By: Adnan Arnautlija
SLOVENIAN TOURISM ORGANIZATION EARMARKS €1.5M FOR MEDIA BUY
Slovenian Tourism Organization (STO) has announced a competition for digital media buy. For the promotion of Slovenia online, STO will allocate 1,440,000 euros, and the competition will be open until 5 January 2018.
The subject of the competition is the realization of all digital media lease activities in 2018 during the project (with shorter interruptions until 15 November, 2018), which will take place in more than one wave of advertisements divided into segments of 30 days. Activities are foreseen for potential tourists from France, Great Britain, the Benelux and Nordic States, and Austria, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, Canada, Ireland, Poland and the Czech Republic.
The selected agency will, among other things, provide lease of advertising inventory and technical service of ads, ad design and content design, translation, monetization and ad optimization, media plan preparation per country, efficiency metrics and reporting, and adaptation and optimization of digital media lease.
Contest documents can be found here.
HOWtoWOW WORKSHOP WITH HARRY ROBERTS
HOWtoWOW program in Zagreb will host a workshop titled “Front-end Performance: building faster websites” led by Harry Roberts, tomorrow.
With a list of clients that includes companies like Google, UN, and Unilever, Harry Roberts is an award-winning consultant and front-end architect, designer and developer that helps companies and teams around the world plan, build, and maintain better web sites and quality user experiences.
At this workshop, Harry will share knowledge and tools that will dramatically affect the performance of your websites. Among other things, you will learn how the network really works and how to design accordingly, and how to speed up websites while keeping customers happy. You will also find out how to optimize files for faster delivery to end users, how to get the browser deliver files according to different priorities, and how to measure and profile a good and bad page.
Find more information at HOWtoWOW.
FACEBOOK IS SHUTTING DOWN ITS API THAT MARKETERS LEAN ON FOR RESEARCH
Facebook has long held a tight grip on what data advertisers can and cannot access. Now, it’s pulling some of the reigns away from social media vendors as it shutters its Audience Insight API.
Last week Facebook quietly shut down its research tool, which allowed social vendors to build billion-dollar businesses by tapping into the social network’s firehose of data and crunch vast amounts of user information for marketers.
Audience Insights digs up aggregated demographic, interest and lifestyle data, including age, education levels, job titles, hobbies, family size, income and location. Importantly, Audience Insights is not part of Facebook’s significantly bigger Marketing API that hundreds of ad-tech companies like Adobe, Hootsuite and Integral Ad Science use to manage budgets, create audience profiles and run campaigns. Now that the API is closing, the social vendors—and all companies—are being transferred over to another version of the Audience Insights program, where Facebook supplies its data directly to marketers instead of going through a middleman.
CVS TO BUY AETNA FOR $67.5 BILLION, REMAKING SECTOR
CVS Health will buy Aetna for about $67.5 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter, creating a health-care and retail giant that will have a hand in everything from insurance to the corner drugstore.
CVS will pay $207 a share for Aetna, made up of $145 a share in cash and the rest in stock, according to the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Including CVS’s assumption of Aetna’s debt, the deal will total $78 billion.
The deal combines the largest U.S. drugstore chain with the third-biggest health insurer, rolling Aetna’s health insurance business with CVS’s drug plans and retail operations. In doing so, it may herd some of Aetna’s 22 million customers into CVS drugstores when they fill a prescription through CVS’s drug plans. It will also give Aetna’s insurance plans a closer on-the-ground tie to where customers get care.
FACEBOOK OPENS LONDON HQ WITH 800 JOBS PLEDGE
Facebook is doubling down on its commitment to the UK with a pledge to add a further 800 people to its payroll in the country – on the same day that it opened its new London headquarters.
Half of Facebook’s London employees will be engineers, ensuring that the UK hub will become Facebook’s largest engineering base outwith the US, and it will house a start-up incubator to help grow native digital businesses.
Facebook now intends to employ 2,300 people by the end of next year at its Frank Gehry-designed London base following a succession of expansion plans.
BANFF WORLD MEDIA FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES NEW EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Brunico Communications (Brunico) announced the appointment of Jenn Kuzmyk to Executive Director of the Banff World Media Festival (BANFF). In this role, she will be responsible for leading all commercial activities and partnerships related to BANFF as well as guiding its path forward as one of the world’s premier screen-based entertainment industry events. Additionally, Ms. Kuzmyk will manage all sales efforts related to Playback magazine and events.
Most recently, Jenn Kuzmyk was Director of International Distribution at Proper Rights where she led program sales in English Canada and the EMEA region. Prior to that she was VP Development at Cream Productions where she oversaw the creative and financing of over 10 series including the Emmy-nominated Wild Things with Dominic Monaghan. Ms. Kuzmyk also spent a decade as Canadian Bureau Chief and an Editor at C21 Media.
