The Trade Desk intends to acquire ad data firm Sincera, marking only its second acquisition since it launched in 2009 — a rare move for a company that usually builds, not buys. 

Financial terms weren’t disclosed, but when the deal closes, expected in the first quarter, Sincera’s co-founder and CEO, Mike O’Sullivan, will report directly to The Trade Desk’s CEO, Jeff Green.

Why TTD is breaking its ‘build over buy’ habit 

The move arms the ad tech vendor with more data to convince publishers that ads running through its platform outperform the rest of the programmatic market. In fact, Sincera’s data powered The Trade Desk’s recent “Sellers and Publishers,” spotlighting where advertising value is migrating across the premium, open internet. 

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing reports on the meetings that Netflix held with ad buyers during last week’s Consumer Electronics Show, during which it discussed its advertising road map for the year.

• Nextflix
• Venu’s shutdown, creators’ AI deals, TikTok’s ban likelihood and more

Nextflix

If Netflix’s Christmas Day games were a touchdown — and they were in ad buyers’ minds — then the company is now going for a two-point conversion.

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As of today, Jan. 15, Walmart has doubled down on its push into the metaverse by launching Zepeto’s first-ever e-commerce experience for physical goods.

Zepeto is a digital avatar creation platform that allows its user base — which skews female and is roughly 70 percent Gen-Z, per Walmart and Zepeto — to create and share virtual experiences using digital representations of themselves. Now, Zepeto app users viewing virtual Walmart clothing items can use the app to log into their Walmart accounts and order physical versions of those items to be shipped directly to their doorsteps. Additionally, purchases of select physical garments in brick-and-mortar Walmart stores will also come with free downloads of their virtual equivalents on Zepeto.

The launch is Walmart’s third metaverse e-commerce experience, evidence that the retailer is playing the long game in its approach to virtual worlds. In April 2024, Walmart partnered with Roblox to open that platform’s first e-commerce experience for physical goods; in May 2024, Walmart opened its own virtual world platform featuring e-commerce opportunities, Walmart Realm.

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This story was originally published by sister site, Modern Retail.

Last July, the period care brand Viv saw its monthly traffic spike by 400%, which “came out of nowhere,” according to Viv’s marketing and design director Kelly Donohue.

After some digging, Donohue discovered that the jump in traffic was driven primarily by Google Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT search recommendations for non-toxic period care. At the time, a study by the scientific journal Environment International came out that found that many popular tampon brands contain heavy metals like lead and arsenic. Many people were asking the AI assistants about toxins in tampons and searching for sustainable period products, which led them to Viv’s blog.

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The copyright infringement trial between The New York Times and OpenAI kicked off in a federal court hearing on Tuesday.

A judge listened to arguments from both parties in a motion to dismiss brought by OpenAI and its financial backer Microsoft. The New York Times — as well as The New York Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting, which have filed their own lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft — claim OpenAI and Microsoft used the publishers’ content to train their large language models powering their generative AI chatbots. Doing so means the tech companies are competing with those publishers by using their content to answers users’ questions, taking away the incentive for a user to visit their sites for that information and ultimately hurting their ability to monetize those users through digital advertising and subscriptions, they claim.

OpenAI and Microsoft say what they’re doing is covered by “fair use,” a law that allows the use of copyrighted material to make something new that doesn’t compete with the original work.

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We want to hear your thoughts on the potential TikTok ban. Take our brief survey.

The likelihood of a future without TikTok is getting more real as the deadline to sell or be banned in the U.S. is just days away. While Tiktok’s future hangs by a thread, brands that rode a wave of virality thanks to TikTok’s algorithm, like Bogg Bag, Duolingo and Cakes, now grapple with the challenge of recreating virality elsewhere (if that can be done).

For some companies, TikTok’s algorithm has been a big get, one of the last cost-effective ways to reach a broad audience in an increasingly pay-to-play and fragmented social media landscape. While some brands are going down with the ship, posting to TikTok with a business as usual cadence, others have outlined contingency plans on TikTok competitors, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and even LinkedIn, in hopes to strike viral gold again. Or at the very least, maintain its social currency. 

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Related Insights

The Programmatic Marketer

How Megan Clarken plans to get Criteo out of the ad retargeting ‘box’ Read More

Criteo yesterday announced an end to its months-long search for a new CEO with the unveiling of former Dentsu Americas chief Michael Komasinski. 

He takes over the reins from Megan Clarken both as CEO and board member beginning next month in what’s likely to be a pivotal year for both the ad tech company and the broader digital media industry as a whole. 

While maintenance of the stock price is the core priority of any publicly listed company’s CEO, Komasinski’s task is a multifaceted one if he is to build on Clarken’s five-year tenure, during which time she took the company on a transformative period.

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This year, the companies driving innovation in Europe focused on omnichannel strategies, including leaning on first-party data and AI-driven insights to improve targeting and audience engagement. The Digiday Awards Europe finalists also share a common theme of elevating user experiences to deliver more impactful technology and campaigns.

For instance, the Financial Times is a nominee in the Best Contextual Targeting Offering category for its innovative first-party contextual targeting platform. By leveraging a proprietary editorial knowledge graph with more than 700 FT-specific topics and thousands of nuanced concepts, the platform categorizes articles with AI technology, validated by human editors for unparalleled accuracy and relevance. This hybrid approach ensures ads are placed in highly suitable contexts, driving up to 50% higher engagement and improving brand suitability. The platform’s ability to seamlessly integrate third-party blocklists provides advertisers with critical insights, helping them recover valuable inventory while unlocking new engagement opportunities. 

Finalists in the Best Ad Tech Platform category include MiQ, which addresses the complexities of modern TV advertising. Its proprietary TV Intelligence platform leverages the industry’s largest and most diverse dataset, spanning more than 90 million devices globally, to deliver unmatched audience, campaign and competitor insights across linear TV, streaming and YouTube. By integrating data from 11 ACR sources and demographic datasets, MiQ empowers advertisers to optimize reach and frequency, identify underexposed audiences and make informed decisions about their media strategies. This data-driven precision allows brands to cut through the fragmentation of the TV landscape and reach their target audiences effectively and efficiently.

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Any flicker of hope that the ad industry would renew its commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion in 2025 may be getting dimmer just days into the New Year. Recently, Amazon, Meta, Publicis Groupe and McDonald’s joined the growing list of companies to revamp (or roll back, depending on who you ask) their DE&I policies.

Last Friday, it was announced that Amazon was seemingly halting its diversity programs, “winding down outdated programs and materials” as part of its broader business initiatives review process last year, according to a internal memo from Candi Castleberry, Amazon’s vp of inclusive experiences and technology, which Amazon provided to Digiday. Similarly, Meta was said to be terminating its major DE&I programs, including those geared toward hiring, training and picking suppliers, according to Axios.

Earlier in the week, Publicis Groupe reportedly cut its DE&I teams, including removing its chief diversity officer Geraldine White from her post of the past four years. Per AdAge’s reporting, White will continue to work with the holding company on a consultant basis as the company is in the process of hiring White’s successor. Meanwhile, McDonald’s is restructuring its approach to diversity by retiring its supplier diversity efforts, rebranding its diversity team as the “Global Inclusion Team” and sunsetting the concept of setting “aspirational representation goals” to instead focus on embedding inclusion practices into everyday operations. (Meta, McDonald’s and Publicis didn’t respond to Digiday’s requests for comment. When asked for comment, a spokesperson for Amazon provided Castleberry’s memo to Digiday.)

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Omnicom Group’s pending acquisition of Interpublic Group seems especially timely in the hindsight of last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

A major talking point among the brand and agency executives in attendance was the onset of the so-called agentic era of artificial intelligence, in which AI tools handle multi-step tasks for people like booking a full travel itinerary — or firing off a client brief. In this era, data will be at even more of a premium than it is today

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By this time next week, we’ll likely know (though, anything could happen) whether TikTok has gone dark in the U.S. or if the app will continue to exist. So far, it’s not looking good. The likelihood of a ban has creators uneasy, preparing their audiences to follow them on other platforms and hoping to take brand deals elsewhere. Meanwhile marketers are questioning refunds, readying contingency plans and sorting out where they’ll move ad dollars.

It seems, all things considered, that marketers are prepared for the short-order effects of a TikTok ban should that come to fruition. What remains up in the air, however, are the long-term effects for brands should TikTok be rendered unusable in the U.S. Sure, there are other short-form video alternatives that stand to benefit (YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels) but short-form video wasn’t the only appeal of the platform. TikTok has been a cultural spigot of sorts for marketers in recent years — they’ve looked to the app not only for what’s trending and to tap into those trends but to understand potential audiences and various cultural niches. So what happens when that spigot is shut off?

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Influencer agencies have embraced generative AI applications over the last year, as they seek to cut the time taken to arrange creator involvement in brand campaigns.

The client reaction to those solutions has been mixed. But in recent months, agencies operating in this space have found one area with clear application for AI tools — brand safety.

Creator vetting can consume up to “a few days to a couple of weeks, depending on the depth of analysis,” said James Clarke, senior director, digital and social at PepsiCo Foods U.S. AI solutions aim to cut that time down to a matter of minutes.

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It’s barely halfway through January, but publishers are already kicking off a busy year as they prepare for the inauguration and what another “Trump bump” might mean for them. But before that, about 50 publisher professionals took some time to reflect on 2024. What they told Digiday+ Research in a fourth-quarter 2024 survey is that revenues were up last year and media companies had a successful 2024 — but that success didn’t extend to the media industry as a whole.

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Ted Flanagan, vp of customer success, LiveRamp

As the commerce category evolves and expands to more verticals and use cases, the industry is seeing a proliferation of media networks. Thanks to retailers, there’s a blueprint for how data captured from the core business can power a new high-growth, high-margin revenue stream. Now, across many verticals — like travel and hospitality, rideshare, entertainment, financial services and more — data-rich enterprises searching for growth want to get in the game. 

Launching and scaling a media network is a robust undertaking. These platforms leverage data in fundamentally different ways than the core business, requiring new strategic partnerships and integrations with media buying and selling technologies. Moreover, no CEO will pursue a new business line if it’s perceived to add risk to the enterprise, necessitating clear answers to questions about privacy, security and data governance. 

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T-Mobile has held talks to purchase Vistar Media, as the U.S.’s third-largest telco seeks to strengthen its non-traditional revenue streams by further expanding its footprint in the advertising sector, sources told Digiday.

Such discussions are understood to have taken place amid what would appear to be an ongoing sales process from Vistar Media, which is said to have fielded several inbound inquiries since late 2024, and come as parties in the space anticipate a flurry of mergers and acquisitions. 

T-Mobile and Vistar Media declined to respond to Digiday’s requests for comment, but later confirmed the deal.

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In the age of social media-driven, viral trends, brands often look to platforms like TikTok to strike gold with the algorithm and reach a massive audience. As social media fragmentation continues and the TikTok ban looms even nearer, the concept of virality may soon shift, making it an even less realistic goal than before. 

Take Bogg Bag, the brightly colored, Croc-inspired tote bag that became one of the many “TikTok Made Me Buy It” products backed by influencers and content creators, setting it on the path to achieve $100 million in revenue last year, according to Bogg Bag founder and CEO Kim Vaccarella.

Last year, the bags were everywhere on social media. One video was posted back in May where a mom packing a Bogg Bag with daily essentials got 1.7 million likes. The post was in partnership with Bloom Nutrition, health supplement company, but mentioned Bogg in the caption. Another post featuring a healthcare worker sporting a Bogg Bag racked up more than 378,000 likes in January. In June, another nurse who accessorized the bag in an unsponsored post got nearly 98,000 likes.

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Throughout 2024, several major brands announced they were creating their own brand studios that would soon roll out television shows and films. Marketers, it seems, have become more interested in creating entertainment rather than just advertising around it.

In February, luxury behemoth LVMH announced the creation of 22 Montaigne Entertainment in partnership with Superconnector Studios. In June, Starbucks touted its own burgeoning studio, Starbucks Studios, with the help of Sugar23. And in August, Chick-Fil-A revealed its plan for its own original programming focusing on reality TV. That’s just to name a few of the major brands that have been dipping more than a toe into entertainment to create their own studios.

Studios aren’t the only way brands are getting more involved in entertainment production either. In December, Sugar23 and production and distribution company Fifth Season kicked-off a three year venture to work with advertisers to co-finance $100 million of productions. That’s another one of the ways entertainment production companies are working with marketers. It all lays the groundwork for marketers to move beyond mostly creating advertising that interrupts programming people want to watch to (potentially) create that very entertainment.

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This edition of Digiday’s daily CES Briefing looks at the need for brands to adopt SEO strategies for dealing with AI agents, an interview with Mastercard’s Raja Rajamannar about agency compensation models in the AI era and how Dotdash Meredith has used OpenAI to boost its contextual ad product D/Cipher.

SEO for the agentic AI era

Expect to hear a lot about search engine optimization in 2025. Except it won’t be called that.

“It’s no longer about search engine optimization. It’s about answer engines,” said Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi.

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Advertisers may still be standing by TikTok for now, but its execs are eyeing the door as the app’s U.S. future grows increasingly precarious. 

Since the start of the year, two senior leaders from its ad team have already made their exit. Sameer Singh, general manager for global business solutions in North America, is reportedly leaving the platform, after three-and-a-half years of service. It’s understood he is available to support the transition for his team until the end of February. Days later, it was reported that Jack Bamberger, general manager of agency business for the region, had already left on Jan. 3, having only worked at TikTok since March 2024. 

While they have not said publicly why they departed, the timing is hard to ignore — coming just days before the Supreme Court weighed in on a pivotal case that could determine the platform’s fate in the U.S. last week (Jan. 10). Neither Singh nor Bamberger responded to Digiday’s request for comment.

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