What you need to know in advertising today

BuzzFeed’s
Jim Waterson and Emily Ashton during the website’s EU referendum
debate last year.
Getty

Brands are pouring money into automated, programmatic
advertising, using all sorts of data and analytics to zap ads to
the right person.

They’re also pumping budgets into branded content — articles and
videos created on behalf of advertisers to subtly communicate
their messages. That high touch, highly customized form of
advertising is basically the polar opposite of programmatic.

Yet the ad tech company TripleLift has an ambitious plan to marry
these two very different practices.

The firm has recently been testing a new product, ContentDial,
which purports to help marketers create articles and videos on
their behalf quickly and more efficiently than they do when going
directly to a big publisher like The New York
Times or BuzzFeed.

To read more about how ContentDial poses a threat to the media
companies,
click here.

In other news:

‘People and the egos often get in the way’: Here are 5
things ad agencies can do to survive amid massive pressure to
reinvent themselves. Agencies must transform their
business models to meet the needs of modern CMOs, according to a
new industry report by Forrester.

These are the 5 forces that are rapidly killing
advertising agencies. Ad agencies are facing several
existential threats, the Forrester report adds, including CMOs
taking more media and creative in-house to consulting firms
coming after high-margin agency services.

Twitter finally admits Alex Jones violated its rules,
hits him with a 7-day ban. Amid significant pressure
to follow Apple, Facebook, YouTube and Vimeo in deleting Jones’
account permanently, it appears that Twitter is keeping a
watching brief.

Tinder’s founders have filed a bombshell $2 billion lawsuit
claiming the former CEO ‘groped and sexually harassed’ an
executive at a company party.
 The lawsuit
alleges that the former Tinder CEO and IAC Chairman Greg Blatt
harassed Rosette Pambakian, Tinder’s vice president of
marketing.

New York Media, owner of New York magazine and several
websites, is exploring options including a possible sale, The
Wall Street Journal reports. The publisher is
owned by a holding company controlled by the heirs of Bruce
Wasserstein, the late financier who purchased New York magazine
in 2003 for $55 million.