Advertising news today: Trump’s TV ad, brands get political

President
Donald Trump
Tony
Dejak/AP

NBC is pulling an ad it aired over the weekend from its networks
following a backlash.

The 30-second ad, approved by President Donald Trump, aired
during the “Sunday Night Football” game between the New England
Patriots and the Green Bay Packers.

Facebook and Fox News have also pulled the ad. “Upon further
review, Fox News pulled the ad yesterday and it will not appear
on either Fox News Channel or Fox Business Network,” Marianne
Gambelli, the president of Fox’s ad sales, said in a statement to
Business Insider.

CNN previously deemed the ad too racist to air, issuing
a statement on Twitter on Saturday: “CNN has made
it abundantly clear in its editorial coverage that this ad is
racist. When presented with an opportunity to be paid to take a
version of this ad, we declined. Those are the facts.”

The primetime ad attempted
to draw a connection between Luis Bracamontes, an
undocumented Mexican immigrant who was convicted of killing two
Sacramento deputies in 2014, and the so-called migrant
caravan now traveling up through Mexico toward
the US border. There is no known connection.

Click here to read more about the
controversial political ad.

In other news:

‘I gotta take a knee like I’m Colin’: Brands like Sprite
and IBM are wading into politically charged advertising with the
help of digital publisher Attn:. Some of the ads
have the company’s logo, but the publisher is also experimenting
with white-label content for brands like Sprite.

Ivanka Trump wins 16 Chinese trademarks despite shutting
down her business. The trademarks were filed for
everything from umbrellas to sausages.

Amazon’s got its eyes set on yet another market — and one
high-flying upstart should be worried. In the
broader streaming-video market, Amazon is emerging as the chief
rival to Roku.

A startup backed by Marc Benioff raised a bunch of new
money to bring branded websites back from the dead.
Brandcast has raised $18 million in Series A funding to build out
technology that lets marketers build and edit websites quickly.

Venture-capital investment in advertising technology and
marketing-technology startups will plunge in 2019, according to a
report from Forrester Research covered by the Wall Street
Journal. Forrester predicts a 75% drop in
venture-capital funding to these startups in 2019, to $1.8
billion from $7.2 billion this year.