Mondelez International’s Nutter Butter went viral with a disturbing, surreal crime scene of smeared peanut butter and broken cookies. Language-learning app Duolingo’s green owl twerked for millions of followers and flirted with pop star Dua Lipa. Mars pet food brand Sheba pitted cats against each other in a race to lick gravy. All of these…
Polestar Has a Bold Plan—Get Better at Selling Cars
The China-controled EV brand has been losing tens of thousands of dollars on every car sold. With a US ban on Chinese car sales looming, the company needs to quickly turn things around.
This QSR Brand Wants to Seduce Gen Z by Screaming in Their Faces
If you have a heart condition or any other issue that puts you at medical risk in the event that a stranger suddenly screams in your face, then it’s best to stay far away from German Doner Kebab (GDK)’s chaotic new ads. Running on Facebook and Instagram in parts of the U.S. (including cities in…
Overtime Is Investing Millions Expanding Its Athlete Talk Shows, Citing Virality
The sports media company Overtime plans to expand its slate of athlete talk shows in the coming months, growing its current roster of four series to as many as 10, according to chief executive Dan Porter. “By September, we will most likely double the size of the network and invest millions of dollars in this,”…
For Rocket Companies CMO, A Rebrand Is Just The First Step Towards Disruption
For the past nine months, Rocket Companies, along with creative agency of record Mirimar, and design agency Otherway, has been studying brands like Nike, Apple, and Airbnb to inform the direction of its rebrand. This week, the fintech company–which houses mortgage, real estate, and financial services brands– debuted its new logo, wordmark, and color palette….
As TikTok teeters, YouTube, Meta, Snapchat and more race to claim its ad dollars with incentives, discounts
With TikTok’s fate in the U.S. dangling between the Supreme Court and President-elect Donald Trump, competitors are moving in to try and claim its ad dollars.
Snapchat, for example, isn’t holding back. In recent pitches to marketers, the app’s ad sales team has highlighted the notable audience overlap between Snapchat and TikTok in the U.S., both on a daily and monthly basis, according to two slides shared with Digiday.
The first slide shows Snapchat’s claim that 60% of U.S. users over the age of 18 also use TikTok daily, while the second slide highlights that 77% of Snapchat’s U.S. users aged 18 or over use TikTok monthly. Both slides strongly indicate that anyone seeking a possible replacement could at least find a majority of their TikTok users over on Snapchat.
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Discord’s advertising push continues: A Q&A with new Discord CBO Jules Shumaker
As Discord’s budding romance with brands and advertisers continues, the platform has hired its first-ever chief business officer to scale up its sales and partnership business.
Jules Shumaker, Discord’s new CBO, comes to the company with over two decades of gaming advertising experience. Most recently, she served as CRO of Unity between 2021 and 2024; prior to Unity, she worked as a vp of advertising for the game publisher Zynga. Her first day as Discord’s CBO was Jan. 6.
Shumaker’s entrance comes at an opportune time for Discord. Having established itself as the gaming community’s dominant text and voice chat platform, the company hired a team of experienced platform and gaming executives to launch its first ad product, Play Quests, in March 2024. In October of last year, Discord launched its second ad product, Video Quests. Both are rewarded ad formats — ads that give users an in-app reward in exchange for their engagement and attention — that prompt Discord users to play a certain game or engage in other activities to receive on-platform digital prizes such as profile-picture overlays.
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Twitch streamers lament likely loss of TikTok as an audience referral engine
The impending U.S. TikTok ban could threaten some creators’ ability to grow their audiences across all platforms — not just the embattled Chinese-owned short-form video app.
As the United States marches toward a TikTok ban on Jan. 19, livestreaming creators in particular are lamenting the potential death of the platform’s so-called “clipping culture,” which they believe had an uplifting effect on their followings on both TikTok and other platforms.
“TikTok is pretty commonly used now for Twitch growth,” said Gappy, a Twitch streamer who asked to keep his real name private. “When we think of the new age of Twitch streamers — Kai Cenat, CaseOh, Jynxzi — they all got their virality through TikTok.”
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Telcos in ad tech, haven’t we seen this movie before?
Telcos and ad tech: the media world’s messiest on-again, off-again relationship. T-Mobile’s $600 million cash swoop for outdoor ad specialist Vistart is the latest reunion in this turbulent love story.
Slated to close this spring pending approval, its ad tech’s first notable deal of the year arrives as outdoor advertising cements itself as the sector’s rising star.
What truly stands out, though, is the deja vu. The bit where hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, exchange hands only to come crashing down years later? Haven’t we seen this movie before?
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Xiaohongshu Scrambles to Hire English-Speaking Content Moderators
Job listings posted in China this week indicate that Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote, is struggling to handle an influx of new users joining the platform from TikTok.