This month we’re wrapping up the holiday celebrations, and getting ready to ring in the New Year. With friends, family, parties, and resolutions taking up our attention, it’s easy to forget that the advertising industry is still making headlines. As we bid farewell to 2018, we’ve got a podcast full of the final Game Changers of the year. This month we’re talking about Nexstar’s potential acquisition of Tribune Media, Facebook’s new data patent, a new challenger for ‘the world’s largest advertiser’, kid influencers, and Burger King’s epic troll campaign against its biggest competitor.

• Tribune Looks to a Shining Nexstar

• Facebook (Almost) Knows Who You Live With

• Samsung Takes the Top Spot

• How Kids Make Millions Nowadays

• A Whopper of a Detour

After the Sinclair/Tribune Media deal fell through over the summer, companies wasted no time trying to win Tribune and its media assets. Next in the line of suitors is Nexstar Media Group, which outbid Apollo Global Management, with a $4.1 billion deal that would give them the title of the country’s largest regional TV station owner.  Nexstar already owns 170 stations, and due to FCC restrictions on the number of stations a company can own (a part of the reason why the Sinclair acquisition was not approved), they will likely have to sell off some of its existing media holdings if they hope to see the deal approved. As it stands now, the law limits a media company to no more than 39% of households. However, unlike Sinclair, Nexstar keeps a relatively lower profile and the acquisition is not seen as politically charged. Nonetheless, the Nexstar/Tribune merger would be game-changing, creating a mega-conglomerate of stations that would effectively control a massive network of content distribution.

• Tom McKay at Gizmodo has more information about the potential acquisition.

As if Facebook didn’t already have an uncomfortable amount of personal information about you, its new patent is taking things to a new level. In a patent, filed last year but recently made public, Facebook is looking to utilize data scraped from their platforms to match people who live under the same roof in hopes of feeding you smarter and more targeted advertisements. Using photos you post (or are tagged in), comments, captions, messaging history, and the countless other data points it has from Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp they hope to synergize ads and leverage family connections to maximize the impact of advertisements within the home. Imagine ads for products that one household member may be interested in, could be targeted at the other people in the house as gift suggestions. If successful, Facebook will grab one more inch into controlling every part of our lives – our every move and relationship will soon be used to feed us more and more ads.

• Get the details about Facebook’s patent from Nicole Nguyen at BuzzFeed News.

P&G has long held the title of the world’s largest advertiser but it has now been surpassed by Samsung. Last year, the South Korean electronics giant spent $11.2 billion on marketing campaigns, compared to P&G’s $10.5 billion. Other Asian companies are also ramping up their marketing efforts, like China’s Alibaba and Tencent who are quickly moving into leading positions in the advertising space. Last year, Alibaba more than doubled their marketing spend. Check out the other companies that are changing the game in the AdAge World’s Largest Advertiser ranking.

• Bradley Johnson at Adage has the details.

You’ve somehow stumbled upon a YouTube video of a young boy unboxing new toys and playing with them in his home. At first glance, he seems like a regular kid doing regular kid things. But little did you know that this kid, Ryan, made $21 million from pre-roll ads and another $1 million from sponsored content on his YouTube channel, with close to 17.5 million subscribers. And, he’s only seven years old. Welcome to the world of influencer marketing, where children as young as Ryan are being paid big bucks to do everyday things (like unboxing new toys and squealing with delight), and other kids are tuning in to his videos to live vicariously through him. And it’s not just the videos that are bringing in the money. Expanding from YouTube, Ryan struck a deal with Pocket.watch last year that takes content from his channel to repackage and distribute on Amazon and Hulu. He even launched his own toy and apparel collection that is sold exclusively at Walmart. This is what the next generation of influencer marketing looks like and it is both impressive and insane.

• Learn more about self-made millionaire kids from Madeline Berg at Forbes.

Burger King just executed an epic troll on McDonald’s via their mobile app. Thanks to a clever geo-tracking campaign, the fast food chain located app users approaching a McDonald’s and offered them a 1 cent Whopper, incentivizing them to leave the golden arches and return to the King. This clever and quirky diversion tactic, appropriately named the “Whopper Detour,” has resulted in some serious ad conversions. After 36 hours of the campaign launch, the Burger King app was downloaded over 1 million times and was trending No. 1 in the Apple App Store. To pull off this marketing stunt, Burger King had to geo-fence nearly every single one of the 14,000 McDonald’s restaurants in the U.S. so it can track the location of people in their vicinity and then offer them the Whopper deal. This massive undertaking paid off for Burger King, which has been trying to promote its app since they began offering mobile ordering and payment last summer. Using technology to drive downloads, app engagement, and sales is the advertising trifecta. Let’s see who will step up to try and dethrone the King.

• Get the scoop on Burger King’s campaign from David Griner at Adweek.