Advertising news today: Publishers blame Facebook, brands hack Amazon

Sheryl Sandberg,
Facebook’s chief operating officer.
Greg Sandoval/Business Insider

Facebook is in hot water again with advertisers and publishers.

On Tuesday, a group of small advertisers that call themselves LLE
One (and is made up of social media firm Crowd Siren, Social
Media Models, and Quirky) added
a complaint to a two-year lawsuit accusing
Facebook of ad fraud. Per the lawsuit, Facebook inflated a
specific video metric by 150% to 900% after reporting that the
metric was inflated by only 60% to 80% percent in 2016. Moreover,
the group alleges that Facebook knew about the error in 2015 and
sat on it for a year before reporting it to advertisers.

Facebook has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit and a
spokeswoman said, “suggestions that we in any way tried to hide
this issue from our partners are false. We told our customers
about the error when we discovered it — and updated our help
center to explain the issue.”

But advertisers
aren’t happy. And neither are publishers.

Click here to read more about how publishers
are blaming Facebook for layoffs and forcing a shift from text
articles to videos.

Speaking of Facebook,
a new note from Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser outlines
Facebook’s mounting problems and says that it might be a good
time to sell stock. Facebook has been
pummeled by a seemingly endless string of fiascos, scandals, and
public-relations nightmares this year.

In other news:

An ad agency is ‘hacking’ search results on Amazon’s
Alexa, and it shows how voice is the next battleground in
advertising. Mindshare is training its clients to
take on a future with voice through various ways.

Sprint took the unusual step of touting its miserable
performance, and doing so could save its business.
The telecom claims that without the proposed merger with T-Mobile
it will continue to fail.

YouTube’s latest partnership shows how it’s had to learn
to play a different game to win in the music
business. YouTube struck a deal on Thursday with
Eventbrite, the event and ticketing service.

Lena Dunham’s feminist newsletter, which ran articles by
Jennifer Lawrence and Michelle Obama, is reportedly shutting
down. The newsletter had grown to over 500,000
subscribers, but sources said it had struggled to secure ad
revenue.

Apple reimagined its iconic logo in dozens of ways for
its upcoming iPad event — here are all of the creative and cool
designs. Apple has sent out colorful invites to the
media for its October 30 launch event, where the tech
giant is expected to reveal new iPads and more.