Anthony Albanese vows ‘strongest action possible’ if reports of Oscar Jenkins’s killing turn out to be true

This week’s Future of TV Briefing reports on the meetings that Netflix held with ad buyers during last week’s Consumer Electronics Show, during which it discussed its advertising road map for the year.

• Nextflix
• Venu’s shutdown, creators’ AI deals, TikTok’s ban likelihood and more

Nextflix

If Netflix’s Christmas Day games were a touchdown — and they were in ad buyers’ minds — then the company is now going for a two-point conversion.

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As of today, Jan. 15, Walmart has doubled down on its push into the metaverse by launching Zepeto’s first-ever e-commerce experience for physical goods.

Zepeto is a digital avatar creation platform that allows its user base — which skews female and is roughly 70 percent Gen-Z, per Walmart and Zepeto — to create and share virtual experiences using digital representations of themselves. Now, Zepeto app users viewing virtual Walmart clothing items can use the app to log into their Walmart accounts and order physical versions of those items to be shipped directly to their doorsteps. Additionally, purchases of select physical garments in brick-and-mortar Walmart stores will also come with free downloads of their virtual equivalents on Zepeto.

The launch is Walmart’s third metaverse e-commerce experience, evidence that the retailer is playing the long game in its approach to virtual worlds. In April 2024, Walmart partnered with Roblox to open that platform’s first e-commerce experience for physical goods; in May 2024, Walmart opened its own virtual world platform featuring e-commerce opportunities, Walmart Realm.

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This story was originally published by sister site, Modern Retail.

Last July, the period care brand Viv saw its monthly traffic spike by 400%, which “came out of nowhere,” according to Viv’s marketing and design director Kelly Donohue.

After some digging, Donohue discovered that the jump in traffic was driven primarily by Google Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT search recommendations for non-toxic period care. At the time, a study by the scientific journal Environment International came out that found that many popular tampon brands contain heavy metals like lead and arsenic. Many people were asking the AI assistants about toxins in tampons and searching for sustainable period products, which led them to Viv’s blog.

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The copyright infringement trial between The New York Times and OpenAI kicked off in a federal court hearing on Tuesday.

A judge listened to arguments from both parties in a motion to dismiss brought by OpenAI and its financial backer Microsoft. The New York Times — as well as The New York Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting, which have filed their own lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft — claim OpenAI and Microsoft used the publishers’ content to train their large language models powering their generative AI chatbots. Doing so means the tech companies are competing with those publishers by using their content to answers users’ questions, taking away the incentive for a user to visit their sites for that information and ultimately hurting their ability to monetize those users through digital advertising and subscriptions, they claim.

OpenAI and Microsoft say what they’re doing is covered by “fair use,” a law that allows the use of copyrighted material to make something new that doesn’t compete with the original work.

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We want to hear your thoughts on the potential TikTok ban. Take our brief survey.

The likelihood of a future without TikTok is getting more real as the deadline to sell or be banned in the U.S. is just days away. While Tiktok’s future hangs by a thread, brands that rode a wave of virality thanks to TikTok’s algorithm, like Bogg Bag, Duolingo and Cakes, now grapple with the challenge of recreating virality elsewhere (if that can be done).

For some companies, TikTok’s algorithm has been a big get, one of the last cost-effective ways to reach a broad audience in an increasingly pay-to-play and fragmented social media landscape. While some brands are going down with the ship, posting to TikTok with a business as usual cadence, others have outlined contingency plans on TikTok competitors, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and even LinkedIn, in hopes to strike viral gold again. Or at the very least, maintain its social currency. 

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How Megan Clarken plans to get Criteo out of the ad retargeting ‘box’ Read More

Criteo yesterday announced an end to its months-long search for a new CEO with the unveiling of former Dentsu Americas chief Michael Komasinski. 

He takes over the reins from Megan Clarken both as CEO and board member beginning next month in what’s likely to be a pivotal year for both the ad tech company and the broader digital media industry as a whole. 

While maintenance of the stock price is the core priority of any publicly listed company’s CEO, Komasinski’s task is a multifaceted one if he is to build on Clarken’s five-year tenure, during which time she took the company on a transformative period.

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• Finland said a Russia-linked oil tanker was close to wreaking havoc on its undersea cables.
• Its president said that officials intervened about 12 minutes before the damage got "much worse."
• The tanker is accused of being part of a Russian "shadow fleet" sabotaging European infrastructure.

Finnish President Alexander Stubb said on Tuesday that his country had stopped the crew of a Russia-linked oil tanker just minutes before it caused catastrophic damage to undersea cables in the Baltic Sea.

"Had it continued for another 12 minutes, the carnage would have been much worse than the four basic cables that were there," Stubb told reporters at this week's Baltic-focused NATO summit in Helsinki.

The tanker, the Eagle S, was seized in late December as Finland probed recent damage to its Estlink-2 power line, one of two vital cables carrying electricity in the Baltic Sea.

Four data cables were also severed.

Finnish investigators have accused the Eagle S crew of trying to sabotage the cables by dragging the ship's anchor for miles along the seabed.

The Finnish head of the investigation, Risto Lohi, told Reuters on Tuesday that the Eagle S would likely also have attempted sabotage on the other power cable, the Estlink-1, had police not boarded the vessel.

"There would have been an almost immediate danger that other cables or pipes related to our critical underwater infrastructure could have been damaged," said Lohi, who is the chief of Finland's National Bureau of Investigation.

On Tuesday, Stubb said that Finland's security process for protecting the cables started with the private company overseeing them. If a cable is severed, the firm would alert the authorities, who then try to find possible ships around the location of the damage.

"Once that happens, you identify the ship and contact the ship. Number four, you stop the ship," Stubb said.

Stubb added that Finnish authorities would compel the ship to enter Finnish waters, where officers could then legally board the vessel.

That process is set to change now. European members of NATO announced at the summit that they would launch a new program, called the "Baltic Sentry," to collectively patrol near Baltic Sea infrastructure.

The surveillance program involves frigates, maritime aircraft, and "a small fleet of naval drones," said NATO's secretary-general, Mark Rutte, at the summit.

The investigation into the Eagle S is of particular significance to the European Union because it's suspected for years that Russia has been intentionally trying to covertly damage Western undersea infrastructure. Other cables, such as two fiber-optic data cables running between Finland and Germany, were cut last year.

Though the Eagle S is registered in the Cook Islands, European officials say it's tied to Russia because it was carrying 35,000 tons of unleaded gasoline loaded in Russian ports.

They have accused the ship of being part of a Russian "shadow fleet," or a network of vessels with owners registered outside Russia that are actually carrying sanctioned Russian oil.

Russia has denied being involved in any way with such sabotage. The Russian Foreign Ministry did not respond to a comment request sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.