.
In the official announcement, an NFL exec praised Bad Bunny’s “unique ability to bridge genres, languages, and audiences.” That is the business the NFL is in—less a cultural critic and more of an interpreter of where the culture really is now, and is most likely to go next. And sometimes that means getting absorbed into a wider conversation. In fact, the same thing happened in the last Super Bowl, when the choice of Lamar became a cultural-debate talking point.
“All these white people mad about Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl performance,” one X user posted at the time, “I hope next year they get Bad Bunny performing the whole set in Spanish.”
Prescient call! But still. It would be a mistake to see this as the NFL overtly taking sides—or trolling ideological opponents—in the bickering that the Bad Bunny news sparked. Progressive observers could point to the league’s teams icing out quarterback/activist Colin Kaepernick, or lagging record on hiring diverse coaching staffs, or its track record on confronting concussions and other physical fallout from a brutal sport. The same goal has motivated the NFL through those controversies as the occasional halftime-show flareups: identifying, and courting, the widest audience possible in an otherwise fractured culture.
And its track record has been pretty good. After all the Super Bowl LIX online griping about Lamar, the actual performance received a paltry 125 complaints from viewers to the Federal Communications Commission, Wired reported, many focusing on “the lack of white performers.” Obviously that complaint was hardly a mainstream perspective. To the contrary, it was just a marginal view from a noisy fringe, quickly overtaken—and forgotten.
By Rob Walker
This article originally appeared in Inc.’s sister publication, Fast Company.
Fast Company is the world’s leading business media brand, with an editorial focus on innovation in technology, leadership, world changing ideas, creativity, and design. Written for and about the most progressive business leaders, Fast Company inspires readers to think expansively, lead with purpose, embrace change, and shape the future of business.
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Fast Company
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Sydney Sweeney Has Abandoned Her Jeans
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Photo: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images
Sydney Sweeney shan’t talk pant at the Toronto International Film Festival. In the pages of Vanity Fair, the actress shut down all American Eagle jeans ad talk ahead of her appearance at the fest. Sweeney went to TIFF to promote her new movie Christy, a biopic of professional boxer Christy Martin. “I am there to support my movie and the people involved in making it, and I’m not there to talk about jeans,” Sweeney said. “The movie’s about Christy, and that’s what I’ll be there to talk about.”
Folks want Sweeney to talk denim because of her recent American Eagle ads which some saw as akin to nazi propaganda. The campaign put forward the idea that Sydney Sweeney has “good jeans” that are passed down from generation to generation. Critics of the ads said they were white supremacist and pro-eugenics. Those who defended them said basically the same thing, but in a different font. And Sweeney is saying nothing. She previously refused to talk about jeans at the premiere for Americana.
Wall Street is still talking about the Sydney Sweeney jeans ad, however. The collection sold out within a week. But American Eagle saw slightly declining sales overall during the last financial quarter, per the New York Times. Gap seemingly responded to the eu-jean-ic controversy with an ad featuring girl group Katseye dancing to “Milkshake” by Kellis. The commercial has seen streams of “Milkshake” going through the roof, as well as a TikTok trend of doing the band’s dance inside actual Gaps. Daren Criss, time to once again get your ass to The Grove. Could be funny.
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Bethy Squires
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‘We Were Wrong’: An Oral History of WIRED’s Original Website
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Kevin: When we went to do the IPO, it was very, very clear that the digital side was far more valuable than the magazine side. That was the beginning of the craziness. Here’s a magazine that has a lot of revenue, respectability, great enthusiasm, and support from the readership. And here’s this really weird digital side that’s worth 10 times the magazine.
Jane: When Condé Nast bought WIRED and Lycos bought HotWired, the company combined was worth less than the company separated. To this day, we liken it to Nike deciding to sell their footwear to Puma and their apparel to Adidas. Why would you do that? Why would you take the premier brand that had both the technical credibility as well as the upside of the lifestyle and culture stuff and pull it apart?
Jeff: It was a very traditional and typical tech acquisition where the startup gets acquired and comes into the bigger corporate culture. It just doesn’t work very well.
Jane: Louis and I were so crestfallen, heartbroken, and devastated, and everyone’s like, “Yeah, but everyone got rich.” That was not the point. It was a very, very difficult time.
June: Almost all of us started to feel a pretty profound sense of loss and grief that the culture we knew, the values we believed in as innovators and creators, had been lost. That the industry was no longer about innovation, invention, creativity, and certainly not about democratization. That everything was about money.
Well, maybe. There are 5.45 billion internet users on planet Earth, and sure, some of them are bad actors—no argument from WIRED. But most of us are still raving around the internet, hanging with pals, cruising for jobs and mates, catching up on gossip and news, buying and selling stuff, and finding fellow travelers who share our woes and our passions. And, yes, a slice of us are into fraud, abuse, and bad ideology. Did HotWired not anticipate that humans would be human?
Ian: Back in those days, we’d say, The nice thing about the internet is how safe it is. Everybody’s there to help you, and everybody just wants to do good things. People asked, Why require passwords for stuff, because who’s going to do anything terrible on the internet?
Kevin: Today, a new thing comes along and people immediately say, “I don’t know what it is, but it’s going to hurt me. It’s going to bite me.” That’s definitely a change that wasn’t present when we were starting.
Jeff: But nostalgia can be dangerous. It was really hard what we did, and stressful, and we didn’t know what we were doing. When people say, “If we could only go back to then,” I’m like, no, we only had modems. It was terrible.
John P: As a business, HotWired failed. But all that stuff that we were doing, it was scientific investigation.
Jonathan: We thought the internet was going to be good for people. We were wrong.
Jeff: I still feel like literally anybody with an idea can start hacking on the web or making apps or things like that. That’s all still there. I think the nucleus of what we started back then still exists on the web, and it still makes me really, really happy.
John: We were lucky with WIRED. With HotWired there was no choice, and we couldn’t do it differently if we went back and tried. But we were unlucky to be first.
Condé Nast eventually bought WIRED’s website too—in 2006.
Animation: James Marshall
Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.
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Virginia Heffernan
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NEMLEC Police Foundation to host comedy night
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DRACUT — Who is a mystery but two of Boston’s “best” comedians will perform when the Northeastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council Foundation Inc. hosts its annual comedy night next month to raise money for training programs for police officers in northeastern Massachusetts.
The event is scheduled for Friday, Nov. 1, at Four Oaks Country Club, 1 Clubhouse Lane, Dracut. Doors open at 6 p.m. The program includes a cheese and cracker display, cocktail reception, a full buffet-style dinner, dessert and coffee.
Tickets are $75 per person, or $750 for a table of 10. There are several sponsorship opportunities that range in cost from $250 to $2,000.
NEMLEC allows member agencies to call in the group to respond to emergencies that smaller departments may not be equipped to handle.
Proceeds will assist NEMLEC’s training programs, including NEMLEC SWAT/RRT/K-9 training, NEMLEC Motor Unit annual training, NEMLEC STARS training, basic and advanced criminal investigation training, school and business safety summits, and active shooter training.
The programs are available to officers in the NEMLEC region, which is comprised of 65 law enforcement agencies in Middlesex and Essex counties.
The money also will be used to support local charities, including Cops for Kids with Cancer, which supports families who are struggling with childhood cancer.
Those who would like to buy a ticket or table, donate a raffle or auction item, or become a sponsor for the event, should contact Executive Director Sharon Crowley at 978-852-3589 or by email at nemlecfoundation@yahoo.com.
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Many Brands Risk Being Left Behind By Overlooking These Critical Advertising Steps | Entrepreneur
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Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
The landscape of ad spending has changed significantly in recent years. We have seen a major shift in marketing campaigns from before the pandemic to now. Everything from graphic styles to personalization has evolved, and so has spending. With more brands in the mix, advertising spending is consistently rising.
The question is, why are some still hesitant to adjust their spending? The simple fact is that budgets must change over time. If your budget doesn’t evolve, you won’t be able to compete with the growing number of brands advertising online.
Let’s break down what you need to know if you plan to keep up in the increasingly competitive advertising landscape.
Related: Is Your Advertising Spend Going to Waste? If You Don’t Fully Understand This Metric, It Might Be
Supply and demand dictate spending
Let’s begin with the current situation. Advertising rates are increasing, which means you’ll need to increase your budget to attract the quality of traffic you want. The cost of effective online advertising is determined by supply and demand. When more companies vie for the same ad placement, the price for that placement goes up.
What are the reasons for this recent rise? Firstly, the pandemic fueled a surge in e-commerce as consumers shifted from brick-and-mortar stores to online retailers. However, this boom has been met with challenges. When the world shut down, brands significantly decreased — or even halted altogether — their marketing costs. Now that the economy has picked back up, competition has returned with a vengeance. The dominance of Google Ads and Facebook Ads has also created a double-edged sword for advertisers. While these platforms offer massive reach and targeting capabilities, their popularity has driven up advertising costs. This is due to a classic case of supply and demand. With more businesses vying for the same ad space on these platforms, bidding wars erupt, inflating the cost per click or impression. This trend is further amplified by limitations on data tracking, making it harder for advertisers to pinpoint their ideal audience. The result? Steeper costs for businesses to reach their prospects online. Additionally, the increased popularity of online shopping has attracted more advertisers, driving up competition for consumer attention and inflating the cost of advertising space. These factors are creating a complex landscape for e-commerce businesses, demanding innovative strategies to navigate the new realities of the online marketplace. That, combined with a growing population of advertisers, as well as many brands having moved their marketing online due to remote culture, means costs are, and will only continue, climbing.
Take advantage of technology and automation
Although many business owners decide to take the DIY approach due to cost, the opportunity cost of not knowing how to properly target an audience, use tools to improve your outcomes, and reduce your per-click and per-impression costs is typically far more expensive than working with an expert. One way to produce highly relevant ads is to take advantage of today’s technology. Artificial intelligence can learn more about each subset of your audience than you likely ever could imagine. Moreover, the best AI marketing tools make it easy to use your data to create highly relevant advertisements. So, if you’re still combing through spreadsheets, hoping to find a trend, it’s time to upgrade your technology.
Smart marketing tools and marketing automation are your biggest allies in navigating this challenge. Automation can take the reins on managing your ad spend, constantly searching for the best inventory based on past performance, as well as ongoing ad rates and top-performing channels. Identifying and prioritizing these top-performing channels ensures your budget is directed toward the most impactful avenues. Marketing tools can further serve as cost-cutting allies by pinpointing the most precise targeting options, taking the guesswork out of online advertising and giving you time and energy to take back to other areas of your business. This laser focus eliminates wasted ad spend and time, ensuring your message reaches the exact audience you desire and ultimately reduces your overall ad spend.
Related: 4 Marketing Budget Hacks That Will Boost Your Business in 2024
Plan in advance for disrupted seasons
The holidays may be far away, but from an ad fund standpoint, it’s something you’ll want to be prepared for long before they’re right around the corner. Brands can adhere to various holiday seasons, some may want to up their ad spend tremendously during this time and others may want to reevaluate it. Beyond the holidays, other seasonal events can significantly impact advertising costs. Events like major sporting competitions (e.g., the Olympics, FIFA World Cup), award shows, and even back-to-school season can see increased competition and higher ad rates. These periods of time play a significant role in driving up the cost of advertisements. It’s no secret that consumers like to spend more money during the holiday season compared to their typical spending behavior. As such, it’s important to stay ahead of the curve for your yearly holidays and to note that those periods are when advertisers are most interested in attracting their target audience. That means demand for advertising typically sees significant increases on an annual basis, but keeping an eye out for this and planning ahead will keep you at the forefront. It’s important to make these periods and planning part of your overall marketing strategy.
Over the years, marketers have watched demand climb during the holiday season and seemingly fall after the holiday season. However, that seasonal drop seems to be shrinking each year. Ultimately, marketers seem to be anticipating the drop in demand following the holiday season, and as such, many are saving meaningful amounts of money for this period. This causes an increase in demand that rivals the holiday increase, which in turn means you should continue to consider adding more to your ad fund during these times. Having a marketing automation partner can help set you up for success by automating the process for you.
The bottom line
The bottom line is that the marketing industry has a history of fast-paced evolution, and that evolution isn’t likely to end anytime soon. As more and more advertisers join the fray, demand will likely continue to grow, leading to inflated advertising prices. Make sure your brand is keeping ahead of the competition by planning for the future and potential shifts in advertising.
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Adam Chandler
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Meta Can’t Use Sexual Orientation to Target Ads in the EU, Court Rules
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Europe’s most famous privacy activist, Max Schrems, landed another blow against Meta today after the EU’s top court ruled the tech giant cannot exploit users’ public statements about their sexual orientation for online advertising.
Since 2014, Schrems has complained of seeing advertising on Meta platforms targeting his sexual orientation. Schrems claims, based on data he obtained from the company, that advertisers using Meta can deduce his sexuality from proxies, such as his app logins or website visits. Meta denies it showed Schrems personalized ads based on his off-Facebook data, and the company has long said it excludes any sensitive data it detects from its advertising operations.
The case started with Schrems challenging whether this practice violated Europe’s GDPR privacy law. But it took an unexpected turn when a judge in his home country of Austria ruled Meta was entitled to use his sexuality data for advertising because he had spoken about it publicly during an event in Vienna. The Austrian Supreme Court then referred the case to the EU’s top court in 2021.
Today, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) finally ruled that a person’s sexual orientation cannot be used for advertising, even if that person speaks publicly about being gay.
“Meta Platforms Ireland collects the personal data of Facebook users, including Mr. Schrems, concerning those users’ activities both on and outside that social network,” the court said. “With the data available to it, Meta Platforms Ireland is also able to identify Mr. Schrems’ interest in sensitive topics, such as sexual orientation, which enables it to direct targeted advertising at him.”
The fact that Schrems had spoken publicly about his sexual identity does not authorize any platform to process related data to offer him personalized advertising, the court added.
“Now we know that if you’re on a public stage, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you agree to this personal data being processed,” says Schrems, founder of the Austrian privacy group NOYB. He believes only a handful of Facebook users will have the same issue. “It’s a really, really niche problem.”
The CJEU also ruled today Meta has to limit the data it uses for advertising more broadly, essentially setting ground rules for how the GDPR should be enforced. Europe’s privacy law means personal data should not be “aggregated, analyzed, and processed for the purposes of targeted advertising without restriction as to time and without distinction as to type of data,” the court said in a statement.
“It’s really important to set ground rules,” says Katharina Raabe-Stuppnig, the lawyer representing Schrems. “There are some companies who think they can just disregard them and get a competitive advantage from this behavior.”
Meta said it was waiting for the CJEU’s judgment to be published in full. “Meta takes privacy very seriously and has invested over 5 billion Euros to embed privacy at the heart of all of our products,” Meta spokesperson Matt Pollard told WIRED. “Everyone using Facebook has access to a wide range of settings and tools that allow people to manage how we use their information.”
Schrems has been a prolific campaigner against Meta since a legal challenge he made resulted in a surprise 2015 ruling invalidating a transatlantic data transfer system over concerns US spies could use it to access EU data. His organization has since filed legal complaints against Meta’s pay-for-privacy subscription model and the company’s plans to use Europeans’ data to train its AI.
“It’s major for the whole online advertisement space. But for Meta, it’s just another one in the long list of violations they have,” says Schrems, of this latest ruling. “The walls are closing in.”
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Morgan Meaker
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Google begins wide rollout of ads in AI overview search results
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Alphabet Inc.’s Google is beginning a wide rollout of ads that will be displayed within and alongside the AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of some search results — a move meant to show investors that costly artificial intelligence projects can generate revenue.
Some investors have worried that generative AI, the tech that underpins Google’s AI summaries, could cannibalize the tech giant’s search business, which is still by far its most lucrative unit. The company said in May that it would start testing ads in these search summaries, called AI Overviews, and now it’s rolling the feature out to anyone in the US using Google’s mobile app.
Sponsored panels placed above, below and within the summaries have begun suggesting products related to the search query. At a demonstration for reporters held ahead of the announcement, searching “how do I get a grass stain out of jeans?” yielded AI-generated instructions followed by ads for Tide and OxiClean laundry products.
The company will not share ad revenue with publishers whose material is cited in AI Overviews, a company spokesperson said.
Google places its AI Overviews, which summarize the contents of search results, at the top of the page for some queries. First introduced in May, they were criticized for displaying inaccurate information and reducing the need to click through to cited websites that would earn ad revenue from visits.
The company has been under pressure to prove that it doesn’t have an unfair advantage over competitors in the search and advertising technology markets, which could have implications for its progress in AI. The US Justice Department in recent years brought two antitrust cases against the company, with a judge ruling in August that Google illegally monopolized the search business. The DOJ is considering seeking remedies including forcing the search giant to share precious search data with competitors — which they could use to bolster their own AI tools and services — and even breaking up the company, Bloomberg has reported. In a separate case, the DOJ leveled similar charges against Google’s ad tech unit. That trial wrapped up late last month.
In a separate announcement on Thursday, the search giant also said it will start adding inline links to sources used in AI-generated summaries, and initial tests showed these links sent more traffic to websites compared to the old design with links at the bottom, said Rhiannon Bell, Google Search’s vice president of user experience, during the media demonstration.
In addition, Google will begin sorting search results into scrollable lists of suggestions tailored to the user’s query and account history. “AI-organized search results,” as the company calls the feature, will initially be limited to suggesting recipes to American users of Google’s mobile app.
The company also said that Google Lens, the visual search app, will now be able to process video and voice input in addition to photos and text.
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Curtis Heinzl, Bloomberg
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Google’s Next Antitrust Trial Could Make Online Ads Less Annoying
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Google argues that it faces fierce competition from Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and others. It further contends that customers benefited from each of the acquisitions, contracts, and features that the government is challenging. “Google has designed a set of products that work efficiently with each other and attract a valuable customer base,” the company’s attorneys wrote in a 359-page rebuttal.
For years, Google publically has maintained that its ad tech projects wouldn’t harm clients or competition. “We will be able to help publishers and advertisers generate more revenue, which will fuel the creation of even more rich and diverse content on the internet,” Drummond testified in 2007 to US senators concerned about the DoubleClick deal’s impact on competition and privacy. US antitrust regulators at the time cleared the purchase. But at least one of them, in hindsight, has said he should have blocked it.
Deep Control
The Justice Department alleges that acquiring DoubleClick gave Google “a pool of captive publishers that now had fewer alternatives and faced substantial switching costs associated with changing to another publisher ad server.” The global market share of Google’s tool for publishers is now 91 percent, according to court papers. The company holds similar control over ad exchanges that broker deals (around 70 percent) and tools used by advertisers (85 percent), the court filings say.
Google’s dominance, the government argues, has “impaired the ability of publishers and advertisers to choose the ad tech tools they would prefer to use and diminished the number and quality of viable options available to them.”
The government alleges that Google staff spoke internally about how they have been earning an unfair portion of what advertisers spend on advertising, to the tune of over a third of every $1 spent in some cases.
Some of Google’s competitors want the tech giant to be broken up into multiple independent companies, so each of its advertising services competes on its own merits without the benefit of one pumping up another. The rivals also support rules that would bar Google from preferencing its own services. “What all in the industry are looking for is fair competition,” Viant’s Vanderhook says.
If Google ad tech alternatives win more business, not everyone is so sure that the users will notice a difference. “We’re talking about moving from the NYSE to Nasdaq,” Ari Paparo, a former DoubleClick and Google executive who now runs the media company Marketecture, tells WIRED. The technology behind the scenes may shift, but the experience for investors—or in this case, internet surfers—doesn’t.
Some advertising experts predict that if Google is broken up, users’ experiences would get even worse. Andrey Meshkov, chief technology officer of ad-block developer AdGuard, expects increasingly invasive tracking as competition intensifies. Products also may cost more because companies need to not only hire additional help to run ads but also buy more ads to achieve the same goals. “So the ad clutter is going to get worse,” Beth Egan, an ad executive turned Syracuse University associate professor, told reporters in a recent call arranged by a Google-funded advocacy group.
But Dina Srinivasan, a former ad executive who as an antitrust scholar wrote a Stanford Technology Law Review paper on Google’s dominance, says advertisers would end up paying lower fees, and the savings would be passed on to their customers. That future would mark an end to the spell Google allegedly cast with its DoubleClick deal. And it could happen even if Google wins in Virginia. A trial in a similar lawsuit filed by Texas, 15 other states, and Puerto Rico is scheduled for March.
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Paresh Dave
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Report: A quarter of X advertisers plan to cut spending next year
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X’s advertising woes are about to get a whole lot worse, according to a new report from Kantar, details of which were Advanced Television. The market research firm found that 26 percent of marketers plan to cut their spending on X in the coming year, and that advertisers’ trust in X is “historically low.”
Kantar’s report, which is based on interviews with 18,000 consumers and 1,000 marketers from around the world, underscores just how far X’s advertising business has declined since Elon Musk took over the company. Over the last year and a half, the platform has seen numerous halt or slow down their spending amid concerns about hate speech and other toxic content.
Musk has also antagonized major advertisers, saying that brands worried about hate speech should “.” he’s also accused advertisers of “blackmail,” and recently sued an and several global companies for conducting an “illegal boycott” of the platform. Of note, Kantar found that only 4 percent of marketers believe X is safe for brands.
X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The company told the that “advertisers know that X now offers stronger brand safety, performance and analytics capabilities than ever before, while seeing all-time-high levels of usage.”
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Karissa Bell
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