In the midst of the retail media network boom over the past two years, retailers including Walmart, Amazon and Target, have increasingly started trying to monetize their creator networks and affiliate programs, according to six agency retail media executives Digiday spoke with for this piece. RMN execs see those monetization efforts as a play to take in more ad revenue, especially the brand marketing dollars retailers have spent the last year vying for.

These tactics are formalizing their respective influencer programs as the demand for influencer marketing grows — even as RMNs still face challenges in incremental measurement. Notably, influencer marketing has become a vital part of the media mix with marketing spend in the U.S. influencer marketing ecosystem expected to reach $9.29 billion this year, per eMarketer.

“The impact creators and influencers are having on marketing strategies can’t be ignored, and retail media networks are well aware of the potential,” David MacDonald, evp and head of retail and commerce experience at marketing agency Razorfish, said in an emailed statement to Digiday.

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Despite all the fragmentation in the space, despite the political uncertainty, despite the inconsistent and ever-changing algorithms, social media remains an irreplaceable piece of brands’ and retailers’ marketing strategies. And within those strategies, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram platforms remain the examples of social marketing success.

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Two years after YouTube launched the YouTube Shorts revenue share program in February 2023, creators are finding that their payouts for short-form content are still dwarfed by the ad revenue they can glean from long-form videos.

Six creators who have traditionally focused on long-form content told Digiday that their RPMs (revenue earned per 1,000 views) for YouTube Shorts were consistently beneath $0.20, compared to average RPMs of between $3 and $6 for their long-form content. It’s worth noting that long-form YouTube videos can carry multiple ads, which would help to boost a video’s RPM, whereas YouTube Shorts revenue is shared among creators based on viewership.

“This month, I had an idea for a long-form video, worked on it all night, and after being live for one week, it had made more money than an entire months’ worth of shorts,” said the “Magic: The Gathering” video creator Maldhound, who asked to keep his real name private to protect his personal information. He told Digiday that his average RPM for 20-to-30-minute long-form videos was roughly $5.50, compared to an average RPM of $0.18 for Shorts.

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In January, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission finalized an updated version of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. And for as much attention as the update may have received, it probably merits more.

“It is a big deal. And I think because there’s been so much other activity in the news, people haven’t really paid attention to it,” Debbie Reynolds, a privacy expert and founder, CEO and chief data privacy officer at Debbie Reynolds Consulting, said on the latest Digiday Podcast episode.

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Marketers have begun to turn back toward brand-building strategies in recent months. But that doesn’t mean they’re totally abandoning the ideas underpinning performance marketing.

One sign that’s the case is the rise of alt-measurement companies like System1, iSpot and EDO, each of which offers solutions that promise to help marketers track the impact of brand creative. Their testing solutions are used to optimize — and ultimately justify — the media and creative budgets put aside by advertisers for TV tentpole events like the Super Bowl.

Despite the turn back toward “market-leading creative” by brands such as Kimberly-Clark and Nike, marketing budgets across the industry have shrunk in recent years. Gartner’s 2024 CMO survey found that on average, marketing budgets represented 7.7% of overall company revenue, down from 10.5% in 2019. In short, marketers are pursuing brand-building strategies with weaker hands than they’ve had in previous years.

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Today (Feb. 25) marks the half-way point of the 75-day extension TikTok was afforded by President Trump.

While a lot’s happened over the past month, the entertainment platform still doesn’t seem any closer to knowing its fate in the U.S.

Which is why Digiday has checked in on the platform to see exactly where it’s at right now, with just 37 days left to go until the deadline.

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The marketing playbook continues to be rewritten. In an increasingly fragmented cultural landscape, that reevaluation is coming to celebrity partnerships which has marketers rethinking who they partner with and how.

Take Nike’s new partnership with Kim Kardashian, on a new women’s activewear brand called NikeSkims. The New York Times’ likened it to that of Michael Jordan and Nike, which long has been seen as the creme de la creme of brand partnerships and celebrity endorsements as it allowed Nike to not only enter a new market (basketball) but to cement its brand within culture. Could Kardashian’s shape wear brand be the next?

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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

Life Beyond the Cookie

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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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Brand Safety

Amazon, Google and verification vendors among ad tech cohort under fire from U.S. senators over child safety shortcomings Read More

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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