Month: December 2024

After a record-breaking season, the WNBA’s winning streak continues. A new report from data analytics firm Morning Consult, which tracks how consumers perceive thousands of brands each day, reveals no brand’s reputation rose more throughout 2024 than the WNBA’s. “It’s rare that a sports league ever makes any type of ranking that we put out,”…

As the movie business struggles to return to pre-pandemic box office attendance levels, a few of the cinema ad firms are collaborating to make their inventory available programmatically. 

Screenvision Media and Spotlight Cinema Networks have formed the Cinema Programmatic Alliance, which aims to make their inventory available to advertisers and agencies placing dollars through programmatic firms. The two have also included smaller cinema ad specialists to the alliance: Pecan Pie Productions and On the Wall, both of which focus more on local advertising.

Notably absent is the largest cinema ad firm, National CineMedia, which has its own programmatic offering in the market. Screenvision’s CEO John Partilla said the alliance offered NCM the chance to join the alliance, communicating via the Cinema Ad Council. NCM did not respond to requests for comment. 

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As marketers grow wiser about the multitude of ways to reach gamers, gaming company Overwolf’s focus on owned-and-operated gaming properties has helped grow the company into one of the industry’s largest ad networks.

Founded in 2010 as a software platform for game developers, Overwolf has since evolved into a holding company whose portfolio includes a range of prominent gaming platforms, including the game modification platform CurseForge, in-game payment service Tebex and gaming ad tech company Nitro. Last year, Overwolf brought in nearly $50 million in ad sales, with brands and agencies such as Universal Pictures, Nissan, Dentsu and Havas buying into the company’s gaming inventory.

Overwolf has continued to grow over the past year. In August, Comscore released data indicating that Overwolf had become the fourth-most-visited gaming property in the United States, surpassing the platforms of competitors including Activision Blizzard and Epic Games. At the moment, Overwolf’s unique monthly user count is now above 100 million, more than doubling its audience year over year, according to data the company shared with Digiday.

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This week’s Media Briefing looks at publishers’ strategy on Bluesky (or lack thereof) and how that compares to what they’re doing on X and Threads.

• Bluesky and Threads are “small potatoes” in terms of their role as traffic referrers.
• The Verge’s paywall, BuzzFeed’s debt, Amazon wooing publishers and more.

Bluesky vs. Threads vs. X

Another day, another new social media platform to test.

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When it comes to artificial intelligence technologies affecting the ad industry, programmatic marketers would naturally be toward the tip of the spear. After all, their roles originated as machines disrupted traditional buying methods. And now AI-based ad buying tools are similarly changing the nature of their roles. 

During this week’s Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit in Nashville, Tenn., agency executives convened behind closed doors and opened up about how the insertion of AI has impacted their abilities to optimize clients’ campaigns and how they are having to adapt and define the value they bring to the table. The executives were granted anonymity in exchange for their candor, and a selection of what they had to say is excerpted below.

AI-powered ad buying has a transparency problem

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The curation buzz is no longer just talk — it’s shaping the market, especially in M&A. Case in point: Experian snapping up Audigent.

The data broker announced the deal yesterday, but stayed tight-lipped on the price. A former Audigent insider, however, pegs the valuation at somewhere between $200 million and $250 million. This estimate was backed by several other sources, citing knowledge of Audigent’s business. Experian, for its part, declined to comment on the financials.

It’s likely that there were no third-party bankers involved, given the pair have had a formal relationship since 2022; plus, the estimated price tag (as cited above) would likely mean that Experian’s corporate development team would not have to seek board approval to close the deal. Formal negotiations on a sale are understood to have taken place since early fall 2024.

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President-elect Donald Trump will break his extended hiatus from non-Fox News legacy media outlets this weekend. With one month to go before he re-enters the Oval Office, Trump is set to speak with NBC News’ Kristen Welker on this Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press. It’s his first network interview since Election Night, when the…

The addition of Audigent’s combined first-party publisher data and inventory network and sell-side distribution with Experian’s existing demand-side capabilities builds on the company’s identity
technology to help clients gain a better understanding of customers.

In connection to Giving Tuesday, TikTok has launched an updated “Donation” feature designed to make it easier for people to raise donations for organizations directly in the app.

Meta admits to errors that inhibit free expression across its family of social-media apps and says it is seeking changes to promote fairness.