What you need to know in advertising today
A few highlights from day three:
Celebrity speaker Will Smith addressed a packed crowd on Wednesday morning, with the talk taking a slightly morbid tone.
- Outgoing Snap chief strategy officer Imran Khan presumably made one of his final appearances representing the struggling company in a panel on millennials along with former Hearst exec Joanna Coles and a bevy of millennial-focused brand leaders.
Also coming out of Advertising Week, Uber has taken the steering wheel and gotten creative with its ad targeting. The ride-hailing company has transitioned from an agency-led media buying model to taking greater control of its campaigns over the past few years.
"Three years ago, we were still working primarily with agencies, taking our budgets and giving them to external partners to run mainly acquisition campaigns on our behalf," Bennett Rosenblatt, Uber's programmatic display lead said at an Advertising Week panel on Tuesday with programmatic firm MediaMath. "That has changed dramatically."
To read more about how Uber has taken charge of its advertising, click here.
More news to come out of Advertising Week:
Advertisers are asking publishers to do way more than make ads and instead sell things like lipstick - and it's a growing threat to agencies. Refinery29 is starting to see ad deals from brands that want them to provide agency-like services, meanwhile, the Washington Post is testing selling an ad network with its Arc software to publishers.
In other news:
Amazon is reportedly testing a new feature to convince shoppers to buy its own brands. It is testing a feature that encourages shoppers to check out items from these private labels by adding a link under search results, according to CNBC.
The millionaire suing Facebook over fake bitcoin ads says it's destroying savings funds and making people suicidal. Martin Lewis wants Facebook to apologize, improve its processes for dealing with scam ads, and put things right for people who have lost money.
Snap's most senior executive outside the US says it must solve its 'perception versus reality' problem. Claire Valoti is Snap's most senior executive outside the US, and one of the company's few high-profile women.
The 100 coolest people in UK tech. Every year, Business Insider publishes the UK Tech 100 - a ranking of the 100 coolest people in the UK tech scene, which celebrates the vibrant array of people working to scale companies, develop exciting new research, and shed light on the latest advances (and scandals) in the industry.