No more doom-scrolling?... Last year, Australia proposed a bill to address power imbalances between the news media and digital platforms (read: Google and Facebook). The solution: force Google and FB to pay news outlets for displaying and linking to their content. The proposed law is expected to pass next week.

• Google responded by making payment agreements with Australian publications, including News Corp.
• Facebook responded by banning news in Australia. This week, FB announced that it'll no longer allow Australians to share or view news content. Woah.

Stick to the baby panda videos... and forget the breaking news on the Vegemite shortage. FB has banned all news-related links in Australia, including stories from international publishers. Also: FB users worldwide can't share or view news stories from Australia. The aggressive move could backfire if users see it as a dangerous threat to free expression. For now, it's mainly bad news for publishers:

• Hot off the press: News outlets used to make $$$ selling papers filled with ads. When everything went digital, so did their ads. But Big Tech ads attract much more spend since they're targeted and have wider reach.
• Hot off the feed: In 2019, 52% of Americans got their news on Facebook. And FB got all the $$$ from the surrounding ads. But Facebook says publishers shouldn’t complain, because FB drives traffic to their sites.

First, the primer... The BLM movement put a renewed spotlight on racial discrimination in many areas of society, including the beauty industry. Beauty companies have a history of marginalizing communities of color through non-inclusive marketing and products. In the past year, companies like Estee Lauder, L’Oreal, and Unilever have been criticized for marketing “skin-lightening” products. LVMH-owned Sephora has been accused of racial bias in stores — including instances of associates not being able to do “dark makeup” for women of color. Recently, beauty retailers have started taking steps to improve inclusivity:

• Ulta pledged to double its assortment of Black-owned brands in 2021. Sephora pledged to increase its Black-owned brands from eight to 16 this year (out of its total ~300). And both are expanding employee training to fight unconscious bias.
• Sephora also signed the 15% Pledge, which calls on retailers to work toward committing at least a population-proportional 15% of their shelf space to Black-owned brands.

Building a foundation... In 2017, Rihanna’s makeup brand Fenty Beauty was hailed as groundbreaking for releasing 40 foundation shades. Many of its darker shades sold out in days. That success led to the “Fenty Effect”: Big brands like Dior and CoverGirl followed, launching 40 foundation shades each. But a December 2020 study from Sephora shows there’s still much left to be done:

• 3 in 4 retail shoppers feel that marketing fails to showcase a diverse range of skin tones, body types, and hair textures.
• 2 in 3 shoppers think stores fail to deliver an equally-distributed assortment of products for different tastes and preferences.
• 2 in 5 US shoppers have experienced unfair treatment on the basis of their race or skin tone.

• Stim: The House is aiming to pass its $1.9T coronavirus relief bill by the end of next week.
• $$$: Walmart promises raises for ~425K employees after posting impressive holiday sales.
• Spiked: Sam Adams parent Boston Beer saw its quarterly profit more than 2X from 2019, as Truly spiked seltzer continued to drive growth.
• Cloud: Dropbox's quarterly sales topped $500M for the first time thanks to the WFH cloud-storage boom.
• Robo: Google's Waymo begins testing its robo-taxi service with employee volunteers in San Francisco.
• Awk: Peloton is fighting to cancel trademarks for the terms “spin” and “spinning” so that it can use them freely in marketing.

• Earnings expected from John Deere

Authors of this Snacks own shares of: Walmart and Google

ID: 1531619