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In a Year of Minuses, Streaming Services Are All About the Plus

Charlotte Henry ·

Everyone knows that you can’t have a streaming service and not call it Something+. (You even need to use a ‘+’ if you launch a podcast that discusses streaming services.) The LA Times looked into how, and why, this came to be.

Steve Kazanjian, president and chief executive of Promax, the trade association for marketing companies serving the entertainment industries, said the repeated use of the arithmetic symbol has made it an efficient tool to create awareness of the new services. “There is a stake in the ground that’s around ‘plus’ right now,” he said. “It’s in the consumer lexicon. It owns a bit of emotional equity in your brain already, which is really powerful.” Discovery found that was the case when it conducted surveys and focus groups with consumers on possible names for its service. The company considered dozens of original monikers — testing Latin words and new-fangled creations that came from combined words — a route that Jeffrey Katzenberg’s short-lived streaming service took when it melded “quick bites” into Quibi.

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Facebook Small Advertisers Complain About AI Lockouts

Charlotte Henry ·

Some small advertisers have complained to Bloomberg News that AI has left them locked out and unable to manage campaigns. Given helping small businesses was at the heart of the social media giant’s complaints against Apple, this is somewhat ironic.

“The actual injury, especially for advertisers and marketers, is immense,” said [Chris] Raines, who runs a digital media company called Bullhorn Media. “Had I not had that workaround, my business would have went away.” As he investigated solutions, Raines started hearing about other ad buyers in the same position. Harrison Kugler, an independent digital media manager in New Jersey, was similarly locked out while running ads for his client, a local comedy club. It took him 26 hours to get his account back, during which he estimates he spent $200 in Facebook ads without his usual level of oversight. In New Zealand, marketing consultant Sam Frost was frozen out of his account, and there were no other administrators linked to some of the Facebook Pages running the ads. He spent “a couple hundred dollars” before he was allowed back in.

TMO Deals

Babbel Language Learning Lifetime Subscription (14 Languages): $199

Bryan Chaffin ·

We have a deal on a lifetime subscription for Babbel language learning software. Babbel lets you practice with 10-15 minute bite-sized lessons, and Babbel uses speech recognition technology to keep your pronunciation on point. And, it comes with 10,000 hours of online language education. A lifetime subscription is $199 through our deal, and it covers all 14 languages.

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Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla Take on Kazakhstan Government

Andrew Orr ·

Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla are teaming up to ban a root certificate used by the Kazakhstan government to decrypt HTTPS traffic for residents in the country’s capital, the city of Nur-Sultan.

Kazakh officials justified their actions claiming they were carrying out a cybersecurity training exercise for government agencies, telecoms, and private companies.

The government’s explanation did, however, make zero technical sense, as certificates can’t prevent mass cyber-attacks and are usually used only for encrypting and safeguarding traffic from third-party observers.