Welcome to Ad Age Datacenter Weekly, our data-obsessed newsletter for marketing and media professionals.

Paramount and Omnicom team up to test Nielsen measurement alternatives in buy-side platforms

“Paramount and Omnicom Media Group are partnering to test buy-side systems’ ability to implement Nielsen alternative currencies into legacy workflows,” Ad Age’s Parker Herren reports.

The details: “Paramount and OMG are testing a campaign guaranteed solely on VideoAmp data in Mediaocean. .... The campaign will run through this quarter and is guaranteed on advanced audiences.”

Essential context: “While advertisers have previously been able to strike deals for ad inventory on non-Nielsen currencies, agencies’ ability to integrate the likes of VideoAmp, iSpot.tv and Comscore into software such as Mediaocean, where agencies bill and report results to marketers, has been limited. As more systems are vetted for handling multiple currencies, advertisers will have an easier time using these new entrants as currency alongside Nielsen and at the same scale.”

Keep reading here.

Macroeconomic news and data in a nutshell

• “U.S. jobless claims applications fall as labor market continues to show resiliency,” per the Associated Press

• “What the Inflation Reduction Act has achieved in its first year,” from The Economist

“Majority of Americans say the economy's bad, but their own finances are good—poll,” per Axios, summing up a new Quinnipiac University survey

• ”Why Child-Care Prices Are Rising at Nearly Twice the Overall Inflation Rate,” from The Wall Street Journal

Don’t miss: Layoffs and budget cuts—tracking economic moves and news

Also see: US ad employment gained 1,000 jobs in July, but pace of growth slowed

How Trump’s continuing legal problems are affecting cable news viewership

In a post titled “4 Months. 4 Indictments. How Much Do Cable News Viewers Still Care?,” TVRev’s Eleanor Semeraro parses the viewership data, via Inscape, from the three major cable news networks surrounding Donald Trump’s steady stream of indictments and arraignments, beginning in late March.

Spoiler: To answer the question (“How Much Do Cable News Viewers Still Care?”) ... uh, not too terribly much (although Fox News viewers seem to care the most). In terms of viewership gains related to Trump’s legal troubles, the networks have generally been seeing diminishing returns compared to the earliest indictment/arraignment. “The biggest [audience] bump occurred on the day of Trump’s first arraignment, April 4, 2023, which was related to the Stormy Daniels hush money scandal,” Semeraro reports. “Fox News led by a wide margin, capturing a 9.25% viewership share across all linear TV networks that day, followed by MSNBC (3.84%) and CNN (3.80%).”

A caveat, from Semeraro: “It’ll be interesting to see if Trump’s fourth arraignment, which is supposed to happen by early September and could include cameras in the actual courtroom, sparks renewed interest.” (The fourth case is a 41-count indictment brought against the former president and his allies by the Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney.) Stay tuned (or don’t).

Keep reading here.

More news: See Fox News’ new election-themed ads

Dallas agency Lerma/ combats AI’s DEI bias

“More than 20 employees at Lerma/, the Dallas-based ad agency, recently offered their likenesses to train a generative AI model to create more diverse outputs,” Ad Age’s Asa Hiken reports.

The details: “Lerma/ trained generative AI platform Stable Diffusion with a symphony of different faces and bodies that represent its multicultural staff. The agency snapped some 180 photographs of these 22 individuals over the course of nine hours—portrait, profile, full-body—which were then fed into DreamBooth, a software used to fine-tune AI models.”

Essential context: “For all its impressiveness, generative AI is particularly bad at reflecting diversity,” Hiken notes. “These models, of course, are trained on biased resources—books, articles and websites that often cater to the experiences of majority populations. The result is an omission of minority and marginalized communities from AI-generated content.”

Keep reading here.

Just briefly

• “Fortune cookie ads are an ad tech firm’s answer to digital privacy concerns,” from Crain’s New York Business (via Ad Age)

• “Terms-of-service land grab: Tech firms seek private data to train AI,” from Axios

• “Amazon relies on ‘serendipity’ for office return; employees want data,” The Seattle Times reports

• “US watchdog teases crackdown on data brokers that sell Americans’ personal information,” per CNN

• “A hack at Equifax exposed the data of 147 million people. Here’s what businesses can learn from the company’s response,” from Fortune

The newsletter is brought to you by Ad Age Datacenter, the industry’s most authoritative source of competitive intel and home to the Ad Age Leading National Advertisers, the Ad Age Agency Report: World’s Biggest Agency Companies and other exclusive data-driven reports. Access or subscribe to Ad Age Datacenter at AdAge.com/Datacenter.

Ad Age Datacenter is Kevin Brown, Bradley Johnson and Joy R. Lee.