The Digiday Podcast

It’s been nearly a year since German-based Axel Springer acquired Politico for over $1 billion, which included both the U.S. and EU iterations of the brand, in addition to the almost 3-year-old technology-focused title Protocol. Since that acquisition, the Politico brand has started undergoing a merger of sorts internally as well. Despite sharing a brand name and founder — Robert Allbritton — Poli...

Publishers’ commerce businesses can take many forms nowadays, from earning small commissions with in-article affiliate links to creating an entire direct-to-consumer (DTC) product line that turns a publisher into a retailer. But given commerce revenue is down this year for some media companies and the economic slowdown has put restraints on shoppers’ wallets, publishers may need to rethink their c...

Advertising is taking a hit from the economic slowdown. For some advertisers with podcast and audio budgets, they want to reach more listeners efficiently rather than invest in expensive custom branded content. For Wonder Media Network, however, programmatic advertising isn't part of its inventory. There are certain instances where programmatic advertising in audio makes sense, according to Shira...

The summer can be a slow period for many companies, however the economic downturn, supply chain issues, rising inflation rates and world events like the Russian invasion of Ukraine didn’t take time off when the rest of us did. Now heading into the fall, a lot of media execs are trying to strategize for a business environment that doesn’t reflect how it used to look even six months ago. At Digiday,...

CBS News is adding more traditional TV talent to its streaming outlet. After rebranding its streamer as CBS News Streaming Network in January and adding a show hosted by “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell, the Paramount-owned news organization is now updating its streaming service’s primetime lineup by having former “Face the Nation” host John Dickerson anchor CBS News Streaming Network’s 7...

There has been plenty of talk among advertisers and agencies about the need for brands to move ad dollars to minority-owned publishers to ensure they are reaching as many potential customers as possible. As svp and head of economic empowerment at Dentsu Media, Mark Prince is charged with turning that talk into action. “We’re guiding our internal investment and strategy teams to make sure that we h...

BuzzFeed Inc. chief revenue officer Edgar Hernandez and his team have been preparing for a potential recession since May. “We did some recession planning and presented that to senior leadership back in June. And so we’ve been playing the game as if we are in a recession,” he said in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast. That recession planning boils down to two focuses with respect to BuzzFee...

The Washington Post is starting to feel the squeeze on its advertising business but CRO Joy Robins is relying on lessons learned from the 2020 revenue slump to mitigate its impact on the business this time around. Similar to the previous guests of The Evolving CRO series on the Digiday Podcast this month, Robins said her role as revenue chief at the Post has changed tremendously, even in just the...

In March, Vox Media expanded the purview of Ryan Pauley's role as chief revenue officer beyond ad sales to also encompass consumer revenue, affiliate and commerce businesses. Rather than diluting the role of ad sales, the broadening was designed to give the media company's advertising business a boost by connecting it more directly with Vox Media's other revenue streams. "There was a historical ex...

The job description for a chief revenue officer at a media company doesn’t resemble what it used to a decade ago. “There was a time where the lion's share of my job was just going out on sales calls,” said Mia Libby, revenue chief of The Daily Beast, who’s held that position for nearly five years. That was back when she considered the CRO title as more of the head of ad sales given the fact that a...

Slate has been in the podcast business for nearly two decades, but refreshed its strategy this year to increase the frequency of its most popular shows. “Slowburn,” “Decoder Ring” and “One Year” are all narrative podcast series at Slate that will move from one season per year to two or three, to increase listenership as well as give advertisers the opportunity to advertise in those products at dif...

Don’t sleep on privacy regulation. So far 2022 may be lacking 2018’s one-two punch of the General Data Protection taking effect in Europe and the California Consumer Protection Act being passed in the U.S., but a spate of recent regulatory jabs could be setting up for a right hook. Consider the privacy regulation moves of the past couple months. The recently introduced American Data Privacy and Pr...

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,...