As the tit-for-tat tariff fight between the U.S. and Mexico, Canada, China and the European Union continues, marketers are watching closely — and worrying.

To recap: President Donald Trump announced 25% tariffs in February then put them off for a month before re-tabling the issue last week, leading to another postponement for Mexico and Canada. The U.K. and Europe haven’t been granted the same grace and this week’s retaliatory tariffs from the E.U. are, at the time of writing, still set to go into force, pending legislative approval in April, as are Canada’s reciprocal steel, sports equipment and computer tariffs. (Bloomberg has a running tally).

The constant change has left marketers’ and agency execs’ heads spinning.

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It’s been almost a year since Google rolled out its AI-generated search feature AI Overviews, and publishers still know very little about how it’s impacting their referral traffic.

Last week Google introduced AI Mode, an experimental feature for search, which lets users ask follow-up questions without leaving the page, as part of an overall AI Overviews update, which will now be powered by its Gemini 2.0 AI model.

AI Overviews, which provides generated summaries of information from multiple sources to answer a user’s search query, will also be available to more people, including teens and users not signed into Google accounts. AI Mode, which resembles the same kind of experience provided by Perplexity or ChatGPT Search, is only being made available to Google AI One Premium subscribers.

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Brian O’Kelley has made a career out of rewiring the ad tech machine. The AppNexus co-founder has spent much of the past two decades deep in the weeds of programmatic advertising — an industry that, for all its ubiquity, remains an opaque, arbitrage-fueled mess. Now, he’s back with a new mission: tear down its inefficiencies and rebuild something cleaner, leaner and, ideally, more honest.

How? By using AI to rebuild ad tech from the ground up, Scope3’s agentic advertising platform optimizes media buying for efficiency, sustainability and brand safety.

Related Insights

The Programmatic Marketer

Scope3 aims to upend ad tech with an ‘agentic platform’ for ‘effective, responsible advertising’  Read More

If there were ever a moment for such a reckoning, this is it: marketers, long resigned to the system’’s flaws, are losing patience. Real-time bidding, the lifeblood of programmatic, is running low on both trust and liquidity. And then there’s the latest scandal, which landed like a bomb in the middle of an already shaky industry: revelations that major brands’ ads had appeared alongside child sexual abuse content. The fallout was swift. 

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YouTube is turning 20 next month and if there’s one thing the company wants you to know, it’s just how big it is. The numbers are staggering, but what do they really mean?

Digiday has sifted through the data to find the numbers that actually matter. Here’s what you need to know:

YouTube has become huge

Over the past 20 years, YouTube has cemented itself as one of the most dominant platforms in the digital landscape. Launched in 2005, the same year as Reddit and just a year after Facebook, it emerged at a time when social media was still a novelty.

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Creators are utilizing Substack’s live video co-hosting features to grow their audiences — and their subscriber counts.

It’s been one month since Substack enabled video posts — previously a desktop-only function — on its mobile app, and two months since the platform expanded live video to all creators, with the ability for creators to team up and pool viewers as one of the features.

It’s early days, but so far seven creators have told Digiday that they are pleased with the results. 

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There’s a talent problem in the media agency world, and it starts at the bottom — meaning the entry level. 

(There’s a whole different talent problem in the C-suite as well, as a steady dribble of executives leave one holding company for another — but that’s a story for another time.)

The rising use of AI for entry-level and sometimes menial tasks has started to jeopardize the ability of young people to break into the agency business. At a Town Hall discussion held during the Digiday Media Buying Summit in Nashville on March 12 — a meeting that was held under Chatham House Rules, which guarantees anonymity for the agency attendees — some media agency folks spoke of that very problem. 

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Today, Scope3 used its inaugural Landscape conference hosted in New York City to launch its new AI-powered “agentic advertising platform” and a host of partnership announcements.

Scope3 CEO Brian O’Kelley — widely regarded as a godfather in the space — and partners hope the initiative will help light a touchpaper that will upend the status quo in ad tech. 

Related Insights

Brand Safety

How ‘The Godfather of ad tech’ aims to ‘reimagine’ brand safety and challenge the status quo Read More

Execs at Scope3 hope its “agentic advertising platform” will use AI to streamline the industry supply chain and address inefficiencies in the digital media buying space, such as brand safety concerns,

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In this week’s Media Briefing, Digiday’s executive editor of news Seb Joseph talks to publishers to find out what they think about Scope3, the ad platform AppNexus co-founder Brian O’Kelley is pitching as the answer to the ad tech ecosystem’s many problems. Turns out, publishers aren’t convinced this is the answer they need.

• Publishers have lots of questions about AppNexus co-founder’s Scope3 ad platform

• Dow Jones CEO defends AI licensing deals and Wall Street Journal tech coverage changes, The Washington Post reorgs its newsroom, and more.

Publishers have lots of questions about O’Kelley’s Scope3

Brian O’Kelley wants to rebuild ad tech — again. 

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Scope3 has unveiled a new adtech platform that aims to tap a trifecta of hyped ad tech topics: AI agents, curation and brand safety.

The Agentic Media platform, announced today, leverage large language models and other agentic AI capacities to help improve programmatic advertising and brand safety while also creating a more transparent supply chain. This ambitious goal for “AI-driven media optimization” also includes plans to integrate with publishers, agencies, demand-side platforms and supply-side platforms. 

Scope3 CEO and Co-founder Brian O’Kelley described it as a “universal custom algorithm platform” for custom algorithms across direct buys and via programmatic ads through SSP curation or deployment within a DSP. Although more significantly, it also shot across the bow of both the Walled Gardens and the brand safety giants.

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Perhaps sensing the opportunity that’s being created by agency holding companies getting bigger and broader — and leaving mid-sized marketers to feel like they’re being overlooked — another independent agency group is launching a new media agency extension.

BarkleyOKRP, which has long handled some of its own media work but is primarily known for its creative chops, has launched media agency MissionOne Media. It’s led by Sean Corcoran, a veteran media agency executive who most recently ran IPG’s Mediahub until last year, when he joined Barkley.

The new shop will handle all elements of a full-service media agency but with a focus on staying closely linked to the creative side of the business. Corcoran emphasized that being the right size is vital to its success. “We feel like it’s kind of Goldilocks size,” he said, as in neither too big nor too small. The perfect client spends somewhere in the $50 million to $100 million range, he added.

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Later this year, YouTube will make it easier for creators to organize their serialized and episodic content.

The plan was announced briefly at the Made in YouTube event last September, though YouTube did not put a date on it. While there’s still no confirmation on exactly when it will arrive this year, during a press event in Zurich on March 11, YouTube execs gave a little more detail about it. 

Shows will allow creators to structure their content on their channels as though they were fully-fledged, episodic TV shows.

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This is the first installment of a two-part series on the top ad-supported streaming services. This initial report provides an overview of the various platforms’ offerings, including pricing and plans, ad options and ad innovations, as well as an analysis of the platforms where brands and agencies distributed the bulk of their 2024 ad budgets and ad placements. 

The second installment will dive deep into the results of Digiday’s recent survey of brands and agencies to analyze how advertisers measure campaign success on the platforms and the challenges they face when placing ads on ad-supported streaming services.

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In Digiday+ Research’s first-quarter survey of marketing professionals, respondents told Digiday that Instagram and Facebook still hold the majority of their companies’ marketing budgets. YouTube and TikTok came out behind Meta’s platforms in third and fourth place. TikTok saw brands’ and retailers’ usage and marketing spend on the platform decline this year, according to Digiday’s survey. Marketers’ use of TikTok fell by 17 percentage points in Q1 2025 compared to Q3 2024, following the platform’s brief outage in January and as the April 5 deadline for a U.S. ban approaches.

What social media platforms will marketers focus on if TikTok is banned? Examining consumer usage of various social media platforms may help answer this question. According to the Pew Research Center, TikTok’s main users are Gen Z, or consumers aged 18 to 29. Gen Z uses TikTok at higher rates than other age groups, even though the group’s most-used social media platform is YouTube, followed by Instagram. Among all age groups, YouTube is the most-used platform, Pew’s study found. Gen Z uses Snapchat and TikTok more heavily than other generations.

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Brynn Brewer got in line around 9:30 a.m. last Saturday morning behind dozens of others — some of whom got there as early as 6 a.m. to be near the front of the line — for the chance to experience the Criterion closet like the filmmakers and artists featured on the entertainment company’s YouTube channel. The South by Southwest experience to Brewer, a content producer at Chubbies Shorts, felt like an “organic activation” and “more like an interactive art installment.” 

Brewer isn’t alone in her assessment. The three women around her in line shared similar sentiments, noting their love of classic film, while shielding themselves with an umbrella from the heat of the Austin, Texas sun. To them, the three minutes allotted to each group to enter the mobile Criterion closet truck, peruse the classic films featured in the collection, pick out a few of those films to take home on Blu-ray and talk about why they matter (as well as get a Polaroid of themselves in the closet) was worth the wait. 

As marketers, agency execs, filmmakers and musicians returned to Austin this past week for SXSW — which runs until March 15th — so too have the brands like Criterion, FX, Paramount, Amazon and Alaska Airlines with various experiential activations on the ground. In the past, marketers believed that having an experience was a must and brands faced irrelevancy without one. Now, after having experienced the shutdown of experiential efforts during the pandemic, marketers, agency execs and attendees believe experiential at SXSW (and elsewhere) shouldn’t solely be about relevance, but to give attendees a real way to interact with the brand.

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If I paid for ChatGPT Plus from my own pocket and used it to help me write this article, would my boss know — or care?

That’s the question surrounding “shadow AI” — which refers to the use of AI tools at work that haven’t been formally approved by companies.

The ongoing pressure to work faster, along with the proliferation of easy-to-use generative AI tools, means more editorial staff are using AI to complete tasks. And while using generative AI for minor tasks — like grammar checks, rewriting copy, or testing different headlines — falls into one bucket of offenses, there are other uses which could cause bigger problems down the line, if left unchecked.

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The climax of the college basketball season is almost upon us. Most know it as March Madness.

Basketball observers are hoping the next Caitlin Clark will emerge during this year’s March Madness tourney. For the media world, it’s another chance to see how brands like Experian, State Farm, Priceline and longtime sponsor Powerade adapt to shifting viewer habits like the years-long migration from linear to streaming viewership, and mass audiences’ embrace of the women’s game.

According to Nielsen NBA audiences on ABC and ESPN have largely flatlined this season, down 1% year-on-year, while TNT’s are 14% lower — apparently a casualty of dwindling cable usage in the U.S — collectively, NBA audiences are down 5%. But the NCAA’s spring tournament typically attracts significant numbers of casual viewers over its three-week run, thanks in part to thousands of office betting pools around the tournament that draws their attention.

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Marketers are probing deeper on ad tech fees. 

Their long, almost Sisyphaen quest to figure out how much ad tech vendors are pocketing from their programmatic dollars has taken yet another turn.

“The big push from agencies at the moment is fee transparency,” said Matt Sattel, chief revenue officer at OpenX. 

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at what TV network owners’ latest quarterly earnings reports indicate about the state of the TV and streaming ad business.

• Fourth and long
• YouTube’s original programming, A+E Networks’ new name and more

We want to hear from you. Take this quick five-minute survey to help Digiday learn how to make our products even better and you’ll be entered to win a $50 Amazon gift card.

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It’s been just over two years since YouTube started a revenue share program for Shorts. Last year saw a growth in brands’ usage of YouTube, but this year usage has dropped off. At the same time, more brands are spending just a little on marketing on YouTube while a lot fewer are spending a lot.

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This year, Black History Month brand campaigns in February were quieter than normal. Amidst the diversity, equity and inclusion reckoning, expect Women’s History Month in March and Pride Month in June to strike similar tones. 

That’s according to three marketers Digiday spoke with for this story who said brand clients have either paused marketing around days geared toward honoring historically marginalized communities or tweaked language away from anything that could be deemed DEI. 

As more companies retool their commitments to DEI, multicultural marketing around holidays and heritage months have come into question. 

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