The Wall Street Journal - USA (2020-12-02)

B2| Wednesday, December 2, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

INDEX TO BUSINESSES

These indexes cite notable references to most parent companies and businesspeople
in today’s edition. Articles on regional page inserts aren’t cited in these indexes.

A
Airbnb..........................B3
Akris............................B6
Alexandria Real Estate
Equities.....................B5
Alphabet......................B2
Amazon.com..........B2,B4
AXA.............................A8
B
Bed Bath & Beyond....B6
Bestow........................B1
BlackRock..................A10
Bloomin' Brands.......B12
Boston Properties......A1
Brinker InternationalB12
BTA Bank..................B10
Burger King Worldwide
...................................B10
C
Cargill..........................A2
Cheesecake Factory..B12
Church & Dwight........B5
CIC Services................A2
Credit Suisse.............B10
Cushman & WakefieldA4
D-E
Darden Restaurants.B12
Dayforward.................B1
EFG International.....B10
Evenflow Macro........A10
F
Facebook................B1,B2

G Gazit Horizons............B6 General Atlantic..........B6 Goldman Sachs.........A10 H Haier............................B5 HCA Healthcare..........B1 Home Depot................B6 HP Enterprise.............B1 J-K J.C. Penney..................B3 Kohl's...........................B3 L Lloyds Banking Group ...................................B10 LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton............B3 M Microsoft....................A1 N Nestlé..........................A2 O OhmniLabs..................A4 P Pacific Investment Management.............B5 Peak Credit..................B6 R Reddit..........................B2 Renaissance Learning A3 Ritz-Carlton...............B10

S Safavieh......................B6 Salesforce...................A1 Slack Technologies.....A1 SoLa Impact................B6 Star Sports Bet..........A5 T Target...............A2,B2,B3 Tenet Healthcare........B1 Tesla..........................B11 Town Sports International.............B6 Transocean..................B5 Twitter........................B2 U UBS............................B10 Ulta Beauty.................B3 UniCredit...................B12 UnitedHealth...............B5 Universal Health Services.....................B1 V Verny Capital............B10 W Walmart......................B2 Whitebox Advisors.....B5 WPP.......................B1,B2 Z Zoom Video Communications ............................. A1,B11

INDEX TO PEOPLE

BUSINESS & FINANCE

hosted unwelcome content posted by some of its users. “Would I necessarily ad- vise clients to lean right away into their top-10 fast- est-growing categories?” Ms. Schiekofer said. “It’s a simi- lar story to other platforms—their tried-and-true communities are generally safer than something that’s up-and-coming that we have not vetted yet. With these platforms, if you want to look for something that’s brand-unsafe, you can find it.” Ms. Wong said Reddit has

nated by three competitors—
FacebookInc.,Amazon.com
Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s
Google—which together ac-
count for nearly two-thirds of
ad dollars spent on U.S. digital
advertising this year, accord-
ing to research company
eMarketer.
Those three companies
“have done a good job of
showing ad performance—and
when they show performance
marketers shift dollars,” said
Christian Juhl, GroupM’s
global chief executive, said in
an interview.
Small-to-midsize businesses
in particular have flocked to
digital advertising during the
pandemic, according to a re-

cent report from media ana-
lyst Michael Nathanson. “Due
to the favorable combination
of granular targeting and low
creative marketing costs,
small businesses have gravi-
tated to digital marketing in
force,” the report said.
The growth of digital ad
spending comes despite head-
winds faced by some tech gi-
ants this year. Facebook was
thetargetofanadboycottin
August that was called for by
civil-rights groups demanding
the social-media company do
more to rein in hate speech on
its website. Despite that, Face-
book said its ad revenue
jumped 22% from a year ear-
lier in the third quarter.

Continued from page B1

B
Benioff, Marc..............A1
Blecharczyk, Nathan...B1
Butterfield, Stewart...A6
C
Chesky, Brian..............B1
Cook, Melanie.............B5
Crist, Peter.................A2
F-G
Finkelsztain, Gilson..B11
Gass, Michelle.............B3
Gebbia, Joe.................B1
H
Halvorson, Jonathan..B2
Hewson, Michael......B11
Hill, Lauren...............B11
Horta-Osório, António
...................................B10

Hsieh, Tony.................A2 J Jassy, Andy.................B4 Juhl, Christian.............B2 K-L Khouw, Michael........B11 King, Charles...............B2 Kraus, Drew................B4 Linde, Douglas............A1 M Mayo, Whit...............B11 McDonald, Mike..........A4 McLaughlin, Paul........A4 Morgan, Frank...........B11 Muoto, Martin............B6 N Nathanson, Michael....B2 Neri, Antonio..............B2

Nigro, Thiago............B11 O O'Banion, Melbourne..B1 R Rice, A.J......................B1 Rougeot, Jean-André..B3 S Savage, Elliott..........B11 Schiekofer, Susan.......B2 Schuster, Ariel............B6 Shapiro, Aaron............B4 Smith, Margaret.........B6 V Vu, Thuc......................A4 W-Y Wieser, Brian..............B1 Wong, Jen...................B2 Yaraghi, Arash............B6

Digital ad revenue for Google rose nearly 10% to $37.1 billion in the most recent quarter, while Amazon’s ad business grew sharply, with sales up 51% to $5.4 billion in the quarter. Consumer-goods giant Mondelez International Inc., the maker of Oreo cookies and Ritz crackers, said last month that it would spend more on digital advertising than on television commercials for the first time this year. Jonathan Halvorson, Mon- delez’s vice president of consumer experience, said con- sumers typically bought snacks in stores, but the pandemic has led to more snack- buying online as shoppers try out grocery-delivery and other online services. The company started shift- ing ad spending toward digital ads, which “allow a faster link to the actual sale,” he said in an interview. Chicago-based Mondelez expects to continue to spend more on digital ads than on TV ads next year, according to Mr. Halvorson. WalmartInc. andTarget Corp. are using consumer data they have amassed to ramp up their online ad offerings. As they compete with digital rivals, TV networks have been beefing up their ability to offer brands targeted ads. National TV advertising is forecast to drop 7.9% to $39.5 billion this year, GroupM said, but the company expects a bounceback in 2021, with a 6.6% increase to $42.1 billion. TV ad spending in 2021 is still expected to remain below 2019’s $42.9 billion as the industry faces structural chal- lenges, including consumer de- cisions to cancel traditional pay-TV service in favor of internet-based alternatives—a move known as cord-cutting. GroupM expects the pandemic to accelerate the down- ward trends for print. It pre- dicts that next year ad spending in newspapers and magazines will decline 12% and 8%, respectively.

Digital Ads

Become the

Majority

Small-to-midsize

businesses have

flocked to digital

ads in the pandemic.

The growth of spending on digital advertising comes despite
headwinds faced by some tech giants this year.

MIKE SEGAR/REUTERS

formation-technology consult- ing firm. “It’s a sad day for Sil- icon Valley and hopefully a bright day for HPE and its shareholders.” HPE stock was trading at about $11.04 in after-hours market trading Tuesday, down 1.4% from the market close and about 30% from the share price a year ago. Tech companies were among the earliest to send employees home at the start of the pandemic, and several prominent players in the industry have since announced that many or all of their employees will be allowed to work remotely on a permanent basis. That has prompted many Silicon Valley employees to relocate to other parts of the country, in part looking for cheaper living areas. It has also pushed some ex- ecutives to reconsider where their companies are based. Pal- antir Technologies Inc., founded in the Bay Area in 2003, also moved its headquar- ters to Denver this year, dis- tancing itself geographically— and culturally—from an area that has been historically seen as an engine of innovation. HPE’s move won’t result in any layoffs, company officials said, adding that it expects several hundred nontechnical jobs could relocate to the cam- pus under construction in Spring, Texas, just outside of

Continued from page B1

“Like with everybody in the ads business, it’s been a volatile year,” she said, adding that while Reddit isn’t profitable it is making sig- nificant investments. Reddit is in the experi- mental bucket of budgets for advertising by companies in such categories as gaming, technology, entertainment, finance and beauty, said Su- san Schiekofer, chief digital investment officer for ad- buying giant GroupM, which is owned by ad-holding company WPP PLC. “If we are comparing them to the big ones—Snap, Twitter, Facebook, Insta- gram—they are not any- where near that scale,” she said. “But the upside for them is really big.” GroupM has more than 10 clients advertising on Red- dit, and that number contin- ues to grow, Ms. Schiekofer said. Reddit’s big challenge will be in bringing more advertisers across categories to come on board and feel com- fortable advertising on its platform, she added. Like Twitter and Face- book—which recently faced a boycott from some advertisers over its policies for han- dling hate speech and misin- formation—Reddit has

taken efforts to ensure ads don’t appear next to content or conversations that advertising clients may deem ob- jectionable, including by hand-selecting which communities serve ads. Reddit also offers three tiersofadinventory—expanded, standard and limited—that advertisers can choose from to suit their comfort level, and offers clients the option to disable comments on their ads and to keep the ads away from certain keywords and communities. “More advertisers want the expanded and standard inventory than the limited inventory, despite how im- portant brand safety is,” Ms. Wong said. Ms. Wong said Reddit’s future revenue growth will come partly by expanding the company’s ad business to new international markets. Reddit announced an op- erations team in London in September and will seek to open offices in three to five countries every year, initially targeting countries in Eu- rope, the Middle East and Africa, she added. The company also aims for its sales force to employ around 300 people worldwide by the end of 2020, with plans to increase head count by 75% over the next year, Ms. Wong said. “For building this business, it’s trying to explain what Reddit is about, which is a big mission around community and belonging, and explaining Reddit’s role in the future of the internet, which I think is really big, but it’s not always as top of mind with people as if you had a big, shiny new thing,” she said.

RedditInc. said it averaged 52 million daily active users in October, up 44% from the same month a year earlier, disclosing for the first time a metric used by other social-media companies to define the size of their audiences. Reddit hosts message boards for users on seem- ingly countless subjects. The company, which was founded in 2005 and is based in San Francisco, is also known for its “ask me anything” digital town halls with celebrities and politi- cians. It described its daily user count amid a continuing ef- fort to attract more advertisers to its platform, which most marketers consider ex- perimental. “We’re sharing [daily active users] for the first time as a more accurate reflection of our user growth and to be more in-line with industry reporting,” said Jen Wong, chief operating officer of Reddit. “We’re focused on daily usership and increasing this number as we continue to grow our community and scale our advertising business.” Reddit’s number pales compared with that of Face- book Inc., which said it averaged 1.82 billion daily active users on its namesake social network in September, and is less than a third that of Twitter Inc., which said it averaged 187 million mone- tizable daily users in the third quarter. But Reddit said growth in the ranks of its users has co- incided with growth in its advertising business. The company’s ad revenue totaled more than $100 million in 2019 and is on track to rise by more than 70% this year, according to Ms. Wong. A throttling of ad spending caused by the coronavi- rus pandemic hurt Reddit’s business in the second quarter—when year-over-year direct-ad revenue growth fell to 27% from 40% in the first quarter. But it has since re- bounded, growing by 83% year over year in the third quarter, Ms. Wong said. Direct ad revenue is based on deals conducted by Red- dit’s sales team and don’t in- clude revenue from advertising bought and sold through outside automated platforms.

BYSAHILPATEL

Reddit Says Daily Active Users

Increased by 44% Last Month

Ad revenue is on track to rise over 70% this year

NICK ANSELL/PA WIRE/ZUMA PRESS

Houston. The move, expected to happen by 2022, would be voluntary, company officials said. Chief Executive Antonio Neri said the move was part of a reassessment of where and how HPE works, in part tied to the pandemic. “We’ve listened to our team members, who have told us they want...to spend less time at a physical worksite,” he said. “And in response to this new future of work, we have re-evaluated our real estate site strategy.” The Bay Area would remain a strategic hub, and several sites in the area would be con- solidated to its San Jose cam- pus. “Houston is also an attrac- tive market for us to recruit and retain talent and a great place to do business,” Mr. Neri said, adding that as one of the largest and most diverse cities in the country, “Houston pro- vides the opportunity over time to draw more diverse talent into our ranks.” HPE, which focuses on sell- ing computer servers, data- storage gear and other IT services for businesses, was formed in 2015 when the 76- year-old Hewlett-Packard Co. split into two parts. The re- structuring aimed at reversing declining sales and improving long-term fortunes in a chang- ing tech industry. HPE was widely seen as the company with more promising growth prospects. HP Inc., the other successor company that sells computers and printers, is still based in Palo Alto. It has enjoyed brisk business from the pandemic as people have rushed out to buy laptops and printers to support remote working and learning.

HPE

Moving

To Te xa s

Notice to Security Holders of

NUVEENMUNICIPALCREDIT OPPORTUNITIESFUND(NMCO)

Date:1December2020

ThefollowingFundismakinggenerallyavailabletoitssecurityholders anearningsstatementforthetwelve-monthperiodendedOctober31, 2020,inconnectionwithaRegistrationStatementoftheFund:

NuveenMunicipalCreditOpportunitiesFund:No.333-231036,with respectto47,000,000CommonShares,$.01parvalue,oftheFund, whichwasfiledwiththeSecuritiesandExchangeCommissionunder theSecuritiesActof1933,asamended,andwhichbecameeffective onSeptember16,2019.

Copiesofeachsuchearningsstatementwillbefurnisheduponwritten requestdirectedto: MarkL.Winget,Secretary,(Attn:FundName),333 WestWackerDrive,Chicago,IL 60606.

The Wall Street Journal - USA (2020-12-02)

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