What you need to know in advertising today
Facebook and Twitter want to make it clear to the world - when it comes to advertising, we have nothing to hide.
Both companies have recently lifted the veil on how political ads are placed on their platforms. Now, they are each expanding their transparency efforts to all advertisers.
Indeed, ever since news surfaced about Russian operatives running ads on Facebook and Twitter during the 2016 presidential election - ads that were for the most part invisible to the majority of these social networks' audiences - both marketers and lawmakers have been asking tough questions about how ad targeting exactly works on these properties.
To read more about Facebook and Twitter's transparency tools, click here.
In other news:
Investors are torn over whether AppNexus's sale to AT&T was a 'great exit' or a total failure. AT&T has purchased the digital ad firm AppNexus for an undisclosed amount, though reports peg the exit price at about $1.6 billion.
Verizon is discontinuing Go90, its free video service that burned more than $200 million trying to catch the eyes of millennials. The free mobile video service, Go90, will officially be shuttered on July 31, according to representatives.
Instagram's Stories feature is now twice as big as Snapchat, with 400 million daily users. The Facebook-owned app has more than one billion users overall, it announced earlier this month.
Morgan Stanley: Google needs to give every US home a free smart speaker - or get buried by Amazon. Such a giveaway would cost $3.3 billion but ensure that Google is in prime position for what could be the next major platform shift.
California just passed the toughest privacy law in the country, going into effect in 2020. California state lawmakers on Thursday unanimously passed a data privacy bill aimed at giving consumers more control over how companies collect and manage their personal information, a bill that Google parent Alphabet Inc and other big companies have opposed.
Amazon's playbook for upending healthcare just got a lot clearer - here's why it should terrify the pharmaceutical industry. On Thursday, Amazon acquired PillPack, a small startup that mails prescriptions to people who take multiple medications. The news sent a whole host of pharmaceutical and drug-wholesaler stocks tumbling.