The Digiday Podcast

Prebiotic soda brand Olipop is in growth mode, coming off $200 million in annual sales and its first national campaign with pop star Camila Cabello last year. A lot of the six-year-old brand’s initial popularity tracks back to TikTok. However, the last year has been transformational for Olipop, positioning itself as a true competitor to the likes of legacy brands like Pepsi or Coca Cola. “We’re su...

Earlier this year, Janice Min, CEO of The Ankler, said that she’s expecting to hit $10 million in annual revenue in 2025. During a podcast recording with Digiday, Min revised that statement to say, “We have a shot of getting to that number this year.” To do that, Min’s team is taking a three-pronged, straightforward approach: Make good content to attract audiences, quality audiences that are attra...

Coming off of SXSW where Vox Media hosted the conference’s three-day-long podcast stage, the company’s recently appointed CRO Geoff Schiller is going all-in on these types of in-person selling opportunities to generate ad deals for the publisher’s portfolio of digital and audio assets. Centering the Vox Media sales pitch on talent, franchises and tent poles, Schiller said on a recent episode of th...

For the last few months, marketers and advertisers have finally had to reckon with the fallout of Google’s crumbling third-party cookie amid an increasingly fragmented media landscape. Meaning, targeting and measurement are getting harder to do. However, it’s something Liz Mella, director of marketing for Farmer’s Fridge, has been tasked with working through as the food vending company is without...

Zola isn’t just a website for weddings anymore. Late last year, the e-commerce company went from a one-stop destination for all things wedding to include a new baby registry service, Zola Baby. Typically, a new service comes with renewed customer acquisition efforts. But this latest endeavor has revolved around word-of-mouth as opposed to shelling out ad dollars to find new shoppers, according to...

While the recent advertising slowdown has also impacted the amount of money allocated to marketing to media companies created for non-white audiences, Parker Morse, CEO and founder of My Code said that it hasn’t stopped marketers from realizing the value in reaching multicultural audiences. In fact, while the industry standard is 5% of advertiser budgets earmarked for multicultural marketing, that...

Following an on-stage conversation at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit in December, Kerel Cooper, president of advertising at Group Black, joined Digiday once again on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast to dive further into his continued efforts to shed light on the legacy programmatic media buying practices that often disadvantage Black-owned media companies. Working with ad verif...

Magic Spoon, the cereal company that launched entirely online back in 2019, has since expanded its footprint to more than 16,000 national retailers to meet shoppers where they are, whether that’s online or in-store. Historically, the cereal company built its millennial and Gen Z following via short-form social media videos, podcasts alongside other direct-to-consumer brands. But as its retail foot...

Last year, PepsiCo Beverages was taking a test-and-learn approach to a fragmented video landscape. This year, with more ad-supported streaming platforms, most recently including Amazon Prime, the continued creator economy boom and more, there are more places than ever to advertise. That fact is one of the things that keeps Katie Haniffy, senior director of media strategy and investment for PepsiCo...

Adam Baidawi stepped into the role of British GQ’s head of editorial content in November 2021 at a time when the legacy men’s fashion and lifestyle title was facing a crucial pivot point in its identity. Not only was Condé Nast reimagining its editorial and business strategy to be internationally structured, but the very idea of men’s fashion and luxury was evolving from a singular ideal image to...

Digital media companies have to be willing to change with the times if they want to make 2024 a growth year. For Gallery Media Group, publisher of PureWow and ONE37pm as well as over 70 social media-first brands like @Recipes and @Cocktails, this means testing out new social offerings like TikTok Shop, creating social campaigns for clients that will still work despite rapidly changing algorithms a...

Between Google’s third-party cookie phase out (finally) and the generative AI boom, there are many changes facing the marketing and advertising industry this year. It’s a lot for any marketer to keep up with, let alone the chief marketing officer at a 117-year-old legacy company like Xerox, an office equipment brand. But it’s exactly what CMO Deena LaMarque Piquion has on her to-do list this year,...

Bloomberg Media made some changes to its sales operations last year in an effort to stay on top of the tumultuous ad market, including hiring Christine Cook as its new global chief revenue officer. Under Cook’s leadership, the events business hired a new head of event sales to put more intentional focus on that revenue stream, a client council was created to produce a more effective feedback loop...

Social media is in its so-called unhinged era, where social media managers are breaking the digital fourth wall and speaking the language of the internet from branded accounts. At the helm of the unhinged social media movement is a big green owl, Duo, brand mascot for the language learning app Duolingo. Duo has made a name for itself on TikTok with funny skits as the social media team behind the o...

This year was another one for the advertising and media history books, but not for the ways that marketers and media execs hoped for at the start of 2023. Brands’ advertising budgets never quite found their footing and the competition for ad revenue only got steeper. On top of that, the platforms are no longer reliable places to drive traffic or revenue but competing with their scale is a losing g...

The final episode of Digiday’s History of ad tech discusses how the digital media industry has moved faster than those charged to keep it in check, with Ana Milicevic of Sparrow Advisers sharing her insights. In this episode, she discusses how the blurred lines between data management platforms, customer data platforms, and now, data clean rooms have only served to confuse matters. Now that legisl...

Semafor is about to close the book on its first full calendar year, having launched in October 2022 as a media and events company. And despite launching during a tumultuous time for any media organization, Semafor’s co-founder and CEO Justin Smith said that his team had profitable months this fall, even coming close to breaking even in the fourth quarter of 2023. This accomplishment was made possi...

Joanna O’Connell is one of the most recognizable names in ad tech, a fame she built over the course of three decades as an industry analyst, and marketer, among other roles. O’Connell is now evp of innovation at R3. In this episode of Digiday’s Oral History of Ad Tech, she speaks with Seb Joseph about her role in helping to build one of the media industry’s first agency trading desks at Publicis G...

In the wake of measurement woes and data privacy initiatives muddying digital targeting capabilities, a number of companies have pivoted to become less reliant on targeting customers via third-party cookies to generate quick sales via performance marketing. Instead, they've become more focused on boosting brand awareness to re-familiarize customers with their brand. Airbnb is one of those companie...

There are few better placed to critique and narrate the history of the digital media landscape, never mind the sub-sector of ad tech, than Ari Paparo. The serial entrepreneur and ‘first influencer of ad tech’ – sorry @AdtechGod – now helps to demystify and humanize the often dry milieu of digital media PR in his missives over at Marketecture. This week, he speaks with Digiday reporter Ronan Shield...

Big advertisers are seemingly ready to abandon X (formerly Twitter) for good this time thanks to owner Elon Musk’s latest antics and an uptick in anti-semitic posts on the platform. In X’s absence, advertisers may once again find themselves looking for the social media’s next town square after failing to be wooed by X alternatives like Mastodon and Bluesky earlier this year.  Enter Spill. It’s bee...

One of the Godfathers of ad tech on creating an industry, competing with Big Tech, and exactly why he didn’t join AT&T, plus much more Few would argue Brian O’Kelley’s right to claim the title of being one of the Godfathers of ad tech, for what is still one of the nascent spaces of the media industry, his tenure in the sector dates back three decades. During this time, O’Kelley has helped build tw...

Between the Department of Justice’s antitrust suit against Google and the impending self-imposed deadline for removing third-party cookies from its Chrome browser, there is a lot on the technology megacorp’s plate. But Dan Taylor, the company’s vp of global advertising, is confident that nothing will change the timeline that Google has set for cookie depreciation: “Cookies will be phased out compl...

The podcasting advertising industry looks a lot different today than it did even two years ago thanks to programmatic audio ads. While the bread and butter host-read ad format still packs a punch when it comes to driving listener engagement and conversions, those ads aren’t scalable, said Lizzie Widhelm, svp and head of ad innovation and B2B marketing at SiriusXM Media. And in 2023’s slow ad marke...

At this point, TikTok has gone from an experimental digital channel to a must-have in most marketing strategies. Ad spend on TikTok is expected to grow in the coming year — as much as 25% over this year — as the short-form video app looks to bridge the gap between its cultural impact and ad revenue. While TikTok has become a staple within the culture of social media, agencies and brands are still...