Month: April 2024

X, formerly Twitter, is once again telling advertisers it’s serious about brand safety. 

Cue the eye rolls and déjà vu from marketers who’ve been on this merry-go-round since Elon Musk’s reign began in 2022. They’ve weathered broken promises and watched a parade of safety heads come and go. It’s no wonder they’re skeptical about considering this platform a safe haven for their ads.

But maybe — just maybe — there’s a glimmer of hope on the horizon. It appears X is making some genuine strides in the realm of brand safety. Could this be the turning point everyone’s been waiting for? Only time will tell.

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A highlight of Digiday’s summit events is the challenge board, to which attendees post the top obstacles their businesses face at the moment. During this spring’s Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado, publishers filled the challenge board with a whole host of issues that ranged from traffic troubles to AI anxiety.

“There’s a lot of unknowns. You’ve got generative AI and the impact that’s going to have to all of us. Cookie deprecation, of course; it’s been going on for a while, but it’s finally happening. And I would also say algorithm changes in Google,” said Sharon Milz, chief information officer at Time.

In the video below, a handful of publishing executives from Bustle Digital Group, Dotdash Meredith, Hearst Magazines, Semafor, Time and Yahoo Finance explain the biggest challenges they see confronting the industry and how their companies are going about contending with those challenges.

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Performance branding company Within in March was named media agency of record for North America for Foot Locker — beating out the retailer’s incumbent digital media agency at holding company Dentsu.

The 10-year-old independent agency will handle all digital media buying and planning, reporting and optimization for the core Foot Locker brand as well as Champs Sports and Kids Foot Locker.

CEO Joe Yakuel said its success with current clients including The North Face and Rite Aid and previous work running digital media for Nike helped win over the new business despite the agency’s smaller size and resources compared to a holding company. Marketing at larger agencies is often focused on short-term revenue and siloed programs, Yakuel said.

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Publishers’ concerns regarding Privacy Sandbox are well documented; they are apprehensive that the new system could significantly reduce the effectiveness of targeted advertising in Google Chrome. This, in turn, could lead to a substantial dip in ad revenue, a prospect that is causing considerable unease. 

Despite such legitimate concerns, that’s kind of the whole point, right? Some of the liberties taken by actors in the online ecosystem have caused outrage among the public and sparked regulatory oversight.  

Therefore, Google, with its political air cover, is poised to introduce fundamental changes to the entire ad ecosystem. This move has been widely anticipated, as many have called for alterations to how online advertising works, particularly in relation to user targeting and measurement tracking. 

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Are those drumbeats in the distance? In many ways that makes sense because the upfront season is upon the industry — that time when linear TV ( the OG of the upfront event), digital and platforms (the NewFronts), gaming (the PlayFronts, which just took place) and even podcasting (Podcast Upfront) host events and parties to showcase their content wares.

But maybe those drums signal the beginning of the end of the upfront process, something that may have outlived its usefulness because so much of what’s showcased has changed. It’s an interesting premise floated by a veteran industry executive who’s long lived in the intersection between content and marketing. 

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And a hit song for your eyes.

A federal judge declined — for now — to grant class-action status to six Google account holders who are suing the company over its real-time bidding system.

When Do Kwon’s crypto empire fell to pieces, tens of billions of dollars were wiped out. A civil jury in the US has found he lied to investors.