The social media juggernaut famously founded in a Harvard dorm room in 2004 can finally buy beer.

Over the last quarter-century, Facebook, which turned 21 on February 4, has evolved from a social networking tool for college students and a place to poke your middle school crush into a social media Goliath that has fundamentally upended the practice of digital advertising.

Once called TheFacebook, the company’s purview as Meta includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, and myriad other VR/AR technologies, including its Meta Quest headsets, placed as part of a significant bet on the metaverse, which has been followed by a bigger bet on generative AI and smart glasses.

Meta is the second largest advertising platform behind Google, with 96% of its $164 billion in 2024 revenue coming from advertising. More than 3.3 billion people use one or more of its apps every day, according to the company’s Q4 2024 earnings call.

Historically, a majority of that ad revenue has come from Facebook, and according to the Pew Research Center, 68% of US adults use the platform. But that number has remained relatively flat since 2016, according to Pew, and as Facebook has gotten older, its user base has aged even more quickly, with the percentage of US teens saying they use the platform dropping from 71% in 2015 to 33% in 2023. At the same time, the content on the platform has changed, whether that’s the generative AI “slop” appearing in user feeds or Meta’s rollback of content moderation policies that stand to open the door to more hate speech. So how did it get to this point—and can Facebook get its mojo back?

Read more here about how Facebook lost its cool and how it’s trying to get it back.—RB, KH

The year 2004 was memorable for many reasons: Ken Jennings’s 74-game Jeopardy! winning streak, the introduction of Gmail, the founding of Facebook, Nipplegate. It was also the year you could see Napoleon Dynamite free of charge in theaters, over and over again, before the movie was released.

The screenings, held nationwide, were part of an against-the-grain marketing campaign for the unconventional indie film about a tall, awkward, low-energy teenager living in Preston, Idaho, and his unusual friends and family.

Napoleon Dynamite went on to gross $45 million at the domestic box office, but for those working to build an audience for the film around its release, its success was anything but certain. “Nobody possibly could say, ‘Oh, we knew exactly what was going to happen; we knew it was going to become culturally iconic,’” David Gale, then EVP of MTV Films, said. “No way.”

With its offbeat humor, awkward pauses, and absence of obvious laugh lines, it also posed something of a marketing conundrum.

“It was hard to convey the film’s vibe and unique use of humor that sucks you into its world over the course of the film,” recalled Nancy Utley, who was president of marketing at Searchlight at the time. The movie “looked odd in traditional trailers and TV spots,” she said.

But the team at Searchlight believed that the movie could take off, if only it could find the right audience. So how were they to get people to see an oddball movie about an oddball kid with an oddball name?

Read more here about how Searchlight built out its campaign for a now-iconic movie.—BL

More than two decades ago, the online service provider AOL bought Time Warner for $183 billion, marking what was then the largest merger in American business history. The goal—to bring a traditional media company into the digital age—was ahead of its time.

It was also, for all intents and purposes, an unmitigated disaster. Over the next decade, layoffs, federal investigations, and executive departures galore ensued as the two companies combined about as well as hair and bubblegum do, and before the decade was done, Time Warner opted to spin AOL off into its own company.

Despite the disastrous result, the merger ushered in a quarter-century of even more frantic concentration in the media and tech space, where newly established and fast-growing giants like Meta and Google looked to extinguish the competition through absorption, while traditional media stalwarts have increasingly looked to compete against them. The result is an industry that has spent 25 years and counting gobbling itself up, creating, paradoxically, a landscape that is both more vertically integrated and somehow more fragmented than ever before.

Advertisers, meanwhile, are left trying to balance reaching as many eyeballs as possible while benefiting from enough competition to keep costs down.

“Advertisers need to balance efficiency with leverage in their ideal world, meaning they want to have as many possible suppliers who have as much scale as possible, so that they can ideally play as many of them off against each other,” said Brian Wieser, an industry analyst and principal at Madison and Wall. “That’s not what happens in reality.”

Continue reading here.—RB

Executive moves across the industry.

• Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner stepped down amid pressure from the Trump administration; he said in a statement that the decision was “to ensure that Amtrak continues to enjoy the full faith and confidence of this administration.”
• Spark Foundry tapped Kelly Metz, who recently departed Omnicom, to join as chief investment officer; another OMG exec, Anthony Dario, is joining as EVP, video investment.
• Genesis, a Hyundai-owned luxury-car brand, hired Amy Marentic, a Circana alum who previously spent nearly three decades at Ford, as CMO.