Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

After the Academy Awards, even celebrities might be contemplating a hearty, comforting breakfast to recover from Hollywood’s biggest night. To cap off the celebrations, McDonald’s has dropped a commercial spotlighting the go-to breakfast orders of Hollywood stars, including some Oscar-winning and nominated actors. Kieran Culkin, who won the Academy Award for best supporting actor for…

Sorry, Emilia Perez, it’s actually Anora’s world. We’re just living in it–and bringing you the behind-the-scenes Oscars details you didn’t see at home. The little movie that could did pretty much everything at the 97th Oscars. Released by Neon, Anora won statues in five of its six nominated categories, including Best Film Editing, Best Screenplay,…

Advertisers using blocklists to avoid content containing specific keywords inadvertently avoid over half of all Oscars-related content–even though most of this content is culturally relevant and uncontroversial–according to new data from contextual advertising firm Mantis shared exclusively with ADWEEK. Mantis’ research assessed more than 460,000 pageviews between Dec. 28, 2024, and Jan. 27, 2025. A…

Long before TikTok refugees discovered Red Note, Candise Lin was giving Americans a portal into the wild, hilarious world of Chinese social media.

The two holding companies that reported their 2024 earnings last week — WPP and Stagwell — painted considerably different portraits of the future in the guidance they offered for the rest of 2025. Besides IPG’s dour expectations from two weeks ago, WPP is the only holdco to say it expects to have a rough year.

It’s important to maintain perspective in looking at the two holdcos side by side. WPP dwarfs Stagwell in size and scale, (WPP’s nearly $18.6 billion in 2024 revenue compared to Stagwell’s $2.8 billion), but in this case, smaller actually presents an advantage in showing a greater percentage of growth — specifically, 12% growth (including advocacy, which was huge last year thanks to a presidential election) for Stagwell to WPP’s flat to slightly down result.

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DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science have spent years as rivals focused on brand safety and verification, tasked with protecting the world’s biggest brands from showing up in problematic places. However, as recent reports show, things can slip through the cracks.

Now, they’re moving beyond the open web, using AI offerings — some built internally and some acquired — to compete for new types of advertisers in new ad arenas.

Both companies, which reported earnings late last week, showed off their road map for winning over mid-market advertisers across new channels like social media, CTV, and retail media. They’re also moving beyond the thorny issue of brand safety to try and prove themselves in yet another tricky area: performance and measurement.

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In recent weeks, the ad tech sector’s leading lights have issued their financial results for the closing quarter of 2024 — traditionally, the big-money period of the financial year — and while almost all reported numbers that were up and to the right, the markets reacted negatively.

The year 2025 has been widely touted as a comeback year for mergers and acquisitions, and even some initial public offerings, in ad tech, although Wall Street’s reactions to the latest round of earnings calls from companies in the sector will likely prove a drag on valuations.

For example, revenues for the sector’s big two, i.e., AppLovin and The Trade Desk, issued double-digit annual revenue increases (44% and 26%, respectively), but the slings and arrows of the public markets resulted in precipitous price declines in recent weeks.

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When consultant Matt Ryan emerged from last month’s meeting with the CEOs of Omnicom and IPG, one thought stuck with him. Between their fanfare over the proposed union and the swift clap backs from rivals, it’s clear the holding company era is finished. The future belongs to operating companies, where agencies function as a cohesive whole rather than a collection of loosely connected firms.

“I came away from it [the meeting] thinking they’re really pitching this new company as a unified one — they’re really going to operate it like, like, one big company as opposed to lots of smaller ones,” said Ryan, founder of advertising consulting firm Roth Ryan Hayes.

If all this sounds familiar it’s because agency CEOs have been preaching the gospel of operating models for years. Some have inched closer to the ideal, but none have quite nailed the landing — yet. That’s why all eyes are on Omnicom’s planned acquisition of IPG. Should it all go through, it’ll be another test of whether agency leaders can finally break free from the holding company playbook — or just rewrite it.

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Bit by bit, more advertisers are beginning to use contextual targeting approaches for their programmatic media investments.

Signal loss from the gradual decline of the third-party cookie, rising esteem for contextual targeting firms’ AI capabilities, and the recent Adalytics investigation into ad tech’s role in monetizing child sexual abuse material (CSAM), have each given marketers reason to pause and question their current programmatic setups.

As such, contextual targeting providers have been twisting, turning and tuning their pitches to the market — ensuring they’re considered among the solutions to those challenges.

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It’s hard to ignore the sweeping changes to corporate and federal diversity, equity and inclusion policies, as brands like Target, Walmart and now Paramount, for example, continue to retool or walk back their DEI policies. Hyundai, meanwhile, says its multicultural marketing efforts and budget commitments will remain in place. 

Erik Thomas, director of experiential and multicultural marketing at Hyundai Motor America, told Digiday that multicultural audiences represent an estimated 30% of the automotive brand sales. (Thomas did not disclose exact revenue figures.) According to Hyundai’s 2024 annual and Q4 business results, the automotive brand’s global annual revenue increased 7.7% to 175.2 trillion South Korean Won (or slightly over $120 billion U.S. dollars). Meaning, there’s a business imperative behind Hyundai’s multicultural strategy – it continue to drive car sales, something DEI and cultural marketing experts have pointed to in the argument against DEI’s dismantling.

Last month, Hyundai put out its latest multicultural marketing campaign, “Play for the Car,” aimed at Black shoppers with paid media across diverse media, including entertainment channels like BET, TV One and Bounce, and publications like Blavity and Ebony Magazine. The campaign, from creative shop Culture Brands, will also have spots in NBA games this year. Culture Brands is the independent, minority and female-owned agency Hyundai selected as its African American marketing agency of record back in 2021. Since 2022, the automotive company has partnered with Lopez Negrete Communications as its Hispanic marketing agency of record.

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