Perhaps sensing the opportunity that’s being created by agency holding companies getting bigger and broader — and leaving mid-sized marketers to feel like they’re being overlooked — another independent agency group is launching a new media agency extension.

Barkley OKRP, which has long handled some of its own media work but is primarily known for its creative chops, has launched media agency MissionOne Media. It’s led by Sean Corcoran, a veteran media agency executive who most recently ran IPG’s Mediahub until last year, when he joined Barkley.

The new shop will handle all elements of a full-service media agency but with a focus on staying closely linked to the creative side of the business. Corcoran emphasized that being the right size is vital to its success. “We feel like it’s kind of Goldilocks size,” he said, as in neither too big nor too small. The perfect client spends somewhere in the $50 million to $100 million range, he added.

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Later this year, YouTube will make it easier for creators to organize their serialized and episodic content.

The plan was announced briefly at the Made in YouTube event last September, though YouTube did not put a date on it. While there’s still no confirmation on exactly when it will arrive this year, during a press event in Zurich on March 11, YouTube execs gave a little more detail about it. 

Shows will allow creators to structure their content on their channels as though they were fully-fledged, episodic TV shows.

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This is the first installment of a two-part series on the top ad-supported streaming services. This initial report provides an overview of the various platforms’ offerings, including pricing and plans, ad options and ad innovations, as well as an analysis of the platforms where brands and agencies distributed the bulk of their 2024 ad budgets and ad placements. 

The second installment will dive deep into the results of Digiday’s recent survey of brands and agencies to analyze how advertisers measure campaign success on the platforms and the challenges they face when placing ads on ad-supported streaming services.

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In Digiday+ Research’s first-quarter survey of marketing professionals, respondents told Digiday that Instagram and Facebook still hold the majority of their companies’ marketing budgets. YouTube and TikTok came out behind Meta’s platforms in third and fourth place. TikTok saw brands’ and retailers’ usage and marketing spend on the platform decline this year, according to Digiday’s survey. Marketers’ use of TikTok fell by 17 percentage points in Q1 2025 compared to Q3 2024, following the platform’s brief outage in January and as the April 5 deadline for a U.S. ban approaches.

What social media platforms will marketers focus on if TikTok is banned? Examining consumer usage of various social media platforms may help answer this question. According to the Pew Research Center, TikTok’s main users are Gen Z, or consumers aged 18 to 29. Gen Z uses TikTok at higher rates than other age groups, even though the group’s most-used social media platform is YouTube, followed by Instagram. Among all age groups, YouTube is the most-used platform, Pew’s study found. Gen Z uses Snapchat and TikTok more heavily than other generations.

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Brynn Brewer got in line around 9:30 a.m. last Saturday morning behind dozens of others — some of whom got there as early as 6 a.m. to be near the front of the line — for the chance to experience the Criterion closet like the filmmakers and artists featured on the entertainment company’s YouTube channel. The South by Southwest experience to Brewer, a content producer at Chubbies Shorts, felt like an “organic activation” and “more like an interactive art installment.” 

Brewer isn’t alone in her assessment. The three women around her in line shared similar sentiments, noting their love of classic film, while shielding themselves with an umbrella from the heat of the Austin, Texas sun. To them, the three minutes allotted to each group to enter the mobile Criterion closet truck, peruse the classic films featured in the collection, pick out a few of those films to take home on Blu-ray and talk about why they matter (as well as get a Polaroid of themselves in the closet) was worth the wait. 

As marketers, agency execs, filmmakers and musicians returned to Austin this past week for SXSW — which runs until March 15th — so too have the brands like Criterion, FX, Paramount, Amazon and Alaska Airlines with various experiential activations on the ground. In the past, marketers believed that having an experience was a must and brands faced irrelevancy without one. Now, after having experienced the shutdown of experiential efforts during the pandemic, marketers, agency execs and attendees believe experiential at SXSW (and elsewhere) shouldn’t solely be about relevance, but to give attendees a real way to interact with the brand.

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If I paid for ChatGPT Plus from my own pocket and used it to help me write this article, would my boss know — or care?

That’s the question surrounding “shadow AI” — which refers to the use of AI tools at work that haven’t been formally approved by companies.

The ongoing pressure to work faster, along with the proliferation of easy-to-use generative AI tools, means more editorial staff are using AI to complete tasks. And while using generative AI for minor tasks — like grammar checks, rewriting copy, or testing different headlines — falls into one bucket of offenses, there are other uses which could cause bigger problems down the line, if left unchecked.

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The climax of the college basketball season is almost upon us. Most know it as March Madness.

Basketball observers are hoping the next Caitlin Clark will emerge during this year’s March Madness tourney. For the media world, it’s another chance to see how brands like Experian, State Farm, Priceline and longtime sponsor Powerade adapt to shifting viewer habits like the years-long migration from linear to streaming viewership, and mass audiences’ embrace of the women’s game.

According to Nielsen NBA audiences on ABC and ESPN have largely flatlined this season, down 1% year-on-year, while TNT’s are 14% lower — apparently a casualty of dwindling cable usage in the U.S — collectively, NBA audiences are down 5%. But the NCAA’s spring tournament typically attracts significant numbers of casual viewers over its three-week run, thanks in part to thousands of office betting pools around the tournament that draws their attention.

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Marketers are probing deeper on ad tech fees. 

Their long, almost Sisyphaen quest to figure out how much ad tech vendors are pocketing from their programmatic dollars has taken yet another turn.

“The big push from agencies at the moment is fee transparency,” said Matt Sattel, chief revenue officer at OpenX. 

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at what TV network owners’ latest quarterly earnings reports indicate about the state of the TV and streaming ad business.

• Fourth and long
• YouTube’s original programming, A+E Networks’ new name and more

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It’s been just over two years since YouTube started a revenue share program for Shorts. Last year saw a growth in brands’ usage of YouTube, but this year usage has dropped off. At the same time, more brands are spending just a little on marketing on YouTube while a lot fewer are spending a lot.

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This year, Black History Month brand campaigns in February were quieter than normal. Amidst the diversity, equity and inclusion reckoning, expect Women’s History Month in March and Pride Month in June to strike similar tones. 

That’s according to three marketers Digiday spoke with for this story who said brand clients have either paused marketing around days geared toward honoring historically marginalized communities or tweaked language away from anything that could be deemed DEI. 

As more companies retool their commitments to DEI, multicultural marketing around holidays and heritage months have come into question. 

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Executive dysfunction behind the scenes at brand advertisers is making it harder for them to track and direct retail media investments.

The segment is one of the fastest growing areas of investment (accounting for over $140 billion of global ad spend, per eMarketer) and has provided a new stream of revenue for major retailers in the U.S., U.K. and Europe.

In Target’s latest earnings report, for example, strong performance at its retail media unit ($649 million in annual revenue, a 25% increase over 2023) offset gloomy net revenues across the rest of its business. Walmart’s retail media ad business tells a similar story, having grown 27% year over year in 2024 to net in $4.4 billion in global ad revenue.

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With so many creators making their livelihoods across social platforms, players like shopping app LTK and creators virtually have no control over how those algorithms shift and prioritize content.

More importantly, this leaves creators vulnerable if their affiliate businesses are built on social media, like TikTok and Instagram. LTK hopes to give back control to creators with a revamp of its consumer app that began in late February.

LTK (LiketoKnow.it) might be best known for finding deals and trendy influencers, but the company is now overhauling its consumer experience to focus on more entertainment and social media features, like direct messages, discovery feed and videos. The new app will look and feel more like a social app with a watch video tab based on location and interests, a home feed of updates from creators, chat tab for messaging and a discover page for finding more related content.

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On Saturday, amid cozy velvet couches and a large taxidermied cheetah behind the bar at the Austin, Texas speakeasy Powder Room, some 50 or so creators and brand marketers gathered for a mixer hosted by YouTube. There was some deliberate networking — or “forced fun” to use a term that popped up at Vox’s Sunday night event to spotlight its podcast talent — where marketers and creators were asked to make cocktails (one with milk infused with Skittles and two kinds of rum), personalize cowboy hats and, presumably, swap info. for future brand deals.

Four creators told Digiday that the advertising and entertainment industries are starting to catch up to culture — including SXSW’s embrace of the creator community this year. For the second year, SXSW has a dedicated track for the creator economy; this year there are 73 sessions for the track. SXSW kicked off on Friday and will run through March 15th.

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Pinterest has spent the last few years quietly battling for ad dollars, courting advertisers with AI-powered products, like its Performance+ tool which launched last fall, and beefing up its performance capabilities to capture a bigger portion of ad budgets. 

Based on the platform’s latest earnings, in which Pinterest reported $3.65 billion in total revenue for 2024, that quiet battle seems to have reached a fever pitch. Pinterest’s efforts seem to be paying off.

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These days, everything is getting quieter. Employees check out in silence — quiet quitting. Companies nudge them out just as discreetly — quiet firing. And now, even the high-stakes theater of ad agency reviews has been muted. Advertisers are ditching the bloated pageantry of requests for proposals in favor of something more understated: no press, no pomp, just quiet deals behind closed doors.

Look at Coca-Cola. Its North America media review unfolded in near silence. Publicis Media looks like its close securing the win, and only then did word get out. Now, Coca-Cola is ironing out the transition from GroupM, according to a source with direct knowledge of the process.

For some CMOs, this is the new playbook. The era of milking an agency review is fading. Now, discretion is the name of the game.

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Meta’s plan to potentially spin Instagram Reels into a standalone video app has sparked excitement among creators and influencer marketers — but also concerns that the move could disrupt creators’ brand partnerships on Instagram.

The notion that Meta is planning a Reels-spin off, reported by The Information last month, has created many questions for creators, including speculation over the potential decrease in Reels viewership, as well as concerns about whether Meta will allow creators to port over their Instagram followings to the new app, should the decision go through. A Meta representative did not respond to a request for comment prior to the publication of this story.

Although Meta allowed Instagram users to bring their followers with them to Threads when it launched the microblogging platform in 2023, it’s unclear whether the company would take a similar approach for Reels. Furthermore, creators and influencer marketers believe that forcing users to download a new video app could deter some of them from watching creators’ videos. In the case of a spin-off, these factors could reduce the reach of influencers, some of whom have hundreds of thousands of followers, who use Reels as brand partnership inventory.

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The presence of leading executives, including Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, at President Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration led many to believe that Big Tech would have a smooth course in the coming years, especially in any antitrust trial. 

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So, when it emerged that Google met Justice Department execs, encouraging them to roll back earlier proposed remedies, including the divestiture of web browser Chrome, in its search antitrust trial, many assumed its political influence would win out. 

However, developments later in the week suggest those efforts — Bloomberg claimed last week that Google’s arguments centered on maintaining the tech hegemony of U.S. companies — proved fruitless in the case, where Judge Amit Mehta ruled Google’s search market tactics were illegal last year.  

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When Amazon killed its TikTok-style feed, Inspire, last month, most advertisers were unsurprised. In their eyes, it just didn’t seem to have gained any real interest.

“It never really felt like it had enough traction, in terms of scale, to invest more than an initial test for many brands,” said Joe O’Connor, senior director of innovation and growth at Tinuiti. O’Connor noted that his team didn’t see much adoption from their clients, so they weren’t shocked that Amazon sunsetted it.

And while Amazon was nowhere near reliant on the video feed to generate any significant revenue, it’s still a little surprising that even the biggest e-commerce player couldn’t make social commerce work.

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A little over a month ago, a bombshell report documenting ad tech’s shortcomings in stopping the monetization of child sexual abuse material raised the ire of senior politicians and prompted leading names to tighten up their operations.

Since then, the industry debate has been intense, with a growing chorus calling for more vendor transparency. And with that has come some confusion as to how the industry’s leading demand-side platforms will respond.

IAB CEO David Cohen made his philosophy clear on how the industry should move ahead. “Instead of pointing fingers, it may make sense to talk about the misalignment of incentives … move the conversation from efficiency at all costs to effectiveness and starve bad actors from monetization,” he said in a LinkedIn statement.

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