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Fox Corp.’s plan to be a major player in sports betting has hit a snag with the fledgling sports betting site Fox Bet struggling and the company failing to resolve ongoing ownership issues with its partner Flutter Entertainment. The 3-year-old site, heavily promoted on Fox TV networks, is only available in four states, and Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch said he’s unhappy with the progress.

Sports betting in the U.S. has taken over the sports world, with everything from professional leagues partnering with sportsbooks to athletes being sponsored by legal sports betting entities. Sports betting continues to be a major fixture in the country. TVB conducted a study to discover how sports betting entities like DraftKings, FanDuel and others are reaching potential players, and to identify the importance of media platforms in influencing online sports bettor’ decisions.

Advertisers and their buying agencies have come to see the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament as a viable alternative and better value than the Super Bowl, getting multiple spots for the same major payout. Agency executives are already planning negotiations for next year’s tournament at the spring upfronts.

E.W. Scripps CEO Adam Symson told a Deutsche Bank media conference Tuesday that the proliferation of streaming subscription channels, coupled with internet access costs, are driving many younger consumers to “discover” free TV once more.

Hallmark Channel, Hallmark Movies & Mysteries and Hallmark Drama will use iSpots.tv’s real-time capabilities for tracking audience delivery, attention to ads.

By integrating with the Audience Insights Hub, Omnicom Media Group will be able to run permissioned measurement queries across NBCUniversal’s first-party data and data sets from within Omni — Omnicom’s open marketing operating system — without exposing any underlying personally identifiable information.

It’s not much of a mystery why we are seeing brands that dove into streaming using the premium model now pivoting to ads. The story of the past few months in the industry has been slowing growth for the most established and successful platforms, particularly in mature markets such as the United States. The arrows are still headed up — streaming is not a fad — but acquiring and holding on to customers is infinitely harder to do when you’ve already signed up huge swaths of the populations in North America and Europe (as Netflix and, to a lesser degree, Disney+ have done). And while raising prices can bring in more revenue, it also risks increasing churn.

CBS Sports and Turner, which carry the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, said their commercial inventory is sold out on TV and on digital platforms, generating record revenue for the event.
Prices were up double digits, with 30-second spots on early games costing a couple of hundred thousand dollars and commercials in the final game going for more than $2 million. Two years ago, the tournament generated nearly $1 billion in ad revenue, according to Kantar.

The tight labor market that developed during the COVID-19 pandemic has forced companies to pull out all the stops to gin up applications. Many are increasing their spending on help-wanted ads, with some, including Domino’s and FedEx, even embracing pricey national TV ads — a tactic that isn’t typically used for recruiting efforts — while others turn to social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. Above: An employee at a Domino’s in Seattle. The pizza chain is running a TV recruitment ad that touts how an entry-level job at Domino’s can lead to owning a franchise. (Photo: Jovelle Tamayo for the Wall Street Journal)

Criticism of Russia has become a common feature of advertisements and the marketing industry.

The move came after a Russian regulator demanded that the company stop showing ads with what the regulator claimed was false information about the invasion of Ukraine.

DoubleVerify says that several of its programmatic targeting services have been accredited by the Media Rating Council. The products include fraud avoidance for connected TV, desktop, mobile web and mobile app ads, including invalid traffic avoidances and ID display and video viewability targeting for desktop, mobile web and mobile apps.

President Joe Biden plans to call for new privacy laws, including one that would prohibit companies from serving behaviorally targeted ads to children. “Children are … subject to the platforms’ intensive and excessive data collection vacuum, which they use to deliver sensational and harmful content and troves of paid advertising to our kids,” the White House stated in a fact sheet outlining Biden’s State of the Union address, scheduled for Tuesday evening.

Broadcasters widely increased their political revenue guidance for 2022 following an earnings season in which spot saw continued growth across categories except for the still-beleaguered automotive industry.

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NBCUniversal’s clients will be able to run non-intrusive, in-game ads across Anzu’s cross-platform gaming inventory — which spans mobile, PC and consoles — and use interactive, data driven, contextual, and programmatic in-game advertising solutions.

Clorox will spend close to $150 million more on advertising this year, Chief Financial Officer Kevin Jacobsen announced to the Consumer Analyst Group of New York’s virtual conference. Statista recently reported Clorox’s 2021 spending at $790 million, which would put the total dollar figure for 2022 at some $940 million.

Smart TVs may be growing their own ad-supported channels, but streaming viewers are flocking to better-entrenched AVOD and SVOD apps. Smart marketers must assemble a diverse media plan incorporating not only CTV, but third-party streaming platforms to capture enough eyeballs.

National television advertising spending rose 9% in January from a year ago, according to new data from Standard Media Index. SMI said that broadcast TV was up 19%, while cable was down 3%. As usual, digital was a big gainer, jumping 27%.

Spanish-language media giant Univision has agreed to license the ad industry’s Ad-ID advertising assets coding system to identify, track and “significantly improve targeting and delivery” for ads aimed at its Hispanic viewers. The deal follows NBC Universal’s agreement announced last summer, and provides new impetus for the advertising asset management system jointly owned by the American Association of Advertising Agencies and the Association of National Advertisers.

Super Bowl 30-second unit ad rates are up 5% year-over-year, according to just-released projections from Standard Media Index’s Forward Bookings intelligence. The rates for the 2021 Super Bowl on CBS averaged $4.53 million, while this year’s preliminary data so far shows a $4.77 million average for NBC.

Supply challenges stifled new car manufacturing across the automotive industry for much of 2021, but with the rise of prices for new and used car sales, the industry saw record-breaking profits amidst high customer demand, despite the low inventory of cars and trucks available. The automotive industry’s participation in this year’s Super Bowl may be a sign of the auto industry stabilizing.

As Madison Avenue approaches year two in its commitment to create a more diverse and inclusive ad industry, most Super Bowl advertisers are either struggling to produce commercials that depict true representation or don’t appear to be trying at all.

Dozens of first-time Super Bowl sponsors are entering the fray, adding a different element to the game’s annual advertising extravaganza. Many are fighting for consumer recognition, and think a Super Bowl shout-out will score thousands of likes, tweets, website visits and (maybe) dollars.

Consumers said ads in news content were more relevant and valuable, particularly if the ads were placed in a trusted news source, according to a new study from Disney and Magna.

Amid the rising popularity of NFL games this season, one industry estimate predicts the Super Bowl’s live TV viewership will return to growth — rising between 110 million and 117 million viewers, according to PredictHQ, a marketing “demand forecasting” company. At 117 million viewers, that would be 20% higher than last year’s results, which pulled in 97.3 million viewers when totaling linear TV and streaming TV results, according to Nielsen.

NBCUniversal, which has been active in the search for alternatives to Nielsen for audience measurement, is touting some metrics that could encourage its Olympic advertisers. The fancy metrics show that NBC’s coverage of the Beijing Winter Olympics has fewer commercials and that those commercials are working hard, the kind of data NBCU believes is important to companies writing big checks to sponsor the games.

Nielsen is launching a Diverse Media Equity program to help bridge measurement and other structural gaps that have excluded minority-owned media companies from receiving their fair share of ad spend. The effort includes a new report quantifying reach and impact of diverse-owned media outlets and expanding access for minority-owned radio stations to Nielsen data, even if they can’t pay for subscriptions.

Crypto companies are shelling out top dollar for Super Bowl ads as they strive to become household names. Above, Crypto.com has hired Matt Damon for its recent ad campaign.

TelevisaUnivision said it hired two multimedia ad sales executives: Rob McGovern (left), who will be SVP of multimedia sales, and Richard Bertodatti, named SVP, multimedia and audience sales.

TV stations are using Flowcodes to provide a direct link from their local clients’ television advertisements to actual sales. “All of our advertisers have seen phenomenal increases,” says Logan Marshall, the digital sales director for KTVX, Nexstar’s ABC affiliate in Salt Lake City.