Doodle Inspirations – October 23
A few things that caught our attention this past week:
Stories about political coverage and advertising abound including this one form AdAge discussing how much a senate seat is worth in terms of ad spend and this one from AdWeek highlighting Stephen Colbert’s return to Election Night coverage on Showtime because CBS (his home station) is already planning on preempting his normal time slot. While the coverage is verging on unbearable, Chili’s promo announcement helped us find brighten our week as they announced their $5 Presidente Margarita special through election day. This announcement included two other opportunities to participate in their “Margarita Party” promotion that also touts some fun merch/swag. We appreciate this light during a stressful time and find this multi-layered promotion a fun way to engage potential diners with more than just alcohol.
Quibi has officially pulled the plug after six months of trying to carve out an audience in the streaming landscape. While launching a mobile-only streaming service might have provided an interesting opportunity in normal times, we can’t tell for sure if this is platform’s demise is singularly related to COVID or to the platform limitation or a combination of the two. While the platform raised over $1.6 billion originally, the company is working to repay only a fraction of that to its initial investors. While we had hopes for Quibi’s success, we aren’t completely surprised to see this decision given reports that they had struggled to find and keep audiences as behavior patterns had changed due to the pandemic.
Following the release of the DOJ antitrust report against the big 4 tech companies earlier this month, Google has officially been sued for Monopoly abuse. The first step in a multi-prong approach, other state Attorney Generals (including Texas) are preparing complaints against the company as well reaching beyond their search domination and branching into their display advertising as well. While this is being touted as the most significant anti-trust lawsuit since 1998’s case against Microsoft, judging by what’s happened since that company, we wonder if this case will ultimately change anything about the company’s structure or dominance.
In other government news, a new proposal has been brought to the table that would affect CCPA enforcement. Brought by the California Attorney General, this proposed regulation would require business to offer opt-out methods that are easy to find, execute, etc compared to some tactics that have been hidden behind multiple step, stages or “dark patterns.” We are excited to see the AG’s proposal of this and its subsequent support from digital rights groups as, if passed, it would improve data privacy for Californians and continue driving the industry forward.
Facebook Europe has finally launched “Facebook Dating” catching up with US. While it was expected to launch in February of this year (6-months after the US version launched), the application was postponed because of Irish data protection challenges from local regulators. The Europe application version won’t suggest current friends as matches, notify people if a user has joined the application or show their dating activity on users’ newsfeeds so we’re not 100% sure what the value prop will be for users – especially when comparing to other popular dating apps including Tinder and Hinge. We are all just a little nervous about how much data Facebook ultimately has about us.