Advertising claims

Law firm Fenwick dug into the implications of advertising in the metaverse, “regulators emphasized that ads in the Metaverse must be truthful and not misleading even if the technological medium for delivery of those ads is nascent.”

And it turns out, the metaverse literally adds dimensions to potential legal claims. “One unique issue about advertising in the Metaverse is the potential to make three-dimensional claims. A Metaverse application that purports to reflect how a real-life article of clothing would look could be found to make the claim that the article of clothing would fit as shown digitally if worn by the consumer in reality. This is a natural extension of the law as it has currently been applied to claims made in product images.”

They also pointed to that disclosures must be made, even if ‘text disclosures’ are not available in that platform. It seems that there is no longer a this is a new place so you’re off the hook. As regulators are getting savvier and faster to deal with these same issues that pop up repeatedly on new platforms.

• Content marketing maintains momentum as pandemic restrictions ease.
• Why Manscaped is leaning into ads on Tumblr.
• NBCU leaning into new ad formats to engage viewers.
• Twitter announces Premium Content Partnerships at 2022 Digital Content NewFronts. And other NewFronts releases from LinkedIn, Meta, Pinterest & YouTube.
• What are the legal implications of advertising in the metaverse? Is a digital representation held to the same legal standard?
• Eddy Cue reportedly has bigger plans for Apple’s billion-dollar streaming and ads business.
• With no third-party accredited measurement, this year’s upfront season is a testing bonanza.
• Ads may come to Netflix by the end of 2022.

Campaign of the Week

• Anker with BuzzFeed. You should have a home energy kit – and this is the very first thing you should buy for it.

• “We expected local businesses to decrease their use of content marketing following the Covid crisis, when it was widely used, so we were pleasantly surprised to find that their interest actually increased since 2020. This tells us that businesses really believe in the power and promise of content marketing, even though many of them had not even heard of it a few years ago.” –Julia Campbell, Meta Branded Content Project Manager

Datapoints of note

• $80b to be spent on content marketing this year.
• 71 percent of people want to be able to communicate with a business in the same way that they do with friends and family.
• Disney tops 200m subscribers across all streaming services.
• NYT says Wordle acquisition added “tens of millions of new users”.

That’s it for this week.