• Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill on Monday replacing the board of The Walt Disney Co.’s special taxing district in central Florida with a hand-picked, five-member oversight committee. The move is largely viewed as a retaliatory one orchestrated by Florida Republicans against the entertainment giant, which publicly opposed the passing of the “Don’t Say Gay” measure last year. (Reuters) 
• The Biden Administration said government agencies have 30 days to delete TikTok, owned by Chinese firm ByteDance Ltd., from all federal devices and systems following a ban ordered by Congress late last year. (Reuters) Meanwhile, Canada issued a similar prohibition against using TikTok on government-issued devices Monday, as concerns about the video app’s data privacy practices continue to swell. (The Wall Street Journal) 
• Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch admitted some Fox News hosts knowingly endorsed false claims that the 2020 election was stolen during a deposition last month as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the conservative news network. Legal documents filed by Dominion show that many other Fox News executives, including Chief Legal and Policy Officer Viet Dinh, were also aware that hosts were peddling falsehoods. (Axios)
• Meta Platforms Inc. created a new product group dedicated to incorporating generative artificial technology into its Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger platforms. In a post, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said initial AI features will focus on providing “creative and expressive tools” for users, while multimodal experiences and ad formats are on the horizon. (The Verge)

U.S. Ad Market Falls For 7th Consecutive Month In January

MediaPost

Meta’s AI-driven advertising system splits marketers

Hannah Murphy and Cristina Criddle, Financial Times

Meta’s efforts to overhaul its advertising technology in response to Apple’s privacy changes are leading to bumper results for brands but also fears from marketers they are being forced to relinquish too much control to the social media platform.

R/GA CEO Sean Lyons Departs For Accenture; Interim R/GA Global CEO is Named

Brian Bonilla, Ad Age

R/GA Global Chief Creative Officer Tiffany Rolfe also adds a chair position to her remit.

‘Crying Indian’ Ad That Targeted Pollution to Be Retired

Emily Schmall, The New York Times

Keep America Beautiful announced on Thursday that it transferred the rights to the ad to the National Congress of American Indians Fund, the educational arm of the group based in Washington.

FTC warns tech: ‘Keep your AI claims in check’

Devin Coldewey, TechCrunch

It seems like just about every product out there claims to implement AI in some way or another, yet few go into detail — and fewer still can tell you exactly how it works and why. The FTC doesn’t like it.

Japan Accuses Ad Giant Dentsu of Rigging Bids for Tokyo Olympics

Ben Dooley and Hisako Ueno, The New York Times 

Prosecutors said the company and five others conspired to evade the public bidding process for test events, part of a widening investigation into corruption surrounding the Games.

Elon Musk Calls U.S. Media Racist Over ‘Dilbert’ Comic Strip Backlash

Gareth Vipers, The Wall Street Journal

Syndication partner Andrews McMeel Universal, newspapers drop comic after racist rant by cartoonist Scott Adams.

Vice Names Bruce Dixon, Hozefa Lokhandwala Co-CEOs

Caitlin Huston, The Hollywood Reporter

The two longtime executives take over after the departure of Nancy Dubuc on Feb. 24.

Netflix’s live Chris Rock special will have celebrity-packed pre- and post-shows

Emma Roth, The Verge

Netflix is beaming even more livestreamed content to viewers’ TV screens.

Live Nation says Taylor Swift fans can’t sue over ticket debacle

Mike Scarcella, Reuters

Live Nation Entertainment Inc. and subsidiary Ticketmaster LLC asked a U.S. judge to halt a proposed consumer class action over their sales of Taylor Swift concert tickets and instead force claims to be heard privately in arbitration.

CNN Bets News, Not Big Names, Will Capture Crowds at 9 PM

Brian Steinberg, Variety

Starting this week, the Warner Bros. Discovery-backed news outlet will fill the hour with a range of different special reports, all under the rubric of “CNN Primetime.” Future 9 p.m. hours could include one-on-one interviews with newsmakers; town halls that put government officials in direct contact with the people affected by policy decisions; and other programs that feature surprising “gets” and scoops. 

Publishers like ESPN and agencies are seeing more investment in women’s sports coverage

Sara Guaglione, Digiday

The attention and investment in women’s sports coverage has increased especially over the last two years. That’s thanks to new dedication to the topic — from publishers expanding the teams writing that coverage to agencies securing multimillion ad deals for the category.

Apple’s iPhones Winning Over Gen Z—and the World’s Premium Market

Jiyoung Sohn, The Wall Street Journal

Trend puts pressure on rival Samsung, maker of high-end Android smartphones.

Elon Musk says remaining Twitter employees will soon receive ‘very significant’ stock awards

Alex Heath, The Verge

In an internal memo, he calls the company’s most recent round of layoffs ‘a difficult organizational overhaul focused on improving future execution.’

Meta cracks down on a growing crime against teenagers

Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN

A new tool, called Take It Down, takes aim at a practice where someone posts an explicit picture of an individual without their consent to publicly embarrass them. Revenge porn has skyrocketed in the last few years on social media, particularly among young boys, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Microsoft Expands Game Pass as Regulators Fret Over Activision Deal

Cecilia D’Anastasio and Dina Bass, Bloomberg

The subscription service, which dominates competing efforts from Sony and Amazon, is moving into dozens of new countries.

BeReal still has potential for advertisers, but its hype period is well and truly over

Krystal Scanlon, Digiday

As Digiday reported last October, if the app didn’t move quickly to provide marketers with unique features that could pique their interests, BeReal would become a victim of its fleeting success and see attention spent elsewhere. And it looks like that time is here.

LinkedIn rolls out new relationship intelligence tools for B2B marketers and sellers

Kendra Clark, The Drum

The social networking site is debuting a slate of new tools to help marketing and sales professionals identify the audiences best-suited to their needs.

Fighting ‘Woke AI,’ Musk Recruits Team to Develop OpenAI Rival

Jon Victor and Jessica E. Lessin, The Information

Elon Musk has approached artificial intelligence researchers in recent weeks about forming a new research lab to develop an alternative to ChatGPT, the high-profile chatbot made by the startup OpenAI, according to two people with direct knowledge of the effort and a third person briefed on the conversations.

Snapchat is releasing its own AI chatbot powered by ChatGPT

Alex Heath, The Verge

The ‘My AI’ bot will initially only be available to paying Snapchat Plus subscribers. CEO Evan Spiegel says it’s just the beginning for the company’s generative AI plans.

Chipotle embraces viral TikTok trend with new menu item

Chris Kelly, Marketing Dive

The item began as a viral menu hack created by a pair of TikTok creators, Alexis Frost and Keith Lee, but posed a challenge for the chain’s restaurants as it was not an official menu item on its digital ordering channels.

Male athletes score big as beauty brands’ makeup ambassadors

Liz Flora, Glossy

It’s not just female athletes getting beauty brand endorsement deals these days. On February 15, Houston Rockets basketball player Jalen Green became the new brand ambassador for Un/Dn Laqr, Machine Gun Kelly’s nail polish brand. 

Tinder ‘Swipes Right’ on Inclusive Global Campaign to Court Gen Z Daters 

Leslie Blount, Adweek

The colorful 360-campaign created by Mischief @ No Fixed Address thinks beyond the ‘hookup.’

McDonald’s expands Krispy Kreme test to more Kentucky locations

Amelia Lucas, CNBC

It’s an expansion of the fast-food giant’s initial test with the sweet treats. In October, nine McDonald’s restaurants in Louisville started selling Krispy Kreme doughnuts. The larger test is meant to assess customer demand and to understand how a larger-scale launch would affect restaurant operations.

Altria nears deal to buy e-cigarette maker Njoy for at least $2.75bn

Oliver Barnes et al., Financial Times

The deal would give Altria a second bet on the vape market, five years after it spent $12.8bn to buy 35 percent of Juul, the US market leader in e-cigarettes at the time. Altria has since cut its valuation of that investment to just $250mn after Juul suffered a series of regulatory and legal blows.

How to design and equip the office for Gen Z (other generations are invited)

Caine Mayhew and Kari Smith, Quartz

How physical space and technology are making the difference in attracting and retaining talent.

Beware of inflating job titles

Kara Yarnot, Fast Company

Job title inflation is a direct result of the recent recruiting challenges, but could end up creating more issues than it solves.