Bell has acquired a minority interest in global esports entertainment company OverActive Media (OAM) and signed on as the organization’s first founding marketing partner. Headquartered in Toronto, OAM owns a total of 15 esports teams in seven countries, including the Toronto Defiant of the Overwatch League – a League of Legends European Championship series franchise, and recently won the rights to a Toronto-based Call of Duty League franchise. It also acquired Rochester, New York’s Splyce Inc., which operates regional teams in other esports, including Rocket League, Smite and Starcraft II. OAM has grown rapidly since last fall, acquiring Toronto-based esports-specific live events company MediaXP, and launching an OAM Live division. It’s also expanding its footprint into Spain and Latin America with the acquisition of Spanish esports organization Mad Lions EC. Grammy Award-winning artist Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye joined the company’s ownership group in April. The multi-year agreement designates Bell as OAM’s exclusive telecommunications partner and includes team sponsorship, content integration, event production, experiential activations and both traditional and online advertising. Read more here.
FRIENDS of Canadian Broadcasting has launched a pre-election “Unfriend Facebook” ad campaign that appeared in the National Post, The Ottawa Citizen, and the Sun papers this week. The ad urges federal party leaders to Unfriend Facebook by closing a tax loophole that the watchdog group says effectively subsidizes the price of ads sold by foreign internet media giants to the tune of $1.6 billion dollars a year. The loophole FRIENDS wants closed allows those advertising to deduct the cost of ads placed on foreign internet media platforms like YouTube and Google.
University of Ottawa student news site The Fulcrum was hacked over the weekend and all of its online content deleted. The hacker labeled the paper an “anti-union rag” in a single post. So far, it appears the site has only recovered archived articles published previous to April of this year.
Twitter has announced that it will tag but not remove tweets from verified accounts of elected officials, governments, or those running for public office that break its rules. In a blog post entitled “Defining public interest on Twitter,” the social media giant says that could include placing a sensitive Tweet behind an interstitial advising viewers to be aware that they will see sensitive media if they click through. When a Tweet has this notice placed on it, it will feature less prominently on Twitter.
TVOkids has introduced a 24/7 livestream. The ad-free stream is available via the TVOkids YouTube channel.
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