This State of the Industry report, sponsored by NCSolutions, explores how brands and agencies use purchase data and other rich signals to target audiences and engage them with relevant and effective messaging.

Facing increased competition for consumer attention and rising costs of digital advertising, CPG marketers are maximizing campaign performance by leveraging data-driven insights to effectively deliver personalized and relevant messaging.

In this new State of the Industry report, Digiday and NCSolutions surveyed 90 brand and agency professionals to evaluate how data is strategically used throughout the sales funnel and across various channels and formats. Our respondents work across several industries, including retail, beauty, food/grocery and healthcare.

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Amazon’s influence is pulling streaming ad costs downward.

Right now, ad buyers are paying around $40 to reach a thousand viewers on Prime Video, about the same as on Netflix. Whether that holds for the rest of the year is anyone’s guess, but Amazon’s impact on ad pricing is already undeniable.

“Regarding video CPMs, the average for 2024 was close to $40 on Amazon Prime,” said Robert Kurtz, group vp of search media solutions at Basis Technologies. “This is comparable to Netflix, but Disney+ was a significant percentage higher than Amazon Prime.” 

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Changing habits among search engine users have begun to take a toll on the biggest players in the search space — namely Google.

The tech giant still enjoys an enormous chunk of the search market — 89%, October through December in 2024, according to an estimate from Statcounter — but that’s the lowest its share has been in a decade.

Because the tech giant has been synonymous with search, it’s the player with the most to lose, but advertisers need to find new productive ways to reach consumers too.

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Last year, Snapchat started laying the foundations to make Snapchat more accessible to small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), with the goal of creating a more consistent, sustainable and diverse ad revenue stream. And so far, the strategy appears to be paying off, according to the company’s recent earnings call.

With a big year ahead to prove these investments were, and continue to be, the right ones for Snapchat to make, Digiday caught up with Snap’s vp of SMB and mid-market executive Sid Malhotra, to get the lowdown on how important SMBs are to Snapchat’s overall ad revenue stream, what the platform can offer advertisers that its platform peers can’t, and what prevented advertisers from giving the company a proper chance — until now.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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Last week, the Federal Trade Commission announced a new public inquiry to investigate whether online platforms have censored users based on speech or affiliation — and if any actions break any laws.

In its announcement, the FTC said technology companies could use “confusing or unpredictable internal procedures” to cut off users with limited ability to appeal decisions. The agency also invited companies and individuals to submit commentary during the three-month public commentary period while encouraging users who have been “banned, shadow banned, demonetized or otherwise censored.”

“Tech firms should not be bullying their users,” Andrew Ferguson, the FTC’s chair appointed by President Donald Trump, said in a statement. “This inquiry will help the FTC better understand how these firms may have violated the law by silencing and intimidating Americans for speaking their minds.”

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Marketers can’t just check the influencer box on a campaign these days — it’s not enough to have influencers in the mix. Brands need the right influencers for them.

That’s what Black-owned digital media network Culture Genesis has been pitching to brands: A targeted, engaged audience through a network of multicultural and Black creators that are already successful on YouTube. Creators like YouTuber LaLa Milan (422K YouTube subscribers and 3.9 million Instagram followers) and streamer Kai Cenat (with 12 million YouTube subscribers and 13 million Instagram followers) work with Culture Genesis; the agency’s creators make content for brands like Ford and Dove. Now the company hopes it can replicate that growth in its creator strategy with the launch of a new content network dedicated to South Asian creators, called HYPHEN8.

“We are copy pasting … from Culture Genesis, where you’ll see that they follow this exact pattern,” said Joey Mullick, partner at Skara Ventures, an investor of Culture Genesis. (Sean Kilbane, current chief strategy officer at Skara, will also serve as the network’s interim CEO.)

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Although it’s safe to predict that a good portion of the expected crush of mergers and acquisitions in the agency landscape will happen in the U.S., recent signals point toward consolidation and scale-seeking on a global level.

And not just by the major holding companies either — although last week brought news that Publicis bought a Brazilian influencer marketing firm (see Antoinette Siu’s story below in Speed Reading) while Havas bought an Argentinian creative shop.

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Traffic getting sent to publishers’ sites from AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity is growing. And while that makes sense for the publishers that have signed deals with those companies to receive attribution for their content surfaced on those AI chatbot or search platforms, data shows that referral traffic is growing even to sites that are attempting to block those platforms’ crawlers.

Execs at three large digital media companies told Digiday they have seen referral traffic from Open-AI owned ChatGPT increase recently.

The Atlantic saw a “significant” increase in traffic from ChatGPT in the past few months. Referrals rose by more than 80% from December to January, according to a spokesperson. The Atlantic signed a deal with OpenAI in May 2024.

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Related Insights

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The fate of third-party cookies is arguably the ad tech story of the 2020s, particularly how the industry’s most popular web browser (Google Chrome) will permit third parties to track its three billion-plus users. 

However, the online behemoth’s recent policy update, particularly around the timings of its rollout of a much-anticipated user consent prompt, hints at the continuation of the status quo for much of the remainder of the decade.

Of course, an undercurrent to this has been device fingerprinting, an issue that has generally been frowned upon by the sector, given concerns over the ethics of collecting user attributes such as a device’s operating system, language setting, and (more pertinently) IP address — see video below.   

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Content creators’ side businesses are feeling the heat of the Trump tariffs.

Many creators bolster their advertising and brand partnership income by selling goods and products that are relevant to their niche or audience. These businesses often rely on foreign materials or manufacturing to stay afloat — and thus the Donald Trump administration’s tariffs, which impose an additional 10 percent duty on Chinese imports, have led to an increase in creators’ business costs.

Last month, video creator Matt Steffanina pushed back the launch of his apparel brand MadChill due to uncertainty over the future of TikTok Shop. Following the institution of Trump’s tariffs, Steffanina had to delay the launch further in order to find a new — and more expensive — manufacturer that operated entirely outside of China. 

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Brand advertisers are reviewing their organic and paid search strategies in response to web users turning away from Google.

According to an estimate from Statcounter, Google’s share of the search engine market dropped to 89% at the close of 2024, the first time it had fallen below 90% in 10 years.

Google’s market share decrease belies big changes in the way that users search for information online. Today’s consumers use a wider variety of search tools than they did in previous years, from TikTok to Perplexity to Amazon, depending on their goals. Research published by Omnicom in January suggested clients accordingly consider investing their search across a more diverse set of channels.

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Amazon plans to more transparency tools for its advertising offering, updates that come just weeks after its demand-side platform was among the high-profile firms publicly rebuked by lawmakers for ad tech’s role in monetizing child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other problematic content.

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Updates to Amazon’s DSP include new page-level reporting through its Traffic Events API. The goal is to further strengthen its brand safety controls using internal systems and third-party integrations, according to parties familiar with the updates.

An Amazon Ads spokesperson confirmed the changes to Digiday, noting the company already provides site-level (domain-level) transparency through its Inventory Report available through its DSP and through Amazon Marketing Cloud.

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Omnicom CEO John Wren and IPG’s Philippe Krakowsky haven’t exactly been shy about their stance on the proposed deal between both groups since it was unveiled last December.

So when the two met with ad consultants for two hours earlier this week (Feb. 19) in New York, the room knew this was their shot at getting some long-awaited clarity on the flurry of questions, concerns and hot takes sparked by Omnicom’s potential acquisition of IPG.

“They [Wren and Krakowsky] see us as representatives of advertisers so the meeting was very much about giving us the floor to raise the many questions and concerns they have,” said one exec, who exchanged anonymity for candor on what went down.

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This State of the Industry report, sponsored by Clinch, explores how brands and agencies are refining their approaches to ad serving and unlocking new opportunities.

While the ad server has always played a critical role in the digital marketing ecosystem, these tools have continued to evolve across delivery, tracking and reporting. In 2024 and 2025, technology is advancing in lockstep with increasing investments in dynamic creative optimization and personalization at scale — allowing brands and agencies to deliver more relevant ad experiences and maximize ROI.

In this new State of the Industry report, Digiday and Clinch polled 85 brand and agency respondents to learn more about the pivotal role of ad serving as they refine their strategies and drive business outcomes. For example, 63% of our respondents expected ad serving to generate at least 41% of their revenue in 2024. This is up from 2023 when 16% of our respondents reported that ad serving accounted for at least 41% of their revenue.

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Reformation recognizes the power of a viral moment. The sustainable, direct-to-consumer fashion brand is on the heels of another such moment after its Valentine’s Day campaign featuring comedian Pete Davidson as the brand’s “official boyfriend” made the proverbial internet rounds last week. But that doesn’t mean the brand is in the business of virality for the sake of virality.

Brands are finding it more difficult to find virality as the social landscape continues to fragment. What works on one platform could die on the vine on another. And it’s a trickier time for brands on social in general as the fate of TikTok continues to hang in the balance, and amid content moderation rollbacks and brand safety concerns.

Reformation’s Davidson campaign followed a different viral hit last spring after it hired activist Monica Lewinsky on its “You’ve Got the Power” campaign, which featured Lewinsky, encouraging voter registrations. It was an inflection point for the brand as a way to grow brand awareness among new audiences, said Lauren Cohan, chief creative officer at Reformation.

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Amazon may not be the go-to for programmatic ad buys. But with each passing quarter, that assumption is looking shakier. 

Just look at its latest earnings: $17.3 billion in ad revenue, a 17% jump from the same period last year. Driving that growth is the Amazon Demand-Side Platform (DSP), which lets advertisers tap into its rich data to buy ads both within its walled garden and beyond. 

While that premise isn’t new — it’s been pitched as a full-scale programmatic solution for years. But a steady stream of updates, partnerships and strategic moves has made it more compelling than ever. 

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As the release of “Grand Theft Auto VI” grows closer, brands’ interest in the game is increasing, even if the specifics of its marketing opportunities remain unclear.

In recent years, video games such as “Roblox” and “Fortnite” have evolved into creator platforms — and, accordingly, have welcomed brands and advertisers to play inside them. “Grand Theft Auto” has remained intentionally devoid of real-life brands since its release in 1997. But Digiday recently reported that “GTA” developer Rockstar Games is pursuing a user-generated content approach for the upcoming release of “GTA 6” later this year, which has renewed marketers’ interest in the series.

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With “GTA 6” on the horizon, brands’ inquiries about the game have steadily increased, according to five agency executives who spoke to Digiday for this article. (Rockstar Games representatives did not respond to requests for comment.)

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Publicis on Tuesday said it plans to acquire Brazil-based influencer marketing company BR Media Group, and its network of some 500,000 creators.

With another holding company acquiring an influencer marketing shop, it seems the creator mergers and acquisitions market is still hot. WPP bought influencer agencies Village Marketing in 2022 and Goat in 2023; Stagwell purchased Leaders last year and rolled the agency into Stagwell Marketing Cloud’s tech suite.

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Pending regulatory approval, the Publicis deal is expected to close in late March 2025. While financial terms were not made available, this acquisition would build on a growing influencer division for Publicis, which also acquired influencer company Influential last year.

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This week’s Media Briefing looks at a hot topic at this year’s annual podcast business summit On Air Fest: podcast subscriptions, and how to grow them as a complement (or alternative) to advertising revenue.

• Podcasters discuss testing different subscription offerings at the On Air Fest podcast business summit.
• Hearst CEO’s predictions for a challenging 2025, The New York Times approves usage of some internal AI tools, and more.

Testing different podcast subscription offerings

Podcasters are testing a variety of audio subscription offerings to grow recurring revenue as a complement (or alternative, in some cases) to advertising.

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When ad agencies first began signing up to the B Corp movement, execs hoped the climate-friendly status would appeal to new clients and draw industry recruits (as well as further environmental causes).

Agency leaders still cling to that hope, but they do so in a changed political environment.

Last week, Stagwell media agency Assembly certified its European and Asia-Pacific businesses as B Corps. Its U.S., African and Indian businesses are also going through the certification process. At the same time, global full-service agency Dept re-certified its B Corp status — expanding its climate and social commitments beyond its European base and across its global network.

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