advertising

X’s ad business improved under departing CEO Linda Yaccarino, but it’s still tough times ahead

Former NBCU ad exec Linda Yaccarino’s tenure at X may have been fairly short — just two years from start to finish — but she did manage to make an impact on the social network’s ad business, new data from ad intelligence firm Guideline shows. Yaccarino will be leaving X in a better position with […]

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Bluesky feed builder Graze raises $1M, rolls out ads

Graze, a startup that lets people build and monetize custom feeds for Bluesky’s social network, has attracted new capital. Pre-seed investors, led by Betaworks and Salesforce Ventures, have invested $1 million in the company’s small team, which is working to give users control over their algorithms and social media experiences. Graze’s software, available via the

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Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams says company targeted ads at teens based on their ’emotional state’

Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams, the former Director of Global Public Policy for Facebook and author of the recently released tell-all book “Careless People,” told U.S. senators during her testimony on Wednesday that Meta actively targeted teens with advertisements based on their emotional state. This claim was first documented by Wynn-Williams in her book, which documents

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Spotify debuts Gen AI ads, programmatic ad buying

Spotify announced Gen AI ads, among other changes to its advertising business, at an event in New York City on Thursday. Notably, the company introduced a new programmatic offering, the Spotify Ad Exchange (SAX), which allows advertisers to reach Spotify’s logged-in users via real-time auctions. On the latter, Spotify announced new partnerships with Google’s demand-side

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Instagram’s new ad format lets creators get paid for testimonials in comments

Instagram is introducing a new way for creators to work with brands to make money by recommending products. On Thursday, Meta introduced an addition to its Partnership Ads called Testimonials, which allows creators to get paid via written endorsements, shared as comments on the brand’s social media posts and advertisements. The new ad format is

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Comcast and other TV streamers are now chasing YouTube’s ad dollars instead of the other way around

TV providers and streamers’ real competition isn’t each other, it’s social video. Or at least that’s what the president of Comcast Advertising, James Rooke, said during an interview on Wednesday at CES 2025 in Las Vegas. The ad exec was speaking about the company’s Monday launch of “universal ads,” a solution that lets marketers buy

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Connectly, now backed by Alibaba, taps AI to personalize text messages to customers

Stefanos Loukakos, formerly a director at Meta’s business-focused Messenger division and, briefly, the tech giant’s blockchain org, noticed several years ago that online retailers were struggling to connect with potential shoppers. The problem, in his opinion, was that their marketing campaigns weren’t tailored enough. Merchants were sending generic social media, text, and email blasts that failed to

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Creatopy, which automates ad creation using AI, raises a $10M Series A

When advertising agencies create ads for clients, they don’t just make one advert, but potentially hundreds of iterations for a ream of platforms, and that can be pretty manually intensive. Creatopy, which automates ad-creation using AI, has now raised a $10 million Series A co-led by European VCs 3VC (based out of Austria) and Point

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