Our News Roundup this week covers former Uber employee Susan Fowler’s revelations about how she was treated as a female engineer at the company, and the subsequent announcement of an investigation by a semi-independent panel; Waze’s expansion into becoming a carpooling service; and Microsoft’s launch of Skype Lite, an innovative low-bandwidth version of Skype for emerging markets which launched in India this week.
Our Question of the Week is “What is the true state of online advertising?” We’ve all heard lots about Google and Facebook’s massive revenues from online advertising, and their increasing dominance of the space, but we’ve also seen recent news about increasing calls for independent audits of their advertising metrics, and questions from big advertisers about the effectiveness of online advertising. So Aaron takes us through some of the complex dynamics, challenges, and prospects for the online advertising industry and the potential for companies like Snap, Twitter, and Yahoo/AOL under Verizon.
Our Third Segment is an update on the US wireless market following last week’s announcements by Verizon and AT&T that they will begin offering unlimited plans broadly after several years of trying to kill them off. We talk about the likely impact on these companies of offering these plans and potentially opening the floodgates to higher usage, as well as the competitive impact on the two smaller carriers, Sprint and T-Mobile.
Our Weekly Pick is a puzzle app recommended by Jan.
As usual, you’ll find some links to related content as well as other ways to listen to the podcast beneath the embedded Soundcloud player below.
We invite listeners to submit questions for subsequent weeks in the comments below, on Twitter (@jandawson, @aaronmiller), or via email (jan at jackdawresearch dot com). We also have a dedicated Podcast Twitter handle at @BDPcast.
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Show notes:
Here are some useful links relating to this week’s episode:
- News Roundup (links are to Tech Narratives comments on each item):
- Question of the Week:
- Marketing Land explainer on the display ad landscape
- P&G moving away from targeted advertising
- P&G Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard’s talk at IAB
- Google/YouTube agreeing to MRC auditing
- Ad Tech funding dropping in the face of Google/FB duopoly
- Verizon’s effort to combine Yahoo and AOL as a third force in online advertising
- Jan’s Weekly Pick was the puzzle app Wordlings, which is available on the iOS App Store.
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