The Digiday Podcast

Digiday is proud to present The Return, a podcast about what the return to the office can look like as corporate America adapts to the new, not quite post-pandemic normal. The Return follows the staff at one Atlanta-based advertising agency through Covid outbreaks, as well as the highs and lows of transitioning to hybrid work after two years of pandemic lockdown and working remotely. While the fut...

The Wall Street Journal is finally entering the commerce space after spending a year figuring out what that business will look like for Dow Jones. Launched last month, Buy Side from WSJ is a standalone site whose newsroom operates separately from the Journal, but has the same focus of helping people make financial decisions -- a shared mission for Dow Jones’ other properties including MarketWatch...

Heading into this year’s annual TV advertising upfront negotiations, the big story was whether TV ad buyers and sellers would move en masse away from using Nielsen’s measurements as the currency for their upfront deals. They didn’t. However, that doesn’t mean the measurement makeover wave has ebbed, GroupM executive director of research and investment analytics Bharad Ramesh said in the latest epi...

BDG has been on a mission to revamp the brands in its lifestyle division for the past few years, by increasing the exclusivity in its events business, acquiring new luxury-focused fashion brands and adding shoppable elements to its content. But editorially, BDG’s namesake brands Bustle and Bustle UK have been undergoing a content transformation too, led by editor-in-chief Charlotte Owen. Taking a...

In the final installment of the Digiday Podcast from the 2022 Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, I was joined by Rob Pierre, the irrepressible CEO and co-founder of Jellyfish, a network of agencies and marketing services that specialize in digital work and transformation. Pierre distinguishes Jellyfish's operating philosophy from the agency holding companies on a two key levels. For one, Jellyfi...

The Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity is well underway, as the crowds along the Croisette clearly indicate. But a lot of the action, and heady conversations, are also taking place in the suites and conference rooms of the big hotels that dot the main boulevard of Cannes -- not to mention in the yachts parked in the Vielle Port alongside the Palais where Cannes content and awards are taking place...

The Digiday podcast this week is coming to you live from the Cannes Lions, where the media, marketing, ad tech and creative worlds have come together for the first time in person in two years. The guest for today's podcast is Joanna O'Connell, vp and principal analyst with Forrester Research, who offered an unvarnished view of the ills of the industry while crediting some corners of ad tech for tr...

Welcome to the Cannes Lions, which is meeting in-person for the first time since 2019. This week is going to be equal parts exhausting and exhilirating. Although the Lions celebrate all of advertising, the media agency world has taken more of a center-stage position in recent years. "Rather than just talking about servicing our clients and understanding our clients' business, what we're really doi...

In February, digital video publisher Team Whistle unveiled Magnet. The Eleven-owned media company billed Magnet as a social content agency rather than the more typical branded content studio label that publishers have opted for in the past. In the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Magnet lead Danielle Johnsen Karr explained that the company felt the studio label could constrain the roughly 35...

Google is keeping to its end-of-2023 deadline for disabling the use of third-party cookies in its Chrome browser, the company’s senior director of product management, ads privacy and user trust David Temkin said in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast. Of course, that timeline could still change, as it has before. But part of Google’s decision to extend its previous deadline was to give the c...

Born out of a college class project in 2017, Front Office Sports is entering its fifth year with an eye on growth. Earlier this year in February, FOS got a round of funding from Crain Communications, which bought a 20% stake in the company on a $25 million valuation. Founder and CEO Adam White said that the company is on a path to profitability this year between the investment and the success it's...

In the roughly two years since Jason Webby joined Future plc as chief revenue officer for North America, the U.K. publisher has acquired eight companies — including Marie Claire U.S., a portfolio of Dennis Publishing properties and data platform Waive — and the pace of acquisition is unlikely to slow in the short term given the company’s ambitions. “The shopping spree we’ve been on is pretty proli...

As the third-party cookie apocalypse approaches, it’s looking increasingly likely that there will not be one sole replacement that will satisfy publishers’ and advertisers’ needs. That’s never more evident than when you ask a media company about the different data collection strategies they’re testing right now. At Hearst UK, Faye Turner, head of commercial strategy and insight, and Ryan Buckley,...

The return to travel has come back in nearly full force and for a media brand like Condé Nast Traveler, that’s music to its editors’ ears. Like any travel publication in March 2020, CNT needed to pivot its editorial output to include more news about travel restrictions and less about where in the world its readers should jet off to. Since then, however, the brand has been able to pivot back to a d...

Influencers have developed a special knack for making a product go viral, selling it out seemingly overnight, and as more and more retailers and brands notice this, an opportunity has emerged for creators to take their talents (and followings) to new platforms to sell products in a more formalized manner. Enter influencer Katie Sands, who has run her lifestyle and fashion blog — as well as her Ins...

The idea of an “overnight sensation” is often sensationalized when it comes to individual video creators. To accrue a sizable enough audience to become a full-time creator can require years of consistently posting videos and cultivating a community around them. But, thanks to adhering to a disciplined streaming schedule, Twitch streamer Blizzb3ar became a full-time creator in less than a year. Dur...

Kris Collins was working as a hairdresser at the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, and like so many others lost her job. But she soon found solace in posting content on TikTok that made her — and her fast-growing audience — laugh. By July 1 that year, she hit 1 million followers on her TikTok page, @KallMeKris. Once that number quadrupled to 4 million, she decided to add YouTube into the mix to...

Creator duo Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry have a YouTube channel with more than 700,000 subscribers. But a little more than two years ago, they came close to calling it quits. “I have our 2019 [profit and loss record], and we were $18,000 in the hole,” said Chaudry in the latest Digiday Podcast episode. While the pair was producing videos for their YouTube channel “Colin and Samir,” their prim...

As a publication specializing in fashion and beauty, Vice Media Group’s Refinery29 has its origins in commingling content and commerce. Now the outlet is looking to extend its expertise to live shoppable video. “We’re going to start live testing [live shoppable video] in the spring. We’re considering YouTube as a our starting place, and we’re probably going to start with beauty because it’s a stro...

In his forty years of experience in TV production -- spanning shows including Fox’s “Hell’s Kitchen,” NBC’s “American Ninja Warrior” and Netflix’s “Floor is Lava” Arthur Smith has seen plenty of changes. Nothing like the past two years, though. “There was a point between March and July [2020] where we were stuck in neutral. We couldn’t produce anything,” the chairman of A. Smith & Co. Productions...

Crypto trade publication Blockworks is on track to earn $20 million in revenue this year, up from $13 million in 2021 and a large part of that strategy is targeting a new wave of wealth — DAOs. Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are basically clubs for crypto enthusiasts, but they can be as organized and official as a company. Most typically operate under a shared goal and give each mem...

One year ago, Overtime announced it was creating its own basketball league made up of 16- to 18-year- old players — a demographic representative of the sports’ publishers’ audience. Called the Overtime Elite League (or OTE), the social media-first sports publisher used some of the $80 million raised last year in its series C to build a basketball arena, boarding school and dorm facility in Atlanta...

Mark Garner’s job would have been much simpler a decade ago. As evp of global content sales and business development at A+E Networks, he’s charged with doing deals to distribute the company’s own original programming. “My job is to sell all the content that we have in our library and all of our upcoming content that we’re producing on a go-forward basis across a multitude of partners,” Garner said...

While some brands are flocking to the blockchain by launching NFTs or establishing themselves in the metaverse, other companies are still on either side of the spectrum. From contemplating whether their customers are ready for a new virtual shopping reality, or if the crypto-native internet users will be receptive to their brand’s debut in Web3, not all companies are ready to embrace the blockchai...

In 2021, Integral Ad Science (IAS) took the plunge into the connected TV space with the acquisition of Publica, a company that sells ad inventory for CTV publishers.  This was a departure for IAS as it primarily focused on measurement verification and brand safety standards, but CEO Lisa Utzschneider said that it was the right combination of skills, insights and data coming together that enabled t...