AGENCY WORK HIGHLIGHTS

• In December, our Experiential team worked alongside Warner Bros. Pictures Canada to maximize awareness of the Canadian premiere of The Matrix Resurrections. Our team created brand and grassroots partnerships, publicity opportunities, and an unforgettable fan experience. The work paid off as the premiere recently received two ACE Awards from the Canadian Public Relations Society: Bronze for Marketing Communications Campaign of the Year, and Silver for Best Use of Special Events or Experiential Marketing.

  

• For Shudder's The Sadness, our Creative, Earned, and Paid Media teams worked with several influencers to create trailer reaction videos for paid assets and organic activations across Shudder's social channels to broaden reach and increase awareness. The Sadness presented the unique challenge of fully conveying the title's themes and boundary-pushing nature while adhering to advertiser-partner guidelines. The trailers highlighted striking moments from the film without featuring excessive gore. Replacing the gore were acclaim quotes that were interpolated throughout to maintain viewer engagement. So far, The Sadness is one of Shudder's most efficient titles YTD.

  

• For Acorn TV, our Creative, Earned and Media departments gathered the cast of Harry Wild to discuss the new crime series. Jane Seymour, Kevin Ryan, Amy Huberman, and Rohan Nedd discussed behind-the-scenes stories with hilarious banter. The video has garnered 22.4K organic social views, 13.4K link clicks, and 3.9M paid impressions. Check out the full interview on Youtube.

  

• After two years of no live Heineken experiences, AGM was tasked with re-introducing the full Heineken Experience to drive awareness and appeal to Irish consumers. Our Experiential and Creative teams partnered to direct and shoot video and photo assets. We then created a platform that integrates the multiple iconic Heineken live music properties throughout Ireland and elevates consumers' music experiences throughout the calendar year, which resulted in 10K+ entries in the first three weeks.

  

INDUSTRY UPDATES

Ad Vendors / Platforms / Data

• Tremor will acquire ad-tech firm Amobee for $239M to scale its data-driven ad offerings in CTV and video. (Marketing Dive)

• YouTube’s ad revenue grew 4.8% in Q2. It's the slowest growth YouTube has seen in two years. (Variety)

• Google delayed blocking third-party cookies until late 2024. It will continue testing a new set of APIs that it claims can strike a balance between preserving privacy and continuing to enable the online advertising economy. (The Verge)

• An ongoing cybercriminal operation is working to hijack Facebook Business accounts using a newly discovered data-stealing malware. The operations’ motives appear to be purely financially driven. (Tech Crunch)

• Google Analytics now reports on Performance Max and Smart Shopping. Data from both campaign types are listed under a new channel group called cross-network. (Search Engine Journal)

• Meta quarterly ad sales are down 14% from Q4 2021 to Q2 2022. It also reported its first ever revenue decline, down 1% QoQ. (Axios)

  

• Despite missing Q2 revenue expectations, Roku claimed $1B in upfront deals for the 2022-2023 TV season from all seven major agency holding companies. (THR)

Awards / Festivals

• Netflix’s White Noise will be the opening movie for the 2022 Venice International Film Festival. The film stars Adam Driver as a professor in the Midwest going through a very dramatic year. (THR)

• The Latin GRAMMY Awards will return to Las Vegas on November 17th, 2022. The show will air live from the Michelob ULTRA Arena at Mandalay Bay via Univision. (Remezcla)

• Netflix drama The Swimmers will open the Toronto Film Festival on September 8th. It's about real-life sisters on an odyssey as refugees from war-torn Syria to the 2016 Rio Olympics. (THR)

Cinemas / Theatrical

• Jordan Peele's' Nope brought in $44M at the US box office during its opening weekend. About 68% of the opening weekend audience was between the ages of 18 and 34. (USA Today)

• AMC Theaters is offering a $5 movie deal on Tuesdays from now through October. To get the deal, attendees must be enrolled in the AMC Stubs program. (Fox)

• Minions: The Rise Of Gru is the first animated movie to gross more than $300M at the US box office during the Covid era. In its fourth weekend in theaters, Rise of Gru brought in $18M. (Deadline)

• Falcon’s Beyond has announced a new strategic partnership with BRON, a global media and technology studio. The firms will co-develop and co-produce international IPs into feature films, episodic series, and video games. (Blooloop)

• Imax's Q2 global box office revenue hit $247M, up 128% YoY, with help from titles like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Jurassic World: Dominion. However, despite the increase in YoY revenue, it reported a $2.9M Q2 loss. (THR)

Gambling / Casinos

• New York Mets owner Steve Cohen is extending his efforts to bring a casino to unused land near Citi Field in Queens. New York's 2023 budget allots for three downstate casino permits, but two will likely be awarded to current slots-only casinos: MGM Resorts’ Empire City in Yonkers and Resorts World New York City in Queens. (Casino.org)

• A new NFT Poker site, PokerAces, hopes to introduce gamers to quicker and more engaging poker games with the help of AI-designed poker bots. The bots will play one another for real money on behalf of their holders during poker races. (Gambling News)

• Americans wagered hundreds of millions of dollars on lottery tickets just two days, catapulting a US lottery jackpot to more than $1B for only the fourth time ever. (Axios)

  

Live Events / Attractions

• Adele unveiled new dates for her Weekends With Adele Vegas residency. The concerts will run from November 2022 through March 2023. (THR)

• Cirque du Soleil has extended its long-running show, “The Beatles Love,” at The Mirage in Las Vegas. The added performances will run through 2023. (Casino.org)

• Microsoft is holding its first in-person tech event since the start of the pandemic. The event, Microsoft Ignite, is a conference for developers and IT professionals that will take place in Seattle from October 12th-14th. (The Verge)

• MGM Resorts opened the Garden Table, a dining experience located inside Bellagio Conservatory on the Las Vegas Strip featuring pre-fixe menus crafted by the teams at Michael Mina or Sadelle’s Cafe. (Fox)

• Universal Theme Parks Q2 revenue increased 64.8% YoY to $1.8B due to higher attendance and an increase in guest spending. (UPNT)

Music / Audio / Podcasts

• Meta launched a new feature allowing creators to monetize Facebook videos that feature music from major artists. Creators will get 20% of the ad revenue, while Meta and the music rights holders split the rest. (The Verge)

• Spotify ended Q2 with 188M premium subscribers, exceeding its own forecast. It also hit 433M monthly active users, a 19% increase YoY. (THR)

• Universal Music Group's quarterly revenue jumped 25.4% to $2.57B. Subscription and streaming revenue increased by 7%, but downloads and other digital revenue dropped 12.4%. (THR)

• SiriusXM ended Q2 with 34M total subscribers, with self-pay subscribers accounting for 32M. Its Q2 revenue increased 4% QoQ to $2.25B (THR)

• Starting in August, Snapchat will provide monthly grants of up to $100K to artists who are distributing music on the platform via DistroKid. It will provide grants of $5K per song with a cap at 20 songs. (Variety)

NFT / Blockchain / Crypto

• Unstoppable Domains has registered 2.5M blockchain domains since it launched in 2018. The domains use terms like “name.crypto” and “name.blockchain” with each one tied to an NFT. (Fortune)

• Russia is planning to regulate NFTs by putting forward several amendments to the Civil Code and the law on digital financial assets. (Bitcoin.com)

• The Dune bible crypto collective wants to sell its Dune bible, though it's not expecting the book to sell for anywhere close to what it was purchased for - $3M. (The Verge)

• The US Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Coinbase to determine whether it improperly let Americans trade digital assets that should have been registered as securities. (Reuters)

• About 31% of Australians think the metaverse will be regularly used by most people in three to five years, while 7% think it will happen within a year, and 12% don’t think it will ever be widely used. (B&T)

OTT / Streaming

• Almost a quarter of Netflix churners come back within two months. Industry-wide, the average return rate for all SVOD services is 14%. (NextTV)

• Around 30% of streaming subscribers switch services in any given two-month period. From 2020 to 2022, those who switched streaming services most often went to Apple TV+. (NextTV)

  

• Apple is now letting apps, like Netflix, direct iPhone and iPad users to an external webpage where they can sign up for services. Netflix didn't previously have an external link in compliance with Apple's rules which barred external links to sign-up pages. The change also lets brands avoid Apple's 30% fee it levies against transactions conducted within the app. (The Verge)

• The Apple TV app now gives viewers the option to restart a live sporting event already in progress and then to pause, rewind, or fast-forward the action, letting viewers watch games as if they were live. (Streamable)

• The majority of US streaming subscribers feel they already have access to enough movies and TV shows. They're unsatisfied, however, with the amount of live and local content available. (Morning Consult)

  

• NFL+ launched with a base tier price of $4.99/mo. The NFL+ Premium tier costs $9.99/mo and includes full-game replays and condensed-game replays in addition to the base offering of live local and national primetime games. (THR)

• For one week only, Discovery+ offered its ad-supported plan for $0.99/mo for two months, 80% off of the normal price of $4.99/mo. (Streamable)

• After facing backlash for blocking ads on abortion, guns, and climate change, Hulu will now accept political issue advertisements covering a wide spectrum of policy positions. (THR)

• US consumers give ad-free and ad-supported tiers similar rankings when it comes to value. The ad-free versions of Peacock, Hulu and Paramount+ have higher value rankings than their ad-supported tiers, but in the opposite is true for HBO Max and Discovery+. (MediaPost)

  

• Netflix retroactively edited Stranger Things after the creative team set an episode of Stranger Things 4 on March 22nd, forgetting that it had been established as Will Byers' birthday in the earlier season. (GQ)

• Streaming claimed more than a third of total TV time in June. Netflix saw the largest increase in minutes viewed (16%), follwed by Disney+ (15%), and Prime Video (11%). (Nielsen)

  

• Peacock's paid subs stayed flat QoQ, with 13M at the end of June. The streamer saw 4M new subscribers in Q1 due to exclusive content including Super Bowl and the Beijing Winter Olympics. (THR)

• A DTC service for the YES Network, which carries the New York Yankees and Brooklyn Nets, is coming soon. Currently, the only way to stream the YES Network without a cable subscription is with DIRECTV STREAM, which offers it as part of the $89.99/mo CHOICE Package. (Streamable)

Retail / Lifestyle / Travel

• Las Vegas' Harry Reid International Airport set a new record in June for passengers in a single month - 4.68M, up from the previous record of 4.61M passengers in October 2019. (Fox)

• Shopify is laying off about 1K employees as its growth continues to slow down post-pandemic. Most of the layoffs affect roles in recruiting, support, and sales. (Business Insider)

• Amazon is increasing the price of Prime across Europe. An annual Prime membership will increase by 20% in the UK and 43% in France. (Business Insider)

• Comfort with travel among US adults dropped in July. Comfort with taking a train dropped 7 points to 53% while staying at a hotel dropped 5 points to 65%. (Morning Consult)

Social Media

• Instagram will soon let users “remix” public photos for use inside of Reels. The change is meant to provide more content for Reels creators to work with. (The Verge)

• In the US, Gen Z is the only generation to see recent declines in social media use. It reported less use of every social media app last fall, except for TikTok. (Axios)

  

• Despite technical challenges and frequent crashes, BeReal took the number one spot in the US on Apple’s App Store charts — beating TikTok. It had 1.7M installs during the week of July 11th alone. (AdAge)

• Snapchat launched its first in-app AR game called Ghost Phone. In the game, players work to solve the mystery of what happened to the previous owner of a smartphone. (The Verge)

• Pinterest has struck a content deal with Jellysmack for a slate of five shows hosted by popular DIY creators that will be available exclusively on its platform. (THR)

• After facing backlash, Instagram is pausing the release of TikTok-like product features including a full-screen feed emphasizing short-form videos (Reels) and an increase in recommended posts from accounts that users don't follow. (THR)

• Instagram will ask some US users for race and ethnicity data to study how different groups experience the platform. (The Verge)

• TikTok is testing HTML5 mini-games with a handful game developers including Vodoo, Nitro Games, FRVR, Aim Lab and Lotem. (Tech Crunch)

Video Games

• Meta added an 18+ tag for Horizon Worlds and updated its policy to allow creators to include “mature” content that was previously banned. (The Verge)

• The VR subsidiary of ByteDance, Pico, is preparing to launch a new headset called the Pico 4 Pro. Similar to Meta’s Quest headset, it will be a standalone device featuring face and eye tracking functionality. (Protocol)

• Microsoft is speeding up Xbox boot time. The cold startup time has been reduced by 5 seconds for Xbox Series X / S consoles. (The Verge)

• Dick’s Sporting Goods launched an interactive space in Roblox called School of Sport. The experience takes users through a virtual high school where they can rack up currency to purchase back-to-school gear for their avatars. (Marketing Dive)

Interesting Campaigns / Creative

• Remy Martin has partnered with Usher for a limited edition cognac bottle designed by AI. Usher used his own musical vocabulary to describe his experience with the renowned Rémy Martin 1738 Accord Royal, then A.I. technology transformed Usher’s words into artwork. (Forbes)

  

AND NOW THE GOOD STUFF

• The UK government published its national AI strategy, which outlines its long-term vision for the technology and its impact on society.

• Rodney Brooks, the creator of the Roomba, throws cold water on the idea that AI will surpass human intelligence in the near future.

• A unique look behind the curtain at how one VC fund increased returns.

• How Peloton uses design and gamification to keep people on the exercise platform.

• If you think gentrification is about new coffee shops and high rents, you are missing an essential aesthetic element.

• Watch out for the Trisolarians! Scientists might have found the first-known planet orbiting three stars at once.