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The Briefing: Tech’s Super Bowl Ads

The Briefing
After the crush of tech news last week, including a big AI-fueled stock sell-off, things might calm down a bit in the next few days. ͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­͏ ‌     ­
Feb 8, 2026

The Briefing

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After the crush of tech news last week, including a big AI-fueled stock sell-off, things might calm down a bit in the next few days. With any luck, we'll have time to debate which of the tech companies' Super Bowl ads running Sunday night were the best and which were the worst. My vote for best is the Amazon Alexa spot, by the way, although the Anthropic ones were also great. Google's Gemini spot was arguably the worst: Maybe Google should have asked Gemini for help making the commercial!

Meanwhile, earnings season continues this week, with a focus on midsize companies, including several of the gig economy generation. Among the companies reporting are Spotify, Lyft, Shopify, Coinbase, Pinterest, Instacart and Airbnb. Each of these will have something worth checking out. Spotify, for instance, struggled with declining ad revenue in the second and third quarter of last year, which dragged down its overall top-line growth. That was embarrassing, given that Spotify management had said in April that 2025 would be a year where they could build on a years-long effort to accelerate the ad unit's growth! Halfway through the year, Spotify's ad chief exited as senior executives said things needed to move faster. And by early November, reporting the third quarter results, executives were saying changes they'd made to the ads unit would "yield significant results in the years ahead." Oops.

Analysts expect Spotify to report marginally slower fourth quarter revenue growth, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, which suggests another possible dip in ad revenue. Still, Spotify last month said it was raising prices in the U.S. and some other countries, ensuring it will see a revenue bump of some kind this year. For more on Spotify's ad challenges, see here.

Lyft will also be in the spotlight. The No. 2 ride-hailing firm saw a rare stock rally last year—rising 50% through 2025 compared to Uber's 35% gain—as investors applauded CEO David Risher's success in turning Lyft into a solidly profitable company, even if its growth still trails that of Uber. But the stock has sunk 15% so far this year, nearly twice as much as Uber's stock. Both stocks are shadowed by questions about the impact of robotaxis on their businesses, although Uber executives in particular make a strong case that self-driving cars offer more benefit than downside. (Uber's new Chief Financial Officer Balaji Krishnamurthy talked about the subject on The Information's TITV last week.) Analysts expect Lyft to report 13% top-line growth for the fourth quarter, well below Uber's 20% growth for the same period, but within the range Lyft has reported for the past year.

Another one to watch is Pinterest, which through last year reported 16% to 17% growth, well above that of Snap, its closest peer in the social media sector by size. While Snap has stalled at around 10% growth, Pinterest is doing better. CEO Bill Ready has revived the company's ad growth, capitalizing on its position as a natural place for shoppers to research stuff they want to buy. That makes it a natural forum for many advertisers, although some on Wall Street have lately fretted about the competition from AI chatbots. (For more on that, see here.) Given how strong the ad business proved in the fourth quarter for digital ad giants Meta Platforms and Google, we'll be watching Pinterest's numbers to see how it fared.

Here's what analysts are projecting companies will report for the December quarter, courtesy of S&P Global Market Intelligence:

Spotify (Tuesday)

Revenue: 4.522 billion euros +6.6%

Earnings per share: 2.77 euros +57%

Lyft (Tuesday)

Revenue: $1.754 billion +13%

EPS: 12 cents a share –25%

Instacart (Thursday)

Revenue: $969.95 million +9.7%

EPS: 51 cents –3.7%

Airbnb (Thursday)

Revenue: $2.71 billion +9.3%

EPS: 66 cents –9.6%

Pinterest (Thursday)

Revenue: $1.33 billion +15%

EPS: 43 cents -84%

Check out our latest episode of TITV in which Akash speaks with a top researcher at Harvey about OpenAI and Anthropic's dueling coding products.

• The European Commission said on Friday that it had preliminarily found TikTok to be in breach of the Digital Markets Act for its "addictive design," including features like infinite scroll, autoplay and push notifications.

• Alibaba Group, the Chinese e-commerce giant, is offering hundreds of millions of dollars in shopping vouchers and other promotions to users of its Qwen AI chatbot app during the Lunar New Year holiday.

• The Trump administration has granted full approval to a bank charter application for Erebor Bank, a startup-focused lender founded last year by Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale.

• Bithumb, the second largest crypto exchange in South Korea, said it mistakenly gave away 620,000 bitcoin, worth about $44 billion, to users, and has recovered 99.7% of the money.

• The Washington Post CEO Will Lewis left abruptly, succeeded on an interim basis by CFO Jeff D'Onofrio, who joined last June from Raptive. Lewis' departure came a few days after the newspaper laid off a third of its newsroom.

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