Meta Must Face Class-Action Over Inflated Audience Metrics, Court Confirms (mediapost.com)

At unBoxed 2024, Amazon Ads introduced AI creative studio and Audio generator, two new generative AI tools designed to lower creative barriers and expand opportunities for advertisers to scale their reach. By building a suite of self-service, AI-powered tools, Amazon Ads is enabling brands of all sizes to create engaging content across media types and eliminating boundaries across ad formats. With Audio generator, Amazon Ads expands its suite of AI-powered creative tools – including Image generator and Video generator – empowering brands to connect with customers across the shopping journey. These tools make it simple to build and activate new campaign creatives, helping brands experiment more freely and optimize based on performance – with little more than the information on their Amazon product page. According to Amazon Ads findings, on average, brands who used Image generator between October 2023 and June 2024 saw almost 5% more sales per advertiser.

With growing calls for consumer privacy on the web, Google parent company Alphabet Inc. and Apple Inc. plan or already have made major changes to customer tracking. Apple now requires user opt-in for apps to track users, and Google is getting rid of third-party cookies on its market-leading Chrome browser. While these changes hearten privacy advocates, they’re likely to disrupt online retailers’ longstanding marketing practices. Without accurate consumer tracking, merchants are worried that a portion of their ads will be less effective at driving sales. In response, merchants plan to shift their marketing dollars to other channels that are more predictable at driving revenue. Online cookies are small pieces of text websites placed on a site visitor’s browser to track preferences, such as language, to know what consumers are interested in, and facilitate other functions. More companies started using cookies in late 1995 after Microsoft Corp. integrated them into its Internet Explorer browser. There are many different types of cookies, but third-party cookies are controversial because advertisers, marketers and data-analytics firms place them on consumers’ devices to know where a consumer’s been on the web, leading to more targeted ads.

R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company enabled Wizards of the Coast (Wizards) to supply key retailers with customized, launch-specific marketing materials. The partnership increased new product launch visibility and won the award for “Most Innovative Supplier of the Year” at the 2022 Toy and Game International Excellence (TAGIE) Awards. Wizards is a family of studios specializing in building role-playing, trading card, and digital games for all genres of players. With a focus on community, they partner with more than 6,000 local game store retailers through the Wizards Play Network (WPN) to bring products like Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons to players around the world.