The ability of platforms to push content material – or resolve to drag it – was below scrutiny as soon as once more final week, when big-name musicians pulled out of Spotify to protest the misinformation flowing from the mouth of the audio platform’s $100 million unique podcast star, Joe Rogan.

The expertise is a well-known one for a lot of of Spotify’s platform friends, from YouTube to Fb to Twitter. However whereas Fb weathered an advertiser boycott, Spotify is experiencing a creator defection. Having lured a controversial creator to its platform within the type of Rogan, Spotify now should reckon with the fallout of what he says.

But when getting in scorching water over unsavory content material is a well-known section on a platform’s path to maturity, right here’s one other marker: determining a first-party information and id technique. One other high audio platform, SiriusXM, is constructing a home-grown identifier it calls AudioID in an effort to get a single view of customers throughout its a number of acquisitions.

Then, we flip our consideration to the Beijing Olympics. The US diplomatic boycott of the video games has put the sporting occasion right into a bizarre grey zone. Deliberate TV protection of the occasion appears gentle, sports activities articles gushing about athletes really feel near nonexistent – and advertisers seem reluctant so as to add these very costly interlocked Olympics rings to their advert campaigns.

What’s extra, the Tremendous Bowl is crashing the sports activities social gathering. The massive sport goes down in the course of the Olympics. And since many people are nonetheless working from our dwelling rooms, B2B firms have determined to crash, too – interrupting the entertainment-focused vibes that have been as soon as the bread-and-butter of the Tremendous Bowl with Tremendous Bowl advertisements of their very own. Reside sports activities simply aren’t the identical anymore.