This year, chatter concerning mergers and acquisitions is all about whether 2025 will spark a deal frenzy across advertising and ad tech. Here’s the twist: the deal flow never really dried up in 2024.

In fact, the year kicked off with LiveRamp snapping up Habu for $200 million, and the pace of dealmaking steadily picked up — though it never quite became a flood.

Month after month of 2024 delivered notable deals, from Walmart’s February acquisition of Vizio to Outbrain’s August purchase of Teads.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

When training data is similar across major large language models, finding ways to make them more creative and more differentiated is increasingly important. That reality has more enterprise customers asking for ways to make AI more creative when generating content — and to help with the actual process of thinking creatively.

Last month, the AI startup Writer released a new LLM called Palmyra Creative that aims to help enterprise businesses squeeze more creativity out of generative AI. The goal isn’t just to help with outputs; it’s also to help companies using AI in more creative ways. Palmyra Creative follows other domain-specific LLM released from Writer such as the the healthcare-focused Palmyra Med and the finance-focused Palmyra Fin. (Writer’s customers using various models include Qualcomm, Vanguard, Salesforce, Kenvue, Uber and Dropbox.)

In terms of creative thinking, AI models overall already have evolved quite a bit over the past few years. Some experts have found LLMs to be more creative than humans in areas like divergent thinking. Last year, researchers at the University of Arkansas published a paper exploring how OpenAI’s GPT-4 model is able to generate multiple creative ideas, find varied solutions to problems, and explore various angles. However, current LLMs still are largely limited to their own knowledge via training data — rather than lived experiences or learned lessons like humans are able to tap into.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Have you ever planned a vacation using just TikTok to search your destination(s)? That’s more common these days than it used to be, thanks to the changing habits of consumers, who spend more time on social platforms or engaging with influencers.

According to new research coming out of Omnicom Media Group — aptly called The Future of Search — search has essentially evolved from a channel to a behavior, thanks to some of the above consumer adaptations as well as advances in AI and algorithmic application of content across the social sphere. 

Joanna O’Connell, Omnicom Media Group’s chief intelligence officer for North America, spearheaded the research but assembled a variety of team members from influencer shop Creo, cultural specialists Sparks & Honey, commerce shop Flywheel as well as design and research departments. S&H even did a Boolean query to see the latest cultural chatter on the topic. 

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Omnicom’s proposed acquisition of IPG, announced last month, would make it the world’s largest agency-holding company, with $25 billion in annual ad revenue and over 100,000 employees.

The deal aims to generate $750 million in cost synergies, primarily by consolidating back-office functions and reducing redundancies by potentially cutting 30% of staff. A depressingly familiar page in the corporate playbook.

However, the initial pitch from IPG and Omnicom’s executive teams focused on other outcomes, such as AI and the combination of both entities’ big bets in data-enabled marketing. 

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

It’s unsurprising that more teenagers aspire to become influencers, given how many grew up watching TikTok stars like Charli D’Amelio and Ariana Greenblatt go from social media to the big screen.

During this year’s U.S. presidential election, we saw greater interest from candidate Kamala Harris to engage Gen Z through TikTok trends like “brat” summer. Many major creators have also expanded beyond social apps to launch careers in acting, music or starting other businesses.

These are the first cohorts to grow up as digital natives, so they daydream about being creators, explained Alyssa Stevens, global director of PR, social media and influencer marketing at independent agency Connelly Partners.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

In June 2024, the mobile game developer HOMA published “Clean It,” a casual game inspired by the #CleanTok TikTok trend — and the game became a viral hit. 

The game launch, the result of a collaboration between HOMA and TikTok, is the latest example of the TikTok’s intentional bid to court game publishers onto its platform.

“Clean It” was not the first TikTok-inspired game to be published by HOMA, whose most popular titles include mobile games such as “Merge Master” and “Aquarium Land.” For years, the developer has created casual games by combining popular game genres with relevant TikTok trends. 

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Tech giants and startups alike have spent the past year building new generative AI tools for users and advertisers.

From AI images for programmatic ads to a growing number of AI-generated TV commercials, brands are starting to explore new ways of thinking about creative across various platforms. The final weeks of 2024 had big news with expanded access and improved outputs of generative models like OpenAI’s Sora, Amazon’s Nova and Google’s Veo.

Despite the technical feats, AI-generated content has gained both eager devotees and harsh critics. Depending who you ask, the category’s a powerful new form of creativity, underwhelming “AI slop,” or an IP-stealing job-killer. However, the question is, which of these viewpoints will be the one to stick.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Another year, another remarkable give and take for the advertising industry. See below for what we think is in store for 2025.

In
Anti-woke corporate backlash 
Out 
DEI corporate wave

In
Fragmentation of brand safety
Out
Industrialization of brand safety

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Marketers are faithfully obsessed with the shiny new thing when it comes to their brand activations. So it’s no surprise that in year two of having generative AI at their disposal, marketers have rushed to use it in their advertising. 

But so far, consumers aren’t as enamored with generative AI created ads as marketers have been. Throughout 2024, the marketers who obviously used generative AI to make their ads (Toys R Us, Under Armour, Coca-Cola) or touted the possibilities of generative AI in their ads (like Google’s Olympics ad they pulled following backlash) had their ads panned by the general public, particularly the creative community. 

Despite that, the expectation is that marketers and agency execs will continue to (and likely increase) the use of generative AI in 2025. Marketers are regularly asking questions about how creative agencies are using generative AI and how they can integrate it into the creative process for their brands. Creative agency execs, for their part, believe that generative AI is simply a new tool that they’re going to continue to experiment with in various ways – though most don’t see their experiments going fully generative AI powered, at least not yet. 

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Sports marketing spend shot up in 2024. Amid soaring viewership figures for last year’s Olympic Games, worldwide ad spend on sports-related advertising rose to $60.9 billion, according to WARC.

But sports marketing doesn’t always just mean chasing the largest audience possible. In 2025 brand marketers are set to seek audiences via niche, unconventional sports opportunities. Interest among audiences in spots such as padel, pickleball and darts is rising — and in recent months, brand marketers have moved to get in on the game while they’re still emerging.

Best Buy, for example, signed up this winter as one of the principal sponsors of TGL, a televised simulator golf tournament. The new league, set to debut on ESPN (including ESPN+) from Jan. 7, also counts So-Fi and Samsung among its brand partners.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

In 2024, generative AI proved itself to be far more than just a buzzword. From the flurry of AI-powered gadgets to the potential regulations, the second year of a massive innovation race advanced alongside scrutiny, with questions about transparency, copyright, and ethical use.

As a follow-up to last year’s AI timeline for 2023, our recap for 2024 highlights some of the most important headlines with a sampling from every month of the year.

January

The year started off with a bevvy of AI-related announcements at CES 2024, where major tech companies and consumer brands touted new tech: AI chips for laptops and phones, smart TVs, voice assistants for cars, AI-enabled beauty products, and retailer activations. A few weeks later, AI took over NRF 2024 with nearly two dozen exhibitors touting AI.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts • Spotify

2025 is expected to be a hell of a year, if you ask the Digiday staff. After the whirlwind that was 2024, the new year seems to promise a cocktail of chaos and topics the industry can’t escape. Or as Digiday managing editor Sara Jerde puts it, “2025 will be the year of the Twinkies, the cockroaches, TikTok potential ban, and third-party cookies.” 

Last year, several rocks were thrown in the water, ripple effects that’ll shake out in 2025 with everything from mergers and acquisitions, a la Omnicom’s proposed acquisition of IPG or BuzzFeed’s sale of First We Feast, to the proliferation of the social media landscape and the TikTok ban. 

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Interested in sharing your perspectives on the media and marketing industries? Join the Digiday research panel.

We’re wrapping up another eventful year. TikTok has found itself on the positive and negative sides of the news cycle, Google pulled its plans to kill third-party cookies and publishers continued to move the pieces of their revenue puzzles around searching for the right fit.

This is a member-exclusive article from Digiday. Continue reading it on digiday.com and subscribe to continue reading content like this.

Whichever way you look at it, 2024 was a slam dunk year for women’s sports. 

The WNBA enjoyed a banner season featuring newly minted superstars such as Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese while the NWSL saw TV audiences rise by almost 20% compared with the previous season, according to CBS.

Advertiser dollars followed. During the 2024-25 broadcast year, GroupM — still the industry’s largest media agency network, at least for now — has driven more client spending toward women’s sports, increasing it 115% by the end of October (a spokesperson declined to share the dollar amount).

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Judging from the reaction to the news of Omnicom’s planned acquisition of Interpublic Group near the end of 2024, there’s a strong expectation that 2025 will see the biggest of the agency groups get bigger. Size and scale will be vital for them to compete with each other.

But getting so large means seeking out the largest multi-national marketers that need that global heft to execute their media — the P&Gs, Coca-Cola’s and General Motors of the marketing world. Together they make up a large swath of media spend. 

And that leaves a whole world of smaller and mid-sized marketers left on the sidelines of the holdco game — the “Forgotten Middle,” as one independent media agency CEO coined it — and looking for agencies that will bring them their A teams and innovative solutions.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

It’s been a long year. And there’s a lot to keep straight — what do industry acronyms stand for? How does that affect strategies? With our WTF series, we aim to breakdown what these complex topics mean, so the industry can walk into their meetings prepared for whatever’s next. Catch up below on some of our most popular WTF explainers this year.

(Here’s what resonated in 2023).

WTF is principal media?

The concept of principal media — in which agencies invest in media at non-disclosed prices to resell to clients — was on the rise this year. It became widespread enough that the ANA published a report on it for marketers. Read our explainer here.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

This year was the year many publishers took formalized stances on AI companies, many of which resulted in deals between the two.

The wave was first kicked off by an agreement between the Associated Press and OpenAI in July 2023, then followed by another deal between OpenAI and Politico, Business Insider, Bild and Welt owner Axel Springer.

The deals are usually content licensing agreements, where publishers let the AI companies use their content to train the large language models (often including paywalled content). In exchange, publishers get attribution for that content surfaced on the AI companies’ chatbot or search platforms, as well as access to technology that publishers can use to build AI-powered products and features. 

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

AI-generated avatars are further blurring the lines of reality as more life-like characters and animations are integrated into social media and digital platforms.

It’s now possible to generate avatars in minutes using audio, images or videos and produce content with hundreds of different backgrounds, outfits, tones and languages or gestures. But do you as a marketer aim for realism or steer clear of the uncanny valley? Increasingly, they are trying to balance the quirky with the realistic in an avatar’s look and feel to strike the right tone.

The uncanny valley refers to an unease or negative response (that creepy vibe) we feel when encountering something that seems almost human — but it feels off. Think early forms of generative AI-designed avatars that look like a real person, but has no eye movement, or a digital representation that looks exactly like an influencer, but is lacking natural movement or features.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

The so-called TikTok-ification of social media, in which the platform’s short-form, viral, and algorithm-driven content, has fueled the exponential growth of the influencer marketplace and creator economy. As it swells, marketers are tasked with allocating ad dollars to maximize return on investment. As it stands, smaller, more niche creators are delivering the best bang for buck, according to five influencer marketing execs Digiday spoke to for this story.

That means general lifestyle influencers have to adapt and find a niche or run the risk of fizzling out.

“It’s attention, really,” said Sophie Crowther, global talent partnerships director at Billion Dollar Boy, and head of creators at FiveTwoNine, the influencer marketing shop’s creator community membership program. “Attention is in new formats, new creators that are tapping into something completely brand new, basically.”

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Snapchat’s subscription play is shaping up to be one of media’s most compelling plotlines in 2025. 

While subscriptions are still a modest slice of Snap’s revenue pie, they’re giving the company’s top line a noticeable lift. Case in point: Snap’s ad revenue climbed 10% to $1.25 billion in its last quarter, but thanks to $123 million in non-ad revenue — largely driven by its member program, Snapchat+ — the company posted a 15% overall revenue jump to $1.37 billion.

It’s a rare win for a platform navigating a precarious business model, heavily dependent on fiercely contested ad dollars.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.