AI is upending the ad business and S4 Capital is changing its pricing accordingly.

CEO Sir Martin Sorrell said the rise of automation is forcing a rethink of how the firm is paid, particularly with those marketers who are under pressure to slash production costs and funnel more dollars into media without increasing overall spend.

To be fair, this shift isn’t new. Marketers have spent years trying to stay efficient amid sticky inflation, higher interest rates and geopolitical volatility. AI promised relief in the face of all of this, but until now, the technology hadn’t caught up. That, said Sorrell, is finally changing.

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As generative artificial intelligence improves, creators are growing more confident using it to make audience-facing content.

For content creators of all types, generative AI use is on the rise. In March, a survey of content professionals by Kontent.AI found that 74 percent use AI tools on a weekly basis, with 39 percent using them daily. Now, digital creators across platforms such as YouTube and Spotify are joining this growing trend to further scale their content.

Here’s a look at how some creators are leveraging generative AI to create video, audio and written content — and whether or not that’s a turn-off for advertisers.

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Publishing execs didn’t shy away from the elephant in the room during their first quarter earnings calls: What impact would President Donald Trump’s tariff policy and the uncertain economic climate have on their businesses?

CEOs and CFOs at BuzzFeed, Dotdash Meredith, Gannett, News Corp and The New York Times worked to ease shareholder and market concerns about this year’s economic outlook.

Most said they were confident that their businesses could continue to grow amid the uncertain macroeconomic climate. All four companies reaffirmed their quarterly and full-year guidance.

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Related Insights

The Programmatic Marketer

Advertisers put SSPs and curators under the microscope in sell-side push for ad tech fee transparency Read More

It’s late April/early May, and in any given year of the ad industry’s calendar, that means three concurrent series of events are taking place… in no particular order of importance, they are: 

• The NewFronts/upfront season
• January-quarter earnings calls
• Digiday’s spring conference series

In one, those pitching their wares on Madison Avenue make lofty promises about media quality and performance. Meanwhile, in the second series of events, the CEOs and CFOs of such outfits attempt to show Wall Street they are making good on their fiduciary obligations.

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Nearly a year after he left Netflix, ad industry veteran Peter Naylor is back as a board member at ad tech business Kochava.

Digiday caught up with Naylor to unpack why he’s stepping back into the fray with Kochava, what it signals about the state of ad tech and what it could mean for the industry’s second-tier players.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

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Related Insights

The Programmatic Marketer

The Trade Desk stumbles, and the ad tech world cheers — maybe too soon Read More

Maybe things weren’t so bleak for The Trade Desk after all. 

Following a rare stumble in Q4 — its first earnings miss in over eight years — the ad tech giant bounced back with a performance that reminded everyone why it’s long been the industry’s golden child.

The Trade Desk on Thursday (May 8) disclosed Q1 revenues of $616 million, up 25% year-on-year, exceeding its earlier guidance of “at least $575 million.” The results likely prove a welcome return to form for the outfit after its disastrous opening earnings call of 2025, where it disclosed its first revenue miss, and its stock price tanked as much as a third in the day after its Feb. 12 disclosure.

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The longer this earnings season drags on, the clearer it becomes: the ad slowdown might be steeper than anyone first thought. It’s not the tariffs themselves spooking advertisers – its the fog of uncertainty they create. And nothing makes a CMO freeze faster than not knowing what’s possibly around the corner. 

Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun nailed it early in the cycle, telling analysts: “Until there is more clarity, this is not going to get better.”

And it’s hard to argue with him. At this stage even a rollback of tariffs might do more harm than good because what goes down could just as easily snap back up. The volatility itself has become the risk. 

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This story was first published by Digiday sibling ModernRetail

As tariffs drive up the cost of imported goods, Amazon shoppers appear to be increasingly curious about one thing: where their products are made.

According to new data from e-commerce analytics firm SmartScout, discovery-oriented searches like “made in USA products only” have surged 220% year over year. Similarly, “made in America products only” is up 130%, while more specific terms like “American flag made in America” have jumped 250%.

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With so much uncertainty in the mix and even more likely on the horizon, signs are pointing toward publishers pushing harder to diversifying their revenue streams this year in an effort to protect their businesses. Subscriptions in particular is one area where publishers are seeing more revenue, and, in turn, are ramping up their plans to strengthen that part of their business in the coming months.

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This week’s Media Briefing looks at news publishers’ pitch to the ad market at the IAB NewFronts, amid continuing challenges to get marketers to invest more ad dollars in news, and an uncertain economic environment.

• News publishers gather at the IAB NewFronts event to urge marketers to spend more of their ad budgets with them — an old message, but at a time when stakes are high.
• Google is using publishers’ content for AI training without permission, The Washington Post is changing its events strategy, and more.

News publishers gather at NewFronts to advocate for more ad investment

News publishers have spent years banging the same drum: that hard news is safe for brands and essential for democracy. But for all the talk, advertisers still flinch. Now, tired of noble pleas falling on deaf ears, publishers refuse to back down but know they need to sharpen the message.

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Uber’s ads business now has an annual run rate of $1.5 billion — up 60% from its where it was a year ago.

To bolster its case with advertisers, Uber Advertising has brought on its first head of measurement science, Edwin Wong, to fine-tune performance and help unlock even more ad dollars. In his new role, Wong will analyze performance insights while working with measurement partners, advertisers, and Uber’s marketing team.

His appointment was announced Wednesday (May 7) as Uber reported quarterly earnings, which showed its ads business has tripled in value since it launched three years ago. He’s no stranger to this kind of challenge. With previous roles at Yahoo, Pinterest, Buzzfeed, and most recently Vox Media, Wong has built a career helping digital ad businesses at scale during pivotal growth phases — often by putting measurement front and center.

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Karim Rayes, Chief Product Officer, Nexxen

Artificial intelligence has quickly become the ad tech industry’s favorite talking point, and understandably so. Nearly every company is racing to launch AI-powered products, from generative creative tools to predictive models and automated campaign recommendations. But amid the buzzwords and marketing decks, a more important question is overlooked: Is the industry building AI as a transformational amplifier, or is it just adding another shiny feature?

Recently, it has largely seemed to be the latter. Many AI rollouts in the space operate in isolation — an algorithm that suggests optimizations, a chatbot for support, a dashboard that generates summaries. These may sound helpful — and often they are — but their impact is limited unless they’re connected to the systems and workflows that allow AI to learn and improve over time.

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There’s new leadership at the industry’s top agency trade association. Starting today, Justin Thomas-Copeland will succeed Marla Kaplowitz as the 4As’ CEO. Throughout this month, Thomas-Copeland will work alongside Kaplowitz, who has been CEO of the 4A’s for the last eight years, to transition the leadership of the association before her departure at the end of the month.

Prior to taking the top leadership role at the 4A’s, Thomas-Copeland founded and ran the marketing consultancy Kindrd Global. Before that, he was the CEO of DDB in North America, global CEO of Omnicom’s healthcare agency OPMG Health and president and CEO of Rapp in New York. To get a sense of how Thomas-Copeland is thinking about the 4A’s role in adland amid a tumultuous economy and more challenging agency landscape, Digiday caught up with Thomas-Copeland to hear how he’s thinking about the trade association today.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. 

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing recaps a heated discussion about transparency in the connected TV ad market that took place during the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit.

• Black box
• Trump’s Hollywood tariffs, Roku’s kids’ privacy problem, LinkedIn’s original shows slate and more

Black box

Seemingly everyone in the advertising industry knows that the connected TV market has a transparency problem. Ad buyers have been pretty vocal about it. But the tenor of that talk seems to have reached a new, exasperated pitch.

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There’s a shift happening in the display advertising space: Marketers are using and spending more on email this year than programmatic ads — a first for the channel.

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It’s been a year since Google rolled out AI Overviews, and over two years since the launches of ChatGPT and Perplexity — tools that have collectively upended the traditional relationship between publishers, platforms and audiences. 

The spread of AI technology is having an increasingly clear impact on publishers’ traffic and their ability to control content scraping. 

Digiday has sifted through the data to find the numbers that help show where publishers stand now when it comes to AI. Here’s what you need to know:

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Podcasts are no longer the territory of audiophiles. As connected TV becomes YouTube’s primary watch surface, podcasters are seeing a rise in viewership on the biggest screen in the house.

Amid the shift, many podcasters with audiences on YouTube are upping their game with visual content to capture and sustain attention as more fans tune in through connected TVs.

Podcaster Tara Suwinyattichaiporn is among them. Last year, 14 percent of Suwinyattichaiporn’s 46,000 YouTube subscribers tuned into her Luvbites Podcast via connected TVs, with 69.7 percent watching via mobile, 9 percent via personal computers and 6.7 percent through tablets. In April 2025, Suwinyattichaiporn’s TV viewership percentage jumped to 23.5 percent on YouTube’s CTV app — a nearly 10 percent year-over-year increase — while her mobile viewership percentage plummeted to 56 percent.

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After nearly 30 conversations with a variety of executives attending Possible last week in Miami, a few topics bubbled to the surface, from a cooling of the merger and acquisition market to the opportunities and challenges of retail media, to the power of sports to unify a divided country and world.

These conversations were captured at Digiday’s studio at Possible (Digiday is a media partner of the conference), and the following is a sampling of interviews.

For any not here, please visit Possible’s YouTube channel which featured all the interviews.

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This year’s Digiday Content Marketing Awards winners embraced video content, in its various forms, to craft compelling narratives that successfully connect with audiences. As brands work to build long-term consumer relationships, tailoring content to individual preferences has become mission-critical.

For instance, L’Oréal Groupe partnered with The New York Times to launch “This Is Not a Beauty Story,” a global media campaign rooted in the Essentiality of Beauty research study. At its center was “This Is Not A Beauty Podcast,” winner for Best Branded Podcast. Hosted by Isabella Rossellini, the six-episode series explored beauty’s hidden role in industries like sports, politics and business. The podcast leveraged The New York Times’ audio journalism style and was distributed across major platforms, including Apple, Google, Spotify and NYTimes.com. The campaign sparked conversations and helped L’Oréal Groupe strengthen its role as a thought leader across new and influential audiences.

To engage Gen Z and millennial beauty lovers, e.l.f. Cosmetics partnered with BDG Studios for the winning effort in the Most Innovative Use of Content category. “The Beauty Hotline” campaign leaned on a retrofuturistic ’90s and Y2K aesthetic, merging real-world utility with a nostalgic digital experience. A unique LLM was trained on e.l.f.’s top products to provide personalized recommendations, boosting awareness and driving purchases for e.l.f.’s priority products while rewarding loyal Beauty Squad members. The collaboration successfully positioned e.l.f. as a disruptive force in the beauty industry, setting a new standard for innovation in beauty marketing.

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Lance Brothers, Chief Revenue Officer, Adstra

Managing identity has never been more complex. Customer data is fragmented across systems, privacy regulations are tightening and enterprises need different identity capabilities at various stages of their marketing and data strategies. The challenge isn’t just managing identity — it’s controlling it: using it where and how it’s needed without unnecessary constraints.

For B2B marketers, this is exacerbated by the difficulty in stitching together business and consumer identities, which come from disparate data sets. More sophisticated marketers are now adopting a business-to-person strategy, where these two identities are no longer divided. 

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