Flipkart has hired Kabeer Biswas, co-founder of Indian delivery startup Dunzo, as the Walmart-owned e-commerce group expands its quick commerce business in the world’s most populous nation. Biswas will lead Flipkart’s quick commerce business, called Flipkart Minutes, a source familiar with the situation told TechCrunch. The move follows Flipkart engaging with Biswas over a potential […]
After spending much of 2024 recovering from a down period, esports industry executives are stepping on the gas in anticipation of a growth year in 2025.
In 2023, advertisers and investors alike jumped ship from competitive gaming, leading to the so-called esports winter, a period in which esports organizations consolidated or pivoted to new business models in order to stay afloat. Over the past 12 months, however, the industry has recovered, in part thanks to brands coming back into the space, as well as the updated revenue share programs created by the publishers of popular esports games.
Emboldened by the success of new major esports events such as the Esports World Cup — and by an influx of investment by the Saudi Arabian government — esports industry leaders are projecting confidence going into 2025. Here’s a look into the best-case scenario for competitive gaming in the new year.
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The creator economy is gearing up for significantchange over the next year — from the rise of AI and creator-founded businesses to the growth of long-term brand partnerships and embrace of long-form content.
As a whole, the creator economy continues to significantly transform, moving beyond simple influencer marketing to a more complex and integrated ecosystem. All signs point to the maturation of influencer marketing, as brands and creators move toward long-term brand ambassador programs replacing one-off influencer collaborations.
As more business opportunities emerge for creators, the industry is also seeing an increase in entrepreneurial opportunities for them — whether it’s starting their own brands and storefronts to hiring talent agents as they scale. By the start of the year, there may be a potential shakeup in the social media landscape as TikTok nears its ban-or-sale deadline.
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This edition of the daily CES Briefing features an interview with Stagwell’s Mark Penn about the landscape for agencies and a recap of a session from OpenAP’s Audience Summit on the disconnect with streaming ad data.
10 Questions with Stagwell’s Mark Penn
AI is one backdrop for this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. But the Omnicom-Interpublic Group merger is another, particularly for the advertisers and agencies in attendance, such as Stagwell, which has been billing itself as a challenger to the incumbent agency holding companies.
On Tuesday, Digiday sat down with Stagwell CEO and chairman Mark Penn to hear how the Omnicom-IPG merger is coloring his company’s conversations with clients, what Stagwell is up to with its own recent M&A activity and what the potential TikTok ban and agentic AI era mean for advertisers.
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For most advertisers, programmatic advertising is a one-stop shop: log into a demand-side platform (DSP), place your bids and call it a day.
Mars Petcare, however, is doing things differently.
When it comes to CTV, it’s using a supply-side platform — the tool publishers normally use to manage ad sales — to buy ads directly, skipping the usual DSP route altogether.
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Netflix’s Christmas Day NFL coverage was a hit among viewers and advertisers. Its two holiday games each drew an average of 26.5 million U.S. viewers, according to the Nielsen Big Data + Panel, while ad inventory sold out weeks in advance.
In the short term, that performance will defuse industry concerns over the service’s ability to host major sporting moments, following its glitchy telecast of the Jake Paul and Mike Tyson fight in November.
“They proved that they can handle the NFL,” said Adam Schwartz, svp, director of video investment, sports at media agency Horizon Media.
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Wrapping up its search-related string of partner deals announced at CES this week, Digiday has learned that Omnicom Media Group has secured access to Roku’s viewer searches on the streaming platform in order to help guide clients better fine-tune their investments and messaging across the CTV space.
As with all its other partnerships this week — with Google, with Amazon Ads and with TikTok — Omni, the parent company’s central operating platform, will play a major role in the first-to-market deal. Brand-specific audiences created within Omni get sent to Roku’s clean room to get layered with Roku’s anonymized and aggregated search data. It includes data on the most searched programs, content categories, genres and performers.
Say a consumer searches for Hugh Jackman. Those results will likely yield as much song-and-dance films like The Greatest Showman or time-travel works like Kate & Leopold as it will Wolverine films. That immediately opens the door to insights that can inform spend and content decisioning from sponsorships, tailored creative messaging or even contextual optimization.
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This week’s Media Briefing hones in on the business areas that publishing execs say they will prioritize this year – and what they are leaving behind in 2024.
Media execs focused on growing engagement, subscriptions, direct ad revenue and reach
Meta is bringing back political content, Time staffers are concerned about coziness with Trump and more
2025 look-ahead
This year, media companies will focus on growing engagement, subscriptions, reach and direct ad revenue, according to 16 publishing execs.
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Elon Musk concurs with other AI experts that there’s little real-world data left to train AI models on. “We’ve now exhausted basically the cumulative sum of human knowledge …. in AI training,” Musk said during a livestreamed conversation with Stagwell chairman Mark Penn streamed on X late Wednesday. “That happened basically last year.” Musk, who […]
Nexstar Media Group, Inc. and NBCUniversal have reached a comprehensive multi-year agreement to renew NBC Television Network affiliations in 33 markets across the country, including 29 stations owned by Nexstar, three owned by Mission Broadcasting, Inc., and one owned by White Knight Broadcasting, Inc. Together, the 33 stations reach more than 14 million U.S. television...
Wish your would always show your watch face when you glance at it? Be default, Apple Watch will launch certain apps or show the Smart Stack based on your activity. If you prefer to always see your watch face, however, there are a few things to tweak.
Apple is refuting rumors that it ever let advertisers target users based on Siri recordings in a statement published Wednesday evening describing how Siri works and what it does with data.
The section specifically responding to the rumors reads:
Apple has never used Siri data to build marketing profiles, never made it available for advertising, and never sold it to anyone for any purpose. We are constantly developing technologies to make Siri even more private, and will continue to do so.
The conspiracy theory the company is responding to resurfaced last week after Apple agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit over users whose conversations were captured by its Siri voice assistant and potentially overheard by human employees.
While Apple’s settlement addresses an issue that The Guardian reported in 2019. The report showed human contractors tasked with reviewing anonymized recordings and grading whether the trigger was activated intentionally, would sometimes receive recordings of people discussing sensitive information. But it doesn’t include any reference to selling data for marketing purposes.
After The Guardian’s report in 2019, Apple apologized and changed its policy, making the default setting not to retain audio recordings from Siri interactions and saying that for users who opt-in to sharing recordings, those recordings would not be shared with third-party contractors.
However, reports about the settlement noted that in earlier filings like this one from 2021, some of the plaintiffs claimed that after they mentioned brand names like “Olive Garden,” “Easton bats,” “Pit Viper sunglasses,” and “Air Jordans,” they were served ads for corresponding products, which they attributed to Siri data.
Apple’s statement tonight says it “does not retain audio recordings of Siri interactions unless users explicitly opt in to help improve Siri, and even then, the recordings are used solely for that purpose. Users can easily opt-out at any time.”
Facebook responded to similar theories in 2014 and 2016 before Mark Zuckerberg addressed it directly, saying “no” to the question while being grilled by Congress over the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018.
So, if Apple (and Facebook, Google, etc.) is telling the truth, then why would you see an ad later for something you only talked about?
There are other explanations, and attempts to check the rumors out include an investigation in 2018 that didn’t find evidence of microphone spying but did discover that some apps secretly recorded on-screen user activity that they shipped to third parties.
Ad targeting networks also track data from people logged onto the same network or who have spent time in the same locations, so even if one person didn’t type in that search term, maybe someone else did. They can buy data from brokers who collect reams of detailed location tracking and other info from the apps on your phone, and both Google and Facebook pull in data from other companies to build out profiles based on your purchasing habits and other information.
After being hit by a lawsuit over “unlawful and intentional recording” of Siri interactions, Apple has agreed to pay $95 million in a settlement. Even so, the company has just published an article reaffirming its commitment to privacy and clarifying how Siri works.
This robot vacuum from Dreame has a robotic arm that can pick up items and use tools from its toolbox (pictured in the background) to clean more areas of your home. | Image: The Verge
I’ll see your arm and raise you an arm and two legs. It was the battle of the bots on the CES show floor as robot vacuum manufacturers Dreame and Roborock each added limbs to their rival robovacs.
Dreame launched its X50 Ultra at the show earlier this week, debuting the first robovac that can use its legs to navigate steps and room transitions up to 6cm high. But elsewhere at the show, competitor Roborock was showing off its latest flagship, the Saros Z70, which has an arm that can pick up items like socks.
Not to be outdone, Dreame then showed off a soon-to-be-released model at its CES booth, combining those two step-climbing legs with a robotic arm of its own.
Dreame’s model has a chunkier-looking arm than the Roborock’s, and it says it can pick up items up to 500 grams, whereas Roborock’s can only tackle items up to 300 grams. Dreame says its arm can pick up sneakers as large as men’s size 42 (a size 9 in the US) and take them to a designated spot in your home. The concept could apply to small toys and other items, and you’ll be able to designate specific areas for the robot to take certain items, such as toys to the playroom and shoes to the front door.
However, I didn’t see the robot picking up a sneaker — or anything at all — apparently, the infamous CES show floor Wi-Fi couldn't hack it. Instead, they showed the robust-looking arm moving up, down, and around while the robot lifted itself up on its two small legs. It looked like a tiny horse.
Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
The robot vacuum lifting itself up on its legs while its arm stretches out.
Another interesting invention is a separate toolbox with various brushes that Dreame says the arm can connect to, enabling it to reach into corners and tight spaces where the bot itself cannot go and sweep out the dirt and dust. They also had a new base station that dispenses multiple mopping pads. This allows the robot to choose different pads for different jobs around your home — one for the kitchen another for the bathroom — to help avoid cross-contamination around your home.
Dreame’s Longdong Chen told The Verge that the step-climbing, tool-using, arm-touting bot should be available later this year. A price hasn’t been announced, but it’s a safe bet that it’ll cost an arm and a leg.
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Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
