Tim Cook is Meta's Villain, JP Morgan Latest, Digital Advertiser Survey

Ahoy Metamates! 🚢 🏴‍☠️

🆕 The TLDR This Week

• Trump requests meeting with Meta to discuss 'prompt reinstatement' to Facebook

• Bank of America upgrades META to $150 from $136

• Chris Cox allegedly pissing off VPs with suddenly wanting to copy Twitter features

• Meta buys another optics startup, Gary Sharp Innovations

• Eduardo Indacochea joins as VP, Ads ( Prev led Google Ads 360)

• Seattle folks may become mostly remote as 8th Street and a few other offices close.

Meta vs S&P 500 - 🎢

Digital Advertisers LOVE Google Above ALL

Cowen and Company does one of the largest marketing surveys in the industry. Some of the results from the most recent one might surprise you:

I was also surprised to see that despite most respondents saying their largest clients prefer to advertise on TikTok, it's still perceived as a very low ROI platform.

JP Morgan Likes Meta Now

... and it's all thanks to Elon Musk? In its latest report, JPMC called Twitter's loss in advertiser trust a "potential gain for Meta". Here are some of the other interesting bits:

JP Morgan upgraded META to Overweight

This can indicate an expectation that the stock will either increase in value or simply not lose as much value as its market or benchmark. Time will tell, but this is promising.

They see the layoff as a big positive for the stock price

They think Meta will have an easier time this year due to less competition

TLDR: Meta's efforts to lobby against TikTok may be paying off in a major way this year.

Here Comes Tim Cook

Apple just announced it will unveil a VR/ mixed reality headset in Spring. Make no mistake - this is a fight to the death. If Apple wins over early consumers, financial analysts will decimate Meta's stock. 

Same end goal, two super different strategies:

Meta - cost $1500 ( sold 15M units so far)

• Focus is on reducing cost of headset to make it broadly accessible.

• Secondary focus on fully immersive experiences, like virtual worlds

• New VP in Horizon will be an internal move from the gaming group

Apple - cost $3000

• Focus is on mixed reality uses cases, like maps. 

• Eng from Iwork group is now on headset, led by Yaniv Gur

• Hardware optimization is around reducing weight so it can be worn all day.

• Investing a lot of effort into novelty features to go viral at launch - like visualizing sound waves, X-Ray vision type tech to see inside cupboards, ability to see heat maps, etc.

TLDR: Apple could kill Meta's stock in one swift blow if consumer demand for its new headset surges. 

PS: If you missed my overview on this space from last week, read here.

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