Month: December 2018

What do cannabis, autonomous delivery and the resurrection of mall stores have in common? Each was one of retail’s biggest stories in 2018. Take a look ahead to see what helped shape retail discourse this year–and what the industry will still be talking about come 2019. Cashierless Stores Amazon opened its first cashierless Amazon Go…

The White House isn’t the only place that saw a sizable leadership exodus in 2018. Across Hollywood, more than a dozen top TV execs headed for the exits this year, mostly due to megamergers, #MeToo and new opportunities elsewhere. (During just two months this fall, each the big four broadcasters underwent a significant shake-up in…

It was a tumultuous, sometimes painful, year for a lot of publishers and the talented journalists employed by them. There were multiple layoffs throughout the industry, and entire media outlets were shuttered. Many publications changed ownership this year, and other brands greatly reduced their print product–or eliminated them altogether. Multiple publications made moves, though, to…

There’s a new top tweet in town–and this year, not one of the 10 most popular tweets of the year came from a brand. In 2017, Barack Obama was No. 1 with his response to violence in Charlottesville, Va. This is according to social media analytics firm Talkwalker, which found Obama had three of the…

There’s virtually no ecommerce story this year that doesn’t feature Amazon, but it’s not the only company that made waves. Ahead are a few of the biggest ecommerce trends from 2018 and many–like Amazon’s quest for dominance to the rise of more permanent retail stores of digital darlings–are likely to continue in 2019. Amazon, Amazon,…

Programmatic ad spend is only continuing to rise with such technologies powering more than 80 percent of all display ad buys in the U.S. according to eMarketer. Although, the growing dominance of the industry’s largest names, a.k.a the duopoly and increasingly Amazon, is forcing ‘independent ad tech’ to make some major calls–such as which tech…

Progress on AI-generated visuals offers clues on how images, video, and art could power new forms of entertainment and disinformation.