Hold on tight. The rollercoaster that was 2024 is finally coming to an end. Marketers may find themselves dizzy from the many ups and downs the industry experienced this year. 2024 saw more ads on streaming platforms, but also an ad price correction that favored ad buyers’ wallets. There was also the generative AI boom (or bauble, depending on who you ask). Of course, there was Google’s long kiss goodnight with third-party cookies, in which the tech giant decided to keep cookies after all but le...
Dec 24, 2024•22 min
Over the last few years, marketers have been trying to flip their position in the cultural zeitgeist – making moments themselves as opposed to retroactively marketing around them. That's why e.l.f. Beauty has built out its own entertainment arm, e.l.f. made, tasked with creating of the moment content around music, movies, gaming and sports. Thanks to the short-form content boom, advertisers like e.I.f Beauty have been working to move at the so-called speed of culture. While key agency partnershi...
Dec 17, 2024•39 min
Programmatic advertising methods like retargeting can be powerful for pushing interested customers over the line into making a purchase. But the approach can lose potency if the proverbial funnel isn’t regularly refilled with new prospective customers. “Over time, in order to compete and continue to grow, you need to expand your funnel. Otherwise you risk to optimize yourself to the ground and run out. If you continue to sharpen a pencil, at some point you run out of pencil,” Tripadvisor’s Matte...
Dec 10, 2024•48 min
Yahoo News, like many news outlets, had expected this year’s U.S. presidential election to drag on a bit longer than it did. “You have people planning to stay in the office for several days after the fact,” said Kat Downs Mulder, gm and svp at Yahoo News, on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast. Fortunately, news outlets are accustomed to adapting. And with Donald Trump set to retake the Oval Office, they are having to understand how they may need to adapt to either a similar Trump Bump to ...
Dec 03, 2024•49 min
In the age of social media, algorithms and viral content, social media users are increasingly looking for ways to stretch the concept of “15 minutes of fame” into full time careers as content creators, influencers and media personalities. Recently, thanks to TikTok, that arc has played out with viral trends like Jools Lebron, the creator behind the “very demure, very mindful” trend, or Haliey Welch’s “Hawk Tuah” viral moment. Both Lebron and Welch join a long list of names who are working to tak...
Nov 26, 2024•1 hr 9 min
Since the U.S. presidential election was called, the advertising industry has been parsing through the tea leaves, trying to understand exactly what a Trump presidency means for business. That picture is starting to come into clearer focus as Trump continues to announce cabinet picks and assemble the incoming administration. For example, last week, Trump picked Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic who has called for pharmaceutical ads to be banned, to potentially be named Secretary of Health...
Nov 19, 2024•56 min
It’s been roughly a week since Donald Trump was voted into his second presidential term and already, his return to the White House is expected to send ripple effects throughout the advertising world. Publishers are considering what a second Trump presidency looks like in regards to traffic spikes and subscription revenue, otherwise known as the Trump Bump. The brand safety playbook regarding where an advertiser shows up in media may soon need to be reconsidered as more brands look to avoid backl...
Nov 12, 2024•38 min
If generative AI is meant to be more tool than threat to media companies, publishers will need to come up with systems governing their use of the technology. For Dow Jones, that responsibility falls to the company’s AI steering committee. “The function of this cross-functional steering committee is really to ensure that whatever we do with gen AI fits with our core principles,” said Ingrid Verschuren, evp of data and AI and gm of Europe, Middle East and Africa at Dow Jones, in a live recording o...
Nov 05, 2024•49 min
The retail media network space is booming to say the least. An there is a seemingly endless supply of retailers making everything an ad network, all competing for the same ad budgets. To sell its retail media network to advertisers, Walmart Connect placed its bet on Rich Lehrfeld, svp and general manager of Walmart Connect. He’s got a background in media buying, switching to selling media after a 25-year-run and giving him experience on both sides of the aisle. Lehrfeld joined Walmart as svp of ...
Oct 29, 2024•43 min
“Community” is one of those words that has been co-opted by businesses and euthanized into a euphemism for “audiences,” “subscribers,” “customers,” etc. But Oprah Daily has created an actual community. Seriously, it’s called The Oprah Insider Community. The platform – which costs $55 a year to access – mixes aspects of YouTube, Facebook, Slack and Reddit. Oprah Daily posts videos of live audience recordings featuring Oprah Winfrey discussing topics like the teen mental health crisis, longevity a...
Oct 22, 2024•1 hr
After a string of somewhat monumental upfront cycles since 2020, this year’s annual haggle between TV and streaming ad buyers and sellers was hard-pressed to prove its significance. And yet it did. “The biggest shift or change this year is it was really a reset year from a digital video standpoint in terms of pricing,” UM Worldwide’s chief investment officer Marcy Greenberger said on the latest Digiday Podcast. Disney and Netflix were among the more notable sellers to drop their streaming ad rat...
Oct 15, 2024•47 min
CMOs are once again grappling with the age old question of their role in the C-suite. The job has gotten more difficult in today’s business landscape as marketers face increasing pressure to tie marketing to business results (all while being asked to do more with less money). In some cases over the last few months, companies like Hyundai and Starbucks, have eliminated the CMO role entirely. The role with all of its changes can be challenging, but Jackie Jantos, CMO of Hinge dating app, says it’s...
Oct 08, 2024•55 min
The Walt Disney Company plans to automate 75% of its advertising business by 2027. And the company took a further step toward that end in this year’s annual TV and streaming advertising upfront market. “Of the streaming dollars that came in, of those billions of dollars, more than half of them are transacted programmatically,” Disney’s svp of addressable sales Jamie Power said on stage during the Digiday Publishing Summit in a session that served as a live recording for the Digiday Podcast. A ca...
Oct 01, 2024•43 min
WNBA's New York Liberty is having a moment. It just finished the regular season last Thursday with the best record in the league, defeating top teams like the Las Vegas Aces and the Connecticut Sun. Meanwhile, the team’s mascot Ellie the Elephant has become a celebrity in her own right, known for her dance moves and fashion. But it hasn’t always been that way. Five years ago, the team was struggling, playing in Westchester County Center, a smaller court far away from home. But then things starte...
Sep 24, 2024•1 hr 4 min
In the age of disrupted digital audiences, media companies are incentivized to constantly be counting clicks, pageviews and engagement — all while optimizing for how those metrics can be best monetized. But Long Lead, a long-form journalism production company, wants to redefine the journalism business model to bring art back into the craft of journalism. Launched in 2020 by founding editor and longtime journalist John Patrick Pullen and hedge fund manager Bill Perkins, Long Lead’s mission is to ...
Sep 17, 2024•1 hr
Marketers’ attention to the industry’s latest shiny object, generative AI, has yet to shift out of focus. Some agencies have moved to ink enterprise-level deals with major AI players, like OpenAI, Runway and soon, Perplexity. As these AI-powered tools continue to flood the marketplace, agencies and brands alike say they’re creating auditing policies to ensure data security, stability and fairness. It’s a similar story at Babylist, a baby registry company, according to Lee Anne Grant, chief growt...
Sep 10, 2024•49 min
The retail media network space is shaping up to be a competitive one. With countless retailers vying for ad dollars, which retailer gets the bulk of said dollars depends on size and scale. With an expansive brick-and-mortar footprint in the U.S., size and scale are what Sam’s Club Member Access Platform (MAP), the company’s retail access and ad platform, is banking on to draw in advertisers. In this episode of the Digiday Podcast, Ryan Burns, head of strategy at Sam's Club Member Access Platform...
Sep 03, 2024•58 min
Even billionaire-backed media companies are not immune to the challenges facing the media and digital advertising industries.Last week, 22 staffers were laid off from Time — which is owned by Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff and his wife and philanthropist Lynne Benioff — as part of a larger reduction of operational costs amid ad revenue declines. Cuts were made to the editorial, sales, marketing, technology and TIME Studios teams, according to a memo from CEO Jessica Sibley sent to Time ...
Aug 27, 2024•59 min
Big changes came for the media industry in 2024. Between generative AI technology companies spending millions of dollars to license their content and Google flip-flopping on third-party cookie deprecation plans, publishers have had a lot to sort through. When asked which has been the bigger concern to him, Future plc’s CEO Jon Steinberg said, “The cookie thing keeps me up at night more than the AI thing. The AI thing used to keep me up more at night, but [now] … I have more optimism … The cookie...
Aug 20, 2024•59 min
With so many changes happening across the digital marketing landscape, sometimes the best strategy is to have no strategy at all — at least when it comes to social media, according Melissa Ben-Ishay, co-founder and CEO of dessert company Baked By Melissa. Instead, Ben-Ishay props her phone up on her kitchen counter at least once a week, where she walks her TikTok followers through everything from how to make crispy rice to gnocchi, and, of course, a catalog of desserts. Ben-Ishay is one of many ...
Aug 13, 2024•48 min
In the midst of a booming creator economy, where U.S. marketers are expected to shell out $7.14 billion on influencer marketing by the end of this year, according to Goldman Sachs Research, livestreaming platform Twitch is making a play for creator and advertiser attention, competing against other big tech platforms. Last year, the company was reported to have lost its way with the streaming community, which could be seen as its most valuable asset. At the same time, culture is changing, becomin...
Aug 06, 2024•1 hr 10 min
Google may have changed course on its approach to third-party cookie deprecation on Chrome, but that doesn’t mean brand marketers should take their foot off the pedal when it comes to testing cookie-less targeting solutions. At least that’s what Rachel Cascisa, vp of platform adoption at Publicis’ marketing tech company, Epsilon, believes. As it is, recent studies from Adobe and Epsilon have found that marketers are “considerably less ready” for third-party cookies to disappear from the advertis...
Jul 30, 2024•47 min
GoDaddy has been known for its irreverent and racy spots with models — perhaps, most notably, its Super Bowl ads featuring former professional race car driver and model, Danica Patrick, back in 2010. It could be fair to say the web hosting and domain registration company knew how to make waves in the sports marketing space. But the company has sat out the Big Game for the last few years. It’s also moved away from its cheeky, sports-related spots to focus on small businesses and entrepreneurs, sa...
Jul 23, 2024•57 min
Tubi is having a good run. As of May, the free, ad-supported streaming service was taking 1.8% of monthly television viewing across streaming platforms, tying with Disney+ and beating Max, Paramount+ and Peacock, according to Nielsen. It could be considered a win in the streaming wars. Tubi, though, doesn’t consider itself to be part of said wars, according to Tubi CMO Nicole Parlapiano. “I feel like we’re watching the war,” she said. “The relationship in entertainment [between streaming platf...
Jul 16, 2024•34 min
It’s been a busy summer for Bon Appétit and Epicurious’ editor-in-chief Jamila Robinson, who stepped into the top editor role last September. Amid changing algorithms and impacts to search traffic, Robinson is prioritizing relationship building between audiences and Condé Nast’s cooking brands by expanding the coverage of food to include categories like sports and relationships, challenging the idea of “traditional” cooking and building new subscriber products. Bon Appétit took a page from its s...
Jul 09, 2024•54 min
As the creator economy grows, the very definition of what makes a creator or influencer changes. It has expanded to be inclusive of everything from college athletes under the name, image and likeness (NIL) policy change in 2021 to the latest crop of virtual influencers, springing up alongside generative AI advancements. For Nicole Dye Anderson, svp, head of media relations and influencer strategy at Wells Fargo, influencers can extend to anything from celebrities to media personalities. “[Tradit...
Jul 02, 2024•46 min
Making the digital advertising ecosystem more sustainable has been a burgeoning topic for the past couple of years, but the biggest excuse that’s been holding back companies from making moves to actually reduce carbon emissions is the lack of standards around measuring emissions in the first place. But the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) and Ad Net Zero aimed to remedy those concerns with its Global Media Sustainability Framework, launched ahead of the Cannes Lions Festival earlier ...
Jun 25, 2024•44 min
Instacart is on a mission to make every surface shoppable, pitching that to advertisers at this year’s Cannes Lions festival. Notably, there’s been an increased presence of retail and commerce media networks on the ground with brands like Chase and United having a presence here at Cannes on the heels of launching their own networks. “This last year has been about moving off-platform. So now, we’re making our data available on an aggregated, anonymized basis to other media platforms,” said Instac...
Jun 21, 2024•29 min
We’ve made it to the halfway point of Cannes Lions, where Lee Brown, global head of ads business and platform at Spotify joins this episode of the Digiday at Cannes Podcast. The audio streaming platform has spread its wings a bit, taking a swing at visual content, like music videos and lyrics to follow along with music content. In expanding its content offerings, it has also expanded its opportunity to take in more ad dollars. Keeping pace with the AI boom, Spotify recently announced the launch ...
Jun 20, 2024•23 min
We’re on day three of Cannes, joined by Megan Ramm, global director and head of CPG partnerships at Uber, for this episode of the Digiday at Cannes podcast. This is Uber Ads second year in business and simultaneously, second year at Cannes. Just a few days ago, the company announced that it was expanding its programmatic ad business to include partnerships with demand-side platforms like The Trade Desk, Yahoo's DSP and Google’s Display & Video 360. As of late, programmatic has had a rough go...
Jun 19, 2024•23 min
