Newsletter Go-Getter

The big independent newsletter platforms, namely Substack and beehiiv, are in a fierce competition to attract writers and strengthen their content networks.

Substack, for one, has been pushing further into social-style sponsorship deals, Business Insider reports. Social-native brands like Poppi and Rothy’s are looking at the newsletter platform as a way to source new, relevant deals with voices in the food and beverage category. And those same types of social brands – including names like Hinge, Tory Burch and Rare Beauty cosmetics – have also launched Substack publications themselves.

Substack’s Head of Brand Partnerships Dan Robbins penned a post documenting the company’s sponsorship feature expansion. He also noted Substack is “not just trying to recreate existing advertising models” – a notable deflection considering Substack used to eschew all advertising.

Meanwhile, in July, beehiiv announced the launch of its programmatic ad network extension.

There’s a delicate balance between the two. Substack takes a 10% cut of subscription revenue, for instance, while beehiiv touts its 0% cut of subscriptions. So beehiiv must make up that margin with advertising and charging for tech or marketing services (for which it raised prices just this month).

Steer Clear

Long gone are the days when advertisers uploaded campaign creative files with names like “sunny_blue.v2_final_ab_edit15sec” and a handful of loosely added tags or keywords.

It used to be that inscrutable file names and unstructured metadata didn’t matter all that much, because a person’s hands were at the controls of the campaign. Nowadays, though, it’s an AI algorithm behind the wheel.

For humans, it’s now become essential to feed the platform or campaign with the relevant structured information to point the AI in the right direction. This is often dubbed “steering.”

“You might not have thought about that for every single beverage brand in the past, but you need to fill out every field and do all the fundamentals to get it right, or you’re going to be missed and you will not show up,” Josh Gurley, Coca Cola’s VP of transformation and strategic growth, said during an Advertising Week New York panel last week.

Which means simply uploading creative and product catalog feeds into an AI interface won’t cut it. Instead, marketers are adding details about moments when the product is most popular or the preferences of its target customer, Ad Age reports from the event.

“The fundamentals can’t be missed,” Gurley said.

Making Frenemies

With a new name and leadership team in tow, Skydance is ready to boogie. But is it ready to compete in the modern-day streaming wars?

Not if the plan is just grandfathering in the same business playbook for the now-combined company, writes Mike Shields on Substack. Instead, he writes, it might behoove Skydance to try joining forces with other streaming giants to beat the Big Tech companies trying to eat their lunch.

Amazon and Google have a massive deterministic identity spine with billions of IDs. And individual streaming platforms simply can’t compete, according to Shields, in part because audience extension relies on “ flimsy IP addresses” and other less-than-reliable data.

To level the playing field with Big Tech, Shields suggests, Skydance should consider allying with other big kahunas such as Disney, Netflix and Fox to form a data collective. With the right privacy precautions in place, pooling access to that portfolio of first-party data would help all parties be more competitive, particularly with more accurate content recommendations and targeted ads.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because similar work is being done by the Joint Industry Committee in the name of standardized ad measurement. But in that case, there’s a neutral middleman that makes streamers feel a little less like they’re feeding data directly to competitors.

But Wait! There’s More!

The US government had to pay refunds to brands after President Trump’s tariffs on global imports were found to be illegal. Now, the brands are passing those tariff refunds back to consumers – in the form of more ads.

Meta bans TikTok’s former controlling owner ByteDance from advertising on its platforms.

How is Hollywood handling IP in its deals with online creators?

Not surprisingly, ad spots during NFL games work best when they’re funny.

Anthropic will now punish users who are too mean to its AI models by treating the behavior as a violation of its usage policy.

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