Starship Articles
I don’t actually keep up with the Kardashians. If I ran into them in the street, I probably wouldn’t recognise them. I don’t listen to Kanye’s music, and I don’t watch reality TV. Annoyingly enough, they’re still ubiquitous in the popular zeitgeist. In other words, the twittersphere keeps trying to cram details of their life down my eyeballs despite my attempts at curation. If it isn’t the weird fight they had with Taylor Swift, it’s That Terribly Lolsy Pepsi Ad with Kylie… and now this. Recently, Kim Kardashian sparked social media rage by trademarking “Kimono” in the United States for her upcoming range of intimate wear. We’re not sure if she thought she could get away with no one noticing, or if she didn’t care, but to be honest, we’re just kinda disappointed. For someone with a deep understanding of how to monetise personal branding, surely this wasn’t a good step. It should have at least gone to a focus group. Or maybe an agency.
Naturally, the backlash picked up under #KimOhNo with accusations of cultural appropriation. After a week of intense backlash, Kim declared, hilariously, that her brands were built with “inclusivity and diversity” at their core and as such she would be now relaunching it under another name.
KimOhNo and Hashtag Outrage
It’s easy to see why Kim Kardashian and her lawyers originally thought she could get away with this. Her attempt to trademark the word isn’t the first time it’s been done by a non-Japanese person. A quick check of the US Patent and Trademark Office’s Database indicates it’s been done over a hundred times (though not all the marks are live):
In Australia, there are 17 results, with the top one by Hasbro relating to toys:
If we were to check the WIPO database we’d probably be inundated with searches. The majority of these won’t be by Japanese people or Japanese companies. Under current intellectual property rules, it’s probably going to be difficult to block — though I’m not extremely familiar with US law, so don’t take my word for it. In any case, the most effective way to counter any trademark registration is to get a lawyer to register an objection. There’s a 30 day limit for American trademarks for relevant people to file an objection, and a possibility to request for an extension if you need it. The 30 day limit’s run out on some of these marks but not all of them, so if you’re a relevant party with some money to burn on a lawyer, I’d usually recommend filing an objection instead of getting angry online.
It’s easier to write a twitter objection or an angry letter though, and “KimOhNo” was a pretty cool hashtag. Even the Mayor of Kyoto got onto it:
Mayor of KYOTO (!!!) made an official request to Kim K to RECONSIDER and STOP what she’s doing. KYOTO! Once the capital of Japan, city of traditional kimono makers. GO KYOTO! pic.twitter.com/0Mhm7vMPk9
— inKIMONO (@inkimono1) June 28, 2019
As WIRED notes, cultural appropriation outrage has been a staple of Kardashian drama for a while:
In her world, nothing is happening, and nothing will. Kardashian cultural appropriation scandals have been a mainstream talking point since at least 2014, when Khloé wore a Native American headdress to a Coachella-themed birthday party. Kim in particular has made headlines for the following: wearing cornrows (and calling them “boxer braids”), darkening her skin tone in promotional shots, dressing up as Aaliyah for Halloween, wearing Fulani braids (and calling them “Bo Derek braids”), and then wearing Fulani braids again.
Each time, many people came forward to express outrage, many others were outraged that people were outraged, and some people thoughtfully explained the problem: That the Kardashians were congratulated for wearing styles that originated with people of color, often the same styles that people of color are discriminated against for wearing. Personally, I find a white woman dressing up as Aaliyah to be borderline here, but Kardashian’s apology for it was truly cringeworthy: “We don’t see color in my home.” Her apologies have always been minimal and unsatisfying. If she was going to learn, she wouldn’t be a “Bo Derek braid” recidivist. But, like every other influencer’s, her periods of cancellation are brief. Next week, people will be clamoring for more KKW Beauty products, if indeed they ever stopped.
You won’t see the twitter crowd going after the other companies that have been quietly sitting on their Kimono trademarks for a while either. KimK does have a huge platform though, which has no doubt amplified the outrage against her, but at the same time, the very size of her platform insulates her from consequences. If there was a global boycott against Hasbro tomorrow for trademarking “Kimono” for toys, you’d probably see Hasbro issue an apology within days, and perhaps even a retraction of the registration (though we won’t hold our breath). Kim though? She knows she can ride it out if she wanted to. Her family’s done it before. I’m honestly surprised that she caved.
She did cave, though
It’s been fun watching the KimOhNo outrage play out over twitter, but in the absence of a legal challenge, if Kim herself hadn’t decided to back down, there was probably nothing that could’ve been done. Copyright and trademark law is diffused over multiple jurisdictions and the special consciousness/protections that one jurisdiction might have over something (such as Australia’s Indigenous Art Code) don’t apply over others. Some forms of appropriation also seem to generate more outrage and sympathy than most. You’ll still see people wear feather headdresses/ornaments in their hair, use phrases like “spirit animal”, more.
Outrage cycles that gain as much notoriety as the KimOhNo movement — to the point of appearing on headlines — do help move the conversation. And in some cases, like Kim’s, they prompt a retraction and some soul-searching. Hopefully, future branding agencies will know better than to suggest brand names for their clients that appropriate cultural icons without meaningfully engaging with or giving back to the culture in question. In this day and age, brands usually can’t afford this kind of bad PR. People are slowly starting to think twice about wearing Indigenous costumes for fun, just as brands are being careful to be more conscious about what they use. Even the current conversation about brands profiting off Pride Month has been good to see. In 2019, the old adage about any attention being good attention is no longer true. Brands do need to be more respectful of the world they live in, or risk alienating whole swathes of their target audience. Existing rival brands to KimK’s intimates wear brand were trending on twitter as the outrage rolled into high gear, driving business to their sites.
Want to know more? Or are you a Kardashian, now looking to rebrand a certain inappropriately named intimates wear brand? Get in touch.
I’m in a movie theatre, waiting for a film to start. My friends and I tend to watch blockbusters because we’re easily entertained. With the world slowly burning down around us, it’s nice to spend a couple of hours every weekend pretending that tech billionaires would invest their money into armoured flight suits and personally attempt to save the world. The first few ads are familiar, and again make me extremely curious about Desi Dhaba’s advertising strategy. How does a smallish restaurant on Flinders Street always seem to pop up on the cinema ads at Hoyts Melbourne Central? Are they just buying ad space in one cinema? Distressed space? How much is their budget? While secretly praying that whoever wrote the copy for the ad would never find matching socks forever more, a slick new ad pops on. It’s about “clean” coal.
Wow.
There is, in case you haven’t realized, no such thing as “clean” coal. I could go on an hours-long rant about this, but to sum it up in a way that involves less invective:
The best of the new breed of plants can reduce emissions by up to 40 per cent compared to some older-style coal-fired power stations, according to the International Energy Agency. But to call this “clean coal” is misleading. The new generation plants are less damaging to the environment, but they are not clean.
Even the best of the high-efficiency, low-emission plants emit far more carbon into the atmosphere than gas-fired power stations. Coal, by nature, is not clean. Aside from releasing CO2, which contributes to global warming, burning coal releases sooty particulates that can cause cancer and respiratory problems, sulphur and nitrogen, which contribute to acid rain, and other toxic chemicals.
Advertising, I like to think, gets a bad rap. There’s good work that gets done. Ads that can help drive change in ways both large or incremental. Often, though, there’s also stuff like this.
Nothing Is Real Anyway
Everything you see in an ad is fake. Cats unerringly choosing a certain brand of catfood? The other bowls probably had a layer of petroleum on it or something. That happy family you see on screen? Probably not remotely related. That delicious shot of fried chicken falling through the air? Possibly CG. That huge, stacked, fluffy McDonalds burger? Stuffed with tissues and pins and glazed. Not convinced? There’s tons of vids out there about the tricks of the trade, like so:
Everything’s more glamorous after post-production. Advertising is the art of pushing a better, more idealised world to a customer in the hope that they’d part with some money for whatever our client’s selling. With this in mind, does it matter whether the ad is presenting a set of alternative facts? The whole ad itself is technically an alternative fact, isn’t it? We like to think so. We think there’s a difference between a little lie — like a raw chicken painted to look like a roast chicken — and a big lie, aka that coal is a fuel source that doesn’t damage the environment.
Define the Thing
What is ethical advertising, you might ask. Just ads that don’t lie? If all ads lie in some way, what is an acceptable non-truth? I would say that ethical advertising:
- Is effective: aka it meets its key objectives and has decent ROI
- Doesn’t involve much moral compromise in concept
- Doesn’t have a fundamental message that is untrue
- Doesn’t create, perpetuate, or encourage harmful situations or outcomes
- Doesn’t break the law
Basically, to sum it up, ethical advertising does the thing that Google used to have as their brand message: it does no evil.
Ethical Advertising for Profit
It’s easy to make ethical advertising when you work for something like a nonprofit, you’d say. What if you’re shilling a fast food burger? You can’t exactly write the truth into the ad. Everyone knows that McDonald’s burgers don’t look as good in real life as they do in an ad. To what extent can you stretch reality without it being unethical?
Clients do increasingly care about messaging in advertising and branding. Putting political advertising aside, which is a whole ‘nother kettle of terrible fish, you’ve probably already seen the occasional backlash against brands coming from both sides of the political spectrum whenever there’s a particularly egregious lie or message. There was the pushback against the body-shaming “Bikini Ready” ads by Protein World in 2015, for example. Or the recent, laughable pushback against positive masculinity ads by Gillette. Overall, however, clients are more willing to support brands that push social conscience or environmental responsibility. Via the Guardian:
The numbers add up. Neilsen’s global retail analysis shows increased sales for brands with sustainability claims on packaging or active marketing of CSR efforts. What’s more, 55% of global online consumers across 60 countries say they are willing to pay more for products and services provided by companies that are committed to positive social and environmental impact. On top of this, The 2015 Brand Footprint report published by Kantar Worldpanel shows that brands with a social conscience grew in popularity, Dove among them.
It’s not a stretch of the imagination to see where the wind is blowing: towards more socially conscious, “authentic” advertising. The messaging is far more likely to stick in the right way if it’s true. It’ll also attract positive attention to the brand, which would enforce existing customer loyalty and maybe even reach new customers.
Sex, Money, Puppies
Several years ago I attended a talk where a brand guru said that there are three things that easily sell: sex, money, puppies. Maybe not all at once. There are indications that this isn’t necessarily entirely true:
A classic study conducted by Baker and Churchill in 1977 found that advertising models’ physical attractiveness increased viewers’ attention as well as their positive evaluations of the ads. But at the same time, it found that sexual content in ads did not affect respondents’ deeper cognitions, thus rendering physical attraction ineffective in gaining the target market’s acceptance of the advertising message.
Similarly, Parker and Furnham in 2007 realized that sexual ad content had no effect on viewers’ abilities to recall details of television commercials. The study also found that women recalled ads without sexual content better than they did sexualized ads.
A more recent study conducted in July at Ohio State University discovered an even more conflicting effect. Violent and sexual content in ads again succeeded in grabbing attention, but it also overshadowed other important aspects of the marketing effort, including the product being promoted. As a result, the researchers concluded that sex and violence in ads actually impeded product memory and lessened purchase intentions.
Sexualised advertising that objectifies people doesn’t work, so why is it still ubiquitous? Because of mistaken assumptions that it sells. We should all take a closer look at what we think we know, even as we figure out what we think we understand about the campaigns we create and their consequences. Curious and need a chat? Get in touch. In the meantime, bring on the puppy ads.
I’m going to assume that you’ve watched the latest, too-long instalment in the never-ending money-printing franchise called the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yes, I’m talking about Avengers: Endgame. If you haven’t seen it — this article will contain a minor spoiler for the film, so proceed on your own risk. Still reading on? Good. Full disclosure: I watched it twice, even though it was 3 hours per shot and I didn’t exactly enjoy it. That’s probably told you everything you need to know about my life, as is what I’m going to tell you next — I loved the scene where Tony Stark zooms up to the Avengers building in an Audi. It’s not high cinema by any means. Although it’s played for laughs, it’s laboriously filmed. The focus is on the loud and brash car, not on either Tony or Captain America. Millions of people in the world have been forced to watch it. In other words, it’s an extremely effective ad.
Product Placement in Films
Product placement in the Marvel films is hardly new. Audi’s been in a few Marvel films now, and there was a period where they lost the sponsorship to Lexus. It’s hard to be that excited about a Lexus ad, even if Black Panther is involved:
Lexus went one step further, commissioning an 8-page comic called ‘Black Panther: Soul of a Machine’ that followed the film and had its car featured on the cover. Integration with the film was key to Lexus’ strategy for the LC500:
[T]he Marvel partnership was built into Lexus’ promotional strategy for the LC 500 from the ground up as the initial discussions about it took place the year before it went on sale.
The Black Panther production team was shown the only prototype in the United States at the time and MaryJane Kroll, media manager at Lexus marketing, says that Coogler climbed onto its roof to mimic the iconic pose that the hero takes during the car chase. It convinced Lexus that the car would be a crucial sidekick and Kroll explained to Forbes that it is all part of a plan to drive interest with a relevant audience.
Association with a franchise as big as a Marvel film can do wonders for the image of a product. In 2007, a Wall Street Journal article mentioned the consumer perception of a Lexus car as “kind of expensive, always respectable — and a little boring.” Many years later, it still lags behind German brands in sales. Now that the car’s been front and centre before millions of eyeballs, having a central role in a film that’s one of the most successful Marvel films of all time, it’s managed to shed some of its past perception.
Further, via Autoblog:
Packaged Facts’ research revealed that product placement in movies and television shows resonates with African-American consumers. For example, black consumers are more likely to remember the brand name product characters use in a movie and try products they have never tried before that they have seen in a movie. Seeing a product used in a movie is also more likely to reassure black consumers that the product is a good one. Furthermore, when African-American consumers are online or in a store and see a brand name product they recognize from a movie, they are more likely to buy it than its competitor.
[…]
In the end it proved to be a shrewd strategy for Lexus. AutoNews.com reveals that there was “an explosion” of ad impressions across TV, social media, and in theater due to the film and the product tie-in. Further, in the week following Black Panther’s domestic premiere on February 16, online searches for Lexus at shopping site Autotrader were up 15% from the previous week. Likewise, Autotrader revealed that online traffic for the LC 500 specifically was up 10%.
Product placement works — even if it’s gratuitous. Just check out Lexus’ latest dip into the product placement game: MiB International:
Gratuitous Placement
You can’t talk brand placement in films without bringing up one of the most product-placement-heavy film franchises of them all: James Bond.
Product placement is ubiquitous in James Bond films, and lucrative too. Via the BBC:
There are a few moments in the Bond films which even the most forgiving 007 fans can’t recall without wincing. There’s Pierce Brosnan’s hang-gliding off a glacier in Die Another Day. There’s Roger Moore’s Tarzan impression in Octopussy. And, up there with the worst of them, there’s the Casino Royale scene in which Eva Green asks Daniel Craig if his watch is a Rolex. “Omega,” he replies. “Beautiful,” purrs Green. “Eurgghh,” groans everyone in the cinema.
[…]
Daniel Craig said as much when he was making Skyfall in 2012. “The simple fact is that, without [product placement], we couldn’t do it,” he commented. “It’s unfortunate but that’s how it is.” And yet Skyfall went onto rake in $1.1 billion at the worldwide box office, against a budget of under $200 million. Surely such a staggeringly lucrative film shouldn’t have to advertise beer and watches to make ends meet.
[…]
How much money these brands are paying is rarely confirmed, but astronomical sums are bandied about: $45 million has been cited in relation to Bond’s swig of Heineken in Skyfall. The brewery, you might think, is going to have to sell a lot of beers to recoup that outlay.
$45 million? Ouch. Given how popular the James Bond films are — disclosure: I’ve watched most of them, and all of the recent ones — surely they don’t have to resort to the many brand partners listed on their official website to pay their actors. As an advertiser marketing towards a particular audience though, the money might be well-spent. You know that James’ watch is an Omega, even though it’s a Rolex in the books. You look at an Aston Martin and think about secret panels and hidden missiles. You look at a martini and think “shaken, not stirred”, even though that’s the wrong way to drink a martini. Product placements in films like this can often work better than traditional ads because the audience is already predisposed to admire and like the character pushing the product. I can relate. I tried to buy the coat that James wore at the end of Skyfall myself, but couldn’t. It had already sold out within hours.
Interested in chatting more about product placement? Get in touch.
After thirty-ish years living on this slow-dying planet with only a vague idea of what the stock market is or how to engage with it, I’ve finally decided to teach myself how to trade. While doing some basic research — like which online stockbroker to use, which stocks are blue chip, what ETFs are, how dividends are paid out — I read articles from a group of different sites for a few days. You’d think from the ads I’m now being served that I’ve become some kind of Aussie Wolf of Wall Street. Website after website have been serving me ads along the lines of “Don’t buy another share until you read this!!!” and similar breathless screeds from sites like the Motley Fool. Fast forward a couple of days. I’ve been browsing cat food, trying to find something hypoallergenic that isn’t soy pellets*. Now every ad I get involves cats in some way, which admittedly is an improvement because the photography is cute.
Here’s what I saw only just this morning when reading an unrelated article on The Atlantic, an American news site:
Programmatic ads know that I have a cat, that I’ve been dabbling in stocks, that I work in Burnley, and that I’m an expat. Never mind the FBI agent in your laptop meme, tech companies like Facebook and Google already know everything about you. If you like targeted ads — and sometimes targeted stuff, when crafted well and with a trustworthy message, do appeal to me — then move on from this article. If you think things are getting a little TOO creepy, read on.
Going Dark
Want to get rid of creepy programmatic stuff? It’s possible. “Wait, wait,” I hear you say. “You work in advertising — why the hell are you telling us how to get out of being advertised to? What’s your game?” I believe in targeted ads, sure, but I also believe in strategic ads. Ads that come across as too creepy, or that aren’t relevant, or worst of all — annoy the public — don’t work. Advertising online isn’t just a matter of slapping some images and text together and uploading them through the Facebook platform. As a representation of your brand online, they also need thought. At Starship, we routinely create targeted strategies for integrated digital campaigns that hit KPIs while being a solid ROI. Clients who go off into the advertising wilds by themselves without professional help often risk blowing their budgets on little return.
For everyone else frustrated by unwanted ads, here are things you can do right now to limit the ads that you get served:
- The Do Not Call register is a secure register by the Aussie govt where you can register private/personal phone numbers. Advertisers who aren’t charities won’t therefore be permitted to call you (exceptions apply). You can report anyone who contravenes this — I have.
- Reporting unsolicited SMS spam: You can report any sort of commercial SMS that is unwanted or unsolicited by forwarding it to 0429 999 888. You should then block the number. Sadly being on the Do Not Call register does not stop you from getting spam SMSes. It works: Service Seeking Pty Ltd was recently fined by the ACMA to the tune of $50k for SMS spam.
- Using fully anonymous browsers like Tor to browse the internet: This will affect your net speed though.
- Using VPNs like Private Internet Access to scramble your true IP address: This often gets me served hilarious mis-targeted ads. I tended to get a lot of USA voting ads this way.
- Check your privacy settings on your favourite websites/social media. Many sites like Twitter etc will have options where you can limit your ad tracking.
- Do a full Cookies etc clean as often as you can stand it.
- Use encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp.
- Remove yourself off data broking sites.
- Remove everything you’ve ever searched from Google. While you’re at it, you can also remove all your Location data.
- Delete yourself off websites that you no longer use. Close old email accounts.
- Limit ad tracking on your phones. There’d be an option to do this on iOS: Go to Settings – Privacy – Location Services – System Services.
- Opt out of Ads Personalisation on Google.
- Switch to Firefox: it’s much better with privacy, and highly customisable. It does seem to run hotter on my Macbook Pro than Chrome, and is iffy with Tweetdeck, but hopefully that’d all be fixed soon.
Let us know if there’s anything we’ve missed.
Article updated on Friday 14 June 2019.
*Note: Before you freak out that I’m killing my cat, hypoallergenic cat food is not actually 100% soy. It does contain chicken and taurine. It is a prescribed vet diet.
I just got an email from @Adobe that I'm no longer allowed to use the software that I'm paying for. Time to cancel my subscription I guess.
Share plz. pic.twitter.com/ZIIdqK5AkM
— Matt Roszak 🍞 (@KupoGames) May 10, 2019
Adobe programs are to creatives what a tennis racquet is for Roger Federer, if there was only one brand of racquet available to all tennis players and the brand could make everyone pay every year to use the racquet, and raise their prices whenever they liked. If the racquet became more and more bloated and heavy over the years but everyone still had to use it because it was the industry standard. This has been a known and ongoing problem with Adobe software in the industry — since they have a monopoly and know it, they’ve been steadily just bloating their software, tacking on the less-popular software into the suite that most of us don’t need. Adobe now allows you to buy per app, with an individual price, student, business, or university, but compared to similar professional programs like Microsoft, the subscription remains an eye-watering price for freelancers:
Adobe knows that most freelancers really only need the Creative Suite — Illustrator, Photoshop, and inDesign. Yet for the price of those 3 programs, you pretty much might as well get the whole swollen raft of stuff you’d hardly ever use. Many people are lucky enough only to need Photoshop for their work (photographers, digital artists etc). Yet recently Adobe also doubled the price of its Photoshop package, sending people into panic:
The $US9.99/month option still appears for many users visiting the site, and if it doesn’t, PetaPixel has confirmed that it can still be purchased by contacting Adobe’s sales team by phone, using the website’s online chat to talk to a salesperson, or by contacting an official Adobe reseller. The $US9.99/month option can also be purchased as a 12-month plan for $US119.88, which can be further locked down for an additional three years.
But by hiding that option on the website, it means that new Creative Cloud subscribers who aren’t familiar with the current pricing structure will simply assume the $US20.99/month option is the cheapest way to get Photoshop, and that’s a scummy way to take advantage of them.
It turns out that Adobe was just “testing the waters”. Yay?
Adobe Piracy on the High Seas
I remember the first time I saw an Adobe product. I was in school in Asia in the 90s, and I’d walked into a computer store with my parents. There was a display rack with beautiful artwork, including “Adobe Illustrator”, which at the time I’d erroneously thought was an art program like Corel Draw. I was about to ask my mum for it when I saw the price tag. At first, I’d thought it had a few zeroes out of place. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when I finally taught myself how to use Photoshop for digital painting as a kid, I pirated the copy. It’s easy to pirate things in Asia. The internet’s extremely quick, and even if it isn’t, you can easily acquire dodgy copies of anything you want from shops.
Piracy is why Adobe embarked on creative cloud. Adobe products have been pirated for decades. Accessibility is certainly one way to address piracy: Steam/Valve, for example, famously remarked that piracy is simply a failure of marketing. However, Adobe’s eye-watering subscription price continues to make its software a draw for people who can’t afford the programs:
It’s often said that price and accessibility aside, one of the best ways to cope with piracy is to offer a superior service. Narayen says Adobe is doing just that with Cloud by offering unique features unavailable in ‘cracked’ software.
“As we’re delivering more Cloud-based services, as you know the only way to use the mobile apps and share content between the mobile apps as well as our Creative Cloud, is by having a subscription. So I think that’s also why we see more creative sync and creative profile being used, that’s certainly driving that,” Narayen added.
While it is indeed quite difficult to measure the scale of piracy of Adobe products post retail, the company’s popularity with pirates is still very visible.
Is this even still a viable strategy? Probably, yes. With the monopoly that they have on creative industries, it’s possible that Adobe might be able to trundle on, ever-increasing their prices on an industry that’s already in a state of reinvention or slow collapse. Traditional agencies are facing competition from consultancies. Adobe might not care about all the negative attention and bad press. It knows that the people who can afford to turn to cheaper alternatives are not its core audience: everyone who works professionally in the creative industry uses Adobe programs. It has an eye on its own stock price, which was recently upgraded to a Zacks Rank 2, reflecting an upward trend in earning estimates.
And Now This
Like many people stuck with Adobe programs, I use the old versions where possible. The newer versions tend to require faster and faster computers, tend to be more unstable, and have strange functionality changes that cost me readjustment time. Save for inDesign, of which I use the newest version because insisting that everyone else save idml files got annoying after a while, I use the older, stable versions of CC apps. They work with my MacBook, which I’ve been refusing to upgrade because the latest MacBooks have a terrible, easily-breakable keyboard.
Recently, reporting has indicated that people like me could be in danger of infringement. Can you really get sued for using old versions of Photoshop and Lightroom? Via Endgaget:
A spokesperson said in a statement sent to AppleInsider: “Adobe recently discontinued certain older versions of Creative Cloud applications. Customers using those versions have been notified that they are no longer licensed to use them and were provided guidance on how to upgrade to the latest authorized versions.” However, the spokesperson said Adobe can’t comment on claims of third-party infringement, as it concerns ongoing litigation.”
The company didn’t elaborate on what lawsuit compelled it to send out warning emails, but as AppleInsider mentioned, Dolby sued Adobe in March 2018 for allegedly not complying with their licensing deal. Adobe is contractually obligated to report sales of products that use Dolby technologies to the company and to pay the agreed-upon royalty fees.
According to court documents, Dolby is accusing Adobe of selling products that use its technology without paying at all and of refusing to provide the information it needed to conduct a meaningful audit of its books. At the time, Adobe told The Register that “Adobe does not agree with Dolby’s characterization of the issues concerning its audit of Adobe’s past use of its software.”
It’s not a great look for a company that’s already suffering from panicked exodus after the Photoshop stoush. It’s also unclear whether Adobe or Dolby can actually pin any legal responsibility on consumers: it’s not our fault that we were sold licenses for programs that Adobe didn’t have the rights to. Still, if you want to be safe, you probably should update. Bloatware and all. In the meantime, we still have memes:
Time to bring this back pic.twitter.com/eVMp3azZ26
— 👽Mari👽 (@biggaybutchbabe) May 11, 2019
Want to chat? Get in touch.
Google is changing how it’s selling programmatic advertising by the end of the year. It’s moving from a second price auction into first price ad auctions, where people bid what they actually want to pay for advertising. It’s… wait. Did you understand any of that? If you did, skip this article. You probably already work in digital advertising and you’re likely already in a panic. Reach under your desk for your emergency stash of hard liquor. You deserve it.
If you didn’t understand it at all, read on.
US$95.4 billion. That’s how much Google made from ads in 2017. Yes, that’s above the GDP of some countries, and it’s long become Google’s main source of revenue. You’d have seen the ads, peppered through Google search and other parts of its “content network”. If you’ve dealt with agencies at all on a digital campaign, you might have given the agency some money to work some magic on the Google search engine that you might not entirely understand, only that it’s leading to more prank calls to your business. You’ve paid some money that you’re pretty sure is going somewhere. Basically, with the immediate changes up ahead, you’re likely soon going to have to pay more for the same. Then prices might stabilise, and miiiight fall during the long run, but we wouldn’t hold our breath, because that’s how life is and Google isn’t a charity.
What the heck is first or second price ad auctions?
Here is a helpful graphic from Google:
As Google puts it, they’re trying to simplify their bidding process. And they’re certainly not the first system to convert to a first price auction, just the largest — big enough to change how the industry works. Even if it just affects display and video inventory sold through Ad Manager. Auctions on Google Search, AdSense for Search, YouTube, and other Google properties, Google Ads and Display & Video 360 are so far not affected.
Wait, you might be saying. I still don’t get it. What is a unified ad auction? Basically, there are two models for programmatic ads: unified and waterfall. Waterfall = Google had dibs on bidding on inventory, followed by the next exchange, and so on. In a unified auction, everyone has access to the inventory at the same time. Having more people bidding at the same time on the same thing can drive up prices, which is the main fear, though 90% of publishers in US/Europe use unified auctions. Most publishers also use Google Ad Manager as their default ad server, so in theory, this system simplifies what currently exists — instead of bidding on an exchange, you can now bid directly into a publisher’s ad server.
Still don’t get it? Here’s the main change on the buyer’s side. Basically, things used to be like eBay. You could bid $100 on something you felt was $1, and if the next highest bid was $2, you’d win but just automatically pay $2.01. Now, if you bid $100, you pay $100.
If you have a strategy for planning or bidding on ads, this might not even affect you much. Or it might even help — it’s more simplified, a lot of publishers already adopted it. The general consensus is that ads will increase in cost in the short term but will likely stabilise again in the long term. Want to know more? Feel free to get in touch for a chat.