Ad Age “Media Guy” columnist Simon Dumenco’s media roundup for the morning of Thursday, April 6:
I want to give thanks, in a way, to Pepsi, for that instantly notorious Kendall Jenner ad, because it’s given us all something to talk about (see Nos. 1 and 2, below) other than, you know, other things. Would it be too much to ask for, say, Dr Pepper to do a female-empowerment ad starring Caitlyn Jenner, or for Fanta to do an immigration-themed ad featuring Blac Chyna? That way maybe we wouldn’t have to talk about President Trump (No. 5) or Steve Bannon (No. 4) or Sean Spicer (No. 7). Anyway, let’s get started …
1. This tweet by Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter is closing in on a quarter-million likes and 125,000 retweets:
If only Daddy would have known about the power of #Pepsi. pic.twitter.com/FA6JPrY72V
— Be A King (@BerniceKing) April 5, 2017
2. Oh, Madonna!
🥇
A post shared by Madonna (@madonna) on
3. Back to Twitter for a second. Now there’s a new low-calorie, gluten-free Twitter!
Twitter Lite is a faster, data friendly way for people to use Twitter to see what’s happening in the world.
👉 https://t.co/AIUgyCAFj0 pic.twitter.com/9EIG7pgK6O
— Twitter (@Twitter) April 6, 2017
4. The top story on the front page of The New York Times this morning is a story by Peter Baker, Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush headlined “Bannon Removed From Committee on U.S. Security” — retitled “Trump Removes Stephen Bannon From National Security Council Post” for the web — and here’s the spin and counterspin that comes in the fourth paragraph:
Mr. Bannon resisted the move, even threatening at one point to quit if it went forward, according to a White House official who, like others, insisted on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Mr. Bannon’s camp denied that he had threatened to resign and spent the day spreading the word that the shift was a natural evolution, not a signal of any diminution of his outsize influence.
5. Meanwhile, back to Twitter: So, uh, @TrumpsTies has become a thing:
pic.twitter.com/WYRnna6dIh
— Trump’s Ties (@TrumpsTies) April 6, 2017
6. Nilay Patel and Ben Popper of The Verge have a theory about Verizon’s newly christened AOL-plus-Yahoo unit. In a post titled “Oath isn’t just a terrible name — it’s going to be a nightmare ad-tracking machine,” they suggest that Verizon is …
… going to churn out as much cheap content as it can from AOL and Yahoo and tell advertisers it can do a better job of delivering eyeballs because it has better ad-tracking capabilities than Google and Facebook. … And now, with the new privacy not-rules, Verizon is free to take the data generated from the tracking supercookies it imposes on its network customers, mash it up with AOL’s ad stack, and promise advertisers hyper-targeted marketing information that can’t be blocked or stopped because Verizon will own both the pipes and an enormous amount of the content flowing through it.
7. And finally, last night on the “The Daily Show,” notoriously condescending, schoolmarmish White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer got drafted for what must be his dream job:
Simon Dumenco, aka Media Guy, is an Ad Age editor-at-large. You can follow him on Twitter @simondumenco.
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