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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Retail media’s moment in the advertising spotlight continues — both for better and for worse. Concern is growing among marketers about transparency in retail media negotiations, and no one quite knows who should control retail media budgets. But at the same time, marketers keep spending in the channel.

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A downturn is coming, but the ad industry might talk itself into making it worse. 

We get it. The world is a mess. Tariffs are doing the economic hokey pokey, geopolitics are one long anxiety attack, and President Trump is back with his signature brand of chaos.

It tracks that 2025 ad spend forecasts are sliding. Who wouldn’t be skittish? 

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Concerned over Substack’s ideological messaging, some creators are leaving — or considering leaving — the platform in 2025.

One of those creators is sportswriter Joe Posnanski, who published his final Substack post on March 3. Although Posnanski was successful on Substack, achieving a following of over 47,000 on the platform, he said that his decision to leave was motivated by a desire to distance himself from the platform’s growing association with politically extreme voices, whether on the right or the left.

“When you search my stories online, you see Substack above my name,” Posnanski said. “Whenever something would blow up a little bit with Substack, I was somehow connected to that, and I didn’t like that at all.”

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Just weeks ago, the mood among marketers was one of mild crisis. The prospect of a TikTok-less future — unthinkable yet suddenly plausible — had them sketching out fallback plans, hedging bets and recalibrating campaigns. But as the April 5 deadline looms, when TikTok must find a non-Chinese buyer or risk being banned on national security grounds, the panic has curiously subsided.

In its place is something more measured: a composed, almost serene confidence, bolstered, perhaps, by recent meetings with TikTok reps who are still standing. Despite a noticeable thinning of the app’s advertising ranks in recent weeks, those who remain have done their best to project business-as-usual, even as the ground beneath them continues to shift.

“TikTok said they were ‘feeling very optimistic’ about their future in the U.S., but could not share any additional information on what will happen,” said one ad exec, who each exchanged anonymity for candor on their discussions with the platform in the U.S. 

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When Dotdash Meredith made its deal with OpenAI deal last year, it wasn’t only opening its content to ChatGPT. It was also enlisting OpenAI’s large language model to assist its contextual ad product D/Cipher.

“With OpenAI, we now have a tool that allows you to understand language at a much more granular level, and therefore make much more intentional connections between pieces of content when you’re looking for linkages,” Lindsay Van Kirk, svp and group gm of D/Cipher at Dotdash Meredith, said on stage in a live recording of the Digiday Podcast during last week’s Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado.

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Another Google core update was completed last Friday, the first one this year — but what it will mean for publishers won’t be clear for a while, if at all.

Google’s core updates, which happen multiple times a year, change its search algorithms and systems and have the potential to make or break publishers’ traffic. Last year’s core updates threw publishers for a loop. A core update in March 2024 aimed at cleaning up spam and low-quality content in Google search results hit news publishers hard, with many seeing their sites’ search visibility fall. Another change to Google’s algorithm at the end of the year decimated publishers’ product review sites. 

Publishing execs were keen to discuss the latest core update in a closed-door town hall session during the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado, last week. The consensus was clear: there is a sense of Groundhog Day when it comes to Google’s updates, and they’re yet again in the dark and at the mercy of those changes. (It’s been almost a year since Google rolled out its AI-generated search feature AI Overviews, and publishers still know very little about how it’s really impacting their referral traffic, for example.)

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As if the retail media boom isn’t under enough scrutiny, new tariffs and talk of a potential economic recession have sparked more questions about the negotiation process that is known as joint business planning (JBP).

Already, some advertisers have started to walk away from the negotiation table with retailers, citing concerns over transparency, standardization and measurement. Now, as economic headwinds threaten consumer spending, and in turn marketing budgets, agency execs say brand clients are more hesitant than ever to sign JBP commitments.

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Curation’s biggest problem might be its name.

Everyone has a different version of it. Ask an ad tech vendor, and curation is about packaging high-quality inventory for better performance. Ask a data broker, and it’s a vehicle for layering on proprietary audiences. Ask a publisher, and it is a rare chance to reassert some control in an ecosystem that’s spent the last decade pulling power away from them. The only thing everyone can agree on? It’s a growth area.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Money is moving behind it. Deals are getting done. The term “curation” now appears in pitch decks, product updates and M&A strategy. It’s become a default explanation for what comes next in programmatic.

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Despite there being a sea of more than 250 retail media networks, the reality is that it works out to be Amazon, Walmart and everybody else. Everybody else — in other words, the smaller players like Best Buy Ads and DoorDash — has spent Q1 of this year working to step out of Amazon and Walmart’s shadows and take in more ad spend.

While media buyers and retail media agency executives say there’s a chance for these smaller competitors to achieve their goal and actually take in more ad spend, it’s unclear if their efforts, which include third-party partnerships and new ad offerings, will be enough to eat into the market share of the RMN titans.

“If these small networks can play their data cards right, they can set themselves apart from Walmart and Amazon,” Cindy Meltzer, vp of research and analytics at ad agency Dagger, said in an email to Digiday. “Sometimes niche is more profitable than scale.”

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The creator platform Spotter last Thursday hosted the Spotter Showcase, an upfront-style event featuring top YouTube creators. Both the event’s organizers and participants took to the stage to broadcast a clear message: that YouTube is most definitely TV.

Spotter’s creator upfront in NYC, which was hosted by YouTubers Colin and Samir and showcased talent such as Kinigra Deon, MrBeast and Jordan Matter, took place just over a month after YouTube CEO Neal Mohan published an open letter announcing that television devices had surpassed mobile devices and personal computers to become the primary device for YouTube viewing in the United States by watch time. 

“We have started to see creators prioritizing high-quality viewing experiences that shine the brightest on TV screens,” said YouTube’s TV senior director of product management Kurt Wilms. “The share of videos uploaded to YouTube in 4K is up by over 35 percent year over year, so creators are certainly adjusting their content for the big screen.”

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Working moms constantly juggle two nonstop ticker tapes — one filled with work deadlines, the other carrying the endless mental load of motherhood. It’s a daily reality that rarely gets the attention it deserves.

In this episode of Mom’s at Work — WorkLife’s limited edition podcast on the challenges working moms face today — we discuss the daily dance that so many moms perform: the push and pull of balancing professional goals and financial stability with family responsibilities.

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