Month: May 2024

The international reality television franchise The Voice has launched its own virtual experience today inside the metaverse platform The Sandbox. It’s the latest example of the brand’s push into virtual space, showcasing The Voice’s uniquely cross-platform approach to its metaverse strategy.

In addition to this week’s launch in The Sandbox — a mini game named “Coach Battle,” in which players act as coaches in a fictional version of the show — The Voice has shown up across a wide range of metaverse platforms in the past year, including Decentraland, Roblox and HiberWorld. The brand’s virtual activations have ranged from dedicated, always-on metaverse experiences to sales of digital merchandise such as branded virtual hoodies and puffer jackets.

“Overall, our aim was to basically create deeper fan engagement with our audiences,” said Leila Ahmed, a brand manager for The Voice owner ITV Studios. “We know that there’s a lot of people spending more time on these types of platforms, and for us, what was really imperative and important was to engage the connection with the fans and establish a way of how we can actually connect the TV show to these types of platforms.”

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The Olympic Games aren’t due to start until the final week of July, but brands hoping to bask in the glow of the Olympic torch have already commenced campaign efforts. And as the Paris Games edge closer, partnerships with competing athletes are set to be an increasingly vital part of the brand arsenal.

Despite strict regulations around advertising and brand partnerships, marketers and specialist agencies have been working to carefully select rosters of Olympians in the hope of piggybacking their rare organic reach in the run-up to, and during, the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Samsung, for example, began sponsoring the governing body for skateboarding in the U.K. (imaginatively titled Skateboarding UK) last September. The brand hopes to capitalize on both the novelty of the sport, only a recent addition to the Olympic Games, and the profile of skateboarder Sky Brown.

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In this edition of the Digiday+ Research Briefing, we examine how influencers see more Instagram engagement with still images than Reels, how publishers aren’t yet worried about the impact of a potential TikTok ban on their revenues and what types of first-party data are most important to marketers for ad targeting on streaming platforms, as seen in recent data from Digiday+ Research.

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As matters of diversity, equity and inclusion struggle to maintain the footing they seemingly achieved earlier this decade, some agencies continue to push them forward. The latest, independent marketing/communications agency Boathouse, is adding a supplier diversity program starting next week as part of expanding its diversity initiatives more widely.

It will be a way for the agency to extend diversity practices to more areas of the business and expand the opportunities for suppliers that are not certified as a diverse company, said Christopher Boland, owner of Boathouse Group, Inc.

“A lot of the people we started working with initially were like us — and diversity was simply a way to try to bring in people who are not like us,” Boland told Digiday. “Now we’re at a point where we need to bring that to suppliers. We’ve done it throughout our business, but it was just a conscious effort to try to make it different and … make it better.”

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It’s anyone’s guess this election season

No one really knows how the ad market will look in the immediate run-up to the U.S. presidential election, but to avoid the possibility of lost revenue, news publishers are seeking alternative avenues to appeal to advertisers.

While Dow Jones is focusing on events and non-political content for its politically-averse advertisers, The Guardian set its sights on political and advocacy advertisers who want to show up against election coverage. 

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The spot, meant to promote interest in French women’s soccer, has been divisive, equally revered and reviled.

Bankruptcy lawyers representing FTX say it plans to pay back almost all of the creditors defrauded in its collapse, plus interest, after collecting assets valued between $14.5 and $16.3 billion.

OpenAI has been said to be working on a search engine, but now we have further evidence that the rumor might be true.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, as part of a coalition of more than a dozen organizations, is opposing the act as part of legislation reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Authority.

OpenAI released draft guidelines for how it wants the AI technology inside ChatGPT to behave—and revealed that it’s exploring how to ‘responsibly’ generate explicit content.