Billionaire Drahi’s BT Fiber Bet Is a $3.1 Billion ‘Curveball’
Bloomberg 1 hr ago
(Bloomberg)
Patrick Drahi bought a 12% stake in BT Group Plc and pledged to support its high-speed broadband rollout, an unexpected move that marks a return to form by the deal-hungry French-Israeli cable billionaire.
Drahi’s newly created company Altice UK acquired 1.2 billion shares of Britain’s dominant phone company, it said in a statement on Thursday. The stake is worth about 2.2 billion pounds ($3.1 billion) as of Wednesday’s close and makes him the company’s biggest shareholder.
The entrepreneur has a history of challenging the old incumbents in Europe’s telecommunications industry and has often driven far-reaching change and asset sales at the companies he’s invested in. More recently, he’s taken a break from major deals to focus on paying down debt.
What you need to know
Apple recently made big changes to iOS 14 that make it much harder to track users for advertising.
A new report says the move could in fact turn out to be a business opportunity for some firms.
Bloomberg says that heightened business complexity fuelled by the changes could work out to the advantage of some.
A new report states that big changes made to iOS 14 could actually prove favorable to some advertising agencies if they can capitalize on the increased complexity of marketing that follows.
Moves by Apple Inc. and Google that make it harder for brands to track billions of consumers are creating a money-making opportunity for advertising companies that were hit hard by the pandemic.
Google is phasing out third-party online tracking cookies and Apple is requiring app owners to ask for explicit permission to track users across other companies’ apps.
(May 12): Moves by Apple Inc. and Google that make it harder for brands to track billions of consumers are creating a money-making opportunity for advertising companies that were hit hard by the pandemic.
Google is phasing out third-party online tracking cookies and Apple is requiring app owners to ask for explicit permission to track users across other companies’ apps. The changes make it harder for companies to follow our every move online, so marketers are devising new ways for brands to find out what consumers are doing and pitch products to them.
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Consumers are going to spend a lot more money in 2021 than they did in 2020. And that’s great news for the advertising industry not just Google, Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc., who together attract 44% of all ad spending, but also struggling old-school agencies such as WPP Plc., Interpublic Group Inc., Publicis Groupe SA, Dentsu Inc. and Omnicom Group Inc.
That rebound will hide more existential problems, however, for the ad world denizens of Madison Avenue and London’s Soho. A revolution is set to hit online advertising in the coming months. So although the rising tide will lift all ships for now, we won’t know which companies have truly made the right strategic decisions until at least 2022, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Matthew Bloxham.