Month: March 2025

Dirt has adopted an ad strategy closer to streetwear collaboration than standard sponsorship.

Tom Bedecarré, co-founder and former chairman of AKQA, has died at age 70. 

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Retail media’s moment in the advertising spotlight continues — both for better and for worse. Concern is growing among marketers about transparency in retail media negotiations, and no one quite knows who should control retail media budgets. But at the same time, marketers keep spending in the channel.

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A downturn is coming, but the ad industry might talk itself into making it worse. 

We get it. The world is a mess. Tariffs are doing the economic hokey pokey, geopolitics are one long anxiety attack, and President Trump is back with his signature brand of chaos.

It tracks that 2025 ad spend forecasts are sliding. Who wouldn’t be skittish? 

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Concerned over Substack’s ideological messaging, some creators are leaving — or considering leaving — the platform in 2025.

One of those creators is sportswriter Joe Posnanski, who published his final Substack post on March 3. Although Posnanski was successful on Substack, achieving a following of over 47,000 on the platform, he said that his decision to leave was motivated by a desire to distance himself from the platform’s growing association with politically extreme voices.

“When you search my stories online, you see Substack above my name,” Posnanski said. “Whenever something would blow up a little bit with Substack, I was somehow connected to that, and I didn’t like that at all.”

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Just weeks ago, the mood among marketers was one of mild crisis. The prospect of a TikTok-less future — unthinkable yet suddenly plausible — had them sketching out fallback plans, hedging bets and recalibrating campaigns. But as the April 5 deadline looms, when TikTok must find a non-Chinese buyer or risk being banned on national security grounds, the panic has curiously subsided.

In its place is something more measured: a composed, almost serene confidence, bolstered, perhaps, by recent meetings with TikTok reps who are still standing. Despite a noticeable thinning of the app’s advertising ranks in recent weeks, those who remain have done their best to project business-as-usual, even as the ground beneath them continues to shift.

“TikTok said they were ‘feeling very optimistic’ about their future in the U.S., but could not share any additional information on what will happen,” said one ad exec, who each exchanged anonymity for candor on their discussions with the platform in the U.S. 

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When Dotdash Meredith made its deal with OpenAI deal last year, it wasn’t only opening its content to ChatGPT. It was also enlisting OpenAI’s large language model to assist its contextual ad product D/Cipher.

“With OpenAI, we now have a tool that allows you to understand language at a much more granular level, and therefore make much more intentional connections between pieces of content when you’re looking for linkages,” Lindsay Van Kirk, svp and group gm of D/Cipher at Dotdash Meredith, said on stage in a live recording of the Digiday Podcast during last week’s Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado.

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Another Google core update was completed last Friday, the first one this year — but what it will mean for publishers won’t be clear for a while, if at all.

Google’s core updates, which happen multiple times a year, change its search algorithms and systems and have the potential to make or break publishers’ traffic. Last year’s core updates threw publishers for a loop. A core update in March 2024 aimed at cleaning up spam and low-quality content in Google search results hit news publishers hard, with many seeing their sites’ search visibility fall. Another change to Google’s algorithm at the end of the year decimated publishers’ product review sites. 

Publishing execs were keen to discuss the latest core update in a closed-door town hall session during the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado, last week. The consensus was clear: there is a sense of Groundhog Day when it comes to Google’s updates, and they’re yet again in the dark and at the mercy of those changes. (It’s been almost a year since Google rolled out its AI-generated search feature AI Overviews, and publishers still know very little about how it’s really impacting their referral traffic, for example.)

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As if the retail media boom isn’t under enough scrutiny, new tariffs and talk of a potential economic recession have sparked more questions about the negotiation process that is known as joint business planning (JBP).

Already, some advertisers have started to walk away from the negotiation table with retailers, citing concerns over transparency, standardization and measurement. Now, as economic headwinds threaten consumer spending, and in turn marketing budgets, agency execs say brand clients are more hesitant than ever to sign JBP commitments.

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The documents reveal a DOGE affiliate is attempting to transfer the headquarters of an independent think tank, the United States Institute of Peace, to the government at no cost.