As holding companies look to acquire each other to get even bigger, and private equity firms seek out independent agencies to buy and merge with others, there’s another direction some agencies have taken: the ESOP route. 

Employee Stock Ownership Plans, boiled down to their essence, are when an owner or founder sells his or her stake in an agency to the employees who all receive stock in the company, most often held in a trust. The employees are often fully vested within a few years of the transaction — and usually (but not always) cash in their value if they leave the company.

ESOPs have gained some favor in the media agency community since the pandemic, for a few reasons. For one, it’s a way of literally giving employees a stake in the health and future of their shop. It’s a way of trying to ingrain whatever culture has developed, as well as a retention and hiring tool. And for private owners, it’s a means of succession — a way of selling the agency without selling out to PE or a holdco. It can even be used as a shield against an unwanted acquisition. And it can have tax benefits too for the owner looking to cash in.

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The first half of the year brought no shortage of bluster: Amazon gunning for DSP dominance, Google locked in an antirust staring contest, publishers scrambling to offset traffic losses to generative AI, and Publicis staking up wins like its trying to corner the market. But somewhere between the sizzle and spin, fault lines are forming. Now’s a good moment as any to take stock — and make a few bold calls about what’s coming next. 

Google will start to soften its stance with third-party ad tech to appease the U.S. Government, as the Justice Department readies its regulatory scythe

The U.S. Department of Justice is pursuing a potential breakup of Google’s advertising technology business, alleging it holds an unlawful monopoly over the digital advertising supply chain, with the remedies phase of its ad tech trial due to start in September. 

Of course, this follows Justice Brinckema’s ruling in favor of the DOJ, and although Google has signalled its intention to appeal the decision, a process that would prolong the case by a matter of years, in anticipation of or response to such a remedy, Google is likely to offer several olive branches. 

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Marketers are waking up to the sea changes in consumer behavior triggered by the emergence of “zero-click” AI search. Some are moving faster than others, though.

B2B advertisers and brands that use a direct to consumer (DTC) sales model — and which often rely on organic and paid search as a means of dragging customers to the digital till — are taking preventative action now, rather than waiting for ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews to put a dent in their marketing strategy.

Consider the case of business travel company Amex GBT. To date, according to CMO Alisa Copeman, it’s relied heavily on paid search as a means of drumming up leads. Its customers — companies needing to arrange travel for staff on a regular basis — often do their research before committing, inevitably using search. “We have a buying journey that is very lengthy,” said Copeman.

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As Yahoo’s creator program matures, the company is increasingly evolving from a publisher into a creator platform in its own right.

Yahoo launched Yahoo for Creators, a creator publishing platform, in March 2024. In the year and three months since, creators have taken on a more visible role on Yahoo’s homepage, with a dedicated creator vertical and creator content appearing alongside traditional publisher content on the Yahoo app and in the company’s newsletters. 

The OG internet giant is looking to secure its piece of the creator economy, and it’s brought on big-name creators such as Nick DiGiovanni to help accomplish the task. Yahoo now has 135 lifestyle-focused creators in its program. 

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For most of the last 50 years since the upfront was an integral part of marketers’ plans to advertise on TV, the buying bonanza usually wrapped up business between TV sellers and buyers before the July Fourth break. That is definitely not the case this year, for a few reasons. 

According to three heads of investment at major agency groups, the multi-billion dollar marketplace is being slowed down for three reasons: its increasing complexity, discrepancies with Nielsen’s latest ratings system, and lingering confusion over which agency is responsible for upfront negotiations with clients that have recently moved their business from one holdco to another.

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As brands step up their podcast marketing spend, podcast companies are putting on more live events to meet the growing demand.

In 2024, SiriusXM dipped its toes into live podcast events for the first time, organizing 10 live podcast events over the course of the year. So far in 2025, the company has already held 18 live podcast recordings, with plans to double or triple its overall number of live podcast events by the end of the year.

SiriusXM’s live podcasts, whose audiences typically involve 40 or 50 fans, are not ticketed events. However, they represent a growing revenue stream for the company thanks to sponsorships by advertisers such as Hershey’s and Macy’s, with SiriusXM holding the events at both the company’s in-house recording studio in its New York City headquarters and at venues such as Avalon Hollywood. So far this year, SiriusXM Media has more than doubled the number of sponsors and corresponding ad revenue for its live podcast events, according to svp of strategic solutions Karina Montgomery, who declined to give exact figures but said that “ad revenue from these events is already up 160 percent as of June 2025, compared to all of 2024.”

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This article was first published by Digiday sibling Modern Retail.

In 2025, influencer marketing is nothing new. Nevertheless, some major big-box retailers just launched creator programs in response to the evolution of how people interact with social content and creators.

Best Buy in April launched the Best Buy Creator program, which gives creators the ability to create a storefront to highlight their content and earn a commission on sales of products in their tailored collections with no commission cap. Some of the first influencers to join the program have included Linus Sebastian of YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips, Judner Aura of UrAvgConsumer, and tech and lifestyle creator Jenna Ezarik.

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Rising demand among marketers for AI search expertise is driving more agencies to create specialist units intended to help clients navigate the tech and its impact on consumer habits.

In recent months media shops like Jellyfish, Wpromote and Kepler have each launched or expanded AI search services that offer clients a means of partially gauging how applications like ChatGPT and Gemini represent and understand their brands.

Among the advertisers attempting to measure the “share of model” (as opposed to their share of market) within large language models (LLMs) is consumer healthcare firm Haleon. The company is currently testing how Meta’s Llama model represents its Advil and Emergen-C brands in user-generated search results.

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At first glance, Cluely reads like a parody of startup culture. A 21-year-old founder broadcasting viral videos about chatting on job interviews, dating with AI overlay and hosting parties shut down for “too much aura”. 

And yet here we are: Andreessen Horowitz just led a $15 million investment into the startup that turns a person’s screen into an invisible assistant — a kind of real-time whisperer for meetings, sales calls and even exams. 

Or at least that’s what it wants to be. Because Cluely launched a narrative before it launched a tool. And somehow, it’s working. 

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This week’s Media Briefing looks into Cloudflare’s new tool that lets publishers block all AI crawlers – at the click of a button – and why publishers are celebrating.

• An end to publishers’ AI crawler Whack-a-Mole
• Google ends tests of a feature that previewed recipes, Forbes CEO shares AI strategy, and more.

Cloudflare’s red-button blocker

Publishers everywhere have had reason to celebrate this week as a single Cloudflare toggle gave them a rare, decisive victory in the battle to keep AI bot crawlers off their content.

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Condé Nast execs are pressured to retain ad dollars after Anna Wintour announced last week that she will no longer oversee the day-to-day operations of Vogue, the luxury brand she has led as editor-in-chief since 1988.

Wintour will remain in her broader roles as Condé Nast’s chief content officer and global editorial director for Vogue. And while it’s too soon for the ad industry to record a change in brands continuing to advertise or not, one agency exec acknowledged to Digiday the weight of Wintour’s moves: “[ad money] flows to Vogue because of Anna.”

Wintour has become synonymous with the Vogue brand. But the fashion media landscape has changed since Vogue’s print-dominant heyday. Brands are contending with shrinking referral traffic, ad dollars are shifting to search and social, the creator economy is booming, and generative AI technology is curating fashion and summarizing content in search engines.

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Georgina Bankier, vp, global platform partnerships, Eyeota, a Dun & Bradstreet company

In today’s fractured media environment, connected TV and retail media are dominating advertiser attention — and their budgets.

CTV ad spending is projected to reach $33.35 billion this year, while retail media’s 19.7% growth will be more than double the growth in overall digital ad spending (8.8%). At the same time, emerging opportunities in digital out-of-home and audio are gaining ground as marketers seek new ways to engage audiences during their daily lives.

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AI bots scraping publishers’ sites for real-time information are now scraping publishers’ sites more than the bots used to train large language models. And they’re harder to detect.

That’s according to the latest report from TollBit, a data marketplace for publishers and AI companies. From Q4 2024 to Q1 2025, bot scrapes used for Retrieval Augmented Generation, or RAG, per site grew 49%. That is nearly 2.5 times the rate of training bot scrapes (which grew by 18%) in the same time period. 

An increase in bots scraping content from publishers’ sites represents a threat to their businesses. But scraping for AI training and scraping for real-time outputs present different challenges — and some opportunities — for publishers. And not all of them are fully understood. 

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Future is betting on AI to boost recirculation – and make that stickier audience more appealing to advertisers.

The publisher’s new proprietary AI-powered content categorization engine, called Advisor, acts like a “brain” trained on Future’s internal data, according to Jamie Samuel, head of commercial products at Future. Built into its audience data platform Aperture, Advisor lets Future quickly test an “unlimited” number of approaches to keep users engaged on its sites, ranging from chatbots to content recommendation widgets, he said.

Advisor uses machine learning and OpenAI’s large language models to analyze articles in real-time across Future’s over 50 publications, including Marie Claire, Who What Wear, Tom’s Guide and The Week. 

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how mobile still accounts for an overwhelming majority of YouTube video views and why some Gen Z viewers aren’t tuning into YouTube on TV screens.

• Screen check
• Let’s talk CTV in NYC
• YouTube vs. TikTok vs. Instagram: What Gen Z really watches in 2025
• Brands on the big screen, TikTok & Instagram on TV screens and more

Screen check

This year marked a milestone for YouTube. People are spending more time watching the platform’s videos on TV screens than any other device. But there’s a but. Actually two buts.

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As Substack invests in video content, the platform’s smaller creators stand to gain the most subscribers and advertisers by embracing the medium.

Over the past year, Substack has considerably expanded its video tools for both creators and audience members. In January, Substack launched live video as a tool for all users. In early March, the company enabled video posts for mobile users for the first time; two weeks later, the platform rolled out its first TikTok-style video feed.

Six months into 2025, however, Substack’s video push has resulted in mixed results for creators on the platform, with the impact of video on individual Substackers’ subscriber growth varying widely depending on the size of the creator’s following, according to an analysis of over 58,000 active Substack accounts by Subalytics, an influencer marketing platform with data on Bluesky, Substack and Medium creators. (Substack has not publicly disclosed how many accounts have been active on the platform in 2025, but the company’s founders shared in a December blog post that “more than 50,000 publishers” had made money on Substack in 2024.)

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Sources tell Digiday that Integral Ad Science has entertained suggestions of splitting from Publica, amid further speculation of take-private plans.

At the same time, there is consistent speculation that Criteo is considering a potential divestiture of its BidSwitch assets. This comes amid speculation of its own future on the public markets.  

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Welcome to the era of the ad network arms race. Over the past year, retail media and other ad networks have been pulling out all the stops to convince media buyers that they’ve evolved from performance-driven tools into full-funnel media ecosystems.

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Retail Media Rewritten

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With more than 250 ad networks — and counting — all fighting for the same ad dollars, the competition is getting stiff, and the RMN space is becoming increasingly crowded. Amid the so-called retail media gold rush, Kristi Argyilan, the global head of Uber Advertising, turns to her own RMN playbook.

Dubbed the “godmother” of retail media by AdExchanger, Argyilan has seen the ad network category from every angle — buyer, seller, publisher, and client. Argyilan’s retail media scorecard dates back to her stint as president of Target’s Roundel back in 2019, svp of retail media at Albertsons Media Collective in 2021 and global head of Uber Ads since last December.

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Interested in sharing your perspectives on the media and marketing industries? Join the Digiday research panel.

TV and streaming are one and the same in the eyes of today’s consumers, and, therefore, marketers. As a result, the majority of marketers are directing ad spend toward TV, with a focus on ads that drive impressions and branding.

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Advertisers aren’t feeling the direct blow of generative AI on traffic the way publishers are. But they see what’s coming. Tripadvisor, for one, is already adjusting its strategy as the foundation of search starts to shift. 

It’s not going full Dotdash Meredith – the publisher has openly braced for a future without Google traffic – but a recalibration is clearly underway. 

“Google’s AI mode in search is going to eat large chunks of search,” said Matthew Dacey, CMO at Tripadvisor. “It’s going to happen fast as they [Google] push it and more people subsequently adopt it.”

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