Every week, The Big Smoke presents industry news curated by MediaScope. This week, we look at the fence that Facebook has constructed, the home of the top 46 advertisers, and the Dept of Justice vs. The Industry.

Facebook’s Walled Wonderland Is Inherently Incompatible With News
(Frederic Filloux, MondayNote)

“… if those who keep whining about Facebook’s negative impact on the 2016 election had read what Facebook repeatedly and plainly stated, they would have been less surprised. As we say in French, “c’est écrit sur l’emballage” (it’s written on the package). … If Facebook can’t be criticized for not warning its stakeholders in the news media, it still misled them in two major ways.”

What You Need to Know About the World’s Largest Advertisers, from Adidas to Yili 
(Bradley Johnson, AdvertisingAge) 

“If you want to follow the money in advertising, get a passport. … The United States is home to 46 of the world’s top 100 advertisers, but the rest are spread across the globe from Herzogenaurach, Germany (shoemaker Adidas Group), to Hohhot, China (Inner Mongolia Yili Industrial Group Co., the country’s biggest dairy producer).”

Another Scandal In Ad Land 
(Bob Hoffman, AdContrarian) 

“The US Department of Justice (DOJ) is investigating whether agencies are guilty of bid-rigging on production and post-production jobs. … We jump from one fad to another; we are a cesspool of -isms; we have traded our knowledge-base for trendy clichés; we have eroded anything resembling a moral code; we have fired our experienced, talented people and replaced them with cheap, amateurish nobodies who have degraded our product; and we have brutalized our language into a liturgy of dreadful jargon and insufferable bullshit. … Other than that, we’re doing great.”

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