The 10 things in advertising you need to know today
1. The Yahoo deal is done - Verizon is buying the company for $4.83 billion. It's the latest piece of Verizon's $10 billion plan to challenge Facebook and Google.
2. Former Yahoo CEO Ross Levinsohn told us he'd be "excited" if he were a Yahoo employee now. Yahoo now has the resource, capital, and knowledge to grow.
3. Yahoo's most critical investor says he's "subdued" by the sale. Eric Jackson of Spring Owl asset management said the price was at the very low end of what the expectations were at the beginning of the sale process.
4. Marni Walden has taken on the job of merging Yahoo with AOL. She is Verizon's executive vice president and president of product innovation and new businesses.
5. Nike's latest ad backfired. It reminded people of a sweatshop.
6. Facebook is finally considering a huge change employees have been begging for. The company is thinking about opening up an office in San Francisco.
7. Telefónica Brasil is investigating its own marketing department to see whether contracting practices failed to meet internal guidelines and allowed for excessive price discrepancies, Valor Econômico newspaper reported. The internal probe has triggered a restructure of the division.
8. GroupM has appointed John Montgomery to the new role of global executive vice president of brand safety. He will be responsible for creating a "coherent set of global standards that operationalize brand safety for GroupM's clients in every market in which they advertise," GroupM said in a statement.
9. Marc Benioff tried to buy LinkedIn even after it announced the deal with Microsoft. Salesforce was one of three other companies besides Microsoft that were also bidding on LinkedIn.
10. Netflix's slowing subscriber growth could have nothing to do with a price hike.Another theory is that subscribers have abandoned the service because of the lack of content.