In this saturated market, brands are hoping new mascots will tickle consumers’ nostalgia and help them stand out from the competition.

In the last few months, Domino’s pizza launched Mac Scott, a penne-shaped mascot, fast-casual restaurant chain Cava rolled out Peter Chip, a pita chip with googly eyes, and candy brand Hi-Chew introduced Chewbie, the brand’s first official, self-described “ambiguous mascot with a big personality.” This is after Instacart’s first-ever Super Bowl ad this year featured notable brand mascots like Chester Cheetah, the Old Spice man, Mr. Clean, the Energizer Bunny, and the Kool-Aid Man.

“They make more sense now than they ever did because everyone’s attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and there’s so much more saturation in the market,” said Colleen Masters, executive creative director at Aloysius Butler and Clark ad agency.

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After years of lamenting the decimation of Facebook referral traffic, some publishers are starting to see that traffic return this year.

It’s nothing like the heyday of Facebook referral traffic in the late 2010s. But this new wave of growth is noteworthy, according to five publishing executives.

Facebook referral traffic quadrupled in March 2025 compared to March 2024, according to Josh Awtry, svp of audience development at Newsweek. He declined to share raw monthly visitor figures. (Newsweek’s referrals from all social platforms are up almost 10 times compared to the average day in March last year, Awtry noted.)

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Something is amiss in India, when it comes to the media agency landscape. 

By now you’ve most likely heard of mid-March raids by the Competition Commission of India’s on the offices of all of the agency holding companies operating in the country, as well as a few independent media agencies. Holding companies raided include GroupM, Interpublic, Omnicom, Publicis, Dentsu and Havas across Mumbai and Delhi.

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Marketers have to move on from their  “decision paralysis.”

With President Trump’s sweeping tariffs taking effect last week, and an additional 50% tariff threat to China yesterday plunging the stock market, companies are now tasked with the short order effects of the tariffs: Understanding how their brands will be impacted, what the increased costs will be and how they should manage those costs.

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For an industry expected to rake in nearly $62 billion U.S. ad dollars this year, or about 18% of digital ad spend, per eMarketer’s reporting, only one thing seems to be certain when it comes to retail media networks — and that’s uncertainty.

No doubt, retail media is booming. But when it comes to defining measurement in retail media, (or even what constitutes as a retail media network in a sea of more than 250 RMNs for that matter) or who pays for retail media network campaigns, the industry is still figuring things out. Meanwhile, economic headwinds and tariffs loom, causing marketers to push for more flexibility in their retail media spend commitments, in which retailers have been asking for bigger commitments year over year.

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As client demands grow more complex and timelines shrink, agencies are turning to new AI-powered research tools to streamline workflows and supercharge insight development.

In recent months, tech giants and startups alike have released new “deep research” tools that are already helping teams within holding companies and indie shops to move faster, think deeper and deliver better work. Agencies are integrating the capabilities across strategy, media, creative, and comms teams — with some seeing benefits in helping craft pitches, shape creative briefs, and even simulate audience personas. 

Unlike basic search or dashboards, deep research tools from Perplexity and others use AI-enabled reasoning autonomously run multi-step workflows — scanning the open web, proprietary datasets, and niche databases — to generate rich, synthesized insights in minutes. As OpenAI put it, deep research equips ChatGPT to perform “at the level of a research analyst.”

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Publishers are perpetually staring down an armada of obstacles. But the challenges they contend with are constantly changing.

During the spring 2025 edition of the Digiday Publishing Summit, executives from Dotdash Meredith, Punchbowl News, TelevisaUnivision and more spoke out on the most urgent challenges facing publishers today.

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On March 31, YouTube changed how it counts views for short-form videos. So far, brands and agencies are celebrating — but creators’ reactions range from indifferent to openly skeptical. 

The update — which means YouTube now counts every time a Short starts to play or replay as a view, with no minimum time requirement — has caused some cheer among creators, like Dkdynamite and The Rich Nobody, who have seen their view counts spike as a result. But for the most part, creators see the change as having little to no impact on their earnings or daily workflows — and some are concerned it might sacrifice engagement quality in favor of higher numbers. 

Following the update, there has been no change to the way creators’ actual revenue is calculated; the only change is to the way the view counts displayed beneath Shorts are calculated. Creators’ revenue share payouts are still determined by YouTube’s “engaged views” metric — which uses the same view definition previously used for normal Shorts views. In fact, as a result of the change, creators anticipate that their revenue per thousand views (RPMs) will decrease somewhat as their overall view counts rise.

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For years, the dominant platforms of the internet have treated content moderation as both shield and scalpel — eulogized as “trust and safety,” enforced by a mix of algorithmic blunt force and human discretion, and backed by sprawling bureaucracies tasked with adjudicating whether a buttock or a stray word crosses the invisible line.

Substack, the subscription publishing platform, is taking a different tack. 

Rather than tinkering with the machinery of enforcement, it’s betting that the real problem lies not in the rules, but in the incentives — that a system built around advertising and virality will inevitably reward outrage, and that no amount of moderation will fix that. Its solution? Change the business model, and let trust between writers and readers do the work that moderation never could.

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Advertising industry professionals have been eyeing the creator economy — not only to understand it for their work with clients but also for themselves, as more agency employees consider becoming creators.

Agency-based creators aren’t limited to the creative departments, either. Some employees outside of creative, like one marketing associate who works for a digital agency, have dabbled in becoming creators too. “It turns you into a hybrid,” said the marketing associate. “You’re a copywriter, you’re an art director, you’re an editor.”

In the latest edition of Digiday’s Confessions series, in which we trade anonymity for candor, we hear from this marketing associate and creator about the difficulty of the strictly-defined lanes that exist at agencies, why today’s social media landscape requires more flexibility than in the past and what she wishes the agency world understood about the creator economy.

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For working moms, the rising cost of raising a family isn’t just a financial burden — it’s a daily source of stress that impacts careers, well-being, and the ability to plan for the future.

In this episode, we dive into the rising financial pressures facing working parents today. From the skyrocketing costs of childcare, school supplies, summer camps, and college tuition to the everyday expenses of raising a family – the financial burden has never been higher. 

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Though few will cop to cutting media spend or halting campaigns in the short term, marketing execs across America and beyond are spooked about the impacts of President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs.

Wednesday’s (April 2) announcement preceded the worst day on the New York Stock Exchange since the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in June 2020.

“Everybody is trying to figure out what the future is going to look like and what the ramifications are of the announcements,” Bill Koenigsberg, CEO of Horizon Media told Digiday.

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Last week, Digiday asked the question, “Is there any point in breaking up Google?”  

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Asking this question was not an exercise in advocating for laissez-faire economics. Rather, it attempted to determine whether the government was trying to apply a 20th-century regulatory tool to a 2010s market problem in the late 2020s.    

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In a ruling that could rattle the scaffolding of digital advertising, France’s competition authority has fined Apple €150 million ($162 million) for what it deems an antitrust violation disguised as privacy reform.

At the heart of the matter is Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework, the marquee feature of its privacy push — hailed by some as a principled stand against surveillance capitalism and by others as a velvet-gloved power grab. The decision marks a rare European rebuke of Apple’s dominance and raises larger questions about who truly benefits from the era of so-called privacy.

What follows is a closer look at the questions this decision surfaces — not just for Apple but for the entire advertising ecosystem built on the promise (and pretense) of privacy.

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Forget the standard job posting, Monks is auditioning its next AI leaders through an AI of its own creation: an AI recruiter personifying the agency’s co-founder.

The S4-owned agency recently debuted a new chatbot called “WesleyBot” that serves as both recruiter and marketer. The prototype is based on the mind and personality of MediaMonks co-founder Wesley ter Haar, who recently took on a new role as the chief AI officer.

Designed to attract top AI talent, WesleyBot operates as a conversational interface within ChatGPT for the AI-ambitious who feel like “lone wolves” in a traditional agency or consultancy. Part of the plans has meant creating a paid campaign on LinkedIn targeting mid- to senior-level talent who have media, data, or AI tooling skills across rival companies — especially in cities where Monks also has an office. So far, more than 600 people have chatted with WesleyBot, according to Monks.

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Is there such a thing as over-preparing? It certainly feels that way in the case of TikTok’s ban, which has been playing out in the U.S. for months since its initial January 2025 deadline following legislation signed by former President Joe Biden in April 2024 requiring the ByteDance app to sell to a U.S. owner or get shut down. After January, President Trump signed a 75-day extension for TikTok to work out a deal.

This time around, eight agencies and influencer marketing execs told Digiday that their general sentiment going into the April 5 deadline this weekend is more calm and confident. That’s because they’ve had months of practice and data gleaned from the temporary outage on Jan. 18, while some are more sure that a deal or extension is likely to go through by this deadline. Some advertisers like Coca-Cola and Comcast have even increased their spend on the platform this year, as Digiday previously reported this week.

“We’re worn down a little bit by the drama,” said Joanna Fowler, head of talent at Shine Talent Group. “We’re ready to just … move into the action phase, [which includes] building on another platform.”

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January’s TikTok outage has served as a wake-up call for brands, reinforcing the need to diversify their spending across multiple platforms to avoid over-reliance on a single channel.

That’s meant marketers have spent more on other platforms like Instagram and YouTube, both of which outpaced TikTok’s spend in the month following the platform’s Jan. 18 outage, representatives of influencer marketing companies Later, Collabstr, BENlabs and BrandCycle told Digiday.

Although major advertisers such as Unilever are upping their spending on influencer marketing — and some brands are continuing to increase their spending on TikTok — influencer marketers see this trend as evidence that brands are still hedging their bets around TikTok marketing amid the uncertainty surrounding the platform’s potential U.S. ban.

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WPP surprised the marketing and media worlds today with the least-surprising news possible. The agency holding company said it is purchasing InfoSum — the data firm once run by its current global CEO of GroupM, Brian Lesser. From the day Lesser took the reins at GroupM last July, it’s been speculated that WPP might purchase the firm — and now it has.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Sources close to WPP said InfoSum’s last valuation was $300 million.

But the deal represents a leveling-up on WPP’s part in the data-driven arms race among the agency holding companies. It comes just weeks after Publicis purchased Lotame, and months after Omnicom moved to acquire Interpublic Group, which comes with Acxiom.

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Direct-sold ads continue to be the dominant source of publishers’ revenue as we move out of the first quarter of 2025 — which is consistent with past years. But other revenue sources are gaining in importance as publishers diversify their revenue streams more this year, particularly subscriptions and events.

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Advertisers are looking again at the use of probabilistic data for audience targeting, and, in some cases, are seeing it as a potential solution to addressability concerns.

It’s the latest installment in marketing’s tug of war between precise targeting and broad reach — and an indirect consequence of third-party cookie deprecation.

“It’s not an either-or scenario. There’s no favorite child,” said Kumar Amrendra, head of digital marketing at U.K.-based pay-TV broadcaster Sky.

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