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BuzzFeed's Jim Waterson and Emily Ashton during the website's EU referendum debate last year.
They're also pumping budgets into branded content - articles and videos created on behalf of advertisers to subtly communicate their messages. That high touch, highly customized form of advertising is basically the polar opposite of programmatic.
Yet the ad tech company TripleLift has an ambitious plan to marry these two very different practices.
The firm has recently been testing a new product, ContentDial, which purports to help marketers create articles and videos on their behalf quickly and more efficiently than they do when going directly to a big publisher like The New York Times or BuzzFeed.
To read more about how ContentDial poses a threat to the media companies, click here.
In other news:
'People and the egos often get in the way': Here are 5 things ad agencies can do to survive amid massive pressure to reinvent themselves. Agencies must transform their business models to meet the needs of modern CMOs, according to a new industry report by Forrester.
These are the 5 forces that are rapidly killing advertising agencies. Ad agencies are facing several existential threats, the Forrester report adds, including CMOs taking more media and creative in-house to consulting firms coming after high-margin agency services.
Twitter finally admits Alex Jones violated its rules, hits him with a 7-day ban. Amid significant pressure to follow Apple, Facebook, YouTube and Vimeo in deleting Jones' account permanently, it appears that Twitter is keeping a watching brief.
Tinder's founders have filed a bombshell $2 billion lawsuit claiming the former CEO 'groped and sexually harassed' an executive at a company party. The lawsuit alleges that the former Tinder CEO and IAC Chairman Greg Blatt harassed Rosette Pambakian, Tinder's vice president of marketing.
New York Media, owner of New York magazine and several websites, is exploring options including a possible sale, The Wall Street Journal reports. The publisher is owned by a holding company controlled by the heirs of Bruce Wasserstein, the late financier who purchased New York magazine in 2003 for $55 million.