Hello everyone! Welcome back to AdNews! This week, we will cover some nice tools to avoid biased media outlets, speak about some major trends in the industry, and close things off with an amazing ad piece by Coca-Cola!
Media Bias: Understanding and Avoiding Skewed News
In an age when AI gets democratized and fake news becomes rampant, it becomes very important to see if the media outlets have any inherent bias. To this end, an AI-driven tool was developed by a team at the University of Pennsylvania under the guidance of Duncan Watts to understand how the same event is skewed by different media outlets.
The Media Bias Detector is AI-driven to allow the identification of the topic, event detection, examination of tone, partisan lean, and fact selection for any article supplied by major news publishers. This gives us a view of how stories are presented in different outlets and where biases might seep in.
The story behind it is that Duncan Watts, a computational social scientist at Penn, noticed issues with media bias far prior to the 2016 election, which really caught a ton of flak in the US. He thought about how the media can present a set of facts in such an order to fit its narrative, hence his development of the Media Bias Detector.
This tool examines and identifies news articles using the newest generation of large language models that Levy termed Open AI under the brand GPT. It scrapes top articles from leading news websites and processes them to highlight political biases and leanings in the coverage.
For example, running the Media Bias Detector during the first 2024 presidential debate, it determined that more than half of all articles were related to President Biden’s age (Samar Haider, 2024). Right leaning outlets like Fox and Breitbart covered this way disproportionately to the many false statements by Donald Trump, that were hardly covered at all.
Most of the larger publishers within the US tend to cover more related to the Democrats. guardian, huffington post have a strong bias about the Democrats. Fox news and breitbart is considered to be biased about republicans. wsj.com generally is considered to be nearly bias free when it comes to political issues.
In tone, every publisher is more negative than positive. The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post are relatively more balanced and positive. The Huffington Post and the Guardian are biased toward Democrats on business articles, just like Fox News and Breitbart would go for Republicans. Again, the Wall Street Journal and Associated Press encompass the most neutrality.
These examples show the usability of this great tool in finding neutral and quality information. This is critical in checking various sources so that one gets the least biased news quickly.
Major Industry Trends: TikTok and In-Game Advertising
Now, let’s turn to some of the key trends in the advertising industry.
TikTok Ad Spend Reduction
With the U.S. TikTok sell-off bill still in the way, big brands have cut down on their ad spend with Target reducing its ad budget on TikTok by 30%, DoorDash by 25%, Bayer by 20%, and Procter & Gamble by 10%. They were conservative that TikTok might be gone by January next year.
While TikTok’s still out there killing it, that’s not a wager one wants to take too heavily. Diversify your ad spend and stay flexible.
EA’s Bold Foray into In-Game Advertising
Electronic Arts is going big with its foray into in-game ads, and the people are talking about it. The company’s CEO explicitly announced that ad revenue has now taken the lead as a growth driver. They’re shifting all their ads under one umbrella offering—could this be the next ad network?.
However, many gamers are less than pleased about that, stating it would ruin the experience. EA’s ‘Player Graph’ is an ultra-intelligent identity graph that knows player preferences to attract advertisers. EA has to make sure these ads do not disrupt the experience of gaming.
User-Generated Content vs. Traditional News Media
This will be influenced by the rise of user-generated content. While close to 70% of Gen Z get their news from UGC, only about 16% of Baby Boomers do so. Everyone has a voice through Facebook, X, and TikTok—harder for the traditional news outlets to wield their influence.
While UGC gives freedom to news reporting, it lacks the institutional guidelines and standards of journalism that characterise traditional media—thereby facilitating misinformation. Social media personalized feeds further enhance the situation by engaging rather than ensuring accuracy.
Well-researched and accurate journalism has never been more critical. Do not forget to get information from sources worthy of respect if you were to take good care of your democracy.
Ad Showcase: Coca-Cola’s “Celebrate Everyday Greatness”
Today on Ad Show, we’re going to shine a light on Coca-Cola’s newest campaign for the Olympic and Paralympic Games Paris 2024. The “Celebrate Everyday Greatness” campaign contains athletes featured from Team USA and Team Canada. Some of the names include Simone Biles, Katie Ledecky, Alex Morgan, among others.
This new TV advertisement simply showcases everyday athlete greatness: training, beating the obstacles, and rejoicing in winning. That is not all; to complement this campaign so wonderfully, there will be engaging digital experiences where consumers can scan their limited-time packaging for a chance to win daily and grand prizes every day.
Once again, as it does throughout, Coca-Cola does the most superb job with ad campaigns by coming up with creative visuals and touching messages.
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