Hasta La Creative!

One day in mid-October at 11:24 a.m., an alert went off in Facebook’s election War Room. Political news in a Utah congressional district wasn’t coming from inside the U.S.a mismatch Facebook had tuned its software algorithms to detect.

A data scientist in the election-monitoring center at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California, inspected the activity manually and discovered, at 11:47 a.m., that the source spreading the content was an ad farm in Bangladesh. Ten minutes later, an operations specialist removed all the suspect activity.

That’s a real example from the 2018 midterm elections, shared by Facebook executives in a recent slide presentation in Paris, meant to demonstrate that the company’s tools are effective when working correctly. The slides, viewed by Bloomberg News, show in detail how Facebook has improved its process for rooting out bad actors using tactics similar to those Russian operatives used in 2016. The message: Facebook will be more prepared to take on misinformation and meddling in this year’s electionsin India, the Philippines, Ukraine, Thailand and other countriesas well as the U.S. presidential race in 2020.

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Food is one of the most powerful ways we connect with loved ones–so it can be especially complicated when a loved one is gone. A poignant new three-minute ad from French grocer Intermarche–celebrating its 50th anniversary–and agency Romance explores that dynamic, focusing on an elderly man who’s recently lost his wife. There’s still plenty of…

Messaging application Telegram is putting a lot more privacy powers in the hands of its users, but is it also opening itself up for malicious use of those powers? In version 5.5 of the app–just released via the iTunes App Store and Google Play–users are given the ability to permanently unsend any messages they have…

Proximity, a part of Omnicom Precision Marketing Group (OPMG), has announced the hiring of Richard Fraser as its first CEO of North America. Effective April 1, the appointment marks Fraser’s return to the agency. He had joined BBDO Worldwide in 2016 as president of Southeast Asia and CEO of Singapore. Before BBDO, Fraser spent nearly…

Welcome to the latest edition of Ad Age Publisher’s Brief, our new roundup of news from the world of content producers across digital and print. Got a tip? Send it our way. Joining us late? Here’s the previous edition.

USA Tomorrow: In a story titled “Oaktree Capital Expresses Confidence in Digital First’s Bid for Gannett,” The Wall Street Journal’s Cara Lombardo and Lukas I. Alpert report that,

Digital First Media took a step forward in its hostile bid for Gannett Co., with a debt specialist indicating Digital First could raise the funds needed to pay for the $1.4 billion takeover. Oaktree Capital Management LP, a credit-investment firm with $120 billion of assets as of December, told Digital First it is “highly confident” in Digital First’s ability to attain a debt financing package of at least $1.725 billion in connection with the offer for the USA Today publisher, according to people familiar with the matter. Digital First, officially known as MNG Enterprises Inc., offered to buy Gannett in January for $12 a share.

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A Lithuanian man posing as an employee of Taiwanese notebook computer and electronics manufacturer Quanta Computer pleaded guilty last week to being part of a scheme that fraudulently secured payments of some $23 million from Google in 2013 and about $98 million from Facebook in 2015, Chris Dolmetsch of Bloomberg reported. Evaldas Rimasauskas, 50, pleaded…

The Media Rating Council has issued a draft cross-media standard for video that toughens rules for digital viewable impressions but also holds linear TV to new higher standards for commercial ratings.

The draft, which delivers on a long-sought industry goal, comes a year after the MRC issued a call for research on the subject, and a few months later than the original plan to issue the draft by the end of last year. The draft initiates a 60-day industry comment period, with a final version expected by the third quarter, the MRC said.

After nearly two years of industry speculation, the new standard toughens rules for viewable video impressions raising the standard to 100 percent of the ad in view, from the prior 50 percent, for at least two seconds.

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