Last week, Digiday asked the question, “Is there any point in breaking up Google?”  

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Asking this question was not an exercise in advocating for laissez-faire economics. Rather, it attempted to determine whether the government was trying to apply a 20th-century regulatory tool to a 2010s market problem in the late 2020s.    

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In a ruling that could rattle the scaffolding of digital advertising, France’s competition authority has fined Apple €150 million ($162 million) for what it deems an antitrust violation disguised as privacy reform.

At the heart of the matter is Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework, the marquee feature of its privacy push — hailed by some as a principled stand against surveillance capitalism and by others as a velvet-gloved power grab. The decision marks a rare European rebuke of Apple’s dominance and raises larger questions about who truly benefits from the era of so-called privacy.

What follows is a closer look at the questions this decision surfaces — not just for Apple but for the entire advertising ecosystem built on the promise (and pretense) of privacy.

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Forget the standard job posting, Monks is auditioning its next AI leaders through an AI of its own creation: an AI recruiter personifying the agency’s co-founder.

The S4-owned agency recently debuted a new chatbot called “WesleyBot” that serves as both recruiter and marketer. The prototype is based on the mind and personality of MediaMonks co-founder Wesley ter Haar, who recently took on a new role as the chief AI officer.

Designed to attract top AI talent, WesleyBot operates as a conversational interface within ChatGPT for the AI-ambitious who feel like “lone wolves” in a traditional agency or consultancy. Part of the plans has meant creating a paid campaign on LinkedIn targeting mid- to senior-level talent who have media, data, or AI tooling skills across rival companies — especially in cities where Monks also has an office. So far, more than 600 people have chatted with WesleyBot, according to Monks.

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Is there such a thing as over-preparing? It certainly feels that way in the case of TikTok’s ban, which has been playing out in the U.S. for months since its initial January 2025 deadline following legislation signed by former President Joe Biden in April 2024 requiring the ByteDance app to sell to a U.S. owner or get shut down. After January, President Trump signed a 75-day extension for TikTok to work out a deal.

This time around, eight agencies and influencer marketing execs told Digiday that their general sentiment going into the April 5 deadline this weekend is more calm and confident. That’s because they’ve had months of practice and data gleaned from the temporary outage on Jan. 18, while some are more sure that a deal or extension is likely to go through by this deadline. Some advertisers like Coca-Cola and Comcast have even increased their spend on the platform this year, as Digiday previously reported this week.

“We’re worn down a little bit by the drama,” said Joanna Fowler, head of talent at Shine Talent Group. “We’re ready to just … move into the action phase, [which includes] building on another platform.”

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January’s TikTok outage has served as a wake-up call for brands, reinforcing the need to diversify their spending across multiple platforms to avoid over-reliance on a single channel.

That’s meant marketers have spent more on other platforms like Instagram and YouTube, both of which outpaced TikTok’s spend in the month following the platform’s Jan. 18 outage, representatives of influencer marketing companies Later, Collabstr, BENlabs and BrandCycle told Digiday.

Although major advertisers such as Unilever are upping their spending on influencer marketing — and some brands are continuing to increase their spending on TikTok — influencer marketers see this trend as evidence that brands are still hedging their bets around TikTok marketing amid the uncertainty surrounding the platform’s potential U.S. ban.

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WPP surprised the marketing and media worlds today with the least-surprising news possible. The agency holding company said it is purchasing InfoSum — the data firm once run by its current global CEO of GroupM, Brian Lesser. From the day Lesser took the reins at GroupM last July, it’s been speculated that WPP might purchase the firm — and now it has.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Sources close to WPP said InfoSum’s last valuation was $300 million.

But the deal represents a leveling-up on WPP’s part in the data-driven arms race among the agency holding companies. It comes just weeks after Publicis purchased Lotame, and months after Omnicom moved to acquire Interpublic Group, which comes with Acxiom.

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Direct-sold ads continue to be the dominant source of publishers’ revenue as we move out of the first quarter of 2025 — which is consistent with past years. But other revenue sources are gaining in importance as publishers diversify their revenue streams more this year, particularly subscriptions and events.

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Advertisers are looking again at the use of probabilistic data for audience targeting, and, in some cases, are seeing it as a potential solution to addressability concerns.

It’s the latest installment in marketing’s tug of war between precise targeting and broad reach — and an indirect consequence of third-party cookie deprecation.

“It’s not an either-or scenario. There’s no favorite child,” said Kumar Amrendra, head of digital marketing at U.K.-based pay-TV broadcaster Sky.

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This week’s Media Briefing looks at why publishers are disappointed by Apple News advertising revenue, considering how happy they are with the eyeballs their content is reaching on the platform.

• Publishers aren’t happy with the amount of Apple News ad revenue they’re getting, compared to the engagement they’re seeing on the platform and Apple’s recent push to sell more ad inventory. 
• Bloomberg’s AI experiments need corrections, court dismisses some of The New York Times’ claims in OpenAI lawsuit, and more.

Apple News ads woes

Publishers still can’t make meaningful ad revenue from Apple News despite its push to sell more ad inventory. 

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Marketers’ calls for more granular insights from retail media networks have reached a fever pitch as of late. Last January, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Media Rating Council (MRC) finalized retail media measurement standards, to which retailers like Instacart and others have aligned themselves with. Still, marketers question measurement, specifically: Would that sale have happened regardless of the ad?

In response, The Home Depot is pitching a new acronym: ROMO, or return on marketing objectives, in addition to return on ad spend (ROAS) to help marketers paint a more holistic picture of their campaign efficacy. 

Zach Darkow, senior director of marketing measurement at The Home Depot, floated the idea of ROMO to a room full of 350 suppliers, marketers and The Home Depot associates in Atlanta at its second annual InFronts presentation. InFronts is the retailer’s annual event to tout its retail media offering, Orange Apron Media, similar to upfront negotiations or digital media affairs the NewFronts that will kick off late this month and in May.

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Brands that are closely tied to public figures are tricky. If a public figure does something that changes the public’s perception of them, be it positive or negative, perception of their brand often follows. This looks to be the case for Tesla: Elon Musk has become a polarizing figure given his role in President Donald Trump’s administration and it looks like the ripple effects of that polarization are affecting the Tesla brand.

On Wednesday, Tesla’s first-quarter results showed a 13% drop in vehicle deliveries year over year, with the carmaker delivering almost 337,000 cars, down from roughly 387,000 cars during the same time period last year. While Tesla stock reportedly hit its “worst performance for any period since 2022” earlier this week, the stock has since rebounded following reports that Musk might be leaving his role in the government.

With that said, signs do point to brand sentiment dipping for Tesla. As of this week, some 15% of U.S. adults were considering purchasing a Tesla, down from 20% the week of March 24-30, according to data from Morning Consult. The data firm also noted that “negative buzz” around the brand has been growing since the first week of January, when 25% of respondents to a survey said they had heard or read mainly negative things about Tesla, to now, when 42% said the same.

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Nick Rees, associate director of customer success, publishers, Wunderkind

In the modern digital advertising landscape, publishers are inundated with tools, vendors and evolving industry standards that claim to improve performance. However, many struggle to translate these solutions into meaningful business outcomes. 

The key to navigating this complexity isn’t adopting the latest technology — it’s forging deeper partnerships that drive real performance. To do this effectively, publishers must first understand their own business goals at a fundamental level so they can brief vendors in a way that enables them to drive real results. When vendors are given a clear picture of a publisher’s goals and the nuances of its audience, they can deliver outcomes that go beyond one-off wins to sustained success.

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As of today, the first creator-owned account has reached a following of over one million on Fortnite. The milestone could spur more marketers’ interest in working with Fortnite creators and seeing Epic Games’ popular battle royale video game as a platform for both creators and the brands looking to reach their audiences.

The Fortnite creator celebrating the million-follower milestone is Andre Rebelo, who is better known to his fans as Typical Gamer and has more than 15.7 million subscribers on YouTube. Via Fortnite Creative and Unreal Editor for Fortnite — tools that allow creators to build and share their own custom-designed worlds and mini-games — Rebelo has built a following of Fortnite players who use custom maps designed and published by his Fortnite studio, JOGO.

Although the plurality of brands’ marketing spend inside virtual world platforms still takes place inside Roblox — 47 percent, according to data platform GEEIQ’s 2025 report on the state of brands in virtual worlds — Fortnite is nipping at Roblox’s heels, and currently accounts for 33 percent of brands’ total marketing spend inside metaverse platforms. Between January 2024 and January 2025, brands’ spending in Fortnite increased by 99 percent, per the report.

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The Independent is doubling down on talent-led media production as part of a plan to create valuable intellectual property for sponsorship and capitalize on the booming creator economy.

The U.K.-based digital news publisher has signed YouTube creator Adam Clery as creative director to kick off the launch of Independent Studio, a unit that will produce a new crop of individual talent-led videos, newsletters and podcasts. Clery has established himself as a respected voice in football media and will now produce his own videos for his YouTube football channel ACFC, which launched last week and has gained more than 30,000 subscribers. Now Clery will have the studio’s production, promotional and development resources to grow his following further.

Clery’s signing with The Independent is part of a longer-term strategy to create trusted verticals led by individual talent — both in-house editors who have built loyal followings on The Independent’s own sites, which include BuzzFeed and HuffPost in the U.K., and external creators who have built large audiences on other platforms. The Independent had just under 28 million monthly visitors across its sites in February, according to Comscore.

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Unilever may be investing billions of dollars into influencer marketing, but marketers aren’t necessarily copying their playbook just yet.

When one of the world’s largest advertisers says it will now invest half of its ad budget (some $8.5 billion globally in 2023, per Statista) on social media with plans to work with 20 times more influencers, it can make waves — enough that small and medium-sized marketers rush to follow suit.

But before marketers consider doing so, they need to remember that the creator economy isn’t just another media channel but an ecosystem all its own with potential hazards along the way.

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Amazon Ads’s quest to become the first programmatic port of call for media buyers is intensifying. 

It’s courting media agencies across the industry hoping that more will treat its demand-side platform (DSP) as their go-to programmatic provider. According to 11 media buyers who spoke to Digiday, its pitch to decision-makers emphasizes a refreshed user interface, CTV inventory, and, in select cases, financial incentives. Along the way, it hopes to expand its advertiser base to include more non-endemics.

While it’s far from winning over the industry, it’s gained media buyers’ attention — and likely that of market incumbents The Trade Desk and Google’s DV360.

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Uncertainty around TikTok’s future in the U.S. led many advertisers to slam the brakes on their advertising there. Others treated the turmoil as a green light. 

Walmart, Coca-Cola, Comcast, PepsiCo, Warner Bros Discovery, Google and Amazon have increased their U.S. social media spend on the platform by two percentage points, on a year-over-year basis in the first quarter of 2025, according to Sensor Tower. 

Those seven brands were also some of TikTok’s top spending U.S. advertisers in 2024, per the market intelligence firm. However, PepsiCo and Amazon declined to comment on this, while the other five companies did not respond to Digiday’s request for comment.

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how the programmatic guaranteed versus private marketplace debate is shaping up as programmatic becomes an upfront fixture.

• Get with the programmatic
• Amazon’s studio chief exits, Disney’s DE&I dilemma and more

Get with the programmatic

Programmatic has firmly become part of the upfront. “There was a huge swing last year,” said one agency executive, referring to TV network and streaming services being more willing to allow advertisers’ programmatic spend to count toward their upfront commitments.

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With influencer marketing budgets steadily rising, more multinational brands are partnering with influencer agencies as the industry becomes more complex.

The World Federation of Advertisers released a report today showing that some 54% of multinational brand marketers plan to boost influencer marketing spend in 2025, with 61% agreeing that influencer marketing will become more important in the future. However, due to ongoing challenges navigating the space, like issues with disclosures and transparency on creator campaigns, more brands are employing the help of agencies that play a role in influencer marketing.

“Budgets will reflect this as will the increased usage of partners with expertise in influencer marketing,” said Will Gilroy, director of communications and strategy at WFA. “But this opportunity is a double-edged sword unless we get it right through responsible practices.”

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Being small and less data-dependent aren’t always selling points for attracting search advertisers. But in the case of one privacy-focused browser, both are core selling points.

Since introducing search ads in 2024, Brave has courted big brand budgets, pitching itself as the place to squeeze out incremental gains beyond Google’s well-trodden turf.

Part of its differentiation lies in how it matches ads to queries without using behavioral or personal data. Rather than relying on traditional keyword targeting — and the endless back-and-forth of asking marketers “what keywords do you want?” Using embeddings, Brave offers contextual ads with a system mapping queries and ads into the same semantic space, allowing it to match users with relevant results based on meaning and intent, not just exact phrasing.

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