Author: rssmasher

Cinema advertising platform National CineMedia, the U.S. representative of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, officially launched the 2025 Young Lions competition and its new partnership lineup, including the Young Lions Titanium Award and new agency sponsorship. The 2025 competition marks 10 years of NCM’s role as U.S. representative and the first since NCM’s…

Meta is borrowing a page from Elon Musk’s X on free speech and censorship, but advertisers aren’t hitting the panic button — yet. 

For now, they’ve brushed off Meta’s decision to scrap its U.S. fact-checking program in favor of a community notes system reminiscent of X’s and to loosen restrictions on contentious topics like immigration and gender identity. 

Instead, marketers are in wait-and see mode, hoping for clearer guidance on what content Meta will still police. So far, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has offered them little beyond vague assurances, leaving the details up in the air.

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The new medical series “The Pitt” might be the most proficient scripted, emergency-room drama in the long history of such shows.

Does this mean lowering the media-buying threshold for such traditional media messaging – especially given lower legacy TV viewing? Where does more exposure on streaming fit in?

Brands have long been able to track if their Amazon streaming TV ads lead to sales on the ecommerce giant. Now, they can see if those campaigns drive sales at other retailers, too. While Amazon dominates retail media budgets, the bulk of shopping still happens in stores, and advertisers are increasingly hungry to see if…

Mark Zuckerberg has fully adopted the language of his former right-wing critics about what constitutes censorship.

As people try to stick to New Year’s resolutions, Hanes has issued its own maxim for fresh starts: “If You Wouldn’t Flaunt It, Refresh It.” Created by agency of record Special U.S., the brand’s new campaign calls out people’s habit of wearing undergarments well past their prime. You know: holey socks, bras with exposed underwire,…

The clock is officially ticking for TikTok. What once seemed far-fetched now feels more real than ever. After a long, contentious battle–with TikTok arguing that a ban would be unconstitutional and violate free speech rights, and lawmakers citing concerns over data privacy and foreign influence–the app recently lost its legal efforts in the D.C. Circuit…

If anything is clear for 2025, it’s that the cracks in an already fragmented social media landscape are only getting deeper. This year, marketers might be willing to slowly walk away.

“The social media landscape of 2025 will be a difficult place for brands to navigate, harder to monitor, and therefore less appealing to sink resources into,” Stephen Faulkner, director of research and analytics at global creative collective Forsman & Bodenfors New York, said in an emailed statement to Digiday.

Still yet in 2025, social ad spend is expected to continue to climb, reaching more than $82 billion, significantly up from the $75 billion forecasted for 2024, according to Statista. As expected, Facebook is likely to take the lion’s share of that spend, more than 80%, per Statista, leaving competitors like TikTok and Pinterest, and newcomers like Bluesky and Lemon8, facing off for remaining ad dollars. So even if there are more dollars, that spend will likely be more dispersed than ever.

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Generative AI was a big part of marketing discussions throughout 2024, as brands and agencies became eager to invest in AI tools to do everything from creating internal workflow efficiencies to producing consumer-facing ads. These discussions will continue into 2025, and a lot of the industry hype around the technology revolves around the potential for it to make marketers’ jobs easier, faster and more efficient. But some industry experts say there’s a risk of over-relying on automated ad creation.

Another factor in the AI picture that will carry into the new year is the prospect of AI-generated or altered content being labeled as such. Marketers are hesitant to see “made with AI” labels slapped across their creative campaigns, as such a label doesn’t differentiate between content completely generated by AI or content in which AI tools were simply used to help during the creation process — despite the fact that those are two different things.

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