Month: March 2025

The new ad format has led to higher brand performance and lifted unaided brand recall by 53%.

While SXSW has star-studded panel stages, film screenings, and flashy brand activations for the masses, Luck Reunion offers brands a way to test the waters in Central Texas before making a bigger investment.

The campaign kicked off at last year’s CinemaCon.

Curation’s biggest problem might be its name.

Everyone has a different version of it. Ask an ad tech vendor, and curation is about packaging high-quality inventory for better performance. Ask a data broker, and it’s a vehicle for layering on proprietary audiences. Ask a publisher, and it is a rare chance to reassert some control in an ecosystem that’s spent the last decade pulling power away from them. The only thing everyone can agree on? It’s a growth area.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Money is moving behind it. Deals are getting done. The term “curation” now appears in pitch decks, product updates and M&A strategy. It’s become a default explanation for what comes next in programmatic.

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Despite there being a sea of more than 250 retail media networks, the reality is that it works out to be Amazon, Walmart and everybody else. Everybody else — in other words, the smaller players like Best Buy Ads and DoorDash — has spent Q1 of this year working to step out of Amazon and Walmart’s shadows and take in more ad spend.

While media buyers and retail media agency executives say there’s a chance for these smaller competitors to achieve their goal and actually take in more ad spend, it’s unclear if their efforts, which include third-party partnerships and new ad offerings, will be enough to eat into the market share of the RMN titans.

“If these small networks can play their data cards right, they can set themselves apart from Walmart and Amazon,” Cindy Meltzer, vp of research and analytics at ad agency Dagger, said in an email to Digiday. “Sometimes niche is more profitable than scale.”

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The creator platform Spotter last Friday hosted the Spotter Showcase, an upfront-style event featuring top YouTube creators. Both the event’s organizers and participants took to the stage to broadcast a clear message: that YouTube is most definitely TV.

Spotter’s creator upfront in NYC, which was hosted by YouTubers Colin and Samir and showcased talent such as Kinigra Deon, MrBeast and Jordan Matter, took place just over a month after YouTube CEO Neal Mohan published an open letter announcing that television devices had surpassed mobile devices and personal computers to become the primary device for YouTube viewing in the United States by watch time. 

“We have started to see creators prioritizing high-quality viewing experiences that shine the brightest on TV screens,” said YouTube’s TV senior director of product management Kurt Wilms. “The share of videos uploaded to YouTube in 4K is up by over 35 percent year over year, so creators are certainly adjusting their content for the big screen.”

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Working moms constantly juggle two nonstop ticker tapes — one filled with work deadlines, the other carrying the endless mental load of motherhood. It’s a daily reality that rarely gets the attention it deserves.

In this episode of Mom’s at Work — WorkLife’s limited edition podcast on the challenges working moms face today — we discuss the daily dance that so many moms perform: the push and pull of balancing professional goals and financial stability with family responsibilities.

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President Trump’s latest tariff proposal is creating headaches for automotive marketers and media buyers, but they’re not slamming the brakes on media spend just yet.

The uncertainty created by the mere threat of tariffs can often lead to marketplace confusion, consumer hesitancy and unnecessary pullbacks in media spend.

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Despite previously stating it’s an ad-free zone, Substack — like many other platforms before it — is no longer ruling out advertising.

“For us, advertising is an interesting business,” Hamish McKenzie, Substack’s co-founder and chief writing officer, told Digiday. “Maybe some way off in the distant future.”

Call it a reality check — a realization that growing a platform is an expensive business, even one that takes a 10% cut of the money subscribers pay their favorite writers. There’s only so much growth that can come from reader revenue. Whereas ads, when done right, promise scale, margins and the kind of financial upside that’s hard to ignore for long.

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It’s been a tough three months for publishers, according to executives who spoke during a closed-door town hall session at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado, last week.

“Not a great quarter. Traffic’s down. Advertisers are very timid in spending. They’re in a wait-and-see mode. So this is definitely the downslope. We expect it to come back, but definitely not a great quarter,” said one publishing exec.

Q1 is typically a slow quarter for ad revenue, as post-holiday spending slows and new ad budgets get reset. But the exec said the downturn they’re experiencing now contrasts with the same period in 2024, which was their company’s “best quarter … ever.”

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