AGENCY WORK HIGHLIGHTS

• Our Partnerships team secured a second in-game partnership integration in PUBG MOBILE - and the first with a vehicle manufacturer. The promotion, which continues through October 16, brings the Dodge Challenger and Charger in-game for players to drive in exclusive PUBG MOBILE colors. The in-game promotion is being supported with influencer/livestream marketing, social media support, and an article at DodgeGarage (1MM UMVs). You can view the integration in PUBG MOBILE available on the App Store and Google Play. View the announcement trailer here.

  

INDUSTRY UPDATES

Ad Vendors / Platforms / Data

• TikTok is expanding its elections rules to make it harder for politicians and political groups to fundraise using the platform. The company has disabled all advertising and monetization features for politicians and parties. Additionally, accounts belonging to governments, politicians, and political parties must apply for verification. (The Verge)

• As of July 2022, around 16% of Americans indicated their household was underbanked, defined as having a bank or credit union account but also using one of three alternative financial services — check cashing, money order or bill payment — that month. (Morning Consult)

• YouTube will start introducing ads to its popular Shorts feature, making it easier for short form content creators to make money using this platform for short clips. (Social Media Today)

• TikTok is rolling out new advertising options ahead of the holiday shopping season. The new features will let advertisers link their products in in-feed videos, advertise a catalog of products from videos, and place clickable ads in live videos. (Digiday)

• Teads has added CTV to its cloud-based multichannel programmatic advertising platform. Brands can now buy across CTV, mobile and desktop to reach nearly 2B monthly unique users. (MediaPost)

• A new poll suggests the majority of Australians would like to see more restrictions or bans on TV advertising featuring gambling, junk food and alcohol. (ABC)

• What marketers can learn from the NFL’s big miss during Hispanic Heritage Month. (AdWeek)

Awards / Festivals

• Glenn Weiss and Ricky Kirshner were hired to produce the 95th Oscars telecast. Both have extensive experience in producing live television (rather than film). (The Wrap)

• The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced plans to incorporate craft categories into the 2023 Oscars broadcast after their exclusion last year. (Indie Wire)

Cinemas / Theatrical

• IMAX made a deal for six new big-screen theaters in China, in anticipation of a full post-pandemic return to theaters. (Deadline)

• Disney announced upcoming release dates after the D23 expo. Titles including Mufasa: The Lion King and Pixar’s Inside Out 2 are set for 2024. (Deadline)

• The rom-com “Ticket to Paradise,” starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts, reached the top of the international box office chart, bringing in $14.8M outside of the US. (Deadline)

• Sony Pictures announced the return of the original ‘Karate Kid’ movie franchise. A new installment is due out summer 2024; no cast has been announced yet. (Variety)

Gambling / Casinos

• Australia's House of Representatives has launched an inquiry into online gambling and its impacts on people with gambling problems. (Yogonet)

• MGM Resorts International has been named in a Mississippi lawsuit. The plaintiff, a gambler, claims MGM is stealing millions of dollars each year through voucher redemption kiosks. To reduce high-touch transactions amid the pandemic, MGM and many other casino operators did away with dispensing change in their self-service cashier kiosks. When a voucher is redeemed through an MGM kiosk, the machine dispenses only bills, along with a voucher for any change, which can only be exchanged at the casino cage. (Casino.org)

• Betsson has chosen Mexico as the next targeted and localized market for its online products. Under its global flagship brand, the gaming operator will provide live and online casino games together with its sports betting options to local bettors in Mexico, using its betsson.mx platform. (Gambling News)

Live Events / Attractions

• ‘The Phantom of the Opera,' Broadway’s longest-running show, will close in early 2023. (AP News)

• The Great Gatsby, the longest-running immersive show in London, will play its final performance at Immersive LDN on 7 Jan. 2023. The Great Gatsby started out in 2015 at The Fleeting Arms in York. The production premiered in London at the 2017 VAULT Festival, before moving to Gatsby’s Drugstore in SE1, and then Gatsby’s Mansion in 2019. (London Theatre)

• An interesting new patent application from Disney seeks to address one of the ongoing challenges facing theme park operations - people who need extra time getting on and off rides. Disney's patent application marries the concept of a track switch with a roundtable loading station. (Theme Park Insider)

• As of the end of Q2 2022, the amount people expect to spend on their trip to a visitor-serving organization has decreased by 12.5% for exhibit-based organizations and 28.6% for performance-based organizations when compared to EOY 2019. These are significant declines in spending expectations, the majority of which were realized in the first half of this year. (Colleen Dilenschneider)

  

• The 2023 Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show has found its main act: Rihanna has signed on to perform at the mega-event, which is set to take place on February 12. (THR)

Music / Audio / Podcasts

• Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti was at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart for Sept. 24, notching an 11th nonconsecutive week atop the list. That marks the most total weeks at No. 1 by any artist in nearly six years. (Billboard)

• Spotify’s move into audiobooks could reshape a rapidly growing category for publishers. In a surprising shift away from its all-you-can-listen ethos, Spotify is selling audiobooks à la carte, rather than as a subscription service. Executives say prices will vary per title and will be in line with other retailers. (NY Times)

• ARN’s iHeartPodcast Network Australia has dominated the latest Podcast Ranker results, delivering five of the top 10 podcasts and recording a combined total of 5.6M listeners. The August report also shows iHeartPodcast Network Australia had over 25M downloads last month (up 6.5%) – more than 4M downloads ahead of its closest competitor. (Podnews)

Web 3 / Metaverse

• Hadean, a U.K.-based distributed, spatial computing startup setting out to build infrastructure for the metaverse, has closed a $30 million Series A round of funding from a high-profile cast of investors, including Epic Games and Tencent. (TechCrunch)

• Alibaba Group is introducing new metaverse features to its interactive luxury shopping platform. The company’s upscale commerce marketplace, Tmall Luxury Pavilion, will host an AR fashion show and distribute a Meta Pass that will grant shoppers access to deals from select designer brands, among other events and upgrades to the existing interactive shopping experience. The platform already offers 3D shopping, as well as AR and VR try-on features. (AdWeek)

• The Vogue Business Metaverse Atelier with Epic Games on 22 September was a virtual experience showcasing the potential of digital fashion. The second metaverse experience from Vogue Business, it invited Members to visit a virtual island, made in partnership with metaverse company Journee, which included multiple exhibits. Many exhibits were narrated by the designers themselves via spatial audio showers. (Vogue Business)

• Indonesia will require its domestic cryptocurrency exchanges to be mostly led by its citizens as it tightens rules to protect consumers. At least two-thirds of directors and commissioners on crypto bourses must be Indonesians residing in the country. (Bloomberg)

OTT / Streaming

• Using piracy as a proxy for the demand of streaming content: the first episode of HBO's House of the Dragon had 45% more piracy than Prime Video's Rings of Power, and the second episode had 127% more piracy. (Ad Week)

• DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket stream went down for the second week in a row, leaving subscribers unable to view the NFL games. (The Verge)

• Conviva Analytics released its streaming market report indicating continued global growth, with a 14% increase in Q2 2022 over 2021. Asia and LatAm saw the most growth, while NA grew 5% YOY. (Business Wire)

• Amazon Prime Video is dropping the Amazon name from its streaming moniker. (Mediaplay News)

• A French court has ruled in favour of Canal+ Group in a legal spat with commercial broadcaster TF1 over the pay TV operator’s decisions to pull the latter’s channels from free-to-view satellite platform TNTSat. The tribunal ruled that Canal+ doesn't need to distribute TF1’s channels on its satellite platform despite a call by TF1 to force it to do so. (DigitalTVEurope)

• An upstart Spanish-language streamer is taking a big step into original content. Canela Media will debut a daily entertainment news show, ”¡Ponle Canela!,” on its streaming platform, Canela.TV, on Oct. 10. “Secretos De Villanas,” a reality series, will premiere on Oct. 20. (CNBC)

• Netflix has dismissed its copyright infringement lawsuit against Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, the creators behind The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical. Netflix moved to “dismiss this action with prejudice,” meaning that the streamer can’t reopen the case in the future. (The Verge)

Retail / Lifestyle / Travel

• The share of Americans who reported using Buy Now Pay Later to fund a purchase at least once in the past month has not dropped below 16% in 2022. (Morning Consult)

• The share of Americans who plan to shop on Black Friday this year (47%) is virtually identical to the share who said the same last year (49%). (Morning Consult)

• Online ordering for groceries in the US has declined in recent months as shoppers become more aware of inflation’s impact on their grocery purchases. (Morning Consult)

• Walmart announced a "holiday guarantee" that extends returns, starting Oct. 1 and running through Jan. 31. The world's largest retailer will roll out curbside returns in early October, and Walmart+ members in select markets will be able to schedule to have their returns picked up from their doorstep. (Axios)

• Ralph Lauren has pulled back on its department store presence and is focused on a strategy that leans heavily on DTC, with the company aiming to open around 250 of its own stores in the next three years. The company’s direct-to-consumer business now represents 63% of its total revenue. (Retail Dive)

• New Zealand electronic retail card spending rose 0.9% in August, while actual sales rose 26.9% from the same month a year ago. The electronic cards data covers about 68% of core retail sales in the country, and is the main measure of monthly retail activity. (NASDAQ)

• Profits at B&Q owner Kingfisher fell by almost a third in the first half of the year as the pandemic DIY boom came to an end. Pretax profits at Kingfisher, which also owns Castorama and Brico Dépôt in France, fell to £474m in the six months to 31 July, a near 30% drop from a year earlier. (The Guardian)

• Orlando International Airport (MCO) has opened its new Terminal C to the public. The US$2.8B project was inaugurated by receiving flights from Aer Lingus from Manchester and Dublin and GOL Linhas Aéreas from Brasília. Terminal C will let MCO increase its capacity by 25%, adding up between 10 to 12 million new passengers each year. (Simple Flying)

• The French government announced it will introduce a minimum charge for book deliveries of €3 (about $2.92) to help small booksellers compete with retailing giant Amazon. The minimum fee will only apply to orders under €35 (about $34.12). (The Verge)

Social Media

• TikTok is the latest app to add a dual camera feature, hoping to tap in to the surging popularity of BeReal. Earlier this month it announced a new feature called Now, which will send users daily notifications to capture a picture or video using their front and back cameras. (The Verge)

• According to a new Wall Street Journal reporl, Instagram engagement is declining, with Reels in particular seeing a significant engagement drop of 14%. TikTok users are spending 10x as many hours consuming content on that platform than Facebook and Instagram users do on those. (Social Media Today)

• TikTok revealed the global release of the dislike button for comments that it has been testing. The video creation platform stressed that the feature was created as a way for its community to provide feedback on comments and help better identify irrelevant or inappropriate comments. Dislikes will not be publicly visible, nor will users be able to see how many dislikes a comment has received. (AdWeek)

• Instagram is rolling out the ability for users to upload longer uninterrupted Stories. Stories under 60 seconds in length, it won’t be broken up into segments. The company began testing the change with select users late last year and has now rolled it out to all users worldwide. (TechCrunch)

Video Games

• Twitch is cutting how much its biggest streamers earn from subscriptions. Partners on premium deals could end up with less money. (The Verge)

• Roblox is announcing a number of major changes to its platform designed to make it more appealing to its fastest-growing demographic: players ages 17 to 24. (Protocol)

• Rockstar’s next installment in the Grand Theft Auto series could be one of the most anticipated video games ever; a new purported leak offers a sneak peak at GTA 6. (TechCrunch)

• Riot announced a collaboration with Lil Nas X, which will be highlighted by a performance at Worlds in San Francisco on November 5. (The Verge)

• The most-tweeted-about esports and gaming team this year is Loud, a buzzy Brazilian upstart using Web3 to harness its hyper-engaged audience. Described by publication Dexerto in 2021 as the “biggest esports org you’ve never heard of,” Loud has quickly grown from a regional player into a global presence in the video game world. Now the team has launched a new parent company, Spacecaps, with divisions focused on Solana-powered NFTs, crypto-fueled games, and tokenized incentives for fans. (Decrypt)

Live Sports

• MLB fans support adding a pitch clock to speed up games. More than half say the rule change, coming in 2023, will make MLB ‘better for new fans.’ (Morning Consult)

  

• 62% of sports fans think women's sports need more investment or more media coverage. (GWI)

• As Roger Federer retires from professional tennis, about 1 in 3 Americans (34%) say they're less interested in watching men’s tennis without the Swiss tennis legend. (Morning Consult)

  

Interesting Campaigns / Creative

• Heinz released a new spot targeting health-conscious millennials for its low-sugar Ketchup with an animated musical. (Ad Week)

  

• Langauge-learning app Duolingo launched an "adoption" plan, which encourages those with unused spots in their Family Plans to share them with others outside their family. (Duolingo via Twitter)

  

• Paramount placed Smile actors in the crowd at both the Yankees and Mets games last week, at the Dodgers/Cardinals game, and a smiler was spotted photo-bombing the Today Show. The results were creepy and drove social media chatter.

  

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.