Advertising Perspectives

Bill Masterson, President, Publishers Clearing House  A dominant factor guiding the industry has been that cookies and mobile app IDs are vanishing and will be replaced by some mixture of new and emergent identity solutions.  ... read more

The war for talent between agencies and brands’ in-house agencies has cooled. Even so, for adland talent who’ve made the move in-house, some say they are looking to go back to agencies after feeling creatively ... read more

Rent-to-own retailer Aaron’s is looking to boost brand awareness through bilingual TV spots as well as out-of-home and print ads — all with a little help from Mr. T. Last month, the 67-year-old furniture, electronics ... read more

The annual Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity is good for more than a sunburn along the Croisette and exclusive parties. Since its inception, it has been the go-to place for marketers and advertisers to converge ... read more

The great ad tech rebundling is here. Well, it is if the smoke signals coming from the Riviera are anything to go on. Execs there can’t seem to stop talking about the issue it seems. ... read more

With live events back in full swing, esports companies are increasingly expanding their event programming beyond competitive gaming, both to reach a changing esports audience and educate brand partners about the value of gaming fandom ... read more

Sponsored by MNTN Connected TV has solidified its role as a crucial part of the advertising mix, and as it establishes its permanence within omnichannel marketing strategies, both opportunities and challenges are emerging.  Advertisers ... read more

In this week’s Media Briefing, media editor Kayleigh Barber reports on how publishers are adapting their blockchain-related efforts amid crypto’s bear market. HODL patternWhy a local publisher started selling standalone newsletter subscriptionsSemafor’s launch plans, Google’s ... read more

Publishers have historically struggled to compete for audiences’ attention when they were shifting to consuming content on social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube. Now, young people are actively avoiding the news, which was a ... read more

Rounding out a series of moves to accelerate its e-commerce efforts and offerings — all of which have been announced at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity — Omnicom has struck a strategic collaboration with Kroger ... read more

The Boston Celtics aims to get as many eyeballs on its own brand — as well as its sponsors — as possible. In recent years, the team has gone after more integrated partnerships to make ... read more

When most ad execs preach the latest buzzworthy trend they’re likely promising visions that either already exist, are vague or are schemes no one actually wants. Mark D’Arcy isn’t one of those execs. The former ... read more

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify 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 ... read more

There was an air of uncertainty around the festival’s return after a two-year, Covid-induced hiatus with many wondering if the festival would maintain its relevance. It has for some, at least as the slew of ... read more

Continuing a drumbeat of e-commerce moves that it’s rolling out during Cannes Lions, Omnicom has partnered with the king of commerce, Amazon, in a move that involves sharing of data, new tools and several levels ... read more

The Trade Desk has inked a deal to integrate Unified ID 2.0 with Amazon Web Services as the ad tech company continues to further the rollout of the email-based identifier. The integration means companies using ... read more

Timberland has entered the metaverse. The brand kicked off a multi-faceted activation last week that included an interactive Fortnite Creative experience, the Timberland Parkour Trails, in addition to other projects exploring the uses of virtual ... read more

For an industry that was so desperate for an in-person reunion, there sure is a lot of talk about the virtual world as the metaverse gets a bright spotlight at this year’s Cannes Lions International ... read more

Another Cannes, another sojourn for publishers to the south of France in search of validation from the rest of the market. It’s the old song and dance: Time and again, they have stated their case ... read more

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify 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 ... read more

This week’s Future of TV Briefing features an interview with Vox Media Studios’ chief creative officer Chad Mumm who talks about the media company’s latest show and how the production business has evolved. The present ... read more

It was expected to be a tempered return after a two-year hiatus, given the current state of the world. But the many maskless faces, swanky cabanas and massive tents along the Croisette seemingly prove that ... read more

Brands have flooded into Roblox over the past year, working with both the metaverse platform and its creator community to launch custom-built branded spaces. So far, the Roblox brand activations that have garnered the most ... read more

When it comes to marketing privacy, sometimes privacy alone isn’t enough. Recently, ProtonMail rebranded itself as Proton and now offers much more than email, forming a privacy-focused ecosystem including its email, VPN, cloud storage ... read more

In the second of a series of moves Omnicom is making at this week’s Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, the agency holding company today struck a strategic partnership with e-commerce player Instacart that involves sharing ... read more

With the third-party cookie going away, advertisers, publishers, platforms and ad tech firms are looking for a new means of applying data to target ads to people and measure how those ads performed. And the ... read more

“Employee resource groups” (or ERGs) were historically thought of primarily as social groups for employees at a company. But since the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, ERGs have been getting more attention. With more ... read more

IP mashups are becoming as intrinsic to the metaverse as the Story format is to social media.  These days, consumers are clamoring to mix and match their favorite brands and branded intellectual properties — the weirder, ... read more

When it comes to advertising around news, fear often overrides sense among marketers. They’re more worried about being inadvertently associated with an extreme event than they are the halo effect that comes with supporting ... read more

There are still a lot of questions surrounding the impending end of the third-party cookie — including who stands to benefit from the move and who will likely be left scrambling to adapt. Digiday+ Research ... read more

In the second of a series of moves Omnicom is making at this week’s Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, the agency holding company today struck a strategic partnership with e-commerce player Instacart that involves sharing ... read more

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify 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 ... read more

After two years of waiting with bated breath (through N95 masks, of course), the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity returns to the Riviera. Marketers and advertisers can expect to find much of the usual wheeling ... read more

You know times have changed when media agencies do a little soul-searching as a result of digging into what they need to do differently for their clients. As the media world tries to get ... read more

As if e-commerce isn’t already a hot enough topic in the media industry, Digiday has learned that Omnicom plans to announce a raft of e-commerce-related partnerships with major retail players during the Cannes Lions festival ... read more

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify 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 ... read more

Welcome to Digiday’s DealBook. Our focus is to create a quick and easy rundown of the deals, acquisitions and hires taking place the previous week. The goal is to inform and update you on the ... read more

After a two-year hiatus, marketers from around the world will once again travel to the south of France for the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity next week. Although the weeklong event took on a virtual ... read more

Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2021 and some brands and agencies are likely to celebrate it for the first time this year. The expansion of celebrating Juneteenth with a day off as well as ... read more

The New York Times Company and Vice Media Group have made Juneteenth an official company holiday this year. They join a host of other publishers – including BuzzFeed, Condé Nast, Dotdash Meredith, G/O Media, Hearst ... read more

What could be better than a nice refreshing glass of rosé in the sunshine on the mediterranean coastline? Well, how about a nice refreshing drink on the Côte d’Azur, without the hot flushes, guilt and ... read more

Adland is fervent with anticipation for the first in-person Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity since the Covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on the global economy with the glamor-gathering officially kicking off on June 20. ... read more

In this week’s Media Briefing, media editor Kayleigh Barber reports on how the economic slowdown and Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection feature have affected newsletter publishers’ advertising businesses. Pressure on newsletter publishersJournalists dissatisfied with their organizations’ ... read more

Making digital content accessible to people with disabilities is something almost everyone in the industry can get behind — more than 80% of agency and brand executives agree that more must be done about it, ... read more

As the creator economy is bursting at the seams, LTK is leveraging video across all screens to better stand out from the competition and garner a bigger share of shopper attention.  The digital advertising marketplace ... read more

Fewer €600 bottles of average rosé. Larger crowds at Hotel Barriere Les Majestics. More agencies hosting at the beach, not in a hotel suite. And that’s just because the Carlton Hotel is closed for renovations. ... read more

Vistaprint designs and supplies business cards, labels, banners and other kinds of branding and advertising materials for millions of small businesses around the world. It’s no wonder, then, that the company touts small businesses in ... read more

The Cannes Lions weeklong festival has always been a tough test of endurance — now it’s close to Herculean. The festival was once second nature to attendees, but many would benefit from tips, recommendations and ... read more

There’s no doubt that chief marketing officers are under more pressure than at any time since the CMO position first formed in the 1950s around TV and print advertising. Today they have to play a ... read more

Los Angeles Times has formed a six-person team to create content on Instagram and TikTok for a young, diverse audience that may not already be part of the news publisher’s audience. Called 404, the team ... read more

As retailers increasingly invest in ways to let advertisers reach consumers on their online properties, Sam’s Club is the latest to give its ad network a major overhaul. The Walmart-owned company today is rolling out ... read more

With the business-to-business ad revenue pie set to surpass $30 billion next year in the U.S. alone, B2B agencies are looking to secure a satisfying slice. And with the growing options of social and digital ... read more

With interest in all forms of gaming advertising on the rise, hyper-casual mobile game developers are looking to assert the value of the advertising inventory within their product. Although newer forms of in-game advertising ... read more

This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at the stage of the upfront cycle where advertisers submit their orders, which may not match up with the initially agreed-upon commitments. The real upfront marketConnected TV’s ad ... read more

Nearly two years ago, agencies across the country released diversity data, admitted to shortcomings and made commitments to do better. Last year, some agencies released updates to that diversity data, with middling results. This ... read more

The Interactive Advertising Bureau has released updated measurement guidelines for intrinsic in-game advertising — and in-game ad firms are rejoicing at the news. Although in-game ad tech has improved at a rapid pace in recent ... read more

Complex Networks’ ComplexLand was born out of necessity to replace some of the revenue lost when the pandemic shut down the publisher’s largest shopping and entertainment event of the year: ComplexCon. But from that ... read more

The so-called “war for talent” may be cooling off between agencies and brands. That’s not to say it’s easy to hire for an open position now – agency execs say it can still be difficult ... read more

For the last year, vaccination rates have gone up, while fear of the pandemic has seemingly gone down. With that, employers have been calling staff back to the office in an effort to foster company ... read more

Although not official, Google has reportedly offered to let third parties place ads on YouTube in a bid to placate EU antitrust authorities, a move that could have far-reaching implications. The fact that ... read more

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify 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 ... read more

As the elements that encompass Web3 — the metaverse, NFTs, blockchain, crypto, gaming and DAOs — wend their way into the marketing universe, media agencies are taking heed and learning their makeup and potential as ... read more

Welcome to Digiday’s DealBook. Our focus is to create a quick and easy rundown of the deals, acquisitions and hires that took place the previous week. The goal is to inform and update you on ... read more

Liberty Mutual’s rolling out a new ad this month featuring familiar animated characters: Minions. The insurer is doing so as part of a co-marketing effort to promote the Liberty Mutual’s offerings as well as the ... read more

After a two-year hiatus, the schmoozing and dealmaking usually found at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is back in-person. But it may look a little different this year.  While there’s excitement, advertising agency ... read more

Bundling appears to be the new strategy for newsletter publishers like Axios that are hoping to lock in loyal readers. In March, Axios decided to package its AM and PM newsletters, along with the newly ... read more

The $20-billion (give or take a few billion dollars) TV upfront marketplace quietly registered a significant portion of business in the last several days, in an orderly fashion that represents a 180-degree turnaround from last ... read more

Last fall, cryptic messages began showing atop the iconic Columbus Circle billboard in New York City. Along with the temperature and time, the sign at first showed words from a now-famous white paper written by ... read more

It’s official. AT&T’s ad tech business Xandr (formerly AppNexus) has a new owner: Microsoft. The reported $1 billion deal was completed earlier this week on Sunday and gives the software company access to a host ... read more

The continued uncertainty of the economic landscape has not only made forecasting more difficult but made some marketers more anxious, leading them to question their current plans as well as need more hand-holding from agency ... read more

Last year saw a gold rush of public listings in the ad tech and martech sectors, with companies in the space eager to take advantage of a hot stock market fueled by the Wall Street ... read more

The media brand Full Squad Gaming launched in late 2020, focused on gamer-oriented video content on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. Since then, the company has expanded rapidly, hiring prominent talent such as gaming ... read more

The economy’s decline this year has already been alarming. The big questions for many marketers are how gruelling it will ultimately become and how they can endure it. The numbers are worrying: The World Bank ... read more

Connected TV combines the best of traditional TV and digital for advertisers. At least, that’s the promise of CTV. In practice, the hybridization of TV and digital in CTV is more complicated due to nuances ... read more

Identity technologies are the backbone of programmatic advertising, which has been dependent on tracking user data and third-party cookies for decades. In fact, most non-premium publishers depend on ad targeting through third-party cookies for over ... read more

In this week’s Media Briefing, media editor Kayleigh Barber looks at how publishers like Gannett and The Atlantic are surveying their readers to accumulate more first-party data that can boost their advertising businesses. Micro-surveying at ... read more

Time’s events business is on pace to bring in at least $10 million in revenue this year for the first time, according to Ian Orefice, president and COO of Time and Time Studios. The business ... read more

In recent years, brands and agencies have worked to address employee stress and burnout by offering more paid time off, subscriptions to services like Headspace or Calm and direct conversations with employees about mental health. ... read more

As their quarterly earnings rolled out last month, publicly-traded gaming and esports companies highlighted growing revenues and expanding audiences as evidence of their continued success. But these declarations ignored the fact that the majority of ... read more

Unbothered — Refinery29’s five-year-old vertical for a young, Black audience — is preparing to host its first large-scale, in-person ticketed event, called “The Glow Up.” The two-day event will take place in Atlanta on June ... read more

This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how measurement costs could complicate TV networks’ and advertisers’ efforts to shift to a multiple currency era. Currency costsThe TikTok-driven push for on-camera talentNetflix eyes sports rights, ... read more

Ear piercing retailer Studs is taking a more serious stab at TikTok. Over the last year, the three-year-old, New York City-based brand has ramped up paid media spend and started partnerships with TikTok creators to ... read more

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify 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 ... read more

Agencies and brands are obviously concerned about the death of the third-party cookie and the impact on their marketing businesses, but the reality is most don’t have a solid plan regarding what exactly post-cookie measurement ... read more

Advertisers have been itching for the return of in-person events, largely to get back the face-to-face moments with attendees and what those experiential additives can do for brand awareness. But with the looming recession, being ... read more

Some marketers are retooling the way they think about ads on Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram, aiming for brand awareness rather than immediate sales.  In recent years, marketers have been aiming to diversify their social media ... read more

The kick-off date for Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference has been one the digital advertising industry has circled on its collective calendar with a sense of trepidation. For good reason: in recent years, features such as ... read more

If you want something done right then do it yourself, as the saying goes — and at Vox Media that’s truer than ever, as the company is moving to cut out a group of ad ... read more

Paul Thompson, UK country manager, Seedtag  Concerns about online privacy, intrusiveness and irrelevant ads are driving consumer antipathy toward advertising as an industry. As a result, marketing teams face the increasingly difficult challenge of changing ... read more

The exit of Meta’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg is undoubtedly a momentous moment in its history, a departure that comes as the social media giant seeks to mold its next incarnation in the metaverse. ... read more

Late last week, a coalition of governmental organizations, academics and private sector companies banded together at an environmental conference to form the Coalition for Digital Environmental Sustainability (CODES), to engender a “green revolution,” as its ... read more

Welcome to Digiday’s DealBook. Our focus is to create a quick and easy rundown of the deals acquisitions and hires taking place the previous week. The goal is to inform and update you on the ... read more

Plant-based food brand Silk is pouring efforts into TikTok for the first time, as the 45-year-old brand looks to refresh itself and appeal to younger, more diverse shoppers.  As TikTok grows in popularity, the short-form ... read more

Over the last year, direct-to-consumer period care brand Viv has focused marketing efforts on TikTok, using the platform to boost brand awareness and educate consumers about how to use their menstrual cup. Doing so has ... read more

Food52 has let go 21 employees across the company, accounting for 15% of staff. Additionally, the media company’s content team and part of its creative team have been moved to a 32-hour workweek, a spokesperson ... read more

The uncertainty of the current economic landscape has been a challenge for marketers and agency execs as they’ve had to figure out how to communicate inflation hikes as well as deal with fears of a ... read more

Vox Media is working on identifying the titles, newsletters and franchises that are primed for the addition of shopping content, either by adding that content to existing newsletters or creating separate e-commerce newsletters. It comes ... read more

As another holding company steps up its embrace of attention metrics as a valuable tool for media planning, media mix modeling in particular, it turns out there may be a halo effect on figuring out ... read more

Everyone eats each other’s lunch in ad tech but maybe nowhere near as brazenly as they do now. Not a month seems to go by at the minute without one ad tech vendor going after ... read more

In this week’s Media Briefing, media editor Kayleigh Barber interviewed The Cut editor-in-chief Lindsay Peoples about the abortion guide that Vox Media-owned New York Magazine and The Cut published last month. Cut to the coreRecurrent ... read more