Business of Media
AI and TV ads were made for each other
Even if I didn’t work in advertising, I would be a connoisseur of commercials. You’re probably one, too. Think of all the tropes you’ve ingested over the years — the forest-green hatchbacks conquering rugged Western landscapes, the miles of mozzarella stretched by major pizza chains. These are the images that let you know what kind of pitch you’re watching, so you won’t be confused when the brand shows up, reports The New York Times’ Mac Schwerin.
The same applies to one recent video: It begins, conventionally enough, at a barbecue, where a Smash Mouth song is playing and people are chatting happily over beers. But around three seconds in, your amygdala starts paging for backup. The partygoers are laughing too aggressively. A blonde seems to be talking to her beer, which she holds in a fleshy koozie of misshapen fingers. There are strange shots of lips and drinks, cavorting without ever properly meeting. The beverages keep getting bigger, obscenely big. A fire begins spreading, filling the frame like a space-shuttle launch.
This is Synthetic Summer, a fake beer commercial produced entirely with generative artificial intelligence. It’s one of a handful of AI commercials that have been making the rounds online. Synthetic Summer evokes an Instagram post from the Cenobites in Hellraiser: a buffet of ungodly desires, remorselessly fulfilled. In another AI commercial, Pepperoni Hug Spot, we find a family pizza restaurant beset by predatory mouths and 1970s wipe transitions. Another video, a fake ad for orange juice by the artist Crypto Tea, cuts between crisp pour shots and deranged breakfasters; Donald Trump narrates.
Instagram tests feature to block explicit images in direct message requests
Instagram is trialling a feature that will stop explicit images appearing in direct message requests, after research showed trolls using unsolicited DMs to bombard high-profile women with abusive content, reports The Guardian’s Dan Milmo.
The trial will limit people to sending one DM request to someone who does not follow them and that request will be limited to text-only. Users will be able to send images or videos via DM only after the subject of their request has accepted it.
“In practice, this means people will no longer be able to receive unsolicited images or videos from people they don’t follow,” said Meta, Instagram’s owner, in a statement.
The move follows research that showed the TV presenter Rachel Riley, the women’s safety campaigner Jamie Klingler and the magazine editor Sharan Dhaliwal were subjected to misogynistic, hateful and graphically violent messages in DM requests.
Google violated its standards in ad deals, research finds
Google violated its promised standards when placing video ads on other websites, according to new research that raises questions about the transparency of the tech giant’s online-ad business, reports The Wall Street Journal’s Patience Haggin.
Google’s YouTube runs ads on its own site and app. But the company also brokers the placement of video ads on other sites across the web through a program called Google Video Partners. Google charges a premium, promising that the ads it places will run on high-quality sites, before the page’s main video content, with the audio on, and that brands will only pay for ads that aren’t skipped.
Google violates those standards about 80% of the time, according to research from Adalytics, a company that helps brands analyze where their ads appear online. The firm accused the company of placing ads in small, muted, automatically-played videos off to the side of a page’s main content, on sites that don’t meet Google’s standards for monetization, among other violations.
Adalytics compiled its data by observing campaigns from more than 1,100 brands that got billions of ad impressions between 2020 and 2023. The company shared its findings with The Wall Street Journal.
Streaming
Showtime officially folded into Paramount+ in bid for streaming scale
Showtime was officially folded into Paramount+ on Tuesday, kicking off a push to expand Paramount Global’s streaming scale, reports The Hollywood Reporter’s Alex Weprin.
The move, which was officially announced in May, will see Showtime content, including series like Yellowjackets and Billions, as well as sports like live boxing, baked into the Paramount+ experience. As of the end of March, Paramount+ had 60 million streaming subscribers globally.
The company says that the decision to fully integrate Showtime into Paramount+ (the two services were previously available in a bundled offering) was “founded in consumer insights and data.”
“Up to now, customers who have used the current Paramount+/Showtime bundle have watched 40 percent more titles than subscribers with the stand-alone Paramount+ plan, and they spend about 20 percent more time on Paramount+,” a spokesperson said, adding that the content from each service should “complement” the other.
Britons will soon spend more on streaming than TV, analysts say
Within two years the streaming revolution will claim a new milestone when Britons spend more on services such as Netflix and Disney+ than they do on traditional paid TV packages, according to a report by PwC, reports The Guardian’s Mark Sweney.
In 2025, British consumers are forecast to spend £4.2bn on subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) services including Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ and Apple TV+ to get their fill of content ranging from the Star Wars and Marvel franchises to Lord of the Rings (LOTR) spin-offs, comedies such as Ted Lasso and reality TV including Selling Sunset.
This compares with the £4.1bn that is predicted to be spent on TV subscriptions, from providers including Sky, Virgin Media, BT TV and TalkTalk, a tipping point that means it has taken just 13 years for streaming to eclipse traditional pay-TV since the change in viewing habits began with the arrival of Netflix in the UK in 2012.
“In 2025 it is forecast that SVoD will overtake TV subscriptions in terms of revenue reflecting a shift in audiences from linear [TV] to streaming,” said Dan Bunyan, a partner in PwC’s strategy team. “The major SvoD players continue to invest in content rights and original productions to maintain popularity with customers.”
Television
Ally Langdon: “I’ve done it probably a little bit differently to Tracy”
Since Ally Langdon has taken the chair behind the desk at A Current Affair she has maintained the show’s winning ratings inherited from longtime anchor Tracy Grimshaw, reports TV Tonight.
In the fickle game of Television, that isn’t something she takes for granted.
“It’s always nervous when you when you’re coming into a role like this and you look at the greats who sat in that chair before you,” she tells TV Tonight.
“That was Tracy’s chair for 17 years. The audience love her and for a very good reason. So you want to come into that chair, and as she said, to me, in the lead up to it, ‘You’ve got to put your own stamp on it, but always listen to the audience. It’s their show.’ She and I feel very strongly about that.
“I’ve done it probably a little bit differently to Tracy, but the show is still the viewers’ show and most of the stories we get are stories that they email into us.”
No balls-up as Nine claims Warnie is a success, despite criticisms
Despite being subjected to a withering attack from critics and social media commentators, Warnie is being hailed as a win by Nine, with the network claiming the miniseries is “the most-watched new Australian drama of the year”, reports Nine Publishing’s Karl Quinn.
Precisely how many competitors it has beaten out to claim that title, though, is unclear, given the paucity of new home-grown drama on free-to-air television, and the fact the streaming services – where the likes of Deadloch, The Clearing, Bump spin-off Year Of, and Wellmania have all debuted this year – generally do not release viewing numbers.
The two-part biopic of cricketer Shane Warne drew an average overnight audience of 763,000 viewers nationally on Sunday (528,000 in the five-city metro market) and 611,000 (434,000 metro) on Monday night.
Those figures are likely to grow substantially over the next 28 days as broadcast video on demand (BVOD) and catch-up viewing adds to the tally. Nine says an additional 62,000 watched the first part on live BVOD on Sunday, and 52,000 watched episode two on Monday.
The real measure of Warnie’s performance will be in how much the tail wags. But at first blush the controversial series – which the cricketer’s children had criticised for being rushed into production so soon after their father’s death in March last year– was a qualified success at best.
See Also: Lucky number 23! Alex Williams reflects on serendipitous moment while on the set of Warnie