High-level departures spell more trouble for Facebook: The company’s long-time CTO will step down next year as Facebook addresses a flurry of negative press.
Disney+ weighs ads to reinvigorate user growth: A cheaper subscription tier could help broaden its audience domestically and internationally—and give marketers access to its strong brand and wealth of viewer data.
A financial planning platform for students will offer valuable tools to 17- to 24-year-olds and may win their long-term loyalty and retention.
Plaid picks chief privacy officer at a key moment: Sheila Jambekar, the first to fill this role at the open-banking provider, could help it adapt to the CFPB’s future industry regulation.
BofA does more with less in tech: It’s slashed tech and ops spending by about $2B over the past five years, shifting funds to new initiatives—and it’s still adding clients.
The majority of US adults aren’t in the habit of switching their primary bank. As of August, 77% have not moved their primary account to a new bank in the past five years, and just 8% have done so over the past year.
EV recycling could be a win-win for recycling startups and carmakers: Ford’s $50M investment in Redwood Materials creates a partnership to build a US-based battery supply chain.
The UK’s digital advertising industry weathered the pandemic remarkably well. Among the industry sectors we track, digital ad spending will rise across the board (which was not universal last year), but these patterns of growth will fluctuate wildly across categories.
Albertsons gets in on shoppable content early: While the US shoppable video market is still nascent, grocers are hopping on the trend now in the hope it will mature like China’s.
Apple is letting users show proof of vaccine through their Apple Wallet—an app they’re already spending more time in thanks to the pandemic.
Is AI-powered cancer diagnostics mainstreaming? A Memorial Sloan Kettering spinout got the FDA nod for its cancer-detecting AI tool, and NYU Langone’s study results boast the efficacy of a similar tool—more fuel for healthcare stakeholders investing in AI for cancer diagnostics.
Bosworth’s promotion marks Facebook’s pivot toward a hardware-backed metaverse: The company’s head of VR and AR will replace Mike Schroepfer as CTO.
Google rolls out ad transparency tools as Big Tech criticism mounts: Giving users more info about the ads they see helps address companies violating Google’s policies and mitigates misinformation concerns.
On today's episode, we discuss whether Facebook has reached a turning point, how people now feel about digital ads, if the world is ready for eSports endorsers or finance influencers (aka finfluencers), the pandemic pet boom, what we keep learning about customers' needs, how to make sure you treat in-office and remote workers fairly, a town with free alcohol, and more. Tune in to the discussion with eMarketer analysts Nina Goetzen and Blake Droesch, and senior analyst at Insider Intelligence Jasmine Enberg.
Facebook’s Oversight Board flexes its power with a review of the company’s whitelisting system: The autonomous board has the potential to make life complicated for the social platform.
JPMorgan picks UK fintech for core-banking cloud hosting: The banking giant is working with Thought Machine on its US and UK retail-banking operations—the latest partnership in a string of them announced this year.