While brands see creators as a safe bet to boost awareness or drive conversions, they’re missing something. Analyzing influencer campaigns from 2024 uncovered an intriguing trend: that much of the industry isn’t necessarily utilizing or thinking about influencers in the most beneficial way. They’re overlooking the true superpower at their fingertips: influence.

One of the biggest blocks to increasing spend on influencer marketing is measurement. For example, when teams set an objective for their campaign, they often take a familiar route: If the goal is awareness, they focus on reach and impressions; if it’s conversions, they turn to UTMs and sales data. But, creators do more than influence consumer perceptions and behavior in the moment of a single campaign; they do more than reach audiences and drive action — they spark a ripple effect of a growing community and many more actions.

“Influence at scale is a movement, not a moment,” said Max Osborne, founder of ThisThat. 

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Tyler Romasco, svp of global publisher development, OpenX

It’s no secret that CTV is experiencing explosive growth. By 2026, nine streaming services are projected to generate over $1 billion in ad revenue, up from just two in 2020. At that time, CTV will also account for one-fifth of the daily media consumption of U.S. adults.

The most important driver behind this meteoric rise in revenue is biddable CTV, which encompasses non-guaranteed 1-to-1 PMPs, multi-publisher PMPs, curated deals and open market inventory that combines the real-time optimization of digital with the premium, brand-safe experience of traditional TV. 

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Digg, the once-dominant social news aggregator, is set to relaunch with a vision that seeks to recapture the spirit of early internet communities while addressing the shortcomings of Web 2.0. 

Founded in 2004, Digg once rivaled Reddit for the role of “the internet’s homepage.” Now, Digg founder Kevin Rose and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian have bought it back for an undisclosed amount.

The ambitious reboot, announced today, aims to create a community-first platform that uses AI to empower users and improve content moderation. Additional funding comes from True Ventures, which Rose recently joined as partner, and Ohanian’s venture firm Seven Seven Six.

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YouTube’s short-form video push has created new opportunities for dance creators to make money on the platform — but some creators believe these changes are too little and too late to reverse the dance community’s exodus to Instagram and TikTok.

Viewership of both short-form and long-form dance videos on YouTube has consistently decreased year-over-year since 2022, according to figures shared with Digiday by Tubular Labs. That year, dance videos received a total of 20.4 billion views; in 2023, dance videos garnered 17.2 billion views; and in 2024, dance viewership on YouTube declined to 14 billion views.

Amid this viewership decrease, YouTube Shorts became the dominant format for dance videos on the platform, with 86 percent of dance video views coming from videos under one minute long in 2024, compared to only 47 percent in 2022. (A YouTube representative declined to comment on this story.)

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Amazon’s ads business is muscling in on the same ad tech players that once fueled its rise.

Granted, it’s been edging into that cottage industry for years but its latest moves make those earlier steps look like a warm-up. Recently, Amazon has been rolling out features and services that were once the domain of companies like Skai and Pacvue. As Amazon tightens its grip, some casualties may be inevitable.

Amazon’s UnBoxed event last November revealed the writing on the wall. The tech behemoth announced a flurry of announcements and new tools, including a complete overhauling of its demand-side platform (DSP). That overhaul included the launch of its Performance+ tool, its AI-powered, black-box style ad campaign that was designed to woo non-endemic advertisers. Amazon also introduced AI-powered creative tools and a multi-touch attribution model. (Amazon did not immediately return a request for comment.)

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how Hulu’s error-prone Oscars live stream exemplifies the development that streaming still needs to undergo to usurp traditional TV.

• Downstream effects
• MLB’s streaming rights plan, Paramount’s DE&I policy, YouTube’s CTV home screen and more

Downstream effects

The highlight of Mikey Madison’s career coincided with a lowlight for streaming’s development.

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Curation has its fair share of skeptics but Index Exchange CEO Andrew Casale isn’t one of them. He sees it as the biggest shake-up in programmatic advertising since header bidding — maybe even bigger.

In his view, curation’s impact could rival that of open RTB, not just header bidding. His reasoning: while header bidding was a technical shift, curation is fundamentally about economics.

“Curation will be bigger than header bidding and as big as programmatic or RTB — that’s our bet,” Casale said at the Prebid Ascent event in London yesterday (March 4).

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Update Wednesday 11:50 a.m.: T-Mobile has confirmed its sale negotiations with U.K. outfit Blis, announcing it will buy the ad tech startup for $175 million. This comes a day after Digiday first reported the discussions. Below is the original report on the developments.

According to three separate sources familiar with the developments, Blis has been exploring its exit options in recent weeks, conducting discussions with both private equity and strategic suitors.

However, according to separate sources, the U.K. outfit is now understood to be on the brink of announcing a deal with T-Mobile, one of the few telco groups still interested in exploring ad-funded operations.

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Amazon’s grip on TV advertising keeps tightening, and now it’s gunning for the industry’s biggest payouts: upfront commitments and scatter market budgets. To do so, it’s launching Complete TV, a tool designed to make the notoriously convoluted process of managing those investments as seamless as clicking “Add to Cart”.

The pitch is simple: Complete TV gives AI-powered recommendations to help TV buyers optimize their spending across Prime Video and other premium streaming publishers. They do this by inputting their campaign details and target audiences, and, in theory, Amazon’s machine-learning models take care of the rest, allocating spend in real-time across both linear and streaming TV.

For marketers, this kind of automation tackles a persistent industry headache: delivering on upfront commitments in full. Historically, shifting audience behavior, inconsistent measurement and last-minute inventory fluctuations have made it difficult for advertisers to spend exactly as planned. So much so, in fact, that they often find themselves scrambling to move money into the scatter market to fill shortfalls — or worse, wasting budget on redundant reach. 

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News podcast listeners are more likely to use YouTube to watch videos and consume and find podcasts, compared to non-news podcast listeners, according to a report by NPR, NPM and Sounds Profitable.

“The News Podcast Consumer,” which came out last week, looked at news podcast listeners to analyze their demographics, media behaviors and consumption habits. The data is a segment of the “2024 Podcast Landscape Report” from Sounds Profitable and Signal Hill Insights, which surveyed over 5,000 Americans. Of those, nearly 800 respondents had consumed a news podcast in the last month.

The findings — which also show news podcast listeners are more likely to consume video podcasts — shouldn’t come as a surprise, given the recent dominance of YouTube as a podcast platform and the growth of video podcasts.

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A year ago News U.K. replaced brand safety heavyweight Integral Ad Science with a little-known company called Illuma. So far, the gamble is paying off. 

The publisher has increased its brand safe ad inventory by up to 20%, up from 16% just six months ago. 

“We’ve created more ad inventory that we know is brand safe,” said Charlie Celino, head of strategic development at News U.K, without revealing exact figures.

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Questions that keep marketers up at night:

Why did our customers buy our product? 

Why did they buy when they did?

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Amazon just raised the walls of its walled garden.

Last week, the company finally pulled back the curtain on its long-awaited Alexa overhaul, a chattier, more personalized and supposedly more useful version of its voice assistant. Generative AI powers this new version, called Alexa+, which is available beyond just Echo devices, spreading across car infotainment systems, connected TVs and anything else running Alexa.

This is Amazon’s latest attempt to deliver on the grand vision it pitched a decade ago: making voice as intuitive for controlling devices as touch. So far it’s been more gimmick than game-changer, but early reactions to this newest update suggest that could change. If it does, the bigger question isn’t what Alexa can do, it is how Amazon plans to cash in.

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If you ask today’s marketers what’s important to them, you’ll hear a common refrain: They want their brands to truly be part of culture. But what does that actually mean and how are marketers going about making that happen?

There’s a necessary recalibration of control and planning. Culture is ever changing, ephemeral and impossible to predict — and yet, today’s marketers are more beholden to the cultural zeitgeist than ever, intent on finding ways for their brands to be part of whatever the obsession of the moment may be and capitalizing on that. To be part of the cultural zeitgeist requires marketers to change not only how they show up and what they say, but also how they spend their ad dollars.

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Puck’s famed journalist-centric publishing model is changing. Sort of.

The news outlet debuted in 2021 with its journalists as the company’s audience-facing focal point, not the publication. People would subscribe less so to Puck than to Matthew Belloni’s or Julia Ioffe’s newsletters via Puck. And Puck’s journalists were, in part, compensated directly for the subscribers they attracted. Lately though, Puck’s newsletters have come to resemble publications in their own right.

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Twitch is expanding its monetization and moderation tools, and creators see the move as an attempt to regain ground lost to competitors such as Kick and YouTube.

In an open letter penned by Twitch CEO Dan Clancy on Feb. 27, the company revealed a slew of updates for 2025, including the opening up of monetization features such as subscriptions and Bits (a virtual currency that users can purchase from Twitch and donate to creators) to streamers of all sizes, as well as the expansion of the platform’s moderation functions.

Previously, Twitch creators could only enable subscriptions and Bits by joining the platform’s affiliate program, whose guidelines require users to stream for at least eight hours on seven different days and average at least three viewers per stream to qualify. Now, users will be able to turn on subscriptions and Bits from the moment they create their Twitch account, although other monetization features, such as Twitch’s advertising revenue share, remain available only to Twitch partners or affiliates.

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Nearly half of journalists surveyed in a new report said they are using generative AI tools not approved or bought by their organization.

That’s according to a survey by Trint, an AI transcription software platform, which asked producers, editors and correspondents from 29 global newsrooms how they plan to use AI for work this year.

The report found that 42.3% of journalists surveyed are using generative AI tools at work that are not licensed by their company. Journalists said their newsrooms were adopting AI tools to improve efficiency and stay ahead of their competitors, and expected using AI for processes like transcription and translation, information gathering and analyzing large volumes of data to increase in the next few years.

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It’s hard to ignore the sweeping changes to corporate and federal diversity, equity and inclusion policies, as brands like Target, Walmart and now Paramount, for example, continue to retool or walk back their DEI policies. Hyundai, meanwhile, says its multicultural marketing efforts and budget commitments will remain in place. 

Erik Thomas, director of experiential and multicultural marketing at Hyundai Motor America, told Digiday that multicultural audiences represent an estimated 30% of the automotive brand sales. (Thomas did not disclose exact revenue figures.) According to Hyundai’s 2024 annual and Q4 business results, the automotive brand’s global annual revenue increased 7.7% to 175.2 trillion South Korean Won (or slightly over $120 billion U.S. dollars). Meaning, there’s a business imperative behind Hyundai’s multicultural strategy – it continue to drive car sales, something DEI and cultural marketing experts have pointed to in the argument against DEI’s dismantling.

Last month, Hyundai put out its latest multicultural marketing campaign, “Play for the Car,” aimed at Black shoppers with paid media across diverse media, including entertainment channels like BET, TV One and Bounce, and publications like Blavity and Ebony Magazine. The campaign, from creative shop Culture Brands, will also have spots in NBA games this year. Culture Brands is the independent, minority and female-owned agency Hyundai selected as its African American marketing agency of record back in 2021. Since 2022, the automotive company has partnered with Lopez Negrete Communications as its Hispanic marketing agency of record.

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Bit by bit, more advertisers are beginning to use contextual targeting approaches for their programmatic media investments.

Signal loss from the gradual decline of the third-party cookie, rising esteem for contextual targeting firms’ AI capabilities, and the recent Adalytics investigation into ad tech’s role in monetizing child sexual abuse material (CSAM), have each given marketers reason to pause and question their current programmatic setups.

As such, contextual targeting providers have been twisting, turning and tuning their pitches to the market — ensuring they’re considered among the solutions to those challenges.

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When consultant Matt Ryan emerged from last month’s meeting with the CEOs of Omnicom and IPG, one thought stuck with him. Between their fanfare over the proposed union and the swift clap backs from rivals, it’s clear the holding company era is finished. The future belongs to operating companies, where agencies function as a cohesive whole rather than a collection of loosely connected firms.

“I came away from it [the meeting] thinking they’re really pitching this new company as a unified one — they’re really going to operate it like, like, one big company as opposed to lots of smaller ones,” said Ryan, founder of advertising consulting firm Roth Ryan Hayes.

If all this sounds familiar it’s because agency CEOs have been preaching the gospel of operating models for years. Some have inched closer to the ideal, but none have quite nailed the landing — yet. That’s why all eyes are on Omnicom’s planned acquisition of IPG. Should it all go through, it’ll be another test of whether agency leaders can finally break free from the holding company playbook — or just rewrite it.

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