Month: December 2022

This year has seen no shortage of saints and sinners, so, we’ll open with a rogue’s gallery.

Elon Musk

A months-long legal battle ended with one of the world’s richest men completing a $44 billion takeover of the internet’s town square in October 2022.

Since the completion of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, a Pandora’s Box has been opened with much of the controversy centering upon his insistence on freedom of speech, his detractors’ fears of misinformation, and the mass firing of staffers there.

Thus far, the saga has resulted in advertisers shying away from the platform with media agencies such as GroupM advising clients that the brand safety risks are just too great now that moderation teams are no longer there to filter content.

Just consider how earlier this year, Twitter was hailed for its media responsibility, but now EU officials are firing a shot across Musk’s bow over their concerns that his libertarian tendencies will fall short of the misinformation requirements contained within its Digital Services Act.

Whether other platforms will benefit from his maverick approach to leadership remains to be seen. Although, just as Musk starts to poke Apple, one of Twitter’s largest host platforms, Digiday has to wonder if this will incur the wrath of the iPhone maker and condemn Twitter to the same fate as the likes of Facebook? A scenario that would (surely) result in thousands more looking for employment.

Tim Cook

Before Musk’s Twitter takeover tore apart the social media orthodoxy, it was the iPhone manufacturer that was upsetting the Applecart.

Just look at how Meta issued its first-ever large-scale round of layoffs plus earnings decline as evidence of the chaos imposed by Apple’s recent privacy changes, a series of measures that make the likes of Facebook and Snap less attractive for advertisers.

The list of casualties is not limited to the industry’s largest social platforms as countless ad tech companies are also feeling the pain with iPhone users (one of the most highly desirable demographics among marketers) much more difficult for advertisers to target and track.

Of course, the principles of informed consent and the necessity for ad tech providers to enable a genuine value exchange between audiences and media owners are without doubt. Speaking earlier in the year, Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke publicly of how Apple was in favor of privacy given the de facto role of Big Tech as the industry’s privacy enforcer.

“Apple is in favor of privacy regulation,” he said, speaking at the International Association of Privacy Professionals’ flagship conference. He went on to further add, “Policymakers are taking steps in the name of competition that would force Apple to let apps on the iPhone that circumvent the App Store through a process called sideloading.”

And it’s the second part of that statement that will stick in the claw of those that have fallen victim to Apple’s recently implemented privacy policies. As it has become increasingly evident over the course of the last year, Apple has been accelerating its own advertising business.

Earlier this year Digiday revealed how Apple was seeking talent to build a demand-side platform — one of the most egregious of advertising technologies, according to Apple’s public proclamations. Meanwhile, later in the year, it emerged they are in conversation with leading adland figures over the potential introduction of a new TV-like media offering. For the thousands that were laid off as a direct result of Apple’s privacy changes, such developments will surely rankle.

Mark Zuckerberg

It’s been a rough couple of years for the world’s largest social network with Facebook (arguably) never recovering from the Cambridge Analytica scandal in the wake of 2016’s historic Brexit vote plus the U.S. general election of that year. And it was in 2020 that Facebook found itself at the center of an advertiser boycott for its irresponsible approach to moderating hate speech.

Earlier this year, the company’s commercial chief Sheryl Sandberg exited the company with one advertiser describing Facebook as “a necessary evil” at the time. Although, as the company’s most recent quarterly earnings suggest, this is not necessarily the case as measurement difficulties emerge, and rival platforms such as TikTok occupy the mindset of audiences.

Now rebranded, the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp is now a “metaverse-first” outfit, but still, the blows keep coming with Meta still reaping what it sowed during its personal data-fueled ascent to the top of the social networking tree.

In November, the Irish Data Protection Commission — the regulator primarily in charge of ensuring compliance with GDPR among Big Tech players — imposed a record $275 million fine on the social networking outfit for “data scraping.” And it is for such ignominious lows, that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg makes this list.

Who’s been nice?

If you’ve made it this far, you could be forgiven for thinking that the digital media sector is nothing but a rogue’s gallery, but that isn’t necessarily so.

Ruben Schreurs

Take, for instance, this year’s Brands4News initiative, an open-source resource geared toward helping brands support quality journalism, as opposed to channeling their ad dollars toward platforms that permit the spread of disinformation.

The driving force behind this initiative is Ebiquity’s chief product officer Ruben Schreurs, an executive who was motivated to self-fund Brands4News after realizing the fears some advertisers have when it comes to investing their media budgets.

“Brands are understandably nervous around making a decision by themselves around what would be a considerate piece of creative advertising on invasion-related content,” he told Digiday earlier this year. “So we decided to create open source formats and in doing so took some of that decision making away from brands. Now at least they have a starting point.”

Brian O’Kelley

All but the most bellicose can deny the impact of climate change, and as of this year, it’s increasingly on the minds of those in the digital media sector.

Some are attempting to address that, and it was with this challenge in mind that Brian O’Kelley, a cofounder and talismanic CEO of independent ad tech outfit AppNexus — latterly known as Xandr — has re-emerged on the scene.

O’Kelley’s latest venture Scope3 aims to help advertisers better understand the carbon footprint of their ad campaigns. As the Scope3 CEO told Digiday earlier in the year, “Our model is to get buyers to make emissions part of their spending decisions.”

It’s fair to say, that as of this year, sustainability advocacy has real momentum behind it with Ben Feldman, an executive whose career has spanned both ad tech and carbon offsetting, previously told Digiday, “People are going to want to start hiring outside firms to start looking at how companies account for their carbon footprint… it will put the pressure on to publishers to say ‘prove to me what you’re spending on, show me that is an actual offset.’”

MiQ

In contrast to the heady days of late 2020 and early 2021, the mergers and acquisitions market has been sparse this year with few standout deals.

Although, midway through the year, Digiday revealed how U.K. start-up MiQ was to buck this trend with its negotiations with a series of private equity backers and how the company was eyeing a $1 billion valuation. Speaking at the time, MiQ cofounder Lee Puri told Digiday how the company was looking for “the right partner that is aligned with our values” as he and MiQ CEO Gurman Hundal intended to further the company’s growth.

It later emerged that Bridgepoint Group is MiQ’s latest backer with Hundal later speaking publicly about the company’s ambitions to embark along the acquisition trail itself.

“I think MiQ is going to become a strategic acquirer of companies,” he said. “It’s great that we’ve got an organic growth strategy that can double or triple the business but imagine what we could do if we had really smart inorganic growth. That’s going to help us remain relevant for years to come.”

In a period when investors are increasingly shying away from writing big checks, such an endeavor is to be welcomed.

Digiday’s survey found that 58% of publisher pros said their 2022 revenues are up compared with their revenues in 2021. This certainly doesn’t sound like bad news. However, in Digiday’s winter 2021 survey, a significantly higher 86% of publishers said they thought their 2022 revenues would go up compared with 2021, which makes 58% seem like a small majority in comparison.

It turns out that, overall, confidence is down among publishers heading into the new year. While 86% of publisher pros told Digiday last winter that they expected revenues to increase this year, that percentage is down to 51% this winter.

The group of publisher pros who think revenues will increase only slightly (between 1% and 10%) next year didn’t take too big of a hit: Last year 36% of respondents fell into this category and this year the number is 32%. The story changes as we get into the bigger increases. Last year, 28% of publishers said they thought revenues would increase between 11% and 25%. This year, only 17% think so. And publishers think large revenue increases will be unheard of in 2023. Last year, 22% of publisher pros told Digiday they thought their companies’ revenues would increase by more than 25% this year. This year, a mere 2% are optimistic about seeing that kind of increase.

The largest jump this year came with those publishers who think revenues will remain the same into 2023: Last year, only 9% of publisher pros said they thought revenues would be about the same in 2022. This year, 30% said they expect revenues to be unchanged next year.

The fact is, though, that many publishers’ revenues did end up increasing in 2022, despite the overall lack of confidence across the industry. Digiday’s survey found that the largest set of respondents (30%) said their companies’ revenues are up between 1% and 10% over last year, while 12% reported revenue increases of 11% to 25% and 16% reported revenue increases even higher than 25%. Meanwhile, 12% of respondents to Digiday’s survey said their companies’ revenues decreased between 1% and 10% this year, 13% said revenues are down 11% to 25% and only 3% reported revenue decreases of more than 25%. So, all in all, few publishers said revenues went down this year.

Interested in sharing your perspectives on the media and marketing industries? Join the Digiday research panel.

The key hits:

• Streaming entered an era of austerity.
• Advertising took a nosedive.
• Netflix added ads.
• Short-form video platforms started to share revenue.
• Measurement remains a mess.

Seriously, what the hell happened this year? Are any of us even old enough to remember January?

At the start of the year, the big focuses for the TV, streaming and digital video industry were slowing subscriber growth for streaming services, creator funds for short-form platforms and new measurement currencies for TV advertising. Then we entered bizarro world. Netflix added ads; TikTok and YouTube Shorts actually introduced revenue-sharing programs; Bob Iger returned; CNN+ pulled a Quibi. At least there was some stability to be found in measurement remaining a mess.

As yet another weird year comes to a close, here’s a time capsule of five top trends and developments in 2023.

Streaming entered an era of austerity

The streaming wave of 2020 that ebbed into a subscriber slowdown in 2021 crashed into a profitability problem in 2022. After years of investing hundreds of millions and billions of dollars in building their streaming services, companies including Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery faced increased pressure on proving returns on that investment — and not in the form of subscriber counts.

In his welcome Q&A with Disney employees after returning as CEO, Iger said the company needed to pivot its focus from growing subscribers to achieving profitability. Meanwhile, others like Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery constrained their programming budgets in the face of rising production costs, interest rates and inflation.

As production and development executives said during Digiday’s Future of TV Programming Forum in November, the market for TV and streaming shows is in a correction period. “The market is definitely very tight right now. A lot of decisions are being driven by costs. There’s consolidation happening across the board in our business. So we’re definitely seeing less buys,” said Jo Sharon, co-CEO of production company Magical Elves.

Money matters weren’t limited to the economics of streaming programming, though.

Advertising took a nosedive

After a bounce-back year in 2021, TV and streaming ad revenues hit a wall in the second half of 2022. 

Worries over the economy’s deterioration began to bubble up just as TV and streaming ad buyers and sellers approached the annual upfront cycle in late spring. Then matters worsened over the summer, to the point that advertisers revised down their upfront commitments when it came time to place their orders in September.

The hits weren’t limited to traditional TV. In the third quarter, YouTube reported its first year-over-year quarterly ad revenue decline since Google began reporting the video platform’s revenue in 2019.

Roku CEO Anthony Wood sounded an ominous note in November when, during the company’s third-quarter earnings call, he shared his outlook for what is usually the ad market’s biggest period. “We are seeing signs that Q4 is going to be worse in terms of the ad market than Q3 was,” he said.

Netflix added ads

Industry executives got to proclaim themselves prophets when Netflix finally entered the advertising business this year — helluva time to do, given the above.

The dominant subscription-based streamer quickly raced to stand up an ad-supported tier. It signed a deal with Microsoft to provide ad tech and ad sales support and began pitching advertisers and agencies before finally hiring Snap’s business chief Jeremi Gorman to oversee its advertising business, with Snap sales exec Peter Naylor joining as her deputy. Then in November, Netflix’s ad-supported tier rolled out with hundreds of advertisers on board, including Anheuser-Busch InBev and L’Oreal. 

But a little more than a month later, Netflix’s advertising business hit a rough patch. Ad-supported viewership was coming up short of expectations, and the company started allowing advertisers to take their money back, though some opted to stick their spending with Netflix and shift their dollars to 2023.

Of course, Netflix wasn’t the only notable new addition to the TV and streaming ad market. Disney actually beat Netflix to the punch in announcing Disney+’s ad-supported tier in March, though that tier launched a month later than Netflix’s. And then Apple prepped its streaming advertising play by teasing out its plans with ad buyers and eventually pitching them on ads that will air during its Major League Soccer streams starting in February — a month that will feature the debut of another notable ad program.

Short-form video platforms started to share revenue

Technically, YouTube won’t launch its ad revenue-sharing program for Shorts until February, but we can consider the introduction of direct monetization options on short-form video platforms to be a 2022 development.

TikTok kicked off the trend in May when it unveiled its ad revenue-sharing program Pulse. That program offered the first look at how short-form video platforms will try to tackle the challenge of calculating how revenue should be shared when ads are inserted between videos. In TikTok’s case, it’s effectively attaching ads as post-roll placements. 

In September, YouTube followed suit by announcing the Shorts revenue-sharing program, though the platform is taking a different, somewhat controversial approach to calculating rev-shares by pooling revenue and then splitting it among eligible creators and publishers.

Considering that TikTok’s program is still opening up to creators and YouTube’s has yet to launch, the impacts have yet to be seen, and the question remains of how will Instagram respond with Reels. It can hardly afford not to.

Measurement remains a mess

For all that changed in 2022, TV advertising measurement seems to be one area where the industry is ending the year roughly where it started. TV networks, advertisers and agencies are assessing measurement providers to determine which — and how many — they should support as currencies for transactions.

To be clear, the measurement shift did not sit in stasis this year. TV ad buyers and sellers headed into this year’s upfront market planning to adopt alternative measurement providers as “shadow currencies,” and they did so — in order to set baselines to eventually support them as actual currencies. 

Nielsen remained the primary currency this year, though organizations like NBCUniversal was able to evolve beyond the traditional age-and-gender-based measure for 40% of its upfront deals. Nonetheless, Nielsen’s position was protected — if only temporarily — by the “test and learn” phase leading TV networks and agencies to learn how much more testing is needed to suss out the various measurement providers.

How much the state of TV ad measurement will change in 2023 remains up in the air. But change will come. It always does.

What we’ve heard

“They can’t deliver. They don’t have enough inventory to deliver. So they’re literally giving the money back.”

— Agency executive on Netflix’s ad-supported tier so far

Streaming adds to TV watch time lead

After overtaking cable TV’s total TV watch time lead in July, streaming has only increased its advantage in the ensuring months. In November, the amount of time people spent watching streaming services increased by 10.2% month over month, compared to 6.7% for broadcast TV and 4.2% for cable TV, according to Nielsen’s most recent The Gauge viewership report.

A similar story of lead-building has played out within the streaming market. YouTube usurped Netflix’s position as streaming’s watch-time leader in September, and in November, YouTube stole an additional 0.3 percentage points, though Netflix closed the gap by 0.1 percentage point.

Another notable streaming stat is the share of viewership represented by streaming pay-TV services (YouTube TV, Sling TV, Hulu’s live TV service, etc.). “Viewing of live TV via streaming apps (linear streaming) represented 5.8% of total TV in November (up from 5.7%) and 15.2% of all streaming,” according to Nielsen.

Numbers to know

-7%: Percentage decline year over year in the number of people of color who appeared in TV and video ads.

1: Year that Verizon customers will receive Netflix subscriptions for free if they buy a subscription to another service through the telecom giant’s +play bundle.

10%: Share of CNN’s overall profits that came from its digital business at its peak.

89%: Percentage share of brand and retail professionals who said their companies have used influencers in holiday marketing this year.

What we’ve covered

Here are the hidden costs of being a creator:

• Costs for computers, microphones and editing software subscriptions add up.
• Non-financial costs like time management are also considerations.

Read more about creators’ costs here.

Netflix lets advertisers take their money back after missing viewership targets:

• Netflix has only delivered roughly 80% of the expected audience for some advertisers.
• While some advertisers are taking their money back, others are shifting dollars to 2023 but keeping them with Netflix.

Read more about Netflix’s ad business here.

Three YouTube stars join forces to form their own talent management company:

• Charles “MoistCr1TiKaL” White, Gina “Gibi ASMR” Klein and Tyler “Jimmy Here” Collins have founded Mana Talent Group.
• The move is the latest example of creators forming their own talent management firms.

Read more about the YouTubers’ startup here.

What we’re reading

The backstory on Bob v. Bob:
Bob Iger’s dissatisfaction with Bob Chapek’s stewardship of Disney has been well reported, but this report by The Wall Street Journal sheds light Disney CFO Christine McCarthy’s central role in bringing back Iger and ousting Chapek.

Apple exits NFL Sunday Ticket talks:
Apple has decided to step back from bidding to acquire the NFL’s Sunday Ticket package, leaving Amazon and Google as the frontrunners, according to Puck.

The streaming war turns cold:
The shift in focus among major streaming services from growing subscribers to managing costs is throwing cold water on the competition for audiences, according to The Verge.

HBO Max inserts ads in original shows:
There are no sacred cows in Warner Bros. Discovery’s financial overhaul, which will see the company slot ads in HBO originals streaming on HBO Max, according to Insider.

AMC Networks is TV’s canary in the coal mine:
AMC Networks’ financial issues despite its streaming progress underscores the challenge facing all TV networks as the traditional TV business continues to take on water but streaming is not yet a big enough lifeboat, according to The New York Times.

As the holiday season is underway, Digiday talked to social media strategists, marketers and a few of the platforms themselves to find out just what social networks would put on their wish list.

Meta: Legs and faith in the metaverse

It’s been a full year since Meta, formerly known as Facebook, rebranded itself amidst damning reports, a whistleblower, privacy changes from Apple threatening its ad business and young users flocking to TikTok. Last October, the social media giant barreled head first into the metaverse, launching its place in the digital world — Horizon Worlds, to convince users, investors and perhaps itself, that Meta would be a first-founder in Web3, the next iteration of the internet.

Meta declined to make an executive available for this article, but social media strategists who weighed in surmised that Meta would wish for younger users, happy investors and faith in Horizon Worlds.

“With the younger generations moving into newer platforms like TikTok, Meta has to be feeling like the old guy at a party amongst a bunch of teens,” Brandon Biancalani, head of paid advertising at social agency Modifly, said in an email to Digiday. 

According to Pew Research, the number of teens who say they use Facebook has plummeted from 71% in 2014-15 to just 32% in 2022. 

“Even with appealing features like Facebook Reels, the idea of kids wanting to be on the same platform as their very active parents does not have a great appeal to the younger generations,” Biancalani added. 

Also on Meta’s wish list, as on many other social media platforms, is freedom from the effects of Apple’s iOS 14 data privacy regulations, which muddied targeting and tracking. It’s pushed advertisers to take their dollars elsewhere, creating a slow leak in Meta’s ad revenue, which has been falling year over year as the platform tries to recoup. (More on that here.)

“Facebook is going to wish that people would basically trust what they say in terms of performance and numbers,” said Duane Brown, founder and head of strategy at Take Some Risk, performance marketing agency. “They wish that people would just take what they say as gospel.”

Instagram: No more TikToks

Meta-owned Instagram has been in a video arms race with TikTok since its competitor gained popularity, releasing its own pivot to video with Reels. Again, Meta declined to make an Instagram executive available to comment. But social strategists suspect, “Instagram would ask for more original Reels and not just repurposed TikToks,” said Josh Druding, group social strategy director at Mekanism marketing agency via email.

Its pivot to video led to some pushback from users, including Kim Kardashian, who asked that the platform “stop trying to be TikTok.” As previously reported by Digiday, in light of Instagram’s prioritization of video over still images to better compete with TikTok, creators have had to “adapt or die.” (The platform, however, still has user interest from Gen Z, per Pew, which reports a slight increase from 52% of teens using the app in 2014-2015 to 62% of teens using the app this year.)

“Instagram’s number one holiday wish list item is almost a return to the olden days. We saw this year the backlash over the recommended content and the Reels taking over the main feed,” said Andrew Roth, founder and CEO of dcdx, a Gen Z research and strategy firm.

According to social strategists like Roth and Druding, if the photo-sharing turned video-first site could have its way this holiday season, it would eclipse TikTok, siphoning its users and ad dollars.

TikTok: Don’t make TikToks; Buy ads

As social media’s current golden child, TikTok wants authenticity, harking back to its 2020 campaign and challenge to advertisers, “Don’t make ads. Make TikToks.”

“This holiday season, I wish for brands and marketers to feel empowered to rely less on curated perfection, and more on creative marketing that expresses their brand voice and point of view,” Khartoon Weiss, TikTok’s global head of agency and accounts at TikTok, said in an email to Digiday. 

Even as a newer platform, TikTok has quickly wooed advertisers, becoming a line item in many marketing budgets, eating into spend for YouTube and Instagram. However, there’s been a greater emphasis on an organic presence rather than paid media as brands have made it a habit to join the platform to take part in trends and create their own organic viral moment. That may have played a role in its parent company ByteDance’s operating losses “more than triple last year to above $7 billion,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

This year, the platform has made a push into direct response capabilities, upping the ante on its advertising capabilities. While TikTok itself is hopeful for brand authenticity this holiday season, social strategists say the right ask would be for better ad tech and audience matching. That may be a harsh critique of a relatively new platform, said Biancalani. But if TikTok wants to remain advertisers’ platform of choice, it’ll have to improve.

“Audiences that populate fairly well on Meta fail to be even targetable on TikTok,” he said, adding that TikTok’s algorithm needs data, time and patience for content to perform well. “That’s a formula not a lot of businesses have the budget to stick around for.”

Snap: Send ad dollars

Similar to Meta, Gen Z’s once favorite platform is pushing to diversify its revenue business, looking to make a profit off of its subscription offering Snap+ and get more advertisers interested in its augmented reality capabilities. Snap itself declined to make a spokesperson available for comment on what the platform would add to its wish list this holiday season. But if strategists had to guess, it would be ad dollars.

“Snapchat would wish for a user base that is more profitable, intent driven and mature for businesses to take advantage of from paid media,” Biancalani said in an email. “If they could move over the more mature users from Meta with deeper pockets, I’m sure that would be their holiday wish.”

Snap has been on the fringe with advertisers for a while now, only becoming more strained as TikTok eats up a portion of its ad dollars, per previous Digiday reporting. Things were looking up early last year as direct-to-consumer brands started taking a second look at Snap as efforts to diversify media dollars beyond Facebook reached a fever pitch. 

“I bet they wished it was 18 months ago, where they were the darling of everything and they could do no wrong,” said Brown. “TikTok has really stolen a lot of their thunder in the last 12 months.”

Twitter: ‘An ejector seat in the CEO’s office‘

Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk came in like a wrecking ball, spreading misinformation, firing staff and scaring advertisers all within the first few weeks of the transition. (The platform didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.) Per social strategists, Twitter’s holiday wish list would look more like a laundry list, given its recent events.

“From antagonizing the platform’s biggest advertisers to picking a fight with the almighty Apple app store, it’s hard to recall a more catastrophic first month at a major company,” said Noah Mallin, chief of brand strategy for IMGN, in an email to Digiday. That being said, Mallin says at the top of Twitter’s holiday wish list would be “an ejector seat in the CEO’s office.”

With Elon Musk’s takeover, and following the revamp of its premium subscription service Twitter Blue, the social media platform will need to convince users and advertisers of its new business model, strategists say. Under new ownership, the social media platform is tasked with finding its North Star once again. Especially after reportedly losing half of its top 100 advertisers, according to a report by liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America. GroupM, the world’s biggest media buyer, called Twitter a “high risk” media buy. If advertisers will say sayonara for good is still to be determined. But according to previous Digiday reporting, it’s not looking good.

“Internally, it’s [figuring] out how to monetize the platform,” said Brown. “Getting those advertisers back would be a big thing.”

LinkedIn: Same as last year

When talking about social media platforms, LinkedIn is often left out of the conversation. But with experts forecasting economic uncertainty and mass layoffs, users (and thus, advertisers) may be reconsidering. 

This holiday season, the platform itself is asking for the obvious: help people find jobs.

In an email to Digiday, Hari Srinivasan, vp of product management at LinkedIn, said, “If we can accelerate a skills-first labor market, imagine the possibilities for a more diversified and equitable networks, with the ability to help fill the most in demand jobs based on what a candidate can do rather than where they’re from or where they went to school.”

Social strategists, however, are taking LinkedIn’s would-be holiday wish list a step further, ruminating that the platform known for networking may want to strongly be considered a people-to-people platform as opposed to one that’s predominately business-to-business.

“They want people to think of them as a platform to reach people and not as a platform to reach B2B people,” Brown said. “It’s a different way to think about the LinkedIn platform. I’d say that was their wish because, obviously even owned by Microsoft now, they want to make more money.”

Pinterest: Use all the features

For some advertisers, Pinterest has been considered a quiet underdog with Q2 results showing progress thanks to shoppable ads and video content, as per reporting from Digiday.

To keep users among light-hearted content, the platform released its so called compassionate search tool to promote safety and positivity on the app, according to the company. It even banned ads about weight loss from the site.

“I wish everyone who needs it knew compassionate search existed,” global head of content at Pinterest writing, Celie O’Neil Hart, said in an emailed statement to Digiday.

Social strategists were quiet about Pinterest’s so-called holiday wish list, pointing to the idea that the platform may not be as much in need as the others, given the platform is more brand safe with ad capabilities compared to Meta, per previous Digiday reporting. Since last year, it has been quietly flying under the radar as a less notable social media advertising channel. But this holiday season and beyond, it may be fair to expect more of the same from Pinterest.

Reddit: Participate in relevant communities

Reddit has long since been the wild west for brands and advertisers as the platform’s users can be particular about community engagement. That being said, Reddit this year says it’s asking brands to give the platform a chance, becoming active and authentic users themselves.

“Brands have already learned the power and value in advertising on Reddit,” said Rachel Weber Callaway, head of consumer product marketing at Reddit, in an email, “but they can make an even deeper connection to their audiences and customers by joining and participating in communities that are relevant to them and their audiences.”

Over the last year or so, especially as Apple iOS 14 data privacy has made performance marketing trickier, advertisers like Philadelphia Cream Cheese, Tushy DTC brand and others have found a way to build brand loyalty and even drive sales using the platform. (More on that here.)

Here, social media strategists and the team at Reddit seem to agree. “Reddit wishes more people view them as a legitimate advertising platform and also a place that’s used by millions of people every day,” Brown said.

As the social media advertising landscape continues to be a turbulent one, with rising CPMs, data privacy and more, Reddit could stand to siphon ad dollars from other platforms. “Amidst all the chaos and drama that’s going on social media, on all these platforms, if Reddit can be that recognized source of truth, that would help to bring them back [to the forefront of advertiser’s minds],” said Roth.

The media company will instead host a series of one-on-one meetings the month before with agencies and brand clients, in an effort to address a more complex media environment — which just got more crowded in the last month with the availability of premium inventory from Netflix and Disney+. In other words, Carnegie Hall, where Paramount (CBS) held its upfront for decades, is now available for other performances that Wednesday May 17.

That’s not to say Paramount won’t be trying to secure billions of dollars in upfront commitments — and many agencies and clients will comply, at the right price. But it’s also quite possible that Paramount stepping away is the dislodged pebble that could start the landslide away from selling in the upfront marketplace.

Here’s why: in a year that’s widely expected to be economically uncertain, more and more advertisers are edging away from long-term commitments and toward media investments that provide them flexibility and the option to pull money out of the market. 

“Demand for the upfront has been shrinking,” said one major independent media buyer who declined to speak on the record. “We’re now heading into 2023 getting ready for some accounts that are going to scatter and calendar-year [deals]. And while many people are trying to hold the line on the full broadcast upfront from 2022 to 2023, the reality is, that line is going to shrink — that line is going down.”

Given the fact that some advertisers are still figuring out their 2023 marketing budgets — at a much later time in the year than usual — not only will there be fewer dollars, but those dollars spent will require greater flexibility. 

“There will be less dollars in the marketplace — that goes without saying at this moment,” said the buyer. “But when I say less dollars, there could be less in the upfront. It’s all about flexibility. I don’t think marketers do not want to market — I think they do want you selling their message to the consumer. When they do it, how they do it [and] where they do it is where they need the flexibility. Digital money can be cancelled any day — it’s very flexible. Video money is not.”

All that said, at this point the other major TV sellers — NBC Universal, Fox, Disney and, as of last year, Google/YouTube — are expected to still present during Upfront Week 2023. How they all adjust their offerings, and whether they incorporate more flexibility into commitments (perhaps for a higher price?) remains to be seen.