This year’s Digiday Media Buying and Planning Awards winners demonstrated a trend toward personalized, inclusive campaigns that leveraged high-impact creative and cross-channel integration to drive impactful results. Brands and agencies are also increasingly leaning on strategic partnerships and influencer marketing to amplify brand messaging and foster brand loyalty. 

Critical Mass showcased the value of personalized creative in a campaign for Harley-Davidson. The effort, which earned the agency a win in the Best Use of Technology category, aimed to boost bike sales through a dynamic creative optimization program reaching specific audiences at various stages of their customer journey. Critical Mass optimized media efficiency by targeting on-site actions most likely to result in bike sales, lowering the cost-per-sale by 51%. By emphasizing loan applications and tailoring retargeting messages to individual behaviors, the campaign drove a 2x increase in loan submissions. A test-and-learn approach continuously improved performance, with dynamic, customized messaging significantly boosting engagement.

In the Strategy Executive of the Year category, Wondery’s head of global marketing, Bladimiar Norman, is recognized for an approach tailored to specific audience segments. Norman, who is responsible for overall content marketing for Wondering podcasts, began 2024 with “Wondery Means Business,” the first of six innovative marketing campaigns. The month-long campaign was built around a coordinated cross-functional effort to lift listenership across the entire business genre. By focusing on real business success stories, Wondery connected with new, younger audiences and fostered a deeper connection with the genre. 

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

China's response to tariffs could hit Hollywood.

The quest to be number one sometimes includes just a little cheating.

A US appeals court ruled yesterday that DOGE can access personal data held by the US Department of Education and Office of Personnel Management (OPM), overturning an order issued by a lower-court judge.

The US government has "met its burden of a strong showing that it is likely to succeed on the merits of their appeal," said yesterday's ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. In a 2-1 decision, a panel of judges granted the Trump administration's motion to stay the lower-court ruling pending appeal.

"The Supreme Court has told us that, unlike a private party, the government suffers an irreparable harm when it cannot carry out the orders of its elected representatives... Judicial management of agency operations offends the Executive Branch's exclusive authority to enforce federal law," wrote Court of Appeals Judge Steven Agee, a George W. Bush appointee.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty Images | Pacific Press

The leaders in artificial intelligence unlocking new business possibilities.

A report on trend reports reveals a sea of sameness.

GMA has won its total viewer battle with Today for the fourth straight week.

Google is beginning to roll out its Loss of Pulse Detection feature to Pixel Watch 3 owners in the U.S.

Loss of Pulse Detection, the smartwatch’s marquee health feature, calls emergency services if the Pixel Watch 3 can’t pick up your heartbeat while wearing it. It was initially announced alongside the Pixel Watch 3 in August last year, and has been available for European users for months. However, because this is a high-stakes feature, it requires regulatory clearance — something Google didn’t get from the Food and Drug Administration until late February. Google says in a fact sheet that it tested the algorithm with over 100,000 hours of data to minimize false alerts, and has published a peer-reviewed study in Nature.

You’ll have to wait until you see a prompt on the watch to enable the opt-in feature. But don’t worry if you don’t see it just yet. While rollout starts today, Google spokesperson Bridget Starkey told The Verge in an email that users may see it over the next couple of weeks.

Amazon is showing off new AI technology this week, including its take on a more conversational voice model to better compete with things like Gemini Live and OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode and an update to its model that can generate video.

The new Nova Sonic voice model handles real-time speech processing and AI voice generation for conversational applications, Amazon says. Nova Sonic uses a “unified model architecture” that Amazon claims is better than other approaches that interconnect separate models to handle speech recognition, speech-to-text conversion, response generation, and then text-to-audio. Amazon says Nova Sonic can also better detect someone’s tone and deliver more natural responses.

Nova Sonic is available to try through Amazon’s Bedrock developer platform and the company says it can be used to make things like customer service bots or build AI agents for travel, education, healthcare, and a variety of other industries. “Components” of Nova Sonic are already being used in Amazon’s new Alexa Plus assistant, Amazon’s Rohit Prasad, SVP and head scientist of AGI, told TechCrunch.

As for video, Amazon announced Nova Reel 1.1, which the company says provides quality and latency improvements over 1.0. It also can now keep consistent styles across multiple 6-second scenes cut together to a full video of up to two minutes in length.

The last installment of Netflix’s Love, Death, and Robots anthology series was nothing short of fantastic, and we’re just a few weeks away from the show returning to Netflix with new episodes.

Today, Netflix announced that Love, Death, and Robots’ fourth volume is set to debut in May with 10 new animated stories about people living in worlds filled with all kinds of wildly futuristic technology. David Fincher and Tim Miller return as the series’ executive producers, and Kung Fu Panda 2’s Jennifer Yuh Nelson is once again the supervising director.

A teaser trailer for the new volume highlights how tonally distinct its episodes will be as they drop you into worlds overrun by gigantic robot babies and gladiator dinosaurs.

Some of this season’s stories will be lighthearted and comedic while others zoom in on people trying to survive through apocalypses, but they all seem like they’re going to be gorgeous when Love, Death, and Robots’s fourth volume debuts on May 15th.

The 2025 Digiday Streaming and Video Awards finalists reflect a clear trend: brands and agencies are prioritizing measurable results, personalization and creative collaborations to deliver high-impact campaigns. From AI-enhanced contextual targeting to personalized content powered by data, the work honored this year showcases how emerging technology and smart partnerships are redefining marketing success.

Amazon joined the list of finalists in the Best Brand Film or Series category with Boy Room, a short-form TikTok series that debuted as a comedic exploration of twenty-something guys’ messy bedrooms. After the first season, there was overwhelming viewer demand for transformations, not just observations. Using Amazon Prime to fuel 24-hour renovations, Boy Room evolved into a Gen Z home makeover show, blending humor, emotional connection and brand utility. The new approach resulted in more than 50 million organic cross-platform views — doubling the previous season’s numbers. The series resonated especially with audiences under 34, showcasing how Prime can fuel passions while solving everyday problems.

In the Best Use of AI category, Disney Advertising is a finalist for Magic Words, an AI-powered targeting tool designed to align brand messaging with the emotional tone of Disney content. The platform uses proprietary metadata tagging and machine learning to identify specific moods and moments within live and scripted programming, enabling advertisers to deliver more relevant and emotionally resonant ad placements. Tested through live sports partnerships and media agency collaborations, Magic Words demonstrated measurable lifts in viewer attention and brand favorability, particularly during key in-game moments. In one campaign, Chipotle reported double-digit gains in ad perception when using the tool, underscoring the potential of emotion-based targeting to drive engagement and improve ROI.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Less than a month after reports surfaced that Andreessen Horowitz was aiming to raise $7.2 billion across a series of new venture funds, Silicon Valley’s most ambitious venture capital firm is already going bigger. According to an exclusive report from […]

The post Andreessen Horowitz to raise record $20B AI megafund as global investors bet on U.S. tech first appeared on Tech Startups.

Following the April 2025 OTA update and Scam Detection yesterday, Google is now rolling out Loss of Pulse Detection in the US.

more…

This afternoon’s lineup of Android game and app deals are now live on the heels of Samsung launching its all-new 2025 Odyssey 3D and OLED gaming monitors with as much as $300 in FREE credits up for grabs. We also spotted a re-stock and $200 discount on the Galaxy S25 Ultra and the already-affordable Galaxy Tab A9+ down at $157, just be sure to scope out the brand-new Arc Pulse bumper cases for Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Ultra. But for now we are zeroing-in on the apps including Railroad Ink Challenge, FRAMED 2, Whispering Willows, Evergreen: The Board Game, and more. Head below for everything. 

more…

Earlier this year, The Iconfactory launched a new social feeds app called Tapestry. The app pulls together Bluesky, Mastodon, and other feeds into a unified timeline. And Tapestry’s latest addition, Crosstalk, solves an especially annoying quirk of our fractured social app landscape: duplicate posts.

more…

In a world where year over year iPhone upgrades are getting smaller and smaller, it can sometimes seem like every recent iPhone looks and feels the same. With iPhone 17 Pro launching later this year though, there’ll be a couple of worthwhile upgrades that’ll make it both look and feel notably different from any iPhone that came before it.

more…

A shattered porthole, likely smashed by the iceberg, is one of several haunting new details uncovered in a fresh look at Titanic’s 3D scans.

Having a Black actor as the Black Ranger and an Asian actor as the Yellow Ranger was indeed a 'mistake.'

A 54 percent tariff on imports from China will likely see rising prices on smartphones and laptops in the coming months.

On Monday, John Carmack, co-creator of id Software's Quake franchise, defended Microsoft's recent AI-generated Quake II demo against criticism from a fan about the technology's impact on industry jobs, calling it "impressive research work."

Last Friday, Microsoft released a new playable tech demo of a generative AI game engine called WHAMM (World and Human Action MaskGIT Model) that generates each simulated frame of Quake II in real time using an AI world model instead of traditional game engine techniques. However, Microsoft is up front about the limitations: "We do not intend for this to fully replicate the actual experience of playing the original Quake II game," the researchers wrote on the project's announcement page.

Carmack's comments came after an X user with the handle "Quake Dad" called the new demo "disgusting" and claimed it "spits on the work of every developer everywhere." The critic expressed concern that such technology would eliminate jobs in an industry already facing layoffs, writing: "A fully generative game cuts out the number of jobs necessary for such a project which in turn makes it harder for devs to get jobs."

Read full article

Comments

© Benj Edwards