CMO Today: Twitter Ad Disclosures; IPG’s Earnings Disappoint; Chipotle’s Queso Opportunity

Author: Lara O’Reilly / Source: WSJ

Preempting new rules governing the way political ads are regulated online, Twitter announced Tuesday it will launch a website that will disclose the people and organizations that have paid for ads on the platform and other details such as how long the campaigns have been running and how they were targeted, The Wall Street Journal reports. Twitter will also label political ads in the news feed and disclose the amount political campaigns spend on the platform. Twitter, you’ll remember, is one of the digital companies that said it discovered Russian-backed entities bought ads on its platform to spread divisive messages before and after the U.S. presidential election. “I’m sure the entire industry — Google and Facebook, included — would love to persuade Congress that self-regulation is the answer. Elsewhere, it was clearly Transparency Tuesday for Twitter yesterday as the company also confirmed it had agreed to a Media Rating Council audit, as Adweek reported.

Advertising agency holding company stocks dropped once again on Tuesday after Interpublic Group (IPG) reported disappointing growth in its third quarter and revised down its financial targets for the year, CMO Today reported. IPG Chief Executive Michael Roth said the softness was due to clients deferring or canceling spending, plus some advertisers moving from an agency-of-record model to working with agencies on a project basis. Analysts think the current environment rings alarm bells across the entire sector. In a research note dramatically titled “Sum of All Fears,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Steven Cahall wrote: “Agency sentiment has been steadily weakening for the last 9 months and IPG’s print confirmed, and perhaps increased, investor fears that life’s tough in Agencyland, and probably getting tougher near-term.” Meanwhile, Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser suggested “enhanced contract scrutiny,” in the wake of last year’s damning Association of National Advertisers media-transparency report, is having an effect on all agency holding companies.

Over at Chipotle, the burrito chain told Wall Street its ad campaign to promote its new queso dip is paying dividends. Unfortunately that wasn’t enough to change the overall financial picture: Chipotle’s shares took a dive in after-hours trading on Tuesday after it reported third- quarter profits that fell below analysts’ expectations, WSJ reported. Mark Crumpacker,…

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