We invite you to a week in two minutes, an audio summary of Ctrl Control Advertising magazine.
The ARI Magazine Forum took place in Madrid this week. Magazine Association took the opportunity to present the Pingüino Torreblanca campaign, which defends the unique advantages of this advertising medium. This was explained by the creative director of this agency, Jose Luis Mora. We live in a war for attention, but not all media outlets offer their advertisers the same quality of attention. Faced with attention that can have an impact on the session scrollingmagazines offer quality attention, focused, calm and without competition. Advertisers obsessed with quantity of exposure will choose other media, but those who want to give their brands quality exposure always have magazines. The company is a gem.
Also this week, the W!N Awards from the Association of Communications Agencies were presented, where AcentoenlaCé won the top prize and Carmela and Willy’s “The Perfect Addition” to Olive Oil from Spain. Not only this, but many other award-winning campaigns have clearly demonstrated the power of celebrities and influencers to achieve earned media. That is, influencers take away the advertising budget from the media, and then the media publishes the news of the influencers, so that the cycle begins again. What influencers and their agencies call earned media, the media should call lost advertising.
And we are not going to stop commenting on such news, even if it appears almost every week, because it would be bad if we got used to it. This week we learned new data about Meta’s ad revenue, and it’s scandalous. In fraudulent ads alone, Meta bills more than all media news brandswhich are the ones that provide security for advertising brands. Meta only removes fraudulent ads when it is 95% certain that they are fraudulent. That is, if an advertiser is 94.9% likely to be a fraud, Meta continues to allow their ads, but charges a little more to penalize them for being suspicious. We are talking about advertising investment schemes, fraudulent e-commerce, illegal casinos, illegal drugs and much more.
And here’s another exciting piece of news: Spotify is full of “invalid” listening. What is this? It’s good if the song is not heard by a person, but by a bot. And why would musicians hire bots to listen to their music? Well, it’s not like Spotify pays you more because the platform has systems to detect this suspicious traffic. But there are other benefits, like increasing your cash on live concerts or cheating the algorithm to get more referrals. This week, a group of artists sued rapper Drake, accused of creating billions in fake auditions.
All of this feeds into the dead internet theory that we’ll be hearing a lot about in 2026. Its defenders say the Internet died back in 2017 and that virtually all current traffic consists of bots, AI, automated or manipulated content, and that very little activity comes from real people. It all sounds like a conspiracy, but if it’s growing, it’s because of news like Spotify. I assure you that the speaker is a person, with all the limitations that this implies, but a real one.
More news next week.
