Advertisers have long told themselves that brand safety is something they control. But with Meta rolling back its content moderation rules — narrowing the gap between brands and whether chaos goes viral — it’s clear that control was always a myth.

Platforms make the rules, rewrite them at will, and expect advertisers to fall in line. Most do. Because in digital advertising, the game isn’t about eliminating risk. It’s about learning to live with it.

Meta’s changes technically don’t touch paid ads. But organic content still dictates the broader tone of the platform — and what users engage with inevitably influences the ad ecosystem. Brand safety tools can only do so much when the overall environment becomes more volatile. And yet, what choice do marketers really have? Pulling spend rarely moves the needle, and staying put means accepting that brand safety is less about control — and more about calculated risk.

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The theme of optimism in marketing continues: Marketers said they’re coming off a successful year in 2024, they expect to have bigger budgets to spend in 2025, and now they see advertisers spending more this year.

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Publishers taking charge of programmatic has always been a mirage — enticing but elusive. In 2025, though, that mirage feels a little closer, a little more real.

While full control may still be a long shot, a growing number of publishers are starting to take a firmer grip on the programmatic reins — if they’re willing to confront a hard truth: Sometimes, the problem isn’t the system but themselves.

For too long, publishers assumed they were powerless to fix programmatic’s deep flaws. Instead, they leaned on ad tech vendors to mend a broken system.

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LinkedIn’s ongoing efforts to woo video creators paid off in the past few months, according to new figures shared by the company.

Short-form video is the fastest-growing content category on LinkedIn. As of this week, total video viewership on the platform has increased by 36 percent year-over-year for the period between Oct. 30, 2024, and Jan. 29, 2025, according to statistics shared by a LinkedIn representative, who said that video creation is growing at twice the rate of other post formats on the platform. (LinkedIn owner Microsoft runs its fiscal calendar between July 1 and June 30 and considers the period between Oct. 30, 2024, and Jan. 29, 2025 to be its fiscal second quarter of 2025.)

LinkedIn’s publisher program, which includes over 500 publishers and journalists, is also intended to amplify video content on the platform. Through the program, LinkedIn provides audience demographic data to news publishers, shares monthly newsletters with information about new tools, and operates workshops to educate members about the platform’s features. Weekly video creation from program members has grown by 67 percent year-over-year, per the company rep.

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The pendulum is starting to swing back to brand and a rethink of the traditional CMO-based marketing model. 

Marketing organizations within major brands are recognizing the damage they can do to their brands if they focus too much on performance marketing and too little on brand marketing. Marketers, agency execs and consultants said there’s a noticeable shift when talking to brand marketers — not only CMOs but those with the various titles that have started to replace the CMO title — where it’s clear that care for brand as well as performance is more apparent. 

That overall shift may be part of the thinking for some companies as they reorganize their marketing departments. Last week, for example, Kimberly Clark announced a new addition to its roster of marketing professionals: Luis Sanches joined as the company’s first global chief creative and design officer working under the company’s chief growth officer, Patricia Corsi. The company has moved away from the traditional CMO model with Corsi replacing its previous CMO Alison Lewis last spring. 

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Publishers that want to experiment with using generative AI technology to build products and features like creating chatbots and analyzing data have to evaluate which large language models best fit the bill. 

And it turns out that one of the biggest factors in these evaluations is how easy it is to integrate an LLM into their companies’ tech systems — such as different product suites and content management platforms — according to conversations with three publishing execs. That often means choosing the LLMs owned by companies with which they already have enterprise technology or content licensing agreements.

For example, a spokesperson at one publisher – who asked to remain anonymous —  told Digiday their company isn’t experimenting with an array of different LLMs and is primarily using OpenAI’s models. Their company has a content licensing deal with OpenAI that followed a successful project to build a chatbot using OpenAI’s GPT model. The publisher has continued to use GPT for other needs, like productivity tools.

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The search advertising landscape is poised to undergo a seismic shift this year, driven by the rise of AI-powered search platforms like Perplexity AI and search ads on social platforms like TikTok. And those are just the platforms with confirmed ad units. 

Meanwhile, the industry has been whispering about search ads cropping up on Reddit and Amazon’s generative AI-powered chatbot Rufus. All of this while search kingpin Google grapples with the fallout from its search trial, in which the Justice Department has tasked Google with selling its Chrome web browser to create a more equal playing field for search competitors. Google, of course, is expected to appeal this case.

The way people search for things online is changing, shifting from keyword-based searches to more conversational queries, in large part due to generative AI. And with Google’s dominance being challenged in court (also in the trial over its ad tech), competitors may soon start circling, hoping to capture any spoils from the fallout.

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This story was first published by Digiday sibling WorkLife

The ability to work remotely was the most requested workplace accommodation last year, according to a survey from AbsenceSoft, a platform for leave of absence and accommodations management, which included responses from 2,400 HR leaders and employees.

It comes as more major companies shift away from the hybrid arrangements they were in last year, and are requiring staff to work from offices five days a week. JP Morgan is one example, along with others in finance like Goldman Sachs, and some in tech like Amazon. Meanwhile, agency holding group WPP caused waves internally when it announced staff would have to be back in the office four days a week from April.

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The concept of ad curation may appear to be a nebulous one. Still, in the contemporary phase of the $750 billion digital advertising industry’s maturation, it has come to represent control: who owns the relationship, and who can command margin?

And with consolidation expected to represent much of the mergers and acquisitions in the space during 2025, the importance of this term is ramping up, as new players enter the space and audience signals become more scarce.

In its most basic concept, curation can be traced back to the earliest ad networks, with several industry figures laying claim to its invention, from high-profile pioneers to under-the-hood stalwarts.

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The Media Briefing this week features an interview with the Financial Times’ Fiona Spooner, managing director of the FT’s Consumer Revenue Group, on how their AI-powered paywall has led to an increase in key subscription metrics like average revenue per user and lifetime value — even though it hasn’t led to more conversions yet.

• How the FT is using AI technology to boost its paywall and improve ARPU and LTV
• The Wall Street Journal’s newsroom restructuring, ABC News’ union win protecting jobs against generative AI and more.

FT’s smarter, more automated paywall

The Financial Times’s months-old AI-powered paywall has helped improve key subscription business metrics, such as average revenue per user and lifetime value, according to Fiona Spooner, Managing Director of the FT’s Consumer Revenue Group.

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Amazon Prime Video’s ad business celebrates its first birthday today.

Over the course of 12 months, it’s fine-tuned a pitch to buyers and brands to put the case for their investment beyond argument — and in doing so, overtaken streaming rivals and ensconced itself on brands’ media plans, while padding the margins of Amazon’s already formidable ad business. 

The platform shifted from emphasizing the quality of its Prime Video content slate, which includes fare like the Rings of Power, The Boys and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, to highlighting its growing measurement capabilities and new ad formats, according to seven media buyers who spoke to Digiday. All the while, it’s held CPMs at a competitive level, forcing rivals to lower their own prices. A spokesperson for Amazon declined requests for an interview.

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how the growing availability of streaming live sports for programmatic sales will test the supply chain’s infrastructure and require new standards.

• ‘Tsunami of supply’
• Trump’s TikTok deal talks, CNN’s digital pivot, Nielsen’s MRC accreditation and more

‘Tsunami of supply’

The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Annual Leadership Meeting this week has confirmed what Disney’s Tech and Data Showcase during CES signaled: It’s about to be primetime for programmatically selling ads against streaming live sports.

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This article was first published by Digiday sibling WorkLife

Despite President Trump’s order this week that federal employees working from home get back to their desks, the battle over remote work is far from over.

New data reveals a workplace revolution that’s still going strong in many sectors, even as some companies slam their office doors shut. And for HR managers navigating these waters, the latest research offers revealing insights into where the market is actually headed.

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Anyone waiting for Google to drop a game-changing cookie update can go ahead and breathe — its not coming with this one.

If anything, the latest details on how the Chrome browser will ask users if they want to be tracked by third-party cookies has only stirred up more questions than answers — par for the course at this point.

Speaking yesterday (Jan. 27) at the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Springs, California, Anthony Chavez, Google’s vp of Privacy Sandbox, explained that the choice will come via a “one-time global prompt,” with the industry getting several months to prepare before it goes live.

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Despite the market disruption wrought by the technical feats of China-based DeepSeek’s new R1 large language model, privacy experts warn companies shouldn’t be too quick to dive in head-first.

However, market opinion is split already. Some privacy experts, marketers and tech execs are advocating for more testing and better guardrails before companies adopt DeepSeek’s latest AI model. Meanwhile, DeepSeek’s progress has shaken the psyche of Silicon Valley — and its investors.

Following last week’s release of the open-weight LLM, the young China-based AI startup has quickly caught attention for its low cost, fast speed, and high performance. DeepSeek’s own chatbot — a ChatGPT rival — has also risen to become the top free app in Apple’s app store. (DeepSeek also released a new AI image model on Monday called Janus-Pro.)

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While TikTok’s status in the U.S. still hangs in the balance, agencies are already shifting the way they recruit creators and develop strategies for their creator campaigns moving forward.

Now even as marketers warily resume their influencer marketing spending, agencies feel pressured to put more emphasis on creators’ multi-platform presence and flexibility in their advertiser contracts. It will no longer be enough for creators to have a million followers on any single platform.

“It kind of makes you think a little bit more deeply about … each and every deliverable [and] the way we go about future campaigns, as well,” said Ria Madon, senior director of creator partnerships at social media agency Superdigital. “Moving forward, [the focus is] working with creators who have diversified their platforms and have similar reach on all platforms, versus just one or the other — it’s affecting that thought process across the board for me.”

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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 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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