With 2017 graduation season coming to a close, Staples isn’t wasting time as it tries to grab a share of budgets for the 2017-18 school year. Cheap laptops are some of the notable deals Staples is hawking at Black Friday-like prices in its back-to-school campaign that launched Monday. Standouts include an Acer 11-inch Chromebook at $179, Dell Inspiron 11-inch convertible PC ($199), HP 15-inch notebook with an Intel Pentium processor ($249), Lenovo 15-inch laptop with Pentium processor ($259) and HP 15-inch laptop with an Intel Core i3 processor ($299).

Verizon should modify or end some claims it makes in advertising the Google Pixel smartphone, including the "exclusively at Verizon" claim, the National Advertising Division said Monday. T-Mobile challenged the ad claims, and NAD said Verizon indicated it modified or discontinued some claims before then. NAD said Verizon also said it disagreed with NAD findings, but it would comply with its recommendations in future ads and not appeal. The carrier didn't comment.

Influencers and marketers aren't heeding FTC warnings about disclosing their relationships to brands when promoting products on Instagram, said Public Citizen and other organizations in a Monday news release, prompting the groups to again complain to the agency. More than two months ago, the FTC sent out more than 90 letters to influencers and marketers as reminders they should reveal material connections between themselves and advertisers unless it's already clear from the context of the communication (see 1704190031). Public Citizen said that from May 1 to June 12 it tracked 46 Instagram influencers who received the FTC letter and found that "only one fully and consistently complied" with agency policy. "In total, 327 (79 percent) of the 412 advertisements posted by the 46 influencers did not comply with FTC standards," said Public Citizen. The group, along with Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and the Center for Digital Democracy, sent a letter to the FTC asking it to enforce the guidelines and seek penalties. "The FTC must demonstrate that there will be consequences for failure to follow the FTC’s guidelines," said the letter. It said the commission should work with Instagram to create a system "to denote paid posts consistent with" those guidelines. An FTC spokesman emailed that the agency is reviewing the groups' letter.

Google later this year will stop scanning contents of users Gmail content to deliver targeted ads, blogged Diane Greene, senior vice president-Google Cloud, Friday. She wrote G Suite's Gmail isn't used for ad personalization and the company will follow suit with the free consumer Gmail service. "Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization," she wrote. "This decision brings Gmail ads in line with how we personalize ads for other Google products." She said ads are shown based on user settings and users can disable ad customization. She said there are more than 1.2 billion Gmail users.

Verizon, accused by the National Advertising Division of not responding to a Comcast complaint about Fios advertising (see 1706210065), said it will "happily demonstrate [its] performance superiority in a neutral and proper forum." It said it "offered to respond to Comcast's frivolous complaint in the NAD process," but NAD "refused to resolve a conflict of interest" resulting from a former NAD official who had participated in previous Verizon cases and is now representing Comcast "on substantially similar matters." Former Deputy Director David Mallen is now an advertising disputes lawyer at Loeb & Loeb. Mallen didn't comment Thursday. Verizon said it "regrets that NAD was unwilling to address this fundamental unfairness." NAD didn't comment.

The National Advertising Division is referring Verizon Fios ads to the FCC and FTC after it said Verizon didn't respond to a Comcast complaint. In a news release Tuesday, the investigative unit of the ad industry’s self-regulation system said Comcast challenged a variety of Internet speed claims in the Fios ads. Verizon didn't comment Wednesday.

IHeartMedia and Fox Networks Group will jointly offer digital advertising products for audio and video, the companies said in a news release Monday. Smart A/V Audiences will use FNG and iHeartMedia data sets to bring the features of digital ads to broadcast radio and TV, the release said. “Brands will be able to deliver more compelling creative across platforms by tapping into local data and dynamic creative capabilities based on triggers like weather, sports scores, stock market performance.” By combining technology developed by iHeart with the “data and video assets of Fox,” advertisers will be able to “leverage audio and visual as one integrated platform,” said iHeart CEO Bob Pittman. Smart A/V Audiences will launch “in beta” this fall, the release said.

U.S. digital advertising for Q1 reached a record $19.6 billion, said the Interactive Advertising Bureau in a Wednesday news release on a report prepared by PwC. The 23 percent increase from the year-ago period was the second-highest quarter, following Q4's $21.6 billion, said IAB. Chris Kuist, senior vice president-research and impact, said that “this steady growth is a direct result of interactive advertising’s power to reach consumers where they are spending more and more of their time -- on connected screens.”

Google is introducing technology that quickly removes certain ads that violate policies, wrote Scott Spencer, director-sustainable ads, in a Monday blog post. In the past, the company typically removed all advertisements from a publisher's site for policy violations but the new technology will allow Google to remove ads on select pages while keeping ads on the rest of the site, he wrote. "We’ll still use site-level actions but only as needed. And when it's necessary, such as in the case of egregious or persistent violations, we'll still terminate publishers. Altogether, this means fewer disruptions for publishers." Spencer also announced a new one-stop shop -- piloted with thousands of AdSense customers -- where publishers can learn about policy actions that affect their sites and pages. In another blog post, Senior Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer wrote two issues will be considered in the coming months involving EU citizens' right to be forgotten. The European Court of Justice will consider "whether people have an absolute right to request removal of lawfully published, but sensitive, personal data from search results. Or whether, as is the case now, search engines should continue to balance the public interest in access to information with the individual’s right to privacy." Fleischer said automatic delisting from search engines creates a "dangerous loophole." The other issue -- being considered by the French Conseil d'Etat (Council of State) -- deals with whether the right to be forgotten should extend beyond Europe, which Fleischer said would "set a grave precedent." Less open and democratic countries could order "Google to remove search links for every citizen in every other country of the world," he said. Since EU citizens gained their right to be forgotten three years ago, Fleischer said the company has assessed 720,000 requests and removed about 43 percent of 2 million links submitted.

Nielsen will measure Twitter mobile campaigns of 23 new global markets beyond the U.S., providing independent assessment of advertising performance, Nielsen said in a Monday news release. "Using metrics that are comparable to those used for TV, Digital Ad Ratings equips advertisers, media agencies and publishers with trusted audience verification, allowing a clearer view into age and gender demographics, unique audience, reach, frequency and gross rating points ... for campaigns that run in Twitter's mobile app." New markets include Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Turkey and the UK. Nielsen has been measuring Twitter campaigns in the U.S. with the tool for about a year.