Baller Branding

In This Issue:

🎪 MSG's new Sphere in Las Vegas presents a unique... and costly marketing canvas.

🤖 Tech companies team up to battle deepfakes and misinformation with watermarks.

📱 YouTube channel permissions can now be managed on mobile.

🎯 TikTok introduces a new ads library tool for EU campaigns.

Viva Las Ad-Vegas: Meet the 14 Acre Ad Placement 

It might just be the biggest ball ad money can buy. 

The MSG Sphere in Las Vegas, a massive dome with a $2.3 billion price tag, recently made its patriotic debut with its outer shell called the Exosphere on July the Fourth. 

The show was powered by its 1.2 million LED lights, featuring geometric designs, underwater and lunar scenes, and NBA basketballs. At one point, it flashed a flag-planting “hello world” greeting to audiences and marketers everywhere. 

Sphere executives have already started courting advertisers to see which deep-pocketed brands will be among the first to commit to the unique media buy.

👀 Your Ticket to 14 Acres of Ad Space 

While there will be corporate sponsorships in the Sphere’s interior, the outer dome is what’s really being hyped up for brands. The Exosphere provides marketers with a 360-degree canvas to create "14 acres of content" unlike existing digital billboards or outdoor media. It has been likened to the "Super Bowl of outdoor spaces." It will likely come with a Super Bowl price tag too. 

While execs wouldn’t disclose the cost of a 90-second ad buy, the standard ad unit, or which brands are on board, the executives did call it “a super premium buy,” in line with London’s Piccadilly Circus or a Times Square takeover in New York. 

The Exosphere will operate for about 18 hours a day, about half of which will be available for marketers. 

Images: Sphere Entertainment

Generative AI to Be More Detectable

Did your agency really write that ad copy? Or did they get Chat GPT to write it? Soon, you might be able to tell with certainty.

Several major players in the space have committed to developing tech to clearly watermark AI-generated content, including: 

• OpenAI

• Microsoft

• Google

• Meta 

These watermarks should make it easier to tell whether an image or text or video came from a human or a bot.

U.S. President Joe Biden is meeting with tech companies today in advance of legislation coming aimed at regaining control over AI tech.

On top of developing watermarks, the tech companies made several other commitments announced by the White House today. Among them, they agreed to test AI systems before release, invest more in cybersecurity, and share information across the industry to reduce AI risks.

Image: Canva 

YouTube Updates Channel Permissions on Mobile 

A handy update for brands and creators on YouTube: You can now manage your channel permissions on mobile. 

Yesterday, the company expanded its ‘Channel Permissions’ feature, which lets channel owners authorize users to manage their channels directly from the main YouTube app.

Until now, this option was limited to YouTube Studio. 

Now, users can post on behalf of approved owners using the main app on both desktop and mobile. The update lets managers, editors, and those with limited roles access features including: 

• Creating Shorts

• Adding posts

• Managing playlists

• Commenting on videos as channel owners

Image: Canva / YouTube 

TikTok’s Updated Ad Library for EU Campaigns 

TikTok released an update to its Ad Library this week.

The library lets marketers search for ad campaigns running on the app, and show information like rough targeting, regional reach, and information about the advertiser. This updated Ad Library, however, is currently only available for European campaigns.

For those campaigns, though, you can enter a country, ad type, date range, and other data points and TikTok will give an overview of all the ads that match the specified parameters.

The platform has a similar feature within its creative research tools, but this update offers some additional targeting information likely to align with evolving European ad policies. 

For regions outside of Europe, the original and somewhat scaled-back TikTok Ads overview remains available. It lets users filter ads by industry, region, objective, and performance.

Images: TikTok