Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

Beginning around five years ago, a brigade of hopefuls marched into the category.

January’s TikTok outage has served as a wake-up call for brands, reinforcing the need to diversify their spending across multiple platforms to avoid over-reliance on a single channel.

That’s meant marketers have spent more on other platforms like Instagram and YouTube, both of which outpaced TikTok’s spend in the month following the platform’s Jan. 18 outage, representatives of influencer marketing companies Later, Collabstr, BENlabs and BrandCycle told Digiday.

Although major advertisers such as Unilever are upping their spending on influencer marketing — and some brands are continuing to increase their spending on TikTok — influencer marketers see this trend as evidence that brands are still hedging their bets around TikTok marketing amid the uncertainty surrounding the platform’s potential U.S. ban.

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Is there such a thing as over-preparing? It certainly feels that way in the case of TikTok’s ban, which has been playing out in the U.S. for months since its initial January 2025 deadline following legislation signed by former President Joe Biden in April 2024 requiring the ByteDance app to sell to a U.S. owner or get shut down. After January, President Trump signed a 75-day extension for TikTok to work out a deal.

This time around, eight agencies and influencer marketing execs told Digiday that their general sentiment going into the April 5 deadline this weekend is more calm and confident. That’s because they’ve had months of practice and data gleaned from the temporary outage on Jan. 18, while some are more sure that a deal or extension is likely to go through by this deadline. Some advertisers like Coca-Cola and Comcast have even increased their spend on the platform this year, as Digiday previously reported this week.

“We’re worn down a little bit by the drama,” said Joanna Fowler, head of talent at Shine Talent Group. “We’re ready to just … move into the action phase, [which includes] building on another platform.”

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Forget the standard job posting, Monks is auditioning its next AI leaders through an AI of its own creation: an AI recruiter personifying the agency’s co-founder.

The S4-owned agency recently debuted a new chatbot called “WesleyBot” that serves as both recruiter and marketer. The prototype is based on the mind and personality of MediaMonks co-founder Wesley ter Haar, who recently took on a new role as the chief AI officer.

Designed to attract top AI talent, WesleyBot operates as a conversational interface within ChatGPT for the AI-ambitious who feel like “lone wolves” in a traditional agency or consultancy. Part of the plans has meant creating a paid campaign on LinkedIn targeting mid- to senior-level talent who have media, data, or AI tooling skills across rival companies — especially in cities where Monks also has an office. So far, more than 600 people have chatted with WesleyBot, according to Monks.

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In a ruling that could rattle the scaffolding of digital advertising, France’s competition authority has fined Apple €150 million ($162 million) for what it deems an antitrust violation disguised as privacy reform.

At the heart of the matter is Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework, the marquee feature of its privacy push — hailed by some as a principled stand against surveillance capitalism and by others as a velvet-gloved power grab. The decision marks a rare European rebuke of Apple’s dominance and raises larger questions about who truly benefits from the era of so-called privacy.

What follows is a closer look at the questions this decision surfaces — not just for Apple but for the entire advertising ecosystem built on the promise (and pretense) of privacy.

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Last week, Digiday asked the question, “Is there any point in breaking up Google?”  

Asking this question was not an exercise in advocating for laissez-faire economics. Rather, it attempted to determine whether the government was trying to apply a 20th-century regulatory tool to a 2010s market problem in the late 2020s.    

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The potential regulations “would harm consumers, the economy, and small businesses by hindering data services companies’ practices that provide valuable and desired offerings to the marketplace,”
Privacy for America says.

At its peak, Newsmax’s market capitalization reached nearly $30 billion.

“Google effectively embedded a live mic in tens of millions of individuals’ private lives,” the consumers argue in new court papers.

Steve Kornacki will stay with NBC News after MSNBC breaks off into SpinCo.