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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In recent weeks, the ad tech sector’s leading lights have issued their financial results for the closing quarter of 2024 — traditionally, the big-money period of the financial year — and while almost all reported numbers that were up and to the right, the markets reacted negatively.

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The year 2025 has been widely touted as a comeback year for mergers and acquisitions, and even some initial public offerings, in ad tech, although Wall Street’s reactions to the latest round of earnings calls from companies in the sector will likely prove a drag on valuations.

For example, revenues for the sector’s big two, i.e., AppLovin and The Trade Desk, issued double-digit annual revenue increases (44% and 26%, respectively), but the slings and arrows of the public markets resulted in precipitous price declines in recent weeks.

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The two holding companies that reported their 2024 earnings last week — WPP and Stagwell — painted considerably different portraits of the future in the guidance they offered for the rest of 2025. Besides IPG’s dour expectations from two weeks ago, WPP is the only holdco to say it expects to have a rough year.

It’s important to maintain perspective in looking at the two holdcos side by side. WPP dwarfs Stagwell in size and scale, (WPP’s nearly $18.6 billion in 2024 revenue compared to Stagwell’s $2.8 billion), but in this case, smaller actually presents an advantage in showing a greater percentage of growth — specifically, 12% growth (including advocacy, which was huge last year thanks to a presidential election) for Stagwell to WPP’s flat to slightly down result.

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DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science have spent years as rivals focused on brand safety and verification, tasked with protecting the world’s biggest brands from showing up in problematic places. However, as recent reports show, things can slip through the cracks.

Now, they’re moving beyond the open web, using AI offerings — some built internally and some acquired — to compete for new types of advertisers in new ad arenas.

Both companies, which reported earnings late last week, showed off their road map for winning over mid-market advertisers across new channels like social media, CTV, and retail media. They’re also moving beyond the thorny issue of brand safety to try and prove themselves in yet another tricky area: performance and measurement.

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For creators, YouTube is still the top platform for making money. 

No surprise there. It’s had a head start, fine-tuning its monetization model while others scramble to keep up. And with U.S. creators expected to rake in over $15 billion from social media alone this year, according to eMarketer, the stakes have never been higher. For platforms, courting creators isn’t just a strategy, its table stakes. And more often than not, the winning move comes down to cold, hard cash. 

“If you asked 10 creators what platform they prefer for monetizing outside of brand partnerships, you’d probably get at least nine (if not all) saying YouTube,” said Keith Bendes, chief strategy officer at Linqia. “Interestingly though, if you asked 10 brands which platform they prefer for creator partnerships, you’d probably get nine (or all of them) saying Instagram or TikTok.”

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It’s been a little over two weeks since The Trade Desk issued its first-ever earnings miss, during which time its stock price dropped by almost 40%. However, at its flagship NYC partner event on Thursday, executives there outlined their priorities for the year ahead. 

Joined on stage by the likes of The New York Times, NBC Universal, Paramount, and Warner Bros.Discovery (among others), the narrative heralded “the rise of the premium internet,” indicating its priorities on Madison Avenue for the year ahead.

In opening remarks, its commercial chief Tim Sims outlined The Trade Desk’s outlook on a new industry paradigm, one that’s free from Google’s influence. This paradigm includes the importance of authenticated audiences and a more efficient supply chain.  

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The creator economy is taking a closer look at creator affiliate programs, giving them more scrutiny than before. The move follows creator pushback against Honey, a PayPal-owned browser extension, after reports broke late last year that the company was allegedly skimming creators’ affiliate revenue.

Honey, which finds coupon codes for online shopping, was exposed by YouTuber MegaLag for allegedly hijacking affiliate links from creators and using its own (even in cases where it wasn’t a better deal). This has since resulted in class action lawsuits from several creators including YouTubers Legal Eagle and GamersNexus, against the browser extension, claiming that Honey is taking affiliate revenue that belonged to creators.

It’s not just Honey. Other companies including Microsoft and Capital One are facing similar claims regarding their browser extensions through Microsoft Shopping and Capital One Shopping. Now creator and legal experts expect to see greater scrutiny to these affiliate partnerships and changes to influencer contracts and agreements to include more protections to mitigate risk — on both the brand and creator sides. While some creator agreements already include morals clauses or similar terms for exit deals if a brand engages in disreputable conduct, there’s more interest from creators today for those terms. PayPal, Microsoft and Capital One did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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Walmart’s ad business grew 27% year over year in 2024, according to the company’s recent earnings report, netting the retail giant $4.4 billion in global ad revenue for the year. That growth has come as Walmart has continued to evolve its ad offerings. This week, for example, the company announced a new Application Programming Interface (API) for Walmart Connect that allows ad tech platforms to create and manage tools for display campaigns — a move that buyers see as Walmart setting the stage to transition display campaigns from managed service to self-service.

As Walmart’s retail media network matures, buyers see it as the leader of the pack among the bevy of retail media networks — aside from Amazon of course. Walmart is checking a lot of the boxes when it comes to what buyers want from retail media networks now, including adding more capabilities and tools, more measurement tracking and off-site ad units. Whenever Walmart adds streaming and CTV capabilities — something buyers expect it will do given its acquisition of smart TV maker Vizio — that will only help the retailer continue its current growth trajectory, according to four ad buyers Digiday spoke with for this piece.

“Walmart has been the one to watch,” said Amie Owen, chief commerce officer at IPG Mediabrands.

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The squeeze on agency holding companies keeps getting tighter. WPP’s year-end revenue slump, paired with lackluster outlook for 2025, is just the latest twist in an ongoing identity crisis for legacy ad giants. In fact, things have gotten so dire that holdco CEOs have mastered a specialized dialect, one designed to downplay their troubles while keeping investors from panicking.

Here’s a guide to what they say versus what they really (might) mean.

What they say: “We are in a period of transformation.”
What they mean: “We have no idea how to fix this, but we’ll throw around words like ‘AI’ and ‘efficiency’ until the next earnings call.”

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Peter Jinfeng Pan, head of MediaGo

In the digital marketing world, advertisers should systematically assess each paid impression by considering the following five critical questions: Is this a real user? Will this user see the ad? What content does this user like? What is the user’s intention? How much value can this user bring?

These five questions form the backbone of the marketing funnel. If the answer is no or is uncertain, the advertiser should disregard that impression; otherwise, the investment is justified. However, while ad placement previously leveraged broad demographic data, the modern privacy-centric landscape has rendered these questions increasingly difficult to answer.

The key to addressing this challenge lies in shifting the focus from user data to optimizing ad experiences through deep learning.

Adopting an experience-centric approach refocuses ad placement on media, context, creatives and products — which inherently serve as signals rather than demographic data — making them key variables in optimizing advertising effectiveness. By training deep learning models on a vast array of signals, they can intelligently infer relationships between the input and output of data.

This means deep learning (DL) models can be relied on to address the five questions above in every impression auction. Records show that DL has evolved into a transformative technology, empowering advertisers to navigate complexity by analyzing vast datasets and identifying intricate patterns. This capability ensures unmatched precision and efficiency, even in an era increasingly shaped by privacy-first priorities.

Evolving from AI to machine learning to deep learning

Modern advertisers face countless media opportunities driven by diverse users with varied interests and intentions, akin to searching for the perfect match among countless screws and nuts in the ocean.

However, when confronted with that ocean challenge, traditional AI can only divide the ocean into regions, rely on human assistance to extract features and identify potential matches within each region.

DL, however, leverages deep neural networks trained on billions of data points, surpassing traditional AI and machine learning in computational capability. In just milliseconds, it can find the best match across the entire ocean, for example, offering unparalleled speed and precision in advertising.

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To borrow from David Mamet’s sleeper 80s film, Things Change, sometimes it’s the “guy behind the guy” who gets a little attention, even if the guy doesn’t necessarily want it. So it is with Siberia, an independent design studio/agency based in New York that does the behind-the-scenes legwork to help clients refresh their brands and digital presences. The firm works with a variety of clients, including Ford, Comcast and Bloomberg, but shared work it’s done for a newer client.

The James Beard Foundation (JBF) — a venerable name for anyone interested in food, be they chefs, restaurateurs, philanthropies or gourmand consumers, issued an RFP for a website and a rebrand. The organization ultimately turned to Siberia to grow its audience and bring food lovers into the equation in a bigger way. Starting in November and just finishing this week, the James Beard Foundation (JBF) altered more than just its color palette and web architecture. The financial terms of the agreement were not made available.

Chris Mele, Siberia’s managing partner and founder, operates on a simple principle: don’t lead with tech — it should underpin what an agency does for a client, but not be the core or rallying point. And with JBF, that thinking came very much in handy. 

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As programmatic advertising spend continues to surge, reaching a projected $180 billion by 2025 in the U.S. alone, the industry faces mounting challenges around efficiency and scale. 

Between 2020 to 2023, the number of bidstream requests between DSPs and SSPs has increased by 2.3 times, far outpacing actual inventory growth. This surge, driven by the proliferation of SSPs, ad tech intermediaries and increased header bidding adoption, has created a complex supply chain rife with inefficiencies, impacting everyone from brands and agencies to DSPs and SSPs.

These inefficiencies manifest in wasted ad spend due to duplicate bid requests, reduced campaign performance from suboptimal inventory matching, strained technical infrastructure and increased operational costs and difficulty achieving campaign goals due to inconsistent access to desired audiences. Meanwhile, DSPs and SSPs face growing processing overhead as they manage an ever-increasing volume of bid requests, some of which never result in delivered impressions. 

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The creator economy is still growing rapidly but that growth isn’t always a benefit to creators.

It’s already difficult to maintain a living as a full-time creator — even more so in recent years as new creators continue to flood the market. An estimated 3% of the U.S. population in 2022 was considered an influencer, up from about 2% in 2020, per influencer marketing platform Influencity — with places like New York (6.45% of its population considered an influencer) and California (5.42% of its population considered an influencer) leading in influencer density in the state.

Meanwhile, influencer agency Neoreach found that only around 15% of 2,000 creators surveyed in 2023 made more than $100,000 per year, and about 69% made less than $50,000 annually. Some 48% made less than $15,000 per year, per the company’s data. Given the competitive landscape as well as an uncertain economic market and the stability of platforms like TikTok, some creators are considering re-joining the traditional workforce for more stability.

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The number of retailers launching their own media, commerce, financial, travel (you get the point) networks continues to grow. At this point, more than 250 retail media networks exist globally, according to retail media intelligence platform Mimbi, and they’re all fighting for the same ad dollars.

To better compete, retail marketing networks have spent the past few months rebranding their names and logos, hosting events and retooling their offerings. At the same time, RMNs are moving beyond on-site search and display ad opportunities and opening up ad formats with creators and streaming services. All signs point to retail media networks wanting to be seen as all out media networks, according to the five RMN agency experts Digiday spoke with for this piece.

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Last March, The Home Depot rebranded its retail media network Retail Media+ to Orange Apron Media at its inaugural infronts presentation (its response to upfront negotiations). Home Depot plans to host the second installment of its infronts presentation this year. Lowe’s made a similar move in August, rebranding from Lowe’s One Roof Media Network to Lowe’s Media Network and debuting a new logo with beefed up channels, like email and in-store audio.

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Independent agencies have discovered their latest edge over the big guys: better tech. 

They’re hiring CTOs, spinning up their own tech platforms, even reselling third-party tech they don’t own. Forget scale and leverage — the indie pitch now is agility, innovation and a tech playbook nimble enough to charm advertisers who don’t need (or want) the big agency industrial complex.

“If I were starting an agency tomorrow then one of the first roles I’d hire would be a chief technology officer,” said Robin Skidmore, founder and CEO of performance marketing agency Journey Further.

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The cost of ad space on streaming platforms has been dragged down in the last year, as early movers Netflix and Disney+ raced to keep up with Amazon’s aggressive pricing.

Now, the cost-per-thousand viewers (CPM) across those three streamers hovers between $38 to $40 (down from Netflix’s 2022 price of $60), low enough that small to medium business (SMB) advertisers can begin to consider them a viable alternative to local cable or regional linear TV.

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Consider the example of Naturepedic, a premium mattress and sleepwear brand based in Cleveland, Ohio.

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This week’s Media Briefing looks at the different standalone newsletter subscriptions publishers are using to convert more readers to pay up for content.

• Publishers’ standalone paid newsletter offerings are helping to attract new subscribers.

• Amazon is testing a program to pay publishers for traffic, YouTube hits 1 billion monthly podcast listeners and more.

Standalone newsletter subscriptions help convert more readers

Publishers are using different kinds of standalone newsletter subscriptions to grow revenue and, in some cases, offer lower priced tiers to see if they can convert readers around popular products without the financial commitment to the more expensive full digital subscription.

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This Tactics + Insights guide, sponsored by Vistar Media, explores the opportunities that arise from integrating branding and performance marketing channels. As part of this report, Digiday and Vistar Media surveyed 113 marketing professionals to learn more about how they balance and prioritize budgets and objectives across both approaches.

Marketers face constant pressure to build brand recognition while driving bottom-line results. However, branding and performance goals are typically executed through separate campaigns and distinct strategies, escalating costs and leading to missed opportunities for optimization and cross-channel synergy.

This challenge is evident in a survey of 113 marketing professionals conducted by Digiday and Vistar Media. When asked about the biggest obstacles to achieving their marketing goals, the top responses were cost restrictions and siloed data operations.

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