IAB Tech Lab’s job basically boils down to taking digital advertising and media practices, products and toolsets and making them mass-production ready. And in 2025, the organization will be doing that at a larger scale and with an emphasis on connected TV advertising and moving programmatic ad practices out of the browser.

This year IAB Tech Lab plans to release 31 new specifications or updates to existing specs, IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur was slated to announce during his keynote on Tuesday at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Springs, Calif. That’s an increase from the 23 spec updates the organization released in 2024.

“A lot of [the releases slated for 2025] is in advanced television. Whether it’s CTV and streaming-specific or some of the spec work is targeted toward the convergence between linear and CTV from an advertising perspective. Another significant part is being driven by privacy. Those are the two big drivers of a lot of that work,” said Katsur in an interview ahead of the keynote.

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This year’s winners exemplify the power of creativity, innovation and collaboration in modern marketing. From campaigns redefining audience engagement through tailored content to groundbreaking uses of technology like AI and automation, these entries set a new standard. Brand partnerships emerged as a driving force, unlocking new markets and opportunities, while compelling storytelling proved essential in creating memorable narratives across diverse formats. Each winner showcased remarkable brand visibility and a lasting impact, demonstrating how thoughtful strategies can leave a profound impression on audiences and elevate brands to new heights.

Epsilon’s collaboration with Currys for Samsung’s TV campaign set a benchmark in retail media. The campaign earned the Best Use of Retail Media award, by employing a full-funnel strategy combining display, online video and CTV to engage tech enthusiasts. Leveraging Currys’ first-party data and Epsilon’s CORE ID, the campaign built awareness and drove online and in-store sales. The strategy led to a 46% increase in conversions with an ROI of 3x and boosted in-store sales by 20%, attracting 56,000 visitors to Currys locations. This innovative approach positioned Currys’ TechHunters as a groundbreaking retail media solution, seamlessly blending audience targeting with measurable sales impact.

T Brand Studio’s international editorial team, part of New York Times Advertising, has set a new standard for branded content and earned Editorial Team of the Year. Despite being a small team of three, they achieved a 47% increase in global campaigns, producing award-winning work across podcasts, videos and written journalism. Highlights include campaigns for CREA, amplifying feminist and disability rights, and Wellcome, spotlighting health and climate change. Their podcasts for Audemars Piguet and L’Oréal ranked among the top on global charts, while their commitment to diversity and inclusion reshaped industry standards. Recognized with 11 industry awards and a Publisher Award, their impact continues to drive global growth.

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Remember when 2025 was supposed to be the first official year of the post-cookie era? Well, clearly that hasn’t happened and seems unlikely to happen anytime soon. And it certainly won’t happen until sometime after Google introduces its user choice mechanism in Chrome for people to allow or block third-party cookies.

“If there’s wild amounts of opt-in, then yeah, the third-party cookie in the Chrome ecosystem is probably alive and well. If there’s [a] wild amount of opt-out, if there’s no critical mass around the third-party cookie, then it is effectively dead, even if it lives on in some small percentage. We just — we don’t know how that’s going to shake out,” said Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, in the latest Digiday Podcast episode, which was recorded on the eve of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Springs, Calif., which concludes on Jan. 28.

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Publishing executives from Forbes, Dotdash Meredith, BuzzFeed and other companies detail how they’re using AI in 2025, from how they’re building AI tools and using them internally and externally, to the guardrails they have in place and the future of AI.

Read Digiday’s report on how marketers are using AI.

Introduction

Over the past year, publishers have been exploring how AI technology can help them streamline their operations, both to create internal workflow efficiencies and to produce consumer-facing content. Internally, publishers are using AI for a range of applications, from article classification and content recommendations to data analysis and ad targeting. When it comes to consumer-facing uses of AI, publishers have put the brakes on using generative AI to write news articles. However they are experimenting with generative AI for search functions, article translation, and quizzes and games. 

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The state of corporate America’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) policies continue to be under a magnifying glass — with all eyes watching to see if a flame will spark from the heat. 

In recent weeks, major brands like Target, Walmart, Amazon, McDonald’s and Meta, have rolled back DE&I policies. It’s unclear whether they’re publicly doing so to appease the new White House administration. President Donald Trump is reportedly making DE&I a policy issue with an executive order this week that would stop the use of DE&I practices within the Department of Defense as well as Homeland Security. Other corporate behemoths like Costco, Apple, Microsoft, e.l.f. Beauty, JPMorgan and Goldman, meanwhile, have defended or publicly stood by their policies.

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As content creators continue to accrue fame and influence, marketers have learned that they are not beholden to traditional brand safety considerations.

In the current landscape of online content creation, AMP is one of the hottest names in the game. The creator collective, whose name stands for Any Means Possible, includes popular influencers Kai Cenat, Davis “ImDavisss” Dodds, Duke Dennis, Din “Agent 00” Muktar, Roberto “Fanum” Gonzalez and Christopher “Chrisnxtdoor” Dimbo. Thanks to Cenat’s meteoric rise on Twitch and a slew of celebrity guest appearances last year, AMP’s following across platforms has ballooned into the tens of millions, empowering the collective and its members to sign sponsorship deals with brands such as PrizePicks and Bang Energy.

“They’re such a good partner, because they give us so much creative control on what we have going on,” said Dodds, speaking about the Bang Energy sponsorship. “They honestly just want to know the general idea, and if they align with it — which they pretty much always do — then they’re here to support, which is awesome because it really gives us an opportunity to not be held back in any way.”

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The IAB Annual Leadership Meeting closes today, hosted in Palm Springs, Calif., and featuring more than 1,200 high-profile industry leaders, including “marketing game-changers,” according to its promotional material. 

Justifying the admittance fee, which can cost anywhere up to $5,000, notable speakers, including filmmaker Edward Norton and Academy Award-winning director Ron Howard, helped add some glamor to the affair.

Topics of discussion at the conference focused on hot-button issues such as artificial intelligence, commerce, creativity, measurement, privacy and addressability, responsible media and streaming. 

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In recent years, ad agencies have embraced the AI narrative to demonstrate continued relevancy, as such disruptive technologies threaten their historic value proposition: manpower.   

Now, AI startups — helmed by agency alums and former execs from Big Tech — are starting to enter the fray with further competition in the promise of “AI agents,” and some brands are starting to listen.

Last week, a new startup called Palona launched with $10 million in seed funding and plans to build AI agents that help consumer brands with sales efforts, customer support and interactive information.

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Jessica Chan is a one-woman team at Perplexity with quite the task at hand: convince publishers that Perplexity has something to offer them, at a time when media companies are increasingly seeking litigation against AI tech companies for copyright infringement.

It’s quite the feat for one person. But after speaking with her boss, former colleagues and publishing executives, it seems that Chan is poised to lure publishers in, given her experience and the hard and soft skills she’s developed during her career.

Perplexity launched its publisher program in July, and was “overwhelmed” after receiving over 100 messages from publishers interested in joining, Chan told Digiday in December.

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For 14 hours on January 19, 2025, TikTok disappeared from the U.S., plunging marketers into a state of collective panic. The app, once synchronized with teenage dance crazes and meme culture, had become a cultural juggernaut — and for many brands, a hard to replace lifeline.

“It was a shell shock to the system,” said Jennifer Kohl, chief media officer at VML, the ad agency that had clients suddenly grappling with a possibility they’d only entertained in hypotheticals: life without TikTok.

Six years of political theatrics had turned the app into a lightning rod branded a national security threat and dragged repeatedly to the brink of extinction in the U.S. But in a twist that might as well as come from TikTok’s own algorithm, President Donald Trump stepped in, reviving the app’s chances with a 75-day lifeline to resolve its future.

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For all the dollars advertisers have been shoveling into retail media networks, marketers are starting to scrutinize the industry’s latest shiny object a bit harder. The pitch of RMNs was their first-party data and the potential to truly track sales. Marketers, however, are still looking for the retailers to make good on that promise.

This year, expect more emphasis on measurement with advertisers prioritizing incrementality metrics as opposed to return on ad spend, or ROAS, which has traditionally been the gold standard to help marketers determine which campaigns and ads are working (and which aren’t).

“Retailers can report incremental sales with greater accuracy than any other media company,” Christine Foster, vp product strategy and media operations for Kroger Precision Marketing at 84.51°, said in an email response to Digiday. “We know exactly what the baseline organic sales should be in any category we sell.”

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The world of audio hasn’t exactly been a hotbed of innovation and wild growth, despite the ubiquity of streaming audio and podcasting — two areas that have enjoyed a steady climb in ad revenue since the pandemic. Terrestrial radio represents the audio equivalent of linear TV in its slow backward roll in ad-revenue generation, despite surprisingly consistent audience numbers over the years.

Well, turn up the volume, because there are actually innovations happening in audio investment that are likely to help all manner of advertisers — but especially small local advertisers — bump up their spend in the sector. 

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Chatter about AI agents is suddenly everywhere — from Silicon Valley to the ski slopes of Davos – but just how will they impact Madison Avenue?

Just yesterday, OpenAI previewed its new “Operator” AI agent tool to help users with web-based tasks like booking travel, making restaurant reservations and buying groceries. Early brand partners across e-commerce and travel include eBay, Etsy, Uber, Instacart, Reuters, AP, Priceline, Target and StubHub.

Despite so much use of the A-word, it’s still early for AI agent adoption, meaning marketers should ask what agents are for, how they’re made, what they do, what they might do — and what they can’t do — including potential reputational risks.  

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When TikTok went down over the weekend, so did its sister app CapCut — revealing how content creators across platforms have become reliant on ByteDance’s software to edit their videos. Following CapCut’s return, creators are divided on whether to continue using the app or explore alternatives before it potentially goes away for good.

Pro wrestling YouTuber and Twitch streamer MinniePortable believes CapCut is one of the best available video editing options for content creators, paying $9.99 per month to use the premium version of the app to edit videos for YouTube and Instagram. When it went down over the weekend, she experimented with alternatives, but found that none of them worked as well for her.

“I was looking for something similar, and people on Twitter were recommending several other ones. One was Filmora, which was a good piece of editing software,” said MinniePortable, who asked to keep her real name private. “But then, when I tried to export it, it said ‘export with watermark or pay the annual $50 a year to export it.’ I’m not doing the $50 a year with no watermark, so I just stopped trying to edit, and was hoping for CapCut to come back.”

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Marketers are coming off of what they felt like was a pretty successful year last year, which is a good feeling. An even better feeling? Heading into 2025 expecting bigger revenues and bigger marketing budgets — a lot of which marketers will put toward influencer marketing.

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The cloud of TikTok’s uncertain future is still lingering.

Some marketers are forging ahead on TikTok creator campaigns after its brief shutdown this month, albeit warily, given the app’s unclear future. Others are maintaining their strategies as if a ban is still in effect and limiting their long-term campaigns as they consider the various twists and turns happening around the ByteDance-owned platform.

“We are still seeing deals come through as usual, but some brands are focusing on other platforms outside of TikTok at the moment because of the long-term uncertainty,” said Ali Grant, co-CEO of influencer agency The Digital Department. “Once TikTok was inoperable in the U.S., we received emails about moving campaigns to alternate platforms. But as we know, that was short-lived.”

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As the 41st annual Sundance Film Festival kicks off in Park City, Utah this weekend, more marketers and creators are joining the ranks of the film industry attendees. The festival, which will run from Jan. 23 to Feb. 2, has typically been a host to advertisers like Adobe, Acura and Shutterstock that set up houses on Main Street with experiential marketing and programming to appeal to attendees. 

While that’s still the case — the festival has myriad returning sponsors as well as new ones like Casamigos and Free People — more marketers are looking to the festival not only as a potential experiential marketing offering but as an event that can help shape their marketing efforts for the year. Anecdotally, marketing execs, ad agency senior leaders and talent agency execs noted that there has been more interest from marketers in attending the conference than in previous years. 

There are a few reasons. The Brand Storytelling conference, which takes place in Park City from Jan. 22 to 25, has brought more marketers to the area. It’s not just a matter of right time, right place. With more creators attending the festival, it’s a place for marketers to meet with potential creators and foster working relationships, noted execs. This interest in Sundance also comes as marketers have a renewed interest in brand marketing after years of focusing on performance over brand. One example of that: The investment in brand studios continues apace as marketers look to create the entertainment that people want rather than simply advertise around it. With that being the case, the festival likely helps marketers network with potential talent, look for funding opportunities for their brands to get in the mix with new creatives as well as seek inspiration. 

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In spite of the weekend’s momentary TikTok shutdown, sales on TikTok Shop didn’t miss a beat.

The hours-long TikTok shutdown on Jan. 18 and 19 did not have a negative impact on the platform’s sales over the weekend. In fact, TikTok Shop sales spiked in the days immediately preceding the ban, as well as on the day that the ban was lifted.

On Jan. 19, the day the outage was lifted, total sales volume on TikTok Shop amounted to $32,064,590, according to data shared by the e-commerce data platform Charm.io — an over $500,000 jump from the total sales figure of $31,429,366 on Jan. 18, and a nearly $5 million week-over-week increase from the total sales of $27,536,680 on Jan. 12. The post-outage spike in sales was on track with a general increase in TikTok Shop activity that began in the lead-up to the potential ban.

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Publishing businesses like the LADBible Group aren’t supposed to be thriving. They depend on ad dollars and platform traffic in an era where brands are skittish about news and platforms barely acknowledge publishers. 

And yet, LADBible Group, known for its youth-focused content, is defying the odds. Its revenue has tripled in five years, soaring from £30 million in 2020 to £90 million today. Advertising has been the driving force, accounting for 98% of the group’s revenue. Meanwhile, its audience surged 19% in the first nine months of 2024, surpassing half a billion people (503 million).

Digiday sat down with LADBible Group CEO Solly Solomou to uncover what’s next for the publishing group, which owns titles such as LADBible, SPORTBible, Betches Media, in the year ahead.

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President Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term earlier this month. During the inauguration ceremony, a coterie of Big Tech CEOs in prominent positions was prominently featured, and observers interpreted this as a bid to curry favor with the current occupant of the Oval Office. 

Among their number was Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, who, despite being the lowest profile of the assembled executives, is arguably in the deepest hot water given the host of battles it faces with the Justice Department and could do with a sympathetic ear in the executive branch of the U.S. government.

Examples include the business-critical search case, where it faces the forced sell-off of the Chrome browser, and in addition to this case, which Google lost but is in the process of appealing, is its ongoing ad tech antitrust trial, where a verdict from presiding Judge Leonie Brinkema has been anticipated for weeks. DOJ lawyers are pushing for a forced sell-off of its sell-side ad tech tools. Many expect the ruling to go against Google, prompting (yet another) appeals process, with the looming uncertainty splitting opinion on how best to position oneself for the resulting fallout.

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