Charter Communications has agreed to modify the 'fiber-powered' claims in website and video advertising in response to a BBB National Programs' National Advertising Division (NAD) Fast-Track SWIFT challenge brought by AT&T.
Calls where no one responds are rarely accidental. In many cases, they are automated reconnaissance events. Fraud operations run at industrial scale, and before they invest human effort in a target, they validate that a number is active and answered by a real person.
The $100 million whistleblower lawsuit Richard Foster filed against WPP last November is back in focus. New court filings - including WPP's motion to dismiss and exhibits that place Foster's own internal documents into the public record for the first time - have added significant texture to both sides of a case that initial headlines only scratched the surface of.
T-Mobile hit back at Verizon on Monday in Manhattan federal court, filing a countersuit that accuses Verizon's 'Better Deal' campaign of luring customers into stores with promises of big savings and then steering them toward pricier add-ons. What started as a marketing spat has now turned into a full-on legal fight over whether in-store upselling crosses the line into deceptive advertising.
At least three advertisers, two from Brazil and one from China, were found to engage in celeb-bait scams, which often involve misusing the image of well-known figures to trick people into clicking on bogus ads that lead to scam sites. These websites are designed to harvest sensitive data or dupe unsuspecting users into sending money or investing in fake platforms.
McDonald's is facing a class action lawsuit from plaintiffs who allege the fast food chain has long deceived customers about what type of meat is in the popular, limited McRib sandwich. The lawsuit was filed late last month in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois by eaters from California, New York, Illinois and Washington, D.C. who claim the sandwich is marketed as containing pork rib meat but actually has none.
In a now viral post on X viewed nearly 400,000 times, Lindsay Owens on Sunday wrote, "Big/bad news for consumers. Google is out today with an announcement of how they plan to integrate shopping into their AI offerings including search and Gemini. The plan includes 'personalized upselling.' I.e. Analyzing your chat data and using it to overcharge you."
The Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday it will appeal the November ruling in favor of Meta in its antitrust case against the social media giant. The FTC said it continues to allege that, for more than a decade, Meta Platforms Inc. has "illegally maintained a monopoly" in social networking through anticompetitive conduct "by buying the significant competitive threats it identified in Instagram and WhatsApp."
Digiday attempted to gauge market engagement after the dust had settled, and backers have started to put in the hard yards. First, it's worth a recap of what exactly AdCP is - for some, it's an open-source bridge between today's programmatic infrastructure and the dawn of the agentic era - or, as Digiday's Tim Peterson phrased it, "openRTB for the agentic AI era" (see video below).
The moment you visit a website or app with ad space, it asks an ad tech company to determine which ads to display for you. This involves sending information about you and the content you're viewing to the ad tech company. This ad tech company packages all the information they can gather about you into a "bid request" and broadcasts it to of potential advertisers.
These days, the internet "looks a hell of a lot more like Las Vegas than 'Little House on the Prairie.'" That's how Andrew Ferguson, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, described the online experience of children in his opening remarks for an FTC workshop on age verification last week. The event took place on Wednesday, January 28, which also happened to be Data Privacy Day, an annual "holiday" of sorts to raise awareness about privacy issues and encourage better data protection practices.
However, I feel deja vu - cast your minds back to those shocked few days after the Brexit vote, when we all realized that the echo chamber of our social feeds did not actually reflect the diverse views of the whole of the UK. Is this just another example of us realizing everything is not as it seems online? Or maybe it's a case study for the effectiveness of bus-side advertising, but I digress.
