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Over the last year, marketers have been shelling out dollars to show up in sports, the supposed last bastion of monocultural moments and opportunity to get ads in front of a massive audience. There’s been an uptick of interest in unconventional sports like pickleball, and women’s sports. Streaming platforms like Netflix bet big on live sports in hopes to bring in more money from advertisers. Finally, since the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) approved its name, image and likeness (NIL) policy back in 2021, the lines between influencers and athletes is becoming more blurred.

That said, it’s getting more difficult for brands to stand out from one another as more advertisers flock to the space. That’s true even for a brand as big as Verizon, according to Nick Kelly, Verizon’s vp of partnerships. “We have to find something that we can own,” Kelly told Digiday. 

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By now, spotting influencers in major ads and at events is all but mainstream — but what if artificial intelligence allowed influencers to tap into old-school product placement without actually having to shoot in person with brands?

Imagine seeing more seamless product placements across movies and TV shows that are more story-driven and adaptable to various pieces of content, where brands get virtually inserted onto products, backgrounds or signage in post-production. New AI-backed virtual product placement tools, including Mirriad, Ryff and Inshorts, can add fried chicken to a “Stranger Things” scene or edit in cans of paint to Lizzo’s music videos without the talent or creators actually featuring those products in the filming. Brands from Hallmark to Univision have been testing this product placement method since 2020.

With these platforms, brands can make product placements far more natural-looking and scalable now — and the hope is this technology can bridge the gap in the world of product placement and simultaneously boost influencer content across channels. For example, Mirriad included its virtual product placement in 2024 TV Upfronts and worked with Cheetos to integrate its ghost pepper chips into “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” last year. South Korean ad company Inshorts last year also applied its AI digital product placement to drama “Maestra.”

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As virtual-world platforms such as Roblox and Fortnite attract the lion’s share of both users and advertising dollars, the Korean-owned app Zepeto has quietly staked its own claim to a corner of the metaverse.

The metaverse might be a few hype cycles past — but gaming platforms have continued to expand the capabilities of their immersive, three-dimensional worlds, with the “big three” of Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft dominating much of the conversation. 

Nipping at the heels of the major players is the Seoul-based Zepeto. The app, which describes itself as an “immersive avatar-based social universe,” has a total user base of over 400 million registered accounts and a monthly active user count of 20 million. Last week, Zepeto partnered with Walmart to launch the platform’s first-ever e-commerce experience for physical goods. 

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Publishers had mixed feelings about how 2024 shook out for their companies and the media industry as a whole, and it looks like those feelings are going to continue on into 2025. In other words, publishers are optimistic about this year in some important ways, but there are also some things they don’t feel great about.

This is according to a Digiday+ Research survey conducted in the fourth quarter of 2024 among more than 50 publisher professionals.

Digiday’s survey found that it’s a mixed bag for publishers when it comes to optimism for 2025 — they’re optimistic for their individual companies but not optimistic about the industry as a whole (similar to our findings about publishers’ feelings on whether 2024 was a successful year).

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President Trump’s second term will be different from his first. It seems his relationships with the media, tech and marketing industries already show as much.

Ahead of yesterday’s inauguration, those in the media and tech sectors seemed to signal to President Trump that they were ready and willing to work with him, taking a different tone from 2017 to have a closer relationship with the incoming president. Leaders at various companies congratulated Trump after he won the election, made statements about being ready to work with him and put policies in place that seem to benefit him going forward. Some industry executives even attended yesterday’s inauguration.

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Las Vegas is kind of an ideal backdrop to survey marketing and media executives about the state of the ad market. Advertising is ultimately gambling after all.

During this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Sin City, executives from brands, agencies and media companies, including Havas, Mastercard, NBCUniversal and Stagwell, revealed where they are placing their chips in 2025 — as well as the bets they would expect to fold this year.

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Jan. 20 has arrived, and Congress’ ultimatum for ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a U.S. ban has come and gone without resolution. Neither a sale or a ban came to fruition. Instead, TikTok lives on, thanks to President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to stall the federal crackdown on the app with an executive order. 

He made the announcement just hours after major app stores had yanked the app, and TikTok went dark for U.S. users as a federal law kicked in on Sunday. In a post on X, the short-form video app assured users it was in “agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service.”

What was supposed to be a decisive chapter in this long-running saga has, true to form, delivered more confusion than clarity. Questions linger, answers remain scarce.

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The sun rose on Jan. 20, and despite U.S. Congress’ ultimatum for ByeDance to sell TikTok or face a U.S. ban, TikTok is still alive and kicking. A last-minute lifeline from President-elect Donald Trump has left its fate dangling, not decided. 

What’s next? A labyrinth of political wrangling that leaves skeptics wondering if TikTok’s future in one of its largest markets is any less murky than it was six years ago when the first doubts were cast.

But for marketers, this limbo doesn’t mean their prep work was for nothing. While the immediate storm may have passed, the effort was far from wasted — it’s just on pause. If anything, the real takeaway here is to embrace uncertainty: preparation isn’t optional, it’s essential. Plan for the worst-case scenario, but an eye out for the best.

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There was a time, not too long ago, when CMOs started to sound a lot more political. They made statements about brand purpose. They pulled funding from fake news. They held advertiser boycotts — more than once. They were operating, it seemed during Donald Trump’s first presidency, from a position of power in which what they said and how they spent their ad dollars could help shape the cultural climate.

This may not be the case Trump’s second time around. The cultural landscape has shifted. Marketers have watched major brands — not just Bud Light, but McDonald’s, Planet Fitness and others — grapple with boycotts of their own. They’ve seen the likes of Harley Davidson and John Deere about-face on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives amid pressure from activist investor Robby Starbuck. They’ve dealt with legal action questioning brand safety and pushing back against their ability to boycott a platform. They’ve seen GARM shuttered. And they’re currently in wait-and-see mode with Meta to understand how its position on censorship will affect them.

The CMO during a Trump presidency in 2025 won’t be the same as in 2017. It’s unlikely that CMOs will be seen making statements about marketing as a force for good or announcing they’re pulling funding from a platform or making any moves that could be seen as overtly political. (Though, arguably, not doing so could also be considered its own political move.) This time around, while of course it will vary from one CMO to another, it seems that CMOs in general will focus on getting back to the basics of marketing and focus intently on their own customers rather than making any big statements.

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Last week saw not one but two high-profile AI legal battles under the spotlight, with updates in separate copyright cases against Meta and OpenAI.

Court documents unsealed in an AI copyright case against Meta raised new questions about the use of e-books from a book piracy site Library Genesis (LibGen). They also raise new questions about how much CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other Meta execs knew about Meta teams’ use of pirated content to help train its Llama models. 

Court documents allege Meta employees sought to remove copyright information — including headers and other identifiers — from various materials. One filing shows an internal Meta document with a suggestion to remove lines containing words like “ISBN,” “copyright,” and “all rights reserved.” Another filing includes messages between employees talking about the desire to compete with other AI rivals, including beat OpenAI’s GPT-4 while also describing French rival Mistral as “peanuts.”

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They say the only constant is change, and that couldn’t be more true of the 2025 national advertising marketplace, as the U.S. experiences a new administration that seems both familiar and uncertain, and as major platforms’ and publishers’ futures adopt new stances or hang in the balance. 

Meantime, a mini-version of musical chairs has beset the national investment teams at a handful of holding companies — the latest change at GroupM, where Matt Sweeney is leaving his post as U.S. chief investment officer. GroupM didn’t respond to requests for information about Sweeney’s replacement. 

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Over three decades of expansion, Amazon has displaced countless smaller businesses in the sectors it targeted, from bookshops to main street retailers. 

In its latest retail initiative, however, the tech titan wants to be a big brother to smaller businesses that want their cut of the retail media gold rush – lowering the barrier to entry for companies previously priced out of $54.85 billion spent on retail media last year, according to eMarketer stats.

Through the Amazon Retail Ad Service the company is offering to provide (at a cost) its retail media ad tech stack to retail brands that lack the scale or resources to build out their own systems. 

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With TikTok’s fate in the U.S. dangling between the Supreme Court and President-elect Donald Trump, competitors are moving in to try and claim its ad dollars.

Snapchat, for example, isn’t holding back. In recent pitches to marketers, the app’s ad sales team has highlighted the notable audience overlap between Snapchat and TikTok in the U.S., both on a daily and monthly basis, according to two slides shared with Digiday.

The first slide shows Snapchat’s claim that 60% of U.S. users over the age of 18 also use TikTok daily, while the second slide highlights that 77% of Snapchat’s U.S. users aged 18 or over use TikTok monthly. Both slides strongly indicate that anyone seeking a possible replacement could at least find a majority of their TikTok users over on Snapchat.

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As Discord’s budding romance with brands and advertisers continues, the platform has hired its first-ever chief business officer to scale up its sales and partnership business.

Jules Shumaker, Discord’s new CBO, comes to the company with over two decades of gaming advertising experience. Most recently, she served as CRO of Unity between 2021 and 2024; prior to Unity, she worked as a vp of advertising for the game publisher Zynga. Her first day as Discord’s CBO was Jan. 6.

Shumaker’s entrance comes at an opportune time for Discord. Having established itself as the gaming community’s dominant text and voice chat platform, the company hired a team of experienced platform and gaming executives to launch its first ad product, Play Quests, in March 2024. In October of last year, Discord launched its second ad product, Video Quests. Both are rewarded ad formats — ads that give users an in-app reward in exchange for their engagement and attention — that prompt Discord users to play a certain game or engage in other activities to receive on-platform digital prizes such as profile-picture overlays.

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The impending U.S. TikTok ban could threaten some creators’ ability to grow their audiences across all platforms — not just the embattled Chinese-owned short-form video app.

As the United States marches toward a TikTok ban on Jan. 19, livestreaming creators in particular are lamenting the potential death of the platform’s so-called “clipping culture,” which they believe had an uplifting effect on their followings on both TikTok and other platforms.

“TikTok is pretty commonly used now for Twitch growth,” said Gappy, a Twitch streamer who asked to keep his real name private. “When we think of the new age of Twitch streamers — Kai Cenat, CaseOh, Jynxzi — they all got their virality through TikTok.”

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Telcos and ad tech: the media world’s messiest on-again, off-again relationship. T-Mobile’s $600 million cash swoop for outdoor ad specialist Vistart is the latest reunion in this turbulent love story.

Slated to close this spring pending approval, its ad tech’s first notable deal of the year arrives as outdoor advertising cements itself as the sector’s rising star.

What truly stands out, though, is the deja vu. The bit where hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, exchange hands only to come crashing down years later? Haven’t we seen this movie before?

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Chad Schulte, senior vice president of agency partnerships and strategy, Seedtag

In this time of unprecedented access to information, it’s crucial objective journalism remains a cornerstone of an informed and functional society. However, as modern news organizations grapple with increasing financial pressures, a troubling trend has emerged: advertisers’ over-reliance on blunt-object keyword-blocking measures.

These practices are designed to shield brands from content deemed controversial or unsafe but unintentionally undermine the viability of a healthy and functioning news media. At the heart of this issue is a misunderstanding of how the public views advertising in the context of news. Rather than associating brands with negativity, readers often trust brands more when their advertisements appear alongside professional journalism.

Broad ad-blocking strategies discourage coverage of complex topics

The financial strain on news organizations is a longstanding public affair, some of which is self-inflicted. With digital advertising now the dominant revenue stream for news outlets, applying certain brand-safety practices has led to the widespread demonetization of critical news topics. Words like conflict, crisis, protest and even election often trigger automated ad-blocking algorithms, depriving articles on these topics of revenue opportunities.

The implications are profound: Newsrooms face financial disincentives to report on complex issues that require public attention.

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We want to hear your thoughts on the potential TikTok ban. Take our brief survey.

For years, TikTok creators have been trying to migrate their audiences onto other platforms — but were relatively subtle about their efforts, both due to fears that TikTok’s algorithm suppresses attempts to move users off the app and because of TikTok users’ distaste toward manipulative content.

But now, as the U.S. forges ahead with its TikTok ban that’s approaching a Jan. 19 deadline, creators have gone mask-off, growing more proactive and more explicit with their attempts to divert fans off of TikTok as a ban or sale becomes a likely reality. Even though moving followers over onto another social network isn’t easy, it shouldn’t immediately disrupt many brand deals.

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Digiday’s events are getting a refresh under the leadership of Liz Pitonyak, who joined the company as general manager of events in December.

She joined Digiday Media with 15 years of experience in event strategy and partnership, after most recently directing event initiatives at Adweek and at Forbes. She will oversee events for Digiday, Glossy, Modern Retail and WorkLife.

“I have dedicated my career to creating transformative experiences that resonate with target audiences, amplify brand stories and deliver measurable business outcomes,” Pitonyak said.

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This story originally published on sister site, WorkLife.

WPP’s announcement requiring employees to return to the office four days a week has sent shockwaves through the advertising industry, spotlighting a deepening divide between corporate-owned and independent agencies on workplace flexibility. While some leaders argue in-person collaboration fuels creativity, critics view the move as outdated and morale-crushing.

Employees have voiced frustration over the abrupt policy from the agency holding group, citing poor communication and personal challenges, with some questioning whether “creative collaboration” outweighs childcare needs or two-hour commutes. Meanwhile, independents see an opportunity to attract disillusioned talent championing flexible models that balance productivity with personal well-being.

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