The Digiday Podcast

Day two of the Digiday podcast at Cannes Lions, and our guests were Jean Freeman, CEO and principal of L.A.-based Zambezi agency, accompanied by Grace Teng, who runs Scale by Zambezi, the agency's media unit. In an era where rebundling is back on the table, creative shop Zambezi was a bit ahead of the curve by launching Scale by Zambezi back in 2018, and both Freeman and Teng shared their thoughts...

Welcome to The Digiday’s Podcast at Cannes. The first guests are Sir Martin Sorrell, founder and chairman of S4 Capital, parent of Media. Monks digital agency network, and Tara Agen, head of marketing operations and martech for HP, which is a Media. Monks client.  In a wide-ranging conversation that touched on encouraging diverse hiring, economic prospects for the second half of the year and favor...

Spotify will head to this year’s Cannes Lions festival with a new product to peddle to advertisers: Spotify Ad Analytics. The measurement tool aims to provide advertisers with reporting on how their ads are performing on Spotify as well as the impact they are having on advertisers’ businesses outside the platform through the corresponding introduction of the platform’s own tracking pixel. “It’s ta...

The TV and movie industry is once again on the verge of a production pause, at least for scripted projects. The Writers Guild of America’s ongoing strike has put the brakes on the pre-production process, and while the Directors Guild of America reached an agreement with film and TV studios on June 4 to avert a strike, the Screen Actors Guild could still strike and bring about a work stoppage come...

Content creator, chef and soon-to-be restaurateur Tue Nguyen (who goes by @TwayDaBae on her social media accounts) started working with BuzzFeed as the host of its Tasty show, "Making it Big," in 2022. After filming two seasons of the show, and recording monthly videos for the cooking brand's channels as part of her role within the BuzzFeed Creator Network, Nguyen is now developing a new show with...

Advertisers are beginning to see the financial benefits of reducing the carbon emissions created in their digital advertising businesses, but there is still a long way to go before sustainability becomes a shared point of focus across the media and marketing industries. Still, a lot of progress has been made by brands, agencies and publishers alike to at least begin measuring the scope of their ca...

The TV advertising industry is in the midst of a measurement overhaul, and Donna Speciale sees signs that the measurement landscape will more accurately account for diverse audiences. “With the current dataset, which is panel[-based], there has been underrepresentation for minority audiences, and everyone has known it. It was hard to quantify, but everybody realized it,” Speciale, TelevisaUnivisio...

For beauty influencer Sarah Palmyra, Instagram Reels has historically packed the most punch when it comes to driving sales of her favorite products. Last June, Palmyra posted an unsponsored, short-form vertical video about her love of Soft Service's Smoothing Solution product. It was originally posted on TikTok, and later republished on her Instagram Reels account, and according to the company, th...

Like many short-form video creators, Jorge Soto got his start on TikTok. But a year and a half after uploading his first video to TikTok in March 2020, he gave YouTube’s TikTok clone a try. “In two months, I gained a million subscribers, which is crazy,” Soto said in the third episode of the Digiday Podcast’s four-part series on short-form vertical video creators. Initially, Soto would repurpose h...

If Snapchat wants to prove to creators that they can make serious money by posting videos on its short-form vertical video platform, it may not need much more evidence than Alyssa McKay. “I’m on this Snapchat mid-roll [ad] program, which I’ve been part of since last May. I’ve made over a million dollars from Snapchat mid-roll,” McKay said in the second episode of the Digiday Podcast’s four-part se...

In the possible scenario in which TikTok gets banned in the United States, TikTokers like Kat Stickler will need to rely on other platforms to maintain their followings and their brand partnerships. But Stickler, who has almost 10 million followers on TikTok, isn’t worried. That’s partially due to the fact that she already has over 1 million Instagram followers, 268,000 YouTube subscribers and 116...

Publishers' events businesses have been a bright spot in an otherwise grim economic climate. While trade publishers and consumer publishers have different approaches to how events fit in their portfolios, both are benefiting from advertisers wanting face-to-face impressions with prospective customers. VentureBeat’s total revenue increased by 50% year over year from 2021 to 2022. And despite having...

Advertising has been a tumultuous business for some time now, but the one section of that market that’s been holding its own for publishers is events. Part of the reason for that is that brands themselves are realizing that they need to differentiate themselves with consumers, which — according to Lindsey Abramo, the recently appointed CRO of Leaf Group, who was a guest of a live taping of the Dig...

Lynette Kaylor’s background does not mirror that of a traditional TV ad sales boss. But her history in data and identity technology does indicate the makeup of a modern TV ad sales boss. Before joining Fubo as the streaming pay-TV service’s svp of advertising sales last August, Kaylor worked at Dentsu’s data arm Merkle where she worked on identity tech partnerships with publishers and platforms —...

As The Guardian’s fiscal year concludes on March 31, Luis Romero, the publication's svp of advertising in North America, acknowledged that his team has had a “late start” to receiving RFPs and budget planning with advertisers and agencies for the rest of 2023. However, those conversations picked up in the “last couple of weeks,” with several of last year's major advertisers starting to talk about...

At the end of this month, publishing executives from around the country with gather together in Vail, Colo., for the three-day Digiday Publishing Summit to discuss the various challenges facing the media industry, including how the economic downturn has affected advertising revenue, how the launch of new artificial intelligence technology is impacting content production and how more privacy laws m...

NBC News has taken a two-pronged approach to TikTok. In addition to adapting news videos posted to other platforms for the short-form vertical video app, the Comcast-owned news organization creates original videos specifically for TikTok. NBC News executive producer of original social video Devan Joseph and director of social platforms Stephanie Scrafano joined the Digiday Podcast for a deep dive...

Nearly three years after advertisers and agencies pledged to diversify their spending to support Black-owned media companies, there remains a shortfall in the amount of money actually making it to Black-owned media businesses. “We’ve definitely seen movement and momentum. But without question, I think that they have fallen very short from the promises that they’ve made. And even this year, with al...

At the beginning of February, advertising agency Reset Digital launched a new programmatic marketplace for the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), a trade organization that represents more than 200 Black-owned newspapers in the U.S., including the Sacramento Observer, The Philadelphia Tribune and the Dallas Examiner. The goal of the marketplace was to connect large advertisers like P...

A reckoning that most media companies contend with, Blavity Inc has started the revenue diversification efforts of moving from a display advertising-first business model to include more reader revenue options, like commerce. To help with the transition, Melody Brown was hired as Blavity Inc’s new associate vp of consumer media in Sept. 2022 from Travel + Leisure to help with the construction of th...

Last September, The Athletic introduced ads to its business model for the first time (aside from podcast and newsletter ads that've been in the mix since the publication's origins in 2016). This opened a door to revenue diversification, something the subscriptions-centered business had been lacking. The path to profitability was originally set for 2023, and was later pushed back to 2025 after The...

For as big as the short-form vertical video market has become over the past few years, 2023 is poised to be a monumental one. YouTube will start sharing ad revenue with Shorts creators on Feb. 1, as TikTok continues to open the revenue-sharing program it introduced last year to more creators. TheSoul Publishing -- the media company behind 5-Minute Crafts and 123 Go! -- is among the short-form vide...

Earnings season is officially under way, and Eunice Shin has her eye on streaming service owners’ abilities to retain their subscribers. “In a world where economic uncertainties still exist, where the quality of content continues to be hits-based and a lot of bombs, how are we thinking about churn and how are these streaming platforms keeping the customers they’ve worked so hard to gain in an incr...

Many publishers pivoted to short form vertical video in the past year as platforms prioritized those content formats in their algorithms. Betches Media, however, invested more in its social-first content strategy that it’s had since its creation in 2011, according to co-founder and CEO Aleen Dreksler, to continue reaching its audience of primarily millennial and Gen Z women. It seems to have paid...

Vice Media Group ended 2022 behind where it thought it was going to be — about $100 million short of the revenue goal of $700 million set by its leadership at the beginning of the year. But Geoff Schiller, VMG’s global EVP of commercial & sales strategy is optimistic that events, intellectual property and digital video will be the sellable assets that carry the company forward in 2023. That’s beca...