Month: October 2024

Publishers are still very much living in the platform era. But they are also straddling the AI era, with the likes of OpenAI and Perplexity standing in as the next generation of platforms for publishers to deal with, as the recent Digiday Publishing Summit made clear.

“The AI era is going to challenge us in completely new and different ways,” said Bloomberg Media chief digital officer Julia Beizer.

During closed-door town hall sessions and in interviews with Digiday, publishing executives discussed the challenges they face, from traditional platforms like Facebook and Reddit as well as those posed by the new AI platforms. And from what they had to say, the methods for addressing those two sets of challenges may not be all that different, as covered in the video below.

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The growth and maturity of the creator economy is impossible to ignore. It will surely dominate this year’s Advertising Week kicking off today in New York, according to marketers and media executives, who say that the fragmented media landscape continues to elevate the importance of the creator economy, which has become a reality for nearly every platform, even surprising platforms like LinkedIn, for marketers. 

The conference hits a milestone year with the 2024 edition — it’s the 20th anniversary — and more than 17,000 advertisers, tech execs, marketers, creators and media execs are expected to attend (last year nabbed 15,000 attendees, according to the conference) which will again take place near Penn Station in Manhattan. 

 “It’s going to be all about the creator economy,” said Michael Vito Valentino, editor-in-chief of NowThis, who will take the stage on Monday to detail how marketers should be thinking about ads for the GenZ audience. “There’s this myth that Gen Z hates ads, that everyone hates ads. I don’t think that’s quite the case. They don’t hate ads, they hate crappy ads.” 

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Fresh off a win of several chunks of Adobe’s marketing and tech needs — which it shared with Dentsu’s creative arm — agency holding company Stagwell can thank, in some ways, its digital transformation arm, made up in part by the Code and Theory Network.

(For the purposes of this briefing, let’s refer to the network as CandT, since the group eschews the noble ampersand.)

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Five years after acquiring the retail advertising platform PromoteIQ, Microsoft now seems to be quietly shutting it down and pushing clients to use Criteo.

Multiple sources say Microsoft began letting retail media publishers know that it was sunsetting the service over the summer, at the same time it announced a “strategic collaboration” with the ad tech outfit.

While it isn’t promoting the move as an outright closure of PromoteIQ, the underlying understanding is that the service will no longer be used, and employees at the company have been told that Microsoft is focusing on other parts of its retail media strategy.

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With Advertising Week upon the marketing and media industries, Omnicom Media Group is working behind the scenes to establish standards across a few vital areas that currently lack transparency, Digiday has learned.

First off is an effort by Omnicom Media Group to help establish clarity and perhaps even standards in the ad auction process of investing in media, which the network estimates at around $600 billion in global spend. OMG is working through the Media Rating Council’s Auction Standards Working Group, for which Ben Hovaness, chief media officer for OMD, is steering committee chairman. 

With a goal is to standardize practices, policies, measurement, reporting and transparency in digital ad auctions, the Auction Standards Working Group was first formed in May but had its first kick-off meeting in August, at which some 70 companies participated — platforms, marketers, sellers, auctioneers, industry organizations — and other holding companies, in a rare moment of cross-industry cooperation. 

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At a time when it seems much of the news media has become increasingly polarized, fragmented, and echo chamber-ish, one organization has been standing out for it’s non-partisan, context- and
fact-based approach to the issues: Hearst Television’s “Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien,” which recently kicked off its 10th season with a series of presidential election reports focusing on
kitchen table issues influencing voters in the battleground states.

The audio brand might be ticking close to retirement age, but the innovators behind this private company have plenty more tricks up their sleeves, says CEO Lila Snyder.

As it becomes clear that climate change devastation can hit anywhere, engineers are considering how best to protect vital thoroughfares from intense storms.