Instagram is centralizing Reels and Shop on its app homepage as Facebook tries to more aggressively push its TikTok clone and become a bigger social commerce player.
WPP, in a push to consolidate creative and digital teams, will merge agencies Grey Global Group and AKQA to form AKQA Group.
The Walt Disney Co. saw strong growth across its streaming platforms, with Disney+ now closing in on 74 million subscribers—but it will have to stay competitive with content and market expansion to keep up momentum.
Despite larger drops in ad spending overall, content marketing will only drop 1.5% to $63.34 billion, according to new estimates from Borrell Associates. That’s partly due to the large percentage of content marketing spend that goes to digital—nearly two-thirds (66.3%) of the content marketing industry this year, per Borrell—and digital’s comparative strength versus the overall ad market. We estimate that digital ad spending will be far more resilient during the pandemic, growing 7.5% while total media spend will drop 4.1%. Accordingly, digital will be the only channel of the 11 in the study where content marketing spend will increase this year.
Today is the final deadline for ByteDance to complete a sale of TikTok’s US operations to a US company before it’s banned—meaning TikTok is once again in the position of narrowly trying to avoid a ban on the day it’s set to begin. Last week, the company filed for a 30-day extension with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the body responsible for approving a sale. But ByteDance claims the CFIUS hasn’t responded to its request—so now the company has turned to the federal appeals court to grant an injunction allowing it to continue operations, per TechCrunch.
Publisher Group Nine has launched its new online marketplace Swipe.Shop specifically for mobile, yet another publisher jumping on commerce.
Apple is facing new privacy complaints in Germany and Spain from a privacy advocacy group that says the existence of IDFA violates the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
A little over a year since its debut in the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands, Disney+ is now officially available to consumers in Latin America. Subscribers to the platform will be able to enjoy unlimited access to the company’s vast array of content from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, National Geographic, Fox, and more.
Security: Menlo Security raised $100M for cloud-based security services—to address the shift to remote work, companies like Menlo Security are tapping into the growing enterprise interest in the Zero Trust security model and should see strong adoption of cloud-based services into 2021 and beyond.
Watch eMarketer One-on-One, a video interview where Carrie Tharp, vice president of retail and consumer at Google Cloud, talks with Geoff Ramsey, co-founder of eMarketer and chief evangelist of Insider Intelligence, on how retail marketers can unlock value in their P&L through data-driven decisions at the intersection of customer, product, and supply chain data.
With businesses closed during lockdowns, the growth of online shopping accelerated so quickly that sales numbers have reached heights that we didn’t anticipate until 2022. Among those who already shop online, the pandemic has also sped up the adoption of alternative shopping behaviors, such as social commerce.
Grocery ecommerce is continuing to have a moment as more consumers get in the habit of shopping this way.