SOCIAL
Ed East, Billion Dollar Boy CEO

Ed East is global CEO and co-founder of Billion Dollar Boy (BDB), the UK’s fastest-growing influencer agency.
BDB has grown the influencer marketing industry by 62%, helping the business to clinch a spot in the Financial Times’s list of the 1000 fastest growing companies in Europe – the first and only influencer marketing agency featured.
Founded in 2014 with staff of around 150 across the business, BDB forecast $70m revenue for 2023.
My career hasn’t been long but I was finding it hard to find a job after leaving university in the US. I applied to companies like Google in digital marketing-related jobs and kept getting through to the last rounds of the graduate trainee schemes but not progressing.
I met for a drink with a family friend called Oliver Pawle, who had an idea to set up a charitable organisation that would support young entrepreneurs in their journey and give them all the essential elements needed to set up a business. I found it fascinating.
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Previously an investment banker Oliver is now chairman at executive recruiters Korn Ferry. I joined Oliver as an intern, with the hope of perhaps joining his scheme in its inception.
In the meantime, there were so many things I learned.
Oliver simply had an idea, with a great cause supporting young individuals. Since 2011 New Entrepreneurs Foundation has now had 350 alumni. It has since merged with the Centre for Entrepreneurs. Further, 170 businesses have been set up, with over 5,000 jobs created with a combined value of £620m.
The first lesson I took away was always take action and drive it into reality, otherwise it will never become something. Three weeks after our drink, he had hired me as a junior and we were up and running, the first programme launching that autumn.

Oliver is always energetic and optimistic which gives off energy to others. He also took time to be interested and listen. I take the same positive energy approach at BDB – even when giving potentially bad news, I try to give a positive spin.
Over his career, he also built a valuable network and that’s one of the reasons he is now in executive search. It was clear to me that the network was the only way the foundation would succeed. We had to go out to businesses who had never heard anything like this before.
“You need to treat people with the utmost respect when you’re on the way up, as who knows what will happen on the way back down”, he once said. In 2011, I joined the programme and shadowed at a big digital marketing agency as its new entrepreneur.
Having seen Oliver and his drive to action, I was inspired. In my spare time I worked on a database connecting blogs – an incarnation of influencer marketing today – to brands. Having moved to Los Angeles and seen YouTubers and Instagrammers, I realised it was this market which needed to be connected all together to brands.
In 2014, Billion Dollar Boy was born. We wrote a long business plan in order to pay us a salary. The genesis of influencer marketing has not changed, but the route has consistently taken us in different directions.

As we are a bigger business, it’s much harder to have an idea and follow that as there are so many people and stakeholders involved. We are much less entrepreneurial while the last few years we have honed in and perfected what we are good at, as opposed to trying lots of new things.
There are always new platforms and creators emerging. Influencers have democratised this creation of content, can publish via their owned platform on social media and it has changed the way brands can talk to audiences.
While we have done mass scale influencer marketing over the last nine years, creator advertising is now coming to the fore, one where we want to double down over the next few years. We are taking the asset influencers make and using it for many different forms of advertising. For example, we recently had the biggest billboard in Australia, in Melbourne, where the content is made by influencers.
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The creator economy term has now been coined over the last 18 months in building businesses with influencers, leveraging the audiences and the communities they’ve built to create new products and services. It takes us out of the agency model and enables us to co-invest and redefine the way businesses are being built.
Oliver probably had faith in seeing me start something and it’s probably why he pushed and supported me. He may be a bit surprised at where I’ve got to, but he will undoubtedly be happy about it.
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SOCIAL
Walmart says it has stopped advertising on Elon Musk’s X platform

Walmart said Friday that it is scaling back its advertising on X, the social media company formerly known as Twitter, because “we’ve found some other platforms better for reaching our customers.”
Walmart’s decision has been in the works for a while, according to a person familiar with the move. Yet it comes as X faces an advertiser exodus following billionaire owner Elon Musk’s support for an antisemitic post on the platform.
The retailer spends about $2.7 billion on advertising each year, according to MarketingDive. In an email to CBS MoneyWatch, X’s head of operations, Joe Benarroch, said Walmart still has a large presence on X. He added that the company stopped advertising on X in October, “so this is not a recent pausing.”
“Walmart has a wonderful community of more than a million people on X, and with a half a billion people on X, every year the platform experiences 15 billion impressions about the holidays alone with more than 50% of X users doing most or all of their shopping online,” Benarroch said.
Musk struck a defiant pose earlier this week at the New York Times’ Dealbook Summit, where he cursed out advertisers that had distanced themselves from X, telling them to “go f— yourself.” He also complained that companies are trying to “blackmail me with advertising” by cutting off their spending with the platform, and cautioned that the loss of big advertisers could “kill” X.
“And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company,” Musk added.
Dozens of advertisers — including players such as Apple, Coca Cola and Disney — have bailed on X since Musk tweeted that a post on the platform that claimed Jews fomented hatred against White people, echoing antisemitic stereotypes, was “the actual truth.”
Advertisers generally shy away from placing their brands and marketing messages next to controversial material, for fear that their image with consumers could get tarnished by incendiary content.
The loss of major advertisers could deprive X of up to $75 million in revenue, according to a New York Times report.
Musk said Wednesday his support of the antisemitic post was “one of the most foolish” he’d ever posted on X.
“I am quite sorry,” he said, adding “I should in retrospect not have replied to that particular post.”
SOCIAL
US Judge Blocks Montana’s Effort to Ban TikTok

TikTok has won another reprieve in the U.S., with a district judge blocking Montana’s effort to ban the app for all users in the state.
Back in May, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte signed legislation to ban TikTok outright from operating in the state, in order to protect residents from alleged intelligence gathering by China. There’s no definitive evidence that TikTok is, or has participated in such, but Gianforte opted to move to a full ban, going further than the government device bans issued in other regions.
As explained by Gianforte at the time:
“The Chinese Communist Party using TikTok to spy on Americans, violate their privacy, and collect their personal, private, and sensitive information is well-documented. Today, Montana takes the most decisive action of any state to protect Montanans’ private data and sensitive personal information from being harvested by the Chinese Communist Party.”
In response, a collection of TikTok users challenged the proposed ban, arguing that it violated their first amendment rights, which led to this latest court challenge, and District Court Judge Donald Molloy’s decision to stop Montana’s ban effort.
Montana’s TikTok ban had been set to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2024.
In issuing a preliminary injunction to stop Montana from imposing a full ban on the app, Molloy said that Montana’s legislation does indeed violate the Constitution and “oversteps state power.”
Molloy’s judgment is primarily centered on the fact that Montana has essentially sought to exercise foreign policy authority in enacting a TikTok ban, which is only enforceable by federal authorities. Molloy also noted that there was a “pervasive undertone of anti-Chinese sentiment” within Montana’s proposed legislation.
TikTok has welcomed the ruling, issuing a brief statement in response:
We are pleased the judge rejected this unconstitutional law and hundreds of thousands of Montanans can continue to express themselves, earn a living, and find community on TikTok.
— TikTok Policy (@TikTokPolicy) December 1, 2023
Montana attorney general, meanwhile, has said that it’s considering next steps to advance its proposed TikTok ban.
The news is a win for TikTok, though the Biden Administration is still weighing a full TikTok ban in the U.S., which may still happen, even though the process has been delayed by legal and legislative challenges.
As I’ve noted previously, my sense here would be that TikTok won’t be banned in the U.S. unless there’s a significant shift in U.S.-China relations, and that relationship is always somewhat tense, and volatile to a degree.
If the U.S. government has new reason to be concerned, it may well move to ban the app. But doing so would be a significant step, and would prompt further response from the C.C.P.
Which is why I suspect that the U.S. government won’t act, unless it feels that it has to. And right now, there’s no clear impetus to implement a ban, and stop a Chinese-owned company from operating in the region, purely because of its origin.
Which is the real crux of the issue here. A TikTok ban is not just banning a social media company, it’s blocking cross-border commerce, because the company is owned by China, which will remain the logic unless clear evidence arises that TikTok has been used as a vector for gathering information on U.S. citizens.
Banning a Chinese-owned app because it is Chinese-owned is a statement, beyond concerns about a social app, and the U.S. is right to tread carefully in considering how such a move might impact other industries.
So right now, TikTok is not going to be banned, in Montana, or anywhere else in the U.S. But that could still change, very quickly.
SOCIAL
EU wants to know how Meta tackles child sex abuse

The investigation is the first step in procedures launched under the EU’s new online content law known as the Digital Services Act – Copyright AFP Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV
The EU on Friday demanded Instagram-owner Meta provide more information about measures taken by the company to address child sexual abuse online.
The request for information focuses on Meta’s risk assessment and mitigation measures “linked to the protection of minors, including regarding the circulation of self-generated child sexual abuse material (SG-CSAM) on Instagram”, the European Commission said.
Meta must also give information about “Instagram’s recommender system and amplification of potentially harmful content”, it added.
The investigation is the first step in procedures launched under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), but does not itself constitute an indication of legal violations or a move towards punishment.
Meta must respond by December 22.
A report by Stanford University and the Wall Street Journal in June this year said Instagram is the main platform used by paedophile networks to promote and sell content showing child sexual abuse.
Meta at the time said it worked “aggressively” to fight child exploitation.
The commission has already started a series of investigations against large digital platforms seeking information about how they are complying with the DSA.
It has sought more information from Meta in October about the spread of disinformation as well as a request for information last month about how the company protects children online.
The DSA is part of the European Union’s powerful regulatory armoury to bring big tech to heel, and requires digital giants take more aggressive action to counter the spread of illegal and harmful content as well as disinformation.
Platforms face fines that can go up to six percent of global turnover for violations.
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