Roblox is pushing to onboard more advertisers, but the platform’s current lack of third-party measurement tools is becoming a roadblock for some marketers.

Agencies trying to onboard advertisers new to Roblox say it’s becoming harder to convince brands to invest without third-party measurement tools in place, according to three agency execs Digiday spoke to for this article. 

“There’s baseline media integrations, where the media is served through their [Roblox’s] first-party ad server, and then you get data back from their first-party ad server, and then from an [experience] integration standpoint, all of the metrics you’re receiving are from the developers themselves,” said Jason Scorrano, CEO of the agency Gaming Attict. “There’s no third-party Nielsen or Comscore that is showing you what is happening.”

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Budgets may be tighter this year, but the rosé will still be flowing freely as agency executives flock to the French Riviera to attend the year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity from June 16 to 20. As a hub for seaside schmoozing and lavish award ceremonies, Cannes has long been a playground for industry leaders. 

This year, however, that backdrop of luxury comes with a sobering reality: Shrinking marketing budgets, slower client decision-making and economic headwinds are forcing agencies to rethink how they afford to show up at Cannes without bowing out of what’s easily the industry’s biggest event. 

“I’ll be honest, this has been a tougher year in terms of getting decisions out of people for new business and for new scopes,” said David Reid, vp of global growth at Transmission, a global B2B marketing agency, “but we can’t stay quiet and can’t afford to go dark because buyers are in-market.”

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MNTN’s initial public offering has revived hopes for ad tech companies eyeing public markets, debuting at $16 per share and quickly rising to $28, with a valuation of $1.2 billion. 

Backed by Morgan Stanley and linked to Hollywood star Ryan Reynolds (albeit tangentially), the company benefits from a high profile. 

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Nikki Ogunnaike wasn’t always a morning person. But for the last decade, the editor-in-chief of Marie Claire magazine has made it a point to start the day around 6:30 am with a morning routine to ease into a busy day of emails, meetings and after work events.

To capture a glimpse into Ogunnaike’s day, the Digiday Podcast is trying a new format – a “Day in the Life” feature that explores how Ogunnaike and other industry leaders move through their days and how they strike a balance between work life and personal life. 

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It might be perceived as a sign of uncertain economic times that agencies are doing their best to stay lean by keeping full-time staff at a minimum and relying more heavily on freelance help in areas where the lift is needed. 

But from speaking with the principals at two agencies, it’s as much a means of flexibility at a time when maximum optionality is needed. As well as offering the freedom to customize one’s shop to the needs of each client without breaking the bank. 

Chris Mele, managing partner and founder of Siberia, an independent design studio/agency based in Brooklyn, runs a foundation of five full-timers who handle design, product management, engineering, and talent management — while he stands in as head of strategy, as well as sales and marketing. 

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Just after 11PM ET, many people started reporting problems with TikTok, which isn’t completely offline, but definitely has been dealing with some kind of outage. Downdetector listed 44,000 reports at our last check, and the issue isn’t fixed yet.

Based on reports from Reddit, Twitter, Bluesky, and looking at our own devices, at the moment, videos may continue to load in TikTok’s mobile apps, but accessing other features like comments or switching between accounts isn’t working reliably, leading some users to wonder if their accounts were banned.

Trying to pull up the TikTok website, or even its support pages, displays a message saying “An error occurred while processing your request” along with a reference code.

We haven’t seen any update from TikTok about what may be causing the issue, and status pages for some of its service providers, like Akamai and Oracle, aren’t indicating any wider problems. Hopefully, it gets resolved quickly so people can get back to wasting their time scrolling instead of doing whatever they were planning to do, but if we find out any more information, we will update this post.

Known internally as the "Summer Camp," the space formerly housed Buzzfeed and it is also Snap Inc.’s current home.

Following the breakout success of ‘Your Friends and Neighbors’, which stars Jon Hamm and wrapped its first season last week, Apple has extended its deal with showrunner Jonathan Tropper, Deadline reports.

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After months of EU regulators breathing down its neck, Apple is finally seeing a happier kind of headline from across the Atlantic. And it comes courtesy of the new iPhone 16e.

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It’s Pixel 10 leaks day, apparently, as a collection of ringtones from Google’s upcoming smartphones have just leaked following other new information coming out.

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If you’re Apple, this is the kind of internal document that you knew existed, but still hits hard. Especially in the middle of a global antitrust reckoning and internal… whatever the heck is going on in there.

A recently unsealed OpenAI file outlines the company’s ambitions for ChatGPT. In short? They’re coming for Siri with everything they’ve got.

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