Month: February 2025

Today’s marketers have plenty of experience navigating economic uncertainty. They’ve guided their brands through pandemics, elections and long stretches of economic uncertainty, and they’ve built up a playbook of responses and strategies as a result.

That said, the last few weeks have forced many to dust off their playbooks as they figure out how to navigate the latest challenge – a pending trade war between the U.S. and much of the rest of the world. U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs targeting China (as well as mooted policies targeting the EU, Canada, Mexico, Taiwan and others), will inevitably affect advertisers and their investment plans.

For most marketers, the emergence of tariffs poses the same dilemma as a recession or pandemic: You can spend your way through it, or spend less.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

As U.S. creators looked to diversify their online presences following the Jan. 19 TikTok outage, creators in the United Kingdom increased their posting activity in a bid to fill the potential void.

In the week following the United States’ Jan. 19 TikTok outage — the seven days between Jan. 19 and Jan. 25 — video creators in the U.K. posted 15 percent more content than they did during the seven days leading up to the ban, according to figures shared with Digiday by influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy. This data was the result of a report created by the agency on Jan. 31, which analyzed the activity of over 10,000 creators across the U.S. and U.K. following the outage.

Billion Dollar Boy’s report also found that TikTok creators in the U.S. had decreased their posting activity by 3 percent in the week after Jan. 19, creating a potential content void that some U.K. creators rushed to fill. During the same period, U.S. creators’ posting activity increased by 16 percent on Instagram Reels and by 14 percent on YouTube Shorts.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Barely two months into the year, and here we are with yet another expose on the cesspool of content that programmatic ads bankroll. 

A decade into these recurring scandals, the reaction cycle is predictable: outrage, disbelief and a flood of finger-wagging — this time, even from U.S. senators. 

Usually, this would be the part where someone unpacks the convoluted mechanics of ad tech to explain why it keeps happening. 

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

For marketers, the stakes of the Super Bowl are clear. It’s the one night of the year when people eagerly await the advertising with high expectations. It should be the venue where marketers find a grand or silly or audacious or inspiring — or whatever adjective fits — way to say the thing that they want to say to people and make the (at least) $8 million media spend worth it.

But those very stakes and the need to make the outsized spend worth it may be working against marketers’ better instincts, as they are desperate to create something that will appeal to everyone, but may ultimately appeal to no one. This year, marketers have been taking a more light-hearted approach to advertising around the Big Game, leaning on comedy and celebrities, recognizing that it’s a more delicate environment given the fractured nature of the country.

This is a member-exclusive article from Digiday. Continue reading it on digiday.com and subscribe to continue reading content like this.

Podcast orgs and publishers aren’t using videos of their audio shows to try to grow listenership. Well, they are trying to do that — but there’s not really a good way to measure if that strategy actually works well. 

Instead, podcasters are framing their video production efforts as a way to attract incremental audiences, by producing more video from their audio shows to grow viewership and measure audience growth holistically — a prime example of the convergence between audio and video podcasts.

That’s not necessarily a new trend. But as podcasters increasingly produce more and more video content from their audio shows, publishers and podcast organizations are measuring the success of those strategies by looking at growth both in listeners and viewers, according to conversations with five heads of audio.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts • Spotify

Google’s long kiss goodnight with third-party cookies seems never-ending at this point, as the tech giant’s cookie phase-out plans still remain unclear.

Seemingly, Google’s plan to ask Chrome users to opt in to cookie-based tracking is reflective of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) move a few years back. Sure, marketers have long since seen the writing on the wall with this. But, as the future of third-party cookies remains rather ambiguous, marketing and brand executives, including Rankin Carroll, global chief brand officer at Mars Snacking, have started eyeing partnerships and leveraging artificial intelligence to fill in the gaps, with an eye toward a cookie-less future.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

AI agents will rapidly become the next customer-service support system for brands – mainly because the technology has the ability to teach the platform how best to support customers. And that will
change personalization across industries forever.

The Eagles blew out the Chiefs, and Fox blew out the ratings record. Today, Fox reports that Super Bowl 59 reached an average of 126 million viewers. Those numbers come from Fox projections, including Nielsen Fast Nationals and Tubi/NFL first-party analytics. With the rating, Super Bowl 59 becomes the most-viewed Big Game ever, beating Paramount’s…

Elon Musk and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, co-founded OpenAI along with 10 others in 2015. Now the two are in a complicated legal battle that could stop Altman’s plan to make OpenAI a for-profit
company.

With all due respect to the Philadelphia Eagles, there was another big winner at Sunday’s Super Bowl. The Nike logo was shown onscreen more than any other brand during Sunday’s Big Game between the Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs, measurement and technology company Samba TV tells ADWEEK. Nike’s logo appeared 819 times across 521…