Reggie Riley, head of U.S. ad business, SmartNews

Amid overwhelming amounts of content, advertisers face the challenge of capturing audiences’ attention effectively in the era of information overload. While many brands aim to reach a broad audience, targeting consumers deeply engaged with news offers distinct advantages. These individuals are informed, attentive and more likely to respond to relevant messaging — making them an especially valuable audience for advertisers.

News consumers’ active nature makes them valuable to advertisers

News consumers are not passive; they actively seek out information and often spend significant time engaging with trusted sources. This active engagement makes them a prime target for advertisers. 

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With TikTok’s potential U.S. looming ban as early as January, creators and agencies are split: some see it as inevitable, while others are convinced it won’t stick.

The rift has simmered since TikTok’s future was first questioned but has only intensified as the stakes climb — highlighted by the Supreme Court’s decision this week (Dec. 19) to take up the app’s appeal against a U.S. law that could pull the plug next month. 

As organizations put contingency plans in place, some creators and marketers say they aren’t all that worried about TikTok getting pulled. 

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Last month, Clip It, Roblox’s version of TikTok, launched its first official ad products. Now, Sia has become the first musician to activate inside Clip It — and it’s already sparked an unprecedented uptick of user activity within the experience.

Much like TikTok, Clip It is a short-form video service located entirely inside Roblox, with users able to create, share and scroll through videos of their in-game avatars dancing to music inside a variety of virtual settings. 

Sia’s Clip It integration, which launched on December 12 and runs through the end of 2024, gives users access to a free selection of holiday-themed songs, as well as a variety of settings, animations and virtual items based on Sia’s wardrobe and music videos. It’s the first time a prominent mainstream musical artist has placed their music and branding inside Clip It, although the experience also sells custom music and animation packs such as September’s Phonk Pack.

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Modern marketers know that any new work they put out into the world in service of their brand might be encountered by many different audiences.

There’s the target consumer audience, with whom marketers hope their latest campaign or activation will land. There’s competitors, keeping an eye on their rival brands’ every move. There’s online culture warriors waiting to turn an advertiser’s misstep into a cause célèbre. And now there’s another constituency marketers must keep in mind — large language models, the foundational tech upon which generative AI chatbots and applications are based.

With AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity gaining traction, tech firms are creating new ways to understand how large language models perceive their brands — and what AI answers say about them. One of the newest developments comes from Profound, an SEO startup focused on AI search platforms, which today is debuting a way to estimate conversation volume rather than just analyzing AI outputs.

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Agencies aren’t platforms — and they never will be. Let’s not kid ourselves. 

At best, they’ve dabbled in platform cosplay; a pinch of data here, a smidge of recurring revenue there. 

But the idea that they’re about to shed their old-school holding company identity? Wishful thinking. Still, it’s a myth that just won’t die, enthusiastically recycled by holding company CEOs for years.

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The crusade to make everything an ad network continues as yet another player enters the space: real estate media. 

On Wednesday, global real estate brokerage firm RE/MAX announced its own commerce media network, RE/MAX Media Network, a programmatic offering leveraging the real estate brand’s owned properties across its websites, email newsletters, and in-property digital displays.

The question is: Can media buyers be convinced to shell out on yet another retail media network (RMN) given so many of them already exist, like Zillow Group Media Manager, which could serve as direct competition to ReMax’s newly launched offering?

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Neej Gore, Chief Data Officer, Zeta Global

AI is driving a fundamental shift in marketing. While it’s been many years since new technology has drastically changed how businesses operate, AI is here to stay, and the early adopters will be the ones that win the day.

AI agents provide marketers with a new opportunity to reduce the distance between data and action. These agents are specialized assistants programmed to perform essential tasks in automation, optimization, personalization and more — offering a new method for analyzing data and taking action. In modern marketing, action without intelligence is risky, and intelligence without action is wasted, making a successful action–intelligence partnership highly valuable.

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The story was first published by Digiday sibling WorkLife

Workforces may be having an issue with AI overkill.

About half of business leaders report declining company-wide enthusiasm for AI integration and adoption, according to a recent EY pulse survey, including responses from 500 senior business executives.

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Few creators have been able to export their star power beyond the walled gardens of the social internet.

And although the influencer sector hasn’t wanted for commercial growth in recent times, the marketing benefits of a creator partnership or influencer campaign have been largely restricted to channels like Instagram and TikTok.

But this year, brands including personal care and household product maker Arm & Hammer, toy brand Miko and tech firm Snapdragon began experimenting with the use of influencer-made marketing content, in place of traditional creative assets, in programmatic ad inventory accessed via Amazon, The Trade Desk and Google’s DSPs.

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Since the summer, Epic Games has invested in a marketing campaign promoting specific creator-made experiences inside Fortnite. So far, the effort has resulted in a serious traffic boost for the chosen experiences — but it’s also raised questions among some creators regarding how and why Epic decides to elevate certain games on the platform over others.

From at least June 2024 onward, Epic Games has selected specific creator-made Fortnite experiences developed by third-party studios — including “Lumberjack Heroes,” “Havoc Hotel” and “Mercenaries” — for a marketing campaign that has included trailers on the official PlayStation YouTube channel and paid promotions by TikTok creators and Twitch streamers, in addition to posts across Fortnite’s official social accounts on platforms such as YouTube and Instagram. Following the campaign, the concurrent user counts of all three experiences ballooned by the thousands.

“Fortnite creators have the ability to submit their islands for consideration across a variety of promotional opportunities, including the Epic’s Picks Discover row and through our social media channels,” an Epic spokesperson said.

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There will not be a Media Briefing next week due to Digiday’s holiday break.

This week’s Media Briefing takes a look at the top trends from 2024, from AI licensing deals to referral traffic challenges.

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For 2025, Uber Advertising is sticking with what works: scaling up markets, doubling down on programmatic and adding new formats, according to Paul Wright, its head of international advertising. No need to fix what isn’t broken — especially when the ride-hailing app turned ads business already humming along.

So much so that the business hit a 1 billion annual net revenue run rate earlier this summer.. That’s double its 2022 run rate of $500 million. An impressive milestone for an ad business that’s just two years old.

And the way things are going, more milestones are bound to fall in 2025.

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks back at the top topics and trends that overtook the TV, streaming and digital video industries in 2024.

• Year in review
• WBD’s trial separation, LinkedIn’s TikTok clone and more

Year in review

2024 followed a year in which Hollywood experienced a once-in-a-generation work stoppage. So it’d be hard to designate 2024 as “unprecedented” or “seismic” or any of the lofty labels typically affixed in retrospect when trying to surmise the magnitude of a year. With that said, 2024 made a solid case for its place in the history book of the TV, streaming and digital video industry.

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This story was first published by Digiday sibling WorkLife

Had enough of AI hype? Tough. 

For a while, 2025 was shaping up to look like a period where everyone (at least in the business world) took a collective breath and set an AI path that was less driven by hype and threats of “don’t adopt at your peril,” and more anchored to assessing the ROI. 

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LinkedIn may be chasing the deep pockets of mainstream brands these days, but it’s not neglecting the lifeblood of its ad business. B2B companies are still front and center of its latest market pitch. 

Specifically when it comes to its own AI-powered campaign tool Accelerate. Unlike the offerings from Google and Meta, this tool is designed with B2B marketers in mind.

As LinkedIn’s vp of product management, Abhishek Shrivastava, explained: “B2B marketers have to make do with how to fit their own needs into the existing B2C tools.”

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The time to reflect on the year is upon us, and for marketers in particular, it looks like 2024 turned out to be a good one overall. Revenues were up for most, and many marketers even grew their staff this year.

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After an ambitious, but abortive, effort to diversify its business in 2023, the esports team 100 Thieves refocused on brand partnerships in 2024 – and was rewarded by a significant rise in sponsor interest.

100 Thieves’ renewed focus on sponsorships has already paid off. After signing 11 new sponsors and achieving a 50 percent sponsorship renewal rate in 2023, the org managed to bring on 23 new sponsors in 2024, including brands such as Crocs, Adidas and Google Play, with a renewal rate of 75 percent over the past twelve months, according to numbers shared with Digiday by 100 Thieves. Company reps declined to specify the specific dollar value of its sponsorship deals, which typically involve the brand paying the team a fee in exchange for a set number of deliverables, such as social media posts, content pieces and jersey logo slaps, as well as more bespoke custom activations. 

In spite of many esports companies’ attempts to escape the pain of brands’ shrinking marketing budgets, 100 Thieves’ evolution over the past year shows how the industry at large remains dependent on advertising to stay afloat, for better or worse.

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Damian Garbaccio, Chief Business and Marketing Officer, Affinity Solutions

CTV and retail media are some of the fastest-growing advertising channels and the spend is only going to increase. CTV ad spend is forecast to reach $33.35 billion next year, accounting for 7.8% of all spend while retail media networks will reach a stunning $62.35 billion, accounting for 14.7% of spend. 

CTV accelerated this year due to brands embracing shoppable ad formats, evidenced by Warner Bros. Discovery recently introducing “Shop with Max” as a new ad tech offering and NBCUniversal and Walmart bringing shoppable ad experiences to live sports ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

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2024 feels like a year that can be split in two: In the first half we saw some expected marketing trends panning out in expected and unexpected ways (Google’s cookie confusion, retail media obsession and generative AI). In the second half, however, it feels like marketers were in the midst of a recalibration of culture, and everyone was trying to understand how to show up and where to show up and they had to do so with stranger than usual change.

A good way to sum up 2024 might be this: It was a year in which marketers (and everyone else) had to get comfortable with expecting the unexpected.

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Influencer companies have been muscling into the talent management business recently — and now they’re hoping to make use of artificial intelligence and connected TV gimmicks to entice talent managers and brands to broker more creator deals on their platforms.

Two agency groups have recently added new services to expand their share of this growing corner of influencer marketing as the channel continues to grow and mature. This momentum is largely driven by an evolving creator business and the increasing need for all-in-one platforms to manage the various communications and business management aspects of the talent, deal negotiations, pitches and campaign measurement.

There’s a lot to gain if these players can attract talent agents, brands and creators to adopt their technology — the increase of scale on creators and campaigns, as well as a larger pool of relevant data. The talent industry is booming too, with certain platforms looking ripe for acquisition, coupled with growing creator opportunities in social media revenue-sharing models and streaming services expanding their partnerships. The global celebrity talent management market size was estimated at more than $15 billion in 2021 and expected to exceed some $20 billion by 2027, according to 360 Research Reports.

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