20 Jun 2022 | The Media Leader Staff

100% Media Roundup: 20 June- 24 June

This is a daily digest of news stories from around the media world, updated by The Media Leader team, to ensure you’re 100% up-to-date.

Friday, 24 June

Vodafone and Snap debut Wimbledon lens with Emma Raducanu

Snapchat users will be served with a new AR Lens in advance of Wimbledon thanks to a partnership with Vodafone.

Once the Lens is activated, users will receive a call from tennis star Emma Raducanu as they will be virtually sent to Centre Court at Wimbledon.

The addition is part of Vodafone’s #FeelTheConnection summer campaign; Vodafone is a partner of Wimbledon.

The Lens is available today and will run through the tournament.

Meta to ‘pull support’ from misinformation tool

Meta is removing support for CrowdTangle, a tool that allows researchers to track the spread of viral posts, as well as misinformation, on Facebook, according to a report by Bloomberg.

Facebook bought CrowdTangle in 2016, which served as a “quasi-independent” project until 2021, when it began reassigning team members to other divisions amid disagreements over data transparency.

CrowdTangle CEO Brandon Silverman resigned in October 2021.

The tool will be kept alive at least through the midterm elections this year, per the Bloomberg report, but Meta has not stated how it might replace CrowdTangle or otherwise continue to provide free data transparency moving forward.

UK film and high-end TV production projected to be worth more than £7bn in five years

The UK’s film and high-end TV production industry could be worth between £7.07bn and £7.66bn by 2025, according to new research.

This would be an increase from the current value of £5.64bn, but nearly 21,000 additional crew will be needed to meet this upper projection, according to research commissioned by industry body ScreenSkills.

The industry currently employs the equivalent of 122,000 full-time jobs and is experiencing a “surge” in productions as both broadcasters and streamers line up shows.

OMD Worldwide wins Media Network of the Year 2022 at Cannes

OMD Worldwide won the Media Network of the Year award at Cannes Lions, the jury announced on Thursday.

Mediacom and Starcom followed in second and third place, respectively.

Separately, Vice Media has continued to rack up awards throughout the week, winning its third Grand Prix on Thursday in the Social & Influencer Lions for The Unfiltered History Tour.

Netflix lays off 300 staffers in second round of cuts

Streaming giant Netflix is laying off 300 staffers – equivalent to roughly 3-4% of its workforce, according to reports.

The news follows a deceleration in revenue growth as Netflix lost subscribers for the first time in more than a decade in Q1 2022, as well as general belt tightening due to rising interest rates.

Netflix previously cut 150 staff members in May.

eBay acquires UK-based NFT marketplace

eBay has acquired UK-based NFT marketplace company KnownOrigin, whose platform provides artists and collectors to create, buy, and resell digital collectibles.

KnownOrigin was founded in Manchester in 2018.

The acquisition is a further step in eBay’s self-proclaimed “tech-led reimagination” – the company began allowing the buying and selling of NFTs on its platform in May 2021.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Thursday, 23 June

ITV announces two Love Island series for 2023

ITV and Lifted Entertainment (part of ITV studios) have confirmed there will be two series on ITV2 and ITVX next year.

There will be a total of sixteen weeks of Love Island content in 2023 with the first series starting in South Africa in the New Year and the second series running in Mallorca in the summer.

This is the first time there has been two series in a year since 2021.

Viewing data showed that series eight currently airing on ITV2 debuted to a consolidated audience of 5 million including catch-up across TV, mobile, PC and tablet, marking an increase of 0.2 million on the previous series’ opening episode, making it the most-viewed first Love Island episode since 2019.

ITV reported the first episode of this year’s Love Island has been streamed 7.5 million times and the series as a whole has been streamed 74 million times.

The same data showed 2022’s Love Island launch is officially the biggest programme of the year so far for 16- 34 year-old demographic.

Read more on Love Island here:

Love Island opens series 8 with 2.8 million peak

Love Island series 8 ‘will be the true litmus test of its popularity’

Now Love Island has a ‘coffee partner’ in Emmi Caffe Latte

Reddit inks first ITV deal with Love Island sponsorship

Discovery+ to air Trump documentary this summer

The documentary about former president Donald Trump and his 2020 presidential campaign team, an object of interest in the January 6 committee hearings, will premiere on Discovery+, according to reports.

The documentary will air in three parts later this summer.

Alex Holder, the documentarian who produced the film, complied with a subpoena by the January 6 committee earlier this month to grant members access to raw footage of the president and his inner circle in the weeks leading up to and after the attempted insurrection on January 6.

Holder is scheduled to speak to the committee behind closed doors today.

Horizon Media to test Comscore as Nielsen alternative

Horizon Media is planning to employ Comscore to test local-TV audience measurement as an alternative to Nielsen, according to reports.

The media buyer previously stated an intention to spend up to 15% of its upfront purchases on new measurement deals.

Among Horizon’s largest clients are Corona (Anheuser-Busch) and GEICO (Berkshire Hathaway).

Fox Corp. can be included in Fox News defamation lawsuit, judge rules

The judge presiding over Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News has ruled that the channel’s parent company, Fox Corporation, is liable to legal exposure, according to a report by The New York Times.

Judge Eric M. Davis wrote that Dominion “adequately pleaded” that Fox Corporation should be included in the lawsuit because Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan played a role in controlling the defamatory statements made against Dominion by Fox News during and after the 2020 presidential election.

The lawsuit seeks $1.6bn in damages.

Essence appoints analytics and operations leaders

WPP’s GroupM agency Essence has appointed Barbara Blanzat Henao as SVP, analytics EMEA, and Kate Mann (pictured, below) as SVP, agency solutions and operations EMEA.

Henao will be responsible for growing Essence’s analytics team and developing measurement and analytics initiatives for the business and its clients. Mann will be responsible for scaling client best practice and governance whilst overseeing business operations and Essence’s project management function. Both Mann and Blanzat Henao will report into Ryan Storrar, CEO for Essence EMEA.

Henao has been promoted from VP analytics and Mann from VP clientservices. Both will join Essence’s EMEA executive committee team, which the agency said has now achieved 50/50 gender balance.

Semafor raises $25m ahead of fall launch

Digital news start-up Semafor has raised $25m from individual investors as it readies itself for a market entry this fall, according to a report by The New York Times.

Justin Smith and Ben Smith’s project will begin coverage this fall with a staff of around 30 journalists based in London, New York, Washington DC, and an additional unspecified international location in the Middle East or African regions.

The publication officially introduced itself on Twitter Wednesday.

Hello world! 🧵

We’re a new global news brand and platform, launching this fall with the goal of addressing the crisis of trust in news.

Sign up today to be part of our launch. https://t.co/XEP4NVRMA9

— Semafor (@semafor) June 22, 2022

Newquest to make 65 advertising redundancies following Archant takeover

Regional publisher, Newsquest, is set to cut up to 65 advertising jobs at rival Archant following its takeover, according to reports in Holdthefrontpage.

Newsquest confirmed plans to make redundancies at Creative Life, Archant’s in-house advertising production and design services department.

Staff affected include commercial video producers, videographers, print designers, creative copyrighters and digital designers who are now in a 30-day consultation period.

Wednesday, 22 June

Greenpeace ‘storms WPP Cannes beach’

Greenpeace has stormed WPP’s Cannes beach in continued protest of adland’s work with fossil fuel companies, according to a report from The Drum.

The group interrupted a VLMY&R event early in the afternoon Wednesday.

It follows continued climate protests at Cannes Lions – Greenpeace activist and former Cannes Lions winner Gustav Martner jumped on stage earlier this week holding a banner that read “No awards on a dead planet, Ban Fossil Ads!”

Netflix ‘talking to potential ad partners’ for its ads tier

Netflix has been speaking to Google, Comcast/NBCUniversal, and Roku about its forthcoming introduction of an ads tier, according to reports.

In a statement to CNBC, Netflix downplayed the developments: “We are still in the early days of deciding how to launch a lower priced, ad-supported option and no decisions have been made. So this is all just speculation at this point”.

GroupM announces media decarbonization standards to come soon

GroupM announced at Cannes on Tuesday it will soon be publishing a report on the methods used to measure the media industry’s carbon footprint.

GroupM hopes the report will contribute to the standardization of media decarbonization methodology and best practices.

The research will be available for free when it is published “within the next month”.

Former Mirror editor Wallace joins News UK as head of TV

Richard Wallace, the former Daily Mirror editor, has been appointed to a new role as head of TV at News UK Broadcasting. He will oversee all editorial output from TalkTV, as well as have overall responsibility for the profit and loss account.

Wallace (pictured, above) was editor of the Mirror, the rival newsbrand to News UK’s The Sun, from 2004 to 2012 and over the last decade, has worked in TV as SVP TV and Production for Syco, Simon Cowell’s entertainment company.

Leading tech companies create Metaverse Standards Forum

Big tech companies such as Microsoft, Meta, Adobe, Epic Games, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Alibaba, and more, have come together to create The Metaverse Standards Forum to focus on industry-wide cooperation on interoperability standards needed to build an open metaverse.

The Forum amounts to the first significant attempt to self-standardize the metaverse as it undergoes development.

AudioGO launches in Canada

SiriusXM’s self-serve audio ad buying platform AudioGO has launched in Canada.

AudioGO is partnering with major Canadian audio companies such as TuneIn, Audiomack, Corus, Stingray Music, and idobi to enable marketers to run audio campaigns through its platform.

Meta settles lawsuit with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development

Meta announced it had settled a lawsuit with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Facebook had been accused by HUD of discriminatory advertising practices relating to housing by algorithmically refusing to show housing ads to users of certain races, genders, and ZIP codes.

Meta will pay $115,054 as penalty and is altering its housing ad system “to make sure the audience that ends up seeing a house ad more closely reflects the eligible targeted audience for that ad.”

Separately on Tuesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced new monetization policies for creators, including that the company would hold off on revenue sharing between creators on both Instagram and Facebook until 2024.

Ofcom recommends BBC changes complaints procedure and continue online development

Ofcom has reviewed the BBC’s performance and its future regulation of the public service broadcaster at the mid-point of its current Charter period.

In its report, it found too many people “lack confidence” in the BBC complaints process and it needs to meet viewers’ and listeners’ changing needs.

Ofcom discovered one in nine people have had a reason to complain about the BBC, nearly double than for other broadcasters, but most do not make a complaint as they do not believe it would make a difference or be taken seriously.

Audiences rated BBC news and current affairs highly for trust and accuracy but less so for impartiality.

As a result Ofcom has directed the BBC to change its policy and publish “sufficient reasoning” in cases where it decided not to uphold due impartiality and accuracy complaints.

Ofcom also recommended the BBC further develop its online services and continue to deliver “distinctive, original UK content” in its new Operating License it issued today.

Audible scores first-look deal with the Obamas

Amazon’s Audible has scored an exclusive multi-year, multi-project first-look production deal with Barack and Michele Obama’s production company Higher Ground.

The partnership will officially begin once Higher Ground’s current deal with Spotify expires in October.

The Obamas had previously announced they would be ending their exclusive podcasting deal with competitor Spotify in late April.

Tuesday, 21 June

Bauer Media UK appoints publisher for TV listings portfolio

Bauer Media UK’s publishing business has appointed Fiona Campbell in the newly created role of publisher for the TV listings portfolio.

Campbell (pictured, above) will join on 20 July and report directly to Joanne Bourne, publishing director of Bauer Media UK’s TV and Real Life portfolio.

She comes from Immediate Media where she worked for more than eight years and most recently had publishing responsibility for twelve magazines in the Immediate Media Youth & Children’s group, including the Disney and CBeebies portfolios.

She has previous roles at Frontline, Bauer and EMAP.

Ofcom finds Channel 4 breached broadcast license because of subtitle issues

UK watchdog, Ofcom, has found Channel 4 breached conditions of its broadcast license last year after “an extended outage” of its subtitling, signing and audio description services.

After an investigation, Ofcom found Channel 4 did not meet requirements for its subtitle quota on Freesat in 2021 following an incident at a centre run by Red Bee Media meaning audiences were unable to “fully access” Channel 4 programmes for nearly two months.

The broadcast license requires 90% of programme hours to be subtitled on Freesat, and Channel 4 achieved 85.41%.

Ofcom broadly recommended that broadcasters must improve disaster recovery plans and processes and specifically said Channel 4 must report to Ofcom by the end of the year on the steps it has taken to “ensure greater resilience of its access services” and continued improvement of accessibility to broadcast and on-demand programmes.

The Economist Group posts double-digit growth in annual results

The Economist Group registered an operating profit of £46.4m on revenue of £346.3m in the year ending 31 March 2022, according to its latest financial results.

This marked an 11% and 12% growth respectively year-on-year, with digital services constituting 55% of revenue, or 60% when including digital consumption from subscribers to The Economist who receive a combined print and digital product.

The Economist’s total subscribers grew to 1,185,000 and the company also registered the highest profit since 2016 for its continuing business.

NBCUniversal announces new measurement certification for emotion and ad quality

NBCUniversal is creating a new certification for emotion and ad quality as a category within their greater audience measurement framework.

The media company is testing and learning about audience’s emotional responses to ads with Dumbstruck Emotion Analytics, a company which combines insights from psychology with cutting-edge facial coding and eye tracking AI, as well as other alternative measurement companies System 1, Emoto.AI, Kantar, and more.

Google launches playbook for designing accessible marketing

Google is launching a playbook for designing accessible marketing, in partnership with disability inclusion experts LaVant Consulting and Disability:IN.

The expansion in inclusive marketing adds to Google’s existing All In toolkit.

Google noted that in 2021, people with disabilities were represented in 5.6% of its ads, a five-times increase from the year prior, though the company acknowledged it “still has a ways to go.”

Omnicom Media Group announces strategic partnerships with Walmart Connect and Instacart

Omnicom Media Group has announced multiple new strategic partnerships at Cannes Lions this year.

OMG and Walmart Connect – Walmart’s retail media network – announced an agreement to leverage Walmart’s first-party data for Omnicom’s clientele.

Separately, OMG also announced a deal with e-commerce company Instacart to data to more directly link sales data to TV advertisement deals, according to a report by Digiday.

Paramount+ to launch tomorrow in the UK

Paramount+, Paramount’s streaming service, launches Wednesday in the UK.

In advance of the launch, the TV giant has ‘taken over’ London’s West End and hosted a star-studded event featuring Sylvester Stallone, Viola Davis, Jessica Chastain, and others to promote flagship programs such as Yellowstone, Star Trek: Discovery, and Tulsa King.

The overseas expansion comes at a time when users are considering cutting back on their streaming subscriptions amid cost-of-living increases.

In related news, Paramount’s international president and CEO Raffaele Annecchino left the company last week.

Meta debuts two new metaverse Horizon Worlds

Two new Meta Horizon Worlds have debuted today, the social media company announced at Cannes.

The MINIVerse, in collaboration with BMW Group automotive brand MINI, will provide a virtual go-karting experience for metaverse users.

The Fender Stratosphere is a guitar-shaped island in the sky where visitors can collaborate to create original music.

The words will be available to all US, Canadian, British Meta Quest 2 Headset users.

Monday, 20 June

Sky announces £1m partnership with the Black Equity Organisation

Sky has announced a £1m partnership with newly-launched civil rights group, the Black Equity Organisation (BEO), to deliver the Future 100 Growth Fund, backing Black British entrepreneurs to launch and grow their businesses.

As BEO’s first official programme partner, Sky will provide funding and support over three years to help overcome the barriers faced by young Black entrepreneurs in the UK when setting up businesses.

Telegram launches premium subscription option

Instant messaging service Telegram has launched a premium subscription at $4.99/month.

Premium subscribers will have access to features including doubled limits on channels, chats, and chat folders, four GB file uploads, faster downloads, exclusive stickers and reactions, and more.

The company also announced Telegram has surpassed 700 million monthly active users globally.

Meta launches Avatars Store for Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger

Meta is launching an Avatars Store for Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger that will allow users to buy digital clothes for their avatars.

Need a fresh fit for your avatar? We're launching our Avatars Store on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger so you can buy digital clothes. Mark Zuckerberg and @evachen212 tried out new looks from @BALENCIAGA @Prada @ThomBrowne ✨https://t.co/7SN0hdYz2D pic.twitter.com/Bp9zeK2ZNl

— Meta Newsroom (@MetaNewsroom) June 17, 2022

Initial offerings include virtual clothes from brands including Balenciaga, Prada, and Thom Browne.

Roku and Walmart partner for shoppable CTV ads

Walmart is partnering with Roku to launch shoppable advertisements right on users’ TVs.

Users need simply use their remote to press “OK” on a shoppable ad to be taken to checkout, where their payment details will be autofilled from Roku Pay, Roku’s payment platform.