Month: December 2024

This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at streaming service owners’ latest quarterly earnings reports, as well as some recent studies regarding streaming subscriber sentiment.

• Time to renew
• Nielsen’s currency change-of-mind, Showtime’s time to shine and more

Time to renew

What subscription fatigue? Based on streaming service owners’ latest quarterly earnings reports, people are still willing to shell out for paid subscriptions.

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Twitch creator Kai Cenat just finished a month-long “subathon,” livestreaming nonstop for 30 days and smashing the platform’s subscriber record in the process. The event was a ringing endorsement of Twitch as a creator platform — but also showcased the challenges caused by its lack of original IP.

Cenat’s record-breaking stream tested the limits of Twitch’s brand safety guidelines. Although Twitch dissolved its Safety Advisory Council, an advisory group of industry experts, in May, the company has since taken steps to improve its brand safety tools for prospective advertisers. On Nov. 1, for example, Twitch added a new feature that allows users to hide streams that broadcast political or otherwise controversial content, creating new content labels in an effort to help brands exert more control over the types of content they advertise alongside.

But although Cenat’s stream was occasionally marked by PG-13 or R-rated behavior, Twitch did not take any public steps to shield its advertisers from his or his team’s more controversial content. The situation highlighted the subjective approach that Twitch tends to use with regard to its largest creators’ brand safety risks. Twitch needs to consider the needs of both its creators and its advertisers — but threading the needle between the two can be a delicate dance.

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Walmart’s acquisition of smart TV manufacturer Vizio is official as of this week. The move further bolsters Walmart’s ad business, adding streaming capabilities to potentially attract more brand dollars. Walmart is just one on a growing list of retail media networks that’s after those dollars. Advertisers, however, are keeping the purse strings tied tight on brand budgets for now. 

As more retailers launch their own ad networks, competition continues to grow for trade and shopper budgets. To meet that competition, Walmart and other retailers are eyeing brand budgets, rolling out ad opportunities in streaming, social and other off-platform channels. But the retail media space still faces challenges related to measurement and return on ad spend. Until those challenges are solved, advertisers don’t seem interested in parting with brand marketing dollars.

“None of my clients have said we’re getting ready to throw in a ton of dollars, and especially brand dollars, at this next year,” said Sarah Hoffman, group director of connections at TBWAChiatDay. “I do think that they’ve got some work to do before anybody starts to run the piles of cash in their direction.”

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Ad tech’s obsession with “curation” has sparked plenty of chatter — some informed, some less so. 

But don’t worry about separating the wheat from the chaff. Digiday’s cut through the noise, debunked the myths and laid out the facts straight to you. 

Myth: Curation is new.

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New lawsuits and deeper partnerships highlight the delicate balancing act between major publishers and AI companies.

Some of the first media companies to strike deals with OpenAI say they’re getting ready to release new AI-enabled features that aim to benefit readers, publishers and advertisers. One of the latest examples is DotDash, which used AI to create a new way to target readers with contextual ads.

Using historical audience data and Amazon shopping data, the company trained a large language model to find correlations between content consumption and potential user behaviors. The new unit is expected to launch today with a major (undisclosed) retailer, Dotdash chief innovation officer Jonathan Roberts said yesterday while speaking at the AI Trailblazers marketing conference in New York. Other panelists included executives from Time, The New York Stock Exchange and The New York Times.

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Western Union is using first-party data online to offset audience extensions via PubMatic’s Convert platform – designed for commerce media networks to manage and monetize online ad inventory across
various formats like sponsored product listings, video, display and CTV.

At WIRED’s The Big Interview event in San Francisco, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said next year Airbnb could have “one of the biggest reinventions” in recent memory.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has a plan to bring AI infrastructure to countries around the world, and he’s pitching it in person.

The new hires, all experts in computer vision, are the latest AI researchers to jump to a direct competitor in an intensively competitive talent market.

At WIRED’s The Big Interview event, the ex-OpenAI CTO said she’s still in the midst of setting up her startup, but AGI is top of mind.