Month: February 2025

The new NBA All-Star format drew mixed reviews from both viewers and players, but sponsors still bought into Warner Bros. Discovery’s vision for the weekend. According to Jon Diament, Warner Bros. Discovery’s evp of advertising sales, the company sold out the entire weekend’s ad inventory for NBA All-Star 2025 on TNT, truTV, TBS, Bleacher Report,…

What do the most senior execs in the C-suite actually think of chief marketing officers (CMOs)? It’s complicated, according to fresh research from Gartner, shared exclusively with ADWEEK. The research firm interviewed 125 chief executives (CEOs) and chief financial officers (CFOs) to get the inside scoop on what’s expected of CMOs and how they can…

When the Swedish apparel retailer signed up Karl Lagerfeld to design a limited-time collection in 2004, it raised hackles in haute couture circles. But after the entire Karl Lagerfeld x H&M collection sold out in a few hours, H&M never looked back. For the ensuing 20 years, it signed deals with a who’s who of…

In the midst of the retail media network boom over the past two years, retailers including Walmart, Amazon and Target, have increasingly started trying to monetize their creator networks and affiliate programs, according to six agency retail media executives Digiday spoke with for this piece. RMN execs see those monetization efforts as a play to take in more ad revenue, especially the brand marketing dollars retailers have spent the last year vying for.

These tactics are formalizing their respective influencer programs as the demand for influencer marketing grows — even as RMNs still face challenges in incremental measurement. Notably, influencer marketing has become a vital part of the media mix with marketing spend in the U.S. influencer marketing ecosystem expected to reach $9.29 billion this year, per eMarketer.

“The impact creators and influencers are having on marketing strategies can’t be ignored, and retail media networks are well aware of the potential,” David MacDonald, evp and head of retail and commerce experience at marketing agency Razorfish, said in an emailed statement to Digiday.

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Despite all the fragmentation in the space, despite the political uncertainty, despite the inconsistent and ever-changing algorithms, social media remains an irreplaceable piece of brands’ and retailers’ marketing strategies. And within those strategies, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram platforms remain the examples of social marketing success.

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Two years after YouTube launched the YouTube Shorts revenue share program in February 2023, creators are finding that their payouts for short-form content are still dwarfed by the ad revenue they can glean from long-form videos.

Six creators who have traditionally focused on long-form content told Digiday that their RPMs (revenue earned per 1,000 views) for YouTube Shorts were consistently beneath $0.20, compared to average RPMs of between $3 and $6 for their long-form content. It’s worth noting that long-form YouTube videos can carry multiple ads, which would help to boost a video’s RPM, whereas YouTube Shorts revenue is shared among creators based on viewership.

“This month, I had an idea for a long-form video, worked on it all night, and after being live for one week, it had made more money than an entire months’ worth of shorts,” said the “Magic: The Gathering” video creator Maldhound, who asked to keep his real name private to protect his personal information. He told Digiday that his average RPM for 20-to-30-minute long-form videos was roughly $5.50, compared to an average RPM of $0.18 for Shorts.

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In January, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission finalized an updated version of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. And for as much attention as the update may have received, it probably merits more.

“It is a big deal. And I think because there’s been so much other activity in the news, people haven’t really paid attention to it,” Debbie Reynolds, a privacy expert and founder, CEO and chief data privacy officer at Debbie Reynolds Consulting, said on the latest Digiday Podcast episode.

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Marketers have begun to turn back toward brand-building strategies in recent months. But that doesn’t mean they’re totally abandoning the ideas underpinning performance marketing.

One sign that’s the case is the rise of alt-measurement companies like System1, iSpot and EDO, each of which offers solutions that promise to help marketers track the impact of brand creative. Their testing solutions are used to optimize — and ultimately justify — the media and creative budgets put aside by advertisers for TV tentpole events like the Super Bowl.

Despite the turn back toward “market-leading creative” by brands such as Kimberly-Clark and Nike, marketing budgets across the industry have shrunk in recent years. Gartner’s 2024 CMO survey found that on average, marketing budgets represented 7.7% of overall company revenue, down from 10.5% in 2019. In short, marketers are pursuing brand-building strategies with weaker hands than they’ve had in previous years.

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Today (Feb. 25) marks the half-way point of the 75-day extension TikTok was afforded by President Trump.

While a lot’s happened over the past month, the entertainment platform still doesn’t seem any closer to knowing its fate in the U.S.

Which is why Digiday has checked in on the platform to see exactly where it’s at right now, with just 37 days left to go until the deadline.

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The marketing playbook continues to be rewritten. In an increasingly fragmented cultural landscape, that reevaluation is coming to celebrity partnerships which has marketers rethinking who they partner with and how.

Take Nike’s new partnership with Kim Kardashian, on a new women’s activewear brand called NikeSkims. The New York Times’ likened it to that of Michael Jordan and Nike, which long has been seen as the creme de la creme of brand partnerships and celebrity endorsements as it allowed Nike to not only enter a new market (basketball) but to cement its brand within culture. Could Kardashian’s shape wear brand be the next?

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