Hasta La Creative!

Chinese internet giant Tencent Holdings said fourth-quarter ad revenues jumped 45% from the same period a year earlier. The company now gets nearly a fifth of its revenues from advertising, a growing opportunity at a company long powered by its popular online and mobile games.

Tencent was just named the most valuable brand in China in a BrandZ ranking by WPP and Kantar Millward Brown. Its star product is all-purpose app WeChat (called Weixin in Chinese), which is a mobile toolkit for everything from payments to chat to services. The company said WeChat has amassed 889 million monthly active users; the majority of those are presumed to be in mainland China, since the app hasn’t caught on overseas like the company once hoped.

Tencent’s overall quarterly sales, including everything from ads to its top-grossing Honor of Kings game, hit $6.37 billion, up 44% year-on-year. Quarterly net profit jumped 46% to about $1.53 billion.

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-Viral video agency Thinkmodo was behind this “Hum Rider” stunt for Verizon Telematics (video above).

–Mac Hagel is returning to Zenith as managing director for its West Coast operations.

–Dom Boyd left adam&eveDDB to join Publicis London as chief strategy officer.

-Leo Burnett promoted Jason Williams to the newly-created role of chief creative officer for Australia. 

-Google added additional brand safety controls in response to brands pulling advertising from the platform in the U.K.

-A new ISBA study found that clients are increasingly seeking out on-site and in-house advertising solutions.

-Production company representatives at Advertising Week Europe noted that agencies can rig production costs in ways which aren’t illegal.

-Luxury fashion brand Gucci launched a “collaborative meme project” campaign entitled “#tfwgucci” and, uh, not everybody loved it.

-A Mars study utilizing “emotional intelligence” software company Realeyes found that facial reactions can predict ad impact around 75% of the time.

Facebook just executed what might best be described as a digital advertising coup against rival Google and its DoubleClick empire.

The social media power said Wednesday that it’s bringing advertiser demand from its Audience Network to mobile web publishers that use header bidding.

Mobile publishers have been able to tap demand from Facebook Audience Network until now so long as they didn’t use header bidding technology, a system that allows them to take bids from multiple buyer pools all at once. But if they wanted to capitalize on header bidding, they had to forgo any demand in FAN.

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According to most industry analysts, 2017 will be the first year that brand advertisers and marketers in the U.S. will spend more money on digital advertising than on television advertising. This goes hand in hand with the assumption — held by many until recently — that digital marketing is more efficient and ultimately more verifiable than traditional media.

However, in the first two months of 2017, several leading marketers have publicly called for digital publishers to be more accountable for the ads they are delivering and the audiences they are selling against. Specifically, there has been a call for publishers to implement safeguards, independent verification and a minimum standard for viewability. There has also been a call for independent verification, so that publishers are not “grading their own homework.” Finally, and most importantly, there has been a call to show value to advertisers across platforms, rather than attributing all of the value of an ad to the final click.

Several of the largest digital publishers have responded by agreeing to Media Rating Council audits of their self-generated published metrics. But the resulting back and forth between publishers and advertisers is headed in the wrong direction for four key reasons.

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