Targeting teens through advertisements

Google and Meta had apparently made a secret deal to target ads for Instagram to teenagers on YouTube and promote the photo and messaging app, according to an exclusive by The Financial Times. The report said Google disregarded its own rules that prohibit personalizing and targeting ads to under-18s and worked on a marketing project for Meta that was designed to target 13- to 17-year-old YouTube users with ads that promoted the rival’s app, according to documents seen by the Financial Times and people familiar with the matter. Sources told FT that the Silicon Valley giants worked with Spark Foundry, a US subsidiary of French advertising giant Publicis, to launch the pilot program in Canada between February and April this year, and after its perceived success, it was then trialled in the US in May. It had planned to expand it further to international markets and to promote other Meta apps such as Facebook.

(Adapted from “Google And Meta Struck Secret Ads Deal To Target Teenagers,” by The Financial Times, published on August 9, 2024)

A degree’s importance

In the age of online learning, does pursuing a college education still make sense, especially when we have access to information for free via the internet? The problem with this question is that it frames college as an information gatekeeper, misunderstanding much of its value. For many people, higher education institutions offer more than that; college provides a transformative journey where students can network and develop transferable soft skills that require teamwork and repetition, like critical thinking, communication, problem-solving, emotional intelligence, and creativity. While it’s true that a college degree is not the only path to success, we can’t ignore the reality that most organisations still consider it an indicator of a candidate’s readiness for the workforce. In a recent survey of 334 employers by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, respondents said nearly 70pc of their entry-level jobs require a bachelor’s degree. This statistic suggests that — despite alternatives routes — a college education can give job candidates a leg up in today’s market.

(Adapted from “The Case For College In The Era Of Online Learning,” by Robert Walker, published on August 1, 2024, by The Harvard Business Review)

Making money out of love

When Tinder, a mobile dating app, launched on college campuses in America in 2012, it quickly became a hit. Although online dating had been around since Match.com, a website for lonely hearts, launched in 1995, it had long struggled to shed an image of desperation. But Tinder, by letting users sift through photos of countless potential dates with a simple swipe, made it easy and fun. Dating apps have since transformed courtship. Today roughly 350m people around the world have one on their phone, up from 250m in 2018. Yet online romance has been losing its spark lately. The number of people who use the apps once a month has dwindled from 154m in 2021 to 137m in the second quarter of this year, but love has never been an easy business as Tinder and Bumble struggle with singles refusing to pay up.

(Adapted from “Why People Have Fallen Out Of Love With Dating Apps,” by The Economist, published on August 8, 2024, by The Economist)

Scam victims

In late December, Guracha Belachew Bersha helped lead a small but brazen rebellion. He’d been enslaved for 16 months in a twisted new criminal empire in which Chinese gangsters traffic people from around the world, often to remote and lawless parts of Southeast Asia, and force them to sit at computers all day scamming strangers online. The cyber frauds they’re forced to commit are called pig butchering, named for the way the perpetrators fatten up their victims by gaining their trust before taking their money and cutting them loose. The scale of these operations and their rapid expansion is hard to fathom. The United Nations says hundreds of thousands of people may have been trafficked to Myanmar and Cambodia for what they call “forced criminality,” a new and perverse phenomenon in which people are threatened or tortured into committing illegal acts.

(Adapted from “Posing as ‘Alicia’, This Man Scammed Hundreds Online. He Was Also A Victim, by Feliz Soloman and Rachel Liang, published on July 27, 2024, by The Wall Street Journal)

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, August 12th, 2024