The Digiday Podcast

Augmented and virtual reality are well on their way to becoming a mainstream marketing tactic as technology democratizes the space, making it a QR code away for brands and consumers alike. At this point, the industry has gone well beyond flower crown and dog-eared Snapchat filters with Meta, Apple and other tech giants rolling out wearable augmented and virtual reality headsets. (Find a look into...

The New York Times tapped Joy Robins as its global chief advertising officer this past spring and six months later, Robins is leading her team through a number of industry-wide changes. Previously chief revenue officer of the Washington Post, Robins is not unfamiliar with the challenges that news publications are facing when it comes to brand safety concerns and monetizing news coverage. And at th...

Sports media was built on live coverage of games, but younger generations are increasingly less interested in watching sporting events as they happen. That doesn’t mean that the live video format isn’t still appealing to this demographic, though. At least that’s what Bleacher Report’s general manager, Bennett Spector, is finding. Spector’s team spent this past year investing heavily in building a...

The industry’s stalled DE&I progress has been a point of critique. Despite the promises, media companies are still mostly hiring white people as of this year. In 2022, 90% of agency leaders identified as white, up from 73% in 2021, according to the 4A’s 2023 Diversity in Agencies Survey Report. Meanwhile, DE&I positions are drying up after a surge in hiring, with those positions facing the brunt o...

Digiday Media and WorkLife is proud to present season two of The Return, a podcast about what it’s like for Gen Z to enter the workforce for the first time in a post-pandemic world. In season one, The Return followed an Atlanta-based advertising agency as the company returned to the office after a two-year pandemic hiatus. There were clear challenges among this population of workers who knew what...

Today’s social media landscape is an increasingly fragmented one, where legacy platforms are faltering, giving way to challengers. Within that landscape, social media advertisers and professionals are tasked with experimenting and potentially building audiences as they go. Enter the fediverse. The fediverse is best described as a group of social media networks that are independent but still able t...

The autumn season is ushering in some change to the Digiday Podcast. As of this week, Digiday’s senior media editor Tim Peterson will step down from his role as co-host of the podcast after nearly three years at the helm. Kimeko McCoy, Digiday’s senior marketing reporter, will succeed Peterson and serve as the new co-host of the Digiday Podcast alongside media editor Kayleigh Barber. With this cha...

Advertisers’ aversion to the news seems to be a neverending issue for news publishers. Tales of advertisers’ overly broad keyword blocks continue to pop up, as they did during a live recording of the Digiday Podcast at the September 2023 Digiday Publishing Summit. “Another one we just saw was around the U.S. Open, actually, when Coco [Gauff] won and we had advertisers blocking [articles containing...

Plenty can change in a year, particularly in the publishing industry. A year after the media business slipped into a downturn, the upswing seems to have started, at least for Hearst Magazines. “We’re actually seeing more [requests for proposals from advertisers] for 2024 than we had seen at this time last year,” Hearst Magazines evp and global chief revenue officer Lisa Howard said on the latest D...

A few years ago, at least two-thirds of Georgia-Pacific’s ad dollars went to traditional TV. Now the channel accounts for less than 50% of the CPG giant’s spending. “That has been a pretty big shift out of linear TV into more digital channels over the last few years,” said Laura Knebusch, vp of marketing at the parent company of brands including Angel Soft, Brawny and Dixie, said on the latest Dig...

Several publisher CROs are optimistic that ad revenue is coming back in a positive way in the back half of 2023 and Reuters CRO Eric Danetz is no exception. Beyond rebounds in ad categories like finance, as well as growing strength in auto and travel, 2024 presidential election campaigns are starting to kick off and as a result, political advertising revenue is flooding back into the digital media...

It was the summer of acronyms based on the major trends that Digiday reported on over the past four months: MFAs (made-for-advertising sites) became a pain point in programmatic advertising circles. Publishers and marketers started experimenting with generative AI technology and debating over its uses. The SAG-AFTRA (actors’ union) and WGA (writers’ union) went on strike. Many publishers started p...

Rather than relying on the continual quarter-by-quarter or even month-by-month sales cycle trends to guide their 2024 campaign strategies, the clients of ad agency Pereira O’Dell are already thinking ahead to 2024, almost six months ahead of time. But in order to accurately plan in an otherwise murky ad market, factoring contingency plans into their 2024 budgets will be a critical step, according...

For all the attention being paid to X (née Twitter) these days, Ariel Sims is keeping a closer eye on Meta’s Threads at the moment. Between the two text-based social platforms, the latter is the one that the svp and head of paid social at Digitas North America said she’s spending more time talking with clients about and thinking about. “We’re having more conversation around [Threads]. But because...

In 2020, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission put out a call for advertising experts to advise the regulatory body on advertising and privacy. Raashee Gupta Erry, then a director at GroupM’s Essence, answered that call. Gupta Erry initially took an interest in the privacy side of the ad industry in 2018 when working with clients to prepare for Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation privacy law....

A lot has changed in the social media ecosystem over the last couple of weeks: Meta launched its Twitter competitor, Threads, Twitter was rebranded to X and TikTok announced its new e-commerce endeavor designed to compete with Shein and Temu. Understanding how these changes impact creators on those platforms, like publishers, can help shed some light on what the larger media and marketing industri...

This year’s Amazon Prime Day was a boon for many commerce publishers’ affiliate revenue streams. Take Wirecutter, for instance, which saw order revenue and overall earnings for Prime Day sales increase by “high double-digits” year over year, according to Leilani Han, executive director of commerce at The New York Times’s Wirecutter, on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast. While Han declined...

Two years after Vox Media entered the podcast subscription business through the Cafe Studios acquisition, the publisher has “tens of thousands of active paying podcast subscribers,” said Vox Media svp and gm of audio and digital video Ray Chao on the latest Digiday Podcast. “We acquired Cafe a little over two years ago, and we’ve learned a ton from just operating that business over the last two-pl...

Raffi Krikorian would have a better than average read on the artificial intelligence landscape, including as it pertains to potential regulation. Not only is the Emerson Collective CTO also the CEO of conversational AI company SpeakEasy AI, but the former Twitter and Uber executive was also the former CTO of the Democratic National Committee. And even Krikorian is unsure whether the U.S. Congress...

If you’re feeling a little punch-drunk by all the economic downturn talk through the first six months of 2023 (and really, through the last six-plus months of 2022), you’re not alone. Digiday editors and Digiday Podcast co-hosts Kayleigh Barber and Tim Peterson are feeling it too. At the year’s midway mark, the pair compare notes on the state of the media and advertising industries. The discussion...

As the CRO of Salon.com, Justin Wohl is a self-proclaimed programmatic purist, meaning that when it comes to ad sales, the news publisher is almost entirely monetized through the open programmatic marketplace. After joining Salon in 2017, Wohl said that it was clear direct-sold advertising wasn’t performing and his team reconfigured to focus exclusively on the open marketplace. Two years later, Sa...

The final episode of the Digiday podcast at Cannes centered around a topic which everyone on the planet — but especially the digital marketing ecosystem — should be thinking and doing something on: sustainability and carbon emissions reduction. Recording once again from Spotify's podcast studio along the beach of the Croisette, Anne Coghlan, co-founder and COO of Scope3, explained not only all thr...

On a blustery day at Cannes Lions (which prevented us from recording outside), I walked along Yacht Row, well known for the plethora of ad-tech and mar-tech firms that rent the floating party boats moored in Jetée Albert Edouard just astride the Palais des Festivals. I was accompanied by Tom Triscari, an independent analyst who covers the programmatic and ad-tech scene -- and was once worked in th...

In our third episode of the Digiday podcast here in the south of France, I chatted with George Popstefanov, founder and CEO of independent agency PMG, which is best known for beating out several holding-company agencies for Nike's North American media business. Popstefanov is proud that his agency started in 2010 with several engineers as part of its core — and tech and engineering remain a vital...

The gaming industry has experienced its fair share of ups and downs over the last few years, much like the rest of the media space. But it seems that the chips have fallen in a way in which gaming creators, specifically those who stream their content on live platforms like Twitch, YouTube and Kick, are in a position of power. At least, that’s how Damon Lau, head of gaming and esports at United Tal...