It’s been a month since President Trump signed an executive order targeting diversity, equity and inclusion policies, seemingly sending the backlash toward DEI into hyperdrive. Professionals across the board are feeling the ripple effects.

Multicultural marketing agencies braced for shrinking diversity budgets. Black-owned brands were caught in the crosshairs of retooled retailer DEI policies. Diverse publications questioned if media spend commitments will remain intact. Now, one communication professional says clients and sources that have agreed to press interviews about DEI in the past have suddenly gone quiet on the topic.

“I have never been shut down so fast by so many people. That’s never happened to me before, ever,” said a C-suite executive at an independent communications agency who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “I usually can find somebody to talk about this type of stuff and just gag orders all around.”

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The backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion seems to have reached a fever pitch after President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 22 taking aim at DE&I programs on a federal level. It’s the latest indication that “DE&I” is now seen as the word “woke,” a politicized phrase that has marketers hesitant to even acknowledge “diversity,” in everything from corporate titles and hiring practices marketing messages and social impact commitments, according to three marketing execs Digiday spoke with for this story.

The word and therein values associated with diversity seem to be a point of contention and are being stripped from the concept of equity and inclusion, forgoing the goal to better represent historically marginalized communities and leaving a “watered down and blended” version of DE&I, Liv Lewis, an executive marketing communications consultant, told Digiday.

The executive order felt like a long time coming under Trump’s second term with pressure mounting from conservative activists and right-wing voices, pushing companies like Target, Walmart, Ford Motors, John Deere, Molson Coors (and the list goes on) to back away or retool their DE&I commitments. Notably, many of these commitments were created in response to the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd.

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The house built around diversity, equity and inclusion is coming apart brick by brick. Since last summer, brands, retailers, holding companies and, most recently the federal government, have been dismantling (or retooling) DEI initiatives, many of which were built up after the murder of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter Movement of 2020. 

The “diversity” portion of diversity, equity and inclusion has become divisive, impacting multicultural marketing agencies, Black-owned brands and diverse publications. And they’re starting to feel the ripple effects, according to Kirk McDonald, CEO of Sundial Media Group, holding company for brands like Essence magazine, Afropunk festival and Refinery29.

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Google’s long kiss goodnight with third-party cookies seems never-ending at this point, as the tech giant’s cookie phase-out plans still remain unclear.

Seemingly, Google’s plan to ask Chrome users to opt in to cookie-based tracking is reflective of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) move a few years back. Sure, marketers have long since seen the writing on the wall with this. But, as the future of third-party cookies remains rather ambiguous, marketing and brand executives, including Rankin Carroll, global chief brand officer at Mars Snacking, have started eyeing partnerships and leveraging artificial intelligence to fill in the gaps, with an eye toward a cookie-less future.

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HexClad, a direct-to-consumer cookware brand, is running its first Super Bowl spot this Sunday. The DTC brand is one of several new-comers, including Häagen-Dazs, Duracell and MSC Cruises, shelling out significant ad dollars to secure a 30- or 60-second spot in the Big Game. 

It’s a risk, says Daniel Winer, co-founder and CEO of HexClad. “It’s frighteningly expensive, even for big companies,” said Winer, referring to the whopping $8 million price tag for a 30-second spot. “So you’re really left wondering, is the juice going to be worth the squeeze with this?”

Obviously, it’s a risk worth taking for HexClad, given the brand has a 30-second Big Game spot featuring Gordon Ramsay and Pete Davidson. For that kind of money, however, the stakes are high for advertisers to either come in for a perfect landing or risk wasting millions of ad dollars, which is par the course with the Super Bowl. But with the price tag up even more — let alone the cost of production and talent — it’s a gamble that some are sitting out.

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For years, X (known back then as Twitter) was the so-called second screen for the Super Bowl, where fans and brands huddled to react to Big Game moments in real time. This year, however, it’s unclear which social media platform, if any, will serve as the Super Bowl town square.

At this year’s Big Game, expect to see the beginnings of a shifting second screen environment where, “instead of targeting broad audiences, brands focus on individual audience members, crafting messaging that integrates seamlessly into their personal social environment,” said Kate Wolff, founder and CEO of Lupine Creative agency. 

It’s a moment brought to you by social fragmentation.

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Target’s decision to retool its diversity, equity and inclusion measures has sparked backlash as activists are now calling for a nationwide boycott of the retailer. In response, Black-owned brands that the store carried or carries are asking consumers to reconsider, pointing out that the dismantling of DE&I measures is complicated.

Target is one of several companies that have recently retooled their DE&I policies in light of mounting pressure from conservative activists and most recently, the White House, where President Donald Trump signed an executive order taking aim at DE&I programs on a federal level. Others like Walmart, Amazon and McDonald’s have also rolled back their diversity initiatives. (Target did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.)

It’s a tricky issue for these large corporations to navigate, according to the six cultural marketing executives Digiday spoke with for this piece, and for the Black-owned brand founders themselves. Amidst the changes, Black-owned brands like The Lip Bar lipstick, The Honey Pot feminine care brand and Tabitha Brown, a social media personality with several brands at Target, are caught in the crosshairs — all of which have taken to social media to express disappointment with the changes to DEI policy while trying to convince shoppers that things aren’t as black and white as they seem. (The Lip Bar, The Honey Pot and Tabitha Brown all declined to make a spokesperson available for comment.)

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The search advertising landscape is poised to undergo a seismic shift this year, driven by the rise of AI-powered search platforms like Perplexity AI and search ads on social platforms like TikTok. And those are just the platforms with confirmed ad units. 

Meanwhile, the industry has been whispering about search ads cropping up on Reddit and Amazon’s generative AI-powered chatbot Rufus. All of this while search kingpin Google grapples with the fallout from its search trial, in which the Justice Department has tasked Google with selling its Chrome web browser to create a more equal playing field for search competitors. Google, of course, is expected to appeal this case.

The way people search for things online is changing, shifting from keyword-based searches to more conversational queries, in large part due to generative AI. And with Google’s dominance being challenged in court (also in the trial over its ad tech), competitors may soon start circling, hoping to capture any spoils from the fallout.

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For all the dollars advertisers have been shoveling into retail media networks, marketers are starting to scrutinize the industry’s latest shiny object a bit harder. The pitch of RMNs was their first-party data and the potential to truly track sales. Marketers, however, are still looking for the retailers to make good on that promise.

This year, expect more emphasis on measurement with advertisers prioritizing incrementality metrics as opposed to return on ad spend, or ROAS, which has traditionally been the gold standard to help marketers determine which campaigns and ads are working (and which aren’t).

“Retailers can report incremental sales with greater accuracy than any other media company,” Christine Foster, vp product strategy and media operations for Kroger Precision Marketing at 84.51°, said in an email response to Digiday. “We know exactly what the baseline organic sales should be in any category we sell.”

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On Inauguration Day, President Donald Trump signed a flurry of executive orders, including one aimed at the dismantling of government diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. The move signals yet another step in the DE&I about-face and speaks to the shifting cultural landscape that marketers and advertisers are reckoning with now.

In response, media buyers said they’re on high alert, prioritizing brand safety and clamping down on media buying practices to more frequently review ad placements. In what’s expected to be a volatile news cycle, media buyers said they’re more regularly reviewing inclusion lists, websites and domains deemed brand safe and acceptable for serving ads.

“The prevailing mood and direction, at least in my experience, has just been to stay really tight around the election we just had,” said one agency executive who asked to remain anonymous. “It’s just been really rigorous, making sure nothing un-brand suitable comes through.”

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

The likelihood of a future without TikTok is getting more real as the deadline to sell or be banned in the U.S. is just days away. While Tiktok’s future hangs by a thread, brands that rode a wave of virality thanks to TikTok’s algorithm, like Bogg Bag, Duolingo and Cakes, now grapple with the challenge of recreating virality elsewhere (if that can be done).

For some companies, TikTok’s algorithm has been a big get, one of the last cost-effective ways to reach a broad audience in an increasingly pay-to-play and fragmented social media landscape. While some brands are going down with the ship, posting to TikTok with a business as usual cadence, others have outlined contingency plans on TikTok competitors, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and even LinkedIn, in hopes to strike viral gold again. Or at the very least, maintain its social currency. 

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Any flicker of hope that the ad industry would renew its commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion in 2025 may be getting dimmer just days into the New Year. Recently, Amazon, Meta, Publicis Groupe and McDonald’s joined the growing list of companies to revamp (or roll back, depending on who you ask) their DE&I policies.

Last Friday, it was announced that Amazon was seemingly halting its diversity programs, “winding down outdated programs and materials” as part of its broader business initiatives review process last year, according to a internal memo from Candi Castleberry, Amazon’s vp of inclusive experiences and technology, which Amazon provided to Digiday. Similarly, Meta was said to be terminating its major DE&I programs, including those geared toward hiring, training and picking suppliers, according to Axios.

Earlier in the week, Publicis Groupe reportedly cut its DE&I teams, including removing its chief diversity officer Geraldine White from her post of the past four years. Per AdAge’s reporting, White will continue to work with the holding company on a consultant basis as the company is in the process of hiring White’s successor. Meanwhile, McDonald’s is restructuring its approach to diversity by retiring its supplier diversity efforts, rebranding its diversity team as the “Global Inclusion Team” and sunsetting the concept of setting “aspirational representation goals” to instead focus on embedding inclusion practices into everyday operations. (Meta and McDonald’s didn’t respond to Digiday’s requests for comment. When asked for comment, a spokesperson for Amazon provided Castleberry’s memo to Digiday.)

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In the age of social media-driven, viral trends, brands often look to platforms like TikTok to strike gold with the algorithm and reach a massive audience. As social media fragmentation continues and the TikTok ban looms even nearer, the concept of virality may soon shift, making it an even less realistic goal than before. 

Take Bogg Bag, the brightly colored, Croc-inspired tote bag that became one of the many “TikTok Made Me Buy It” products backed by influencers and content creators, setting it on the path to achieve $100 million in revenue last year, according to Bogg Bag founder and CEO Kim Vaccarella.

Last year, the bags were everywhere on social media. One video was posted back in May where a mom packing a Bogg Bag with daily essentials got 1.7 million likes. The post was in partnership with Bloom Nutrition, health supplement company, but mentioned Bogg in the caption. Another post featuring a healthcare worker sporting a Bogg Bag racked up more than 378,000 likes in January. In June, another nurse who accessorized the bag in an unsponsored post got nearly 98,000 likes.

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If anything is clear for 2025, it’s that the cracks in an already fragmented social media landscape are only getting deeper. This year, marketers might be willing to slowly walk away.

“The social media landscape of 2025 will be a difficult place for brands to navigate, harder to monitor, and therefore less appealing to sink resources into,” Stephen Faulkner, director of research and analytics at global creative collective Forsman & Bodenfors New York, said in an emailed statement to Digiday.

Still yet in 2025, social ad spend is expected to continue to climb, reaching more than $82 billion, significantly up from the $75 billion forecasted for 2024, according to Statista. As expected, Facebook is likely to take the lion’s share of that spend, more than 80%, per Statista, leaving competitors like TikTok and Pinterest, and newcomers like Bluesky and Lemon8, facing off for remaining ad dollars. So even if there are more dollars, that spend will likely be more dispersed than ever.

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Fast food and quick service restaurant brands had a rough go over the past few years as shoppers have tried to save a few bucks amidst rising grocery prices and inflation. Seemingly, parts of the brand playbook are seeing a rewrite with things like $5 deals to make consumers feel they’re getting more bang for their buck.

It’s a tale all too familiar to Domino’s, the more than 60-year-old pizza brand that has marketed its way through brand lulls to try and win back customers who have pulled back on dining out. There were the “30 minutes or less” campaigns of the 90s, Pizza Turnaround in 2010 (when the pizza chain acknowledged the recipe needed work) Paving for Pizza in 2018, where Domino’s paved roads to ensure pizzas arrived to customers in good condition, and today’s Emergency Pizza, a pizza giveaway for so-called emergencies like burned dinner.

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2025 is expected to be a hell of a year, if you ask the Digiday staff. After the whirlwind that was 2024, the new year seems to promise a cocktail of chaos and topics the industry can’t escape. Or as Digiday managing editor Sara Jerde puts it, “2025 will be the year of the Twinkies, the cockroaches, TikTok potential ban, and third-party cookies.” 

Last year, several rocks were thrown in the water, ripple effects that’ll shake out in 2025 with everything from mergers and acquisitions, a la Omnicom’s proposed acquisition of IPG or BuzzFeed’s sale of First We Feast, to the proliferation of the social media landscape and the TikTok ban. 

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The so-called TikTok-ification of social media, in which the platform’s short-form, viral, and algorithm-driven content, has fueled the exponential growth of the influencer marketplace and creator economy. As it swells, marketers are tasked with allocating ad dollars to maximize return on investment. As it stands, smaller, more niche creators are delivering the best bang for buck, according to five influencer marketing execs Digiday spoke to for this story.

That means general lifestyle influencers have to adapt and find a niche or run the risk of fizzling out.

“It’s attention, really,” said Sophie Crowther, global talent partnerships director at Billion Dollar Boy, and head of creators at FiveTwoNine, the influencer marketing shop’s creator community membership program. “Attention is in new formats, new creators that are tapping into something completely brand new, basically.”

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Standardized metrics across every site. 
Insights on insights with data so bright.
Incrementality to justify spend.
Data points we can share with all our friends! 
These are a few of advertisers’ favorite things! 

2024 was the year that kept on giving in terms of retail media network expansion. New players entered the space creating everything from financial media networks to travel media networks. Walmart became a breakout star and RMN ad spend surged. 

Still, there are a few things that marketers and advertisers would ask for if Santa were accepting RMN-related wishlists. Digiday talked to four retail media experts about what they’d like to see come out of the retail media boom. Here’s what they said: 

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Hold on tight. The rollercoaster that was 2024 is finally coming to an end.

Marketers may find themselves dizzy from the many ups and downs the industry experienced this year. 2024 saw more ads on streaming platforms, but also an ad price correction that favored ad buyers’ wallets. There was also the generative AI boom (or bauble, depending on who you ask). Of course, there was Google’s long kiss goodnight with third-party cookies, in which the tech giant decided to keep cookies after all but let users decide if they want to opt in or not. And who could forget the 2024 presidential election, the gift that kept on giving to news publishers. 

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