At&T Return to Advertising on YouTube After 2 Years Away

At&T, one of the biggest marketers in the U.S., is back advertising on YouTube after a nearly 2-year hiatus. The company removed all its adverts from the video platform in 2017. It said Friday that it was satisfied that YouTube had worked to stop its adverts appearing next to disturbing or extremist content. At&T’s Chief Brand Officer, Fiona Carter, spoke with New York Times and emphasized that her firm demanded “a near-zero chance of our advertising appearing next to objectionable content.” That standard now appears to have been met.

The decision reflects the progress that Google-owned YouTube has made with advertisers in the 22 months since a number of them discovered that some of their ads were appearing during, or before, videos promoting hate speech, terrorism and other disturbing content. AT&T was among the first companies that stopped paying to advertise on YouTube, telling it that they wouldn’t return until it made improvements.

Weed Influencers Online are Helping Firms Get Around Advertising Regulations

Weed firms are using online influencers to get around rules that prohibit the marketing of cannabis, even in U.S. states where the drug is legal. These influencers tend to be young women, who post on Instagram and YouTube, according to a report in Wired. Content can range from confessional videos to product reviews. Even though YouTube said it prohibits content around regulated substances like marijuana and removes the videos when it discovers them, firms marketing the products are benefiting from the influencers’ work.

For marketing agencies and companies selling cannabis products, influencers have been a boon – a creative way to get around regulations, with the added impression of authenticity. Typically, the more people that are looking at your product, or your posts, the better. But as public and legal attitudes to cannabis have shifted, the subcultures immersed in it are being subject to more scrutiny than before.

Online Voting, the Corporate Public Square, Picard’s Return to Star Trek - ACM 474

What will it take to make online or app-based voting safe, secure, and reliable? Bryan Chaffin and Jeff Gamet are joined by John Kheit to discuss the future of voting. They also explore the idea of corporate platforms (i.e. private platforms) becoming so big that they become synonymous with the public square and subject to the First Amendment. Then Bryan goes off on a weird tangent about how cool Patrick Stewart’s new episode of Star Trek could be if Jean-Luc Picard was a broken and bitter man. Good times!

SongShift Lets You Transfer Apple Music Playlists to Other Services

There’s an app called SongShift that lets you transfer Apple Music playlists to other services. Supported services include Apple Music, Deezer, Discogs, HypeMachine, LastFM, Napster, Pandora, Spotify, Tidal, and YouTube. You can “shift” complete playlists from one streaming service to another, and automatically keep all of your playlists synced with each other. I’ve heard some Apple customers say that when they unsubscribe from Apple Music, then re-subscribe later on, none of their playlists and content is saved. I’ve never unsubscribed yet so I haven’t run into this issue, but it sounds like SongShift can help in these cases. App Store: SongShift – Free

Instagram Testing Live Stories with Friends

Instagram announced Tuesday that it’s testing the ability to do live Stories with friends. Users who are broadcasting live can tap a button that allows them to invite anyone who is watching to join in on the broadcast. The original Story broadcaster can remove and invite another, too. As shown in the screenshot, the original Story broadcaster is on top of the split screen, while the participant is on the lower half. Instagram said the feature is being tested by a “small percentage of our community,” and will be launched globally in the “next few months.” It’s all part of Facebook/Instagram’s slow, but steady attack on YouTube, as well as SnapChat, and I expect it to be a popular feature. Especially after some split Stories go catastrophically wrong.

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