What you need to know in advertising today

Hans Vestberg
Reuters/Steve
Marcus

Verizon wants to help give you a great line up of TV channels —
without any need for a cord.

The wireless giant will include YouTube TV service and Apple TV
4K along with 5G service to customers in each of its four initial
markets — Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles and Sacramento —
when the service hits these cities later in 2018.

The announcement seems an indication that Verizon believes it can
compete with rivals in the telecom and pay-TV industries without
acquiring content (unlike AT&T, which just closed a massive
deal to acquire Time Warner).

To read more about how this seems to be a missile aimed
directly at the cable-TV business,
click here.

In other news:

“We’re the fastest-growing ad-tech company in the world”:
Startup Beeswax is riding the wave of brands taking ad buying
in-house. It has seen a 150% spike in revenue this
year thanks to a tech platform that purports to enable brands to
build their own ad-buying algorithms

As its rivalry with Google heats up, Amazon is reportedly
offering popular YouTubers multimillion-dollar contracts to
switch to Twitch. Twitch is said to be offering
exclusive deals, sometimes with multi-million dollar salaries, to
popular internet personalities.

The UK’s advertising authority banned an Amazon promotion
for being “misleading.” The promotion, which
ran on Amazon’s website in December, advertised the free one-day
shipping that comes with Prime membership, and more than 280
customers complained saying that their shipments had not arrived
in one day.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey doubles down on his criticism of
Facebook and YouTube while defending Alex Jones’ right to keep
tweeting. In a new interview with NBC News, the
Twitter CEO said his peers had been “inconsistent” in their
handling of Jones.