Agency holding companies are gradually remolding themselves. No longer constellations of disparate talent, some of them now behave as “operating companies”.

That’s partially a branding trick, but behind the marquee, units like WPP’s Choreograph, or Omnicom’s Omni provide real connective tissue. And in the pitch room, they’re becoming ever more important.

Take Havas, for example. Its Converged “operating system” (or “data spine”, depending on your taste for corporate metaphors) was launched last February as a cookieless media planning and activation solution.

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Related Insights

The Programmatic Marketer

Scope3 aims to upend ad tech with an ‘agentic platform’ for ‘effective, responsible advertising’  Read More

Last week, Scope3 made a series of product announcements, touching on two of the hot-button issues in ad tech right now: brand safety and ad curation. This is a further sign that competition in ad tech is heating up.

First of all, it’s worth recapping the particulars of the launch — Digiday earlier perused the details in an interview with Scope3 CEO Brian O’Kelley — which included an “agentic advertising platform” among a raft of tie-ups. Among the high-profile names involved are Amazon, Google, Meta and The Trade Desk.

At the core of all the announcements was “AI-driven media optimization,” including a hub for agentic media products, a curation offering whereby users can use a centralized application to set controls across supply-side platforms, and a Brand Standards tool.

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By the looks of Target’s latest earnings call, its ad business continues to be a bright spot for the retailer. Last year, Target’s ad business raked in $649 million in revenue, up 25% from the $522 million it pulled in the year prior.

But for all its growth, Target is the David to the Goliaths of Walmart and Amazon, whose ad businesses brought in $4.4 billion and $50 billion in 2024, respectively. But even if Target is a long shot from hitting the bullseye to become a retail media power player, buyers see potential thanks to the retailer’s new self-service and second-price auction ad offerings.

For the first few months of 2025, Target has been caught in a media frenzy due to its moves involving diversity, equity and inclusion policies and subsequent boycotting, on top of missing its revenue expectations last November. Media buyers and commerce executives say they don’t expect to put a dent in the retailer’s audience data, making it unlikely to impact its ad business — at least for now.

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Starting a family is one of the most exciting moments in life. But for so many people, the reality comes with unexpected hurdles — whether it’s struggling with fertility, figuring out what benefits your job actually offers, or realizing, too late, that your employer doesn’t provide much support at all.

Fertility issues are more common than ever, and the cost of treatments like IVF is sky-high. That means fertility benefits, paternity leave, parental support, and family-friendly policies are becoming make-or-break factors for many job seekers.

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BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said in an earnings call last week that the company was investing $10 million of resources into BF Island, a social platform BuzzFeed is building that will focus on user-generated content supported by AI technology. 

The project will begin private beta testing in Q2, and details remain slim. But Peretti said the goal is to convert 5% of BuzzFeed’s audience of 34 million monthly users to join BF Island. If the company achieves this, Peretti thinks the initiative will make money.

Peretti expects the platform to be at least on par with some smaller social media platforms, when it comes to growth. And he sees a future in which BF Island’s business grows faster than BuzzFeed’s publishing side. (Axios reported in February that BuzzFeed plans to offer a freemium model for BF Island, where some features are free and others need a paid subscription.)

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As the tit-for-tat tariff fight between the U.S. and Mexico, Canada, China and the European Union continues, marketers are watching closely — and worrying.

To recap: President Donald Trump announced 25% tariffs in February then put them off for a month before re-tabling the issue last week, leading to another postponement for Mexico and Canada. The U.K. and Europe haven’t been granted the same grace and this week’s retaliatory tariffs from the E.U. are, at the time of writing, still set to go into force, pending legislative approval in April, as are Canada’s reciprocal steel, sports equipment and computer tariffs. (Bloomberg has a running tally).

The constant change has left marketers’ and agency execs’ heads spinning.

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It’s been almost a year since Google rolled out its AI-generated search feature AI Overviews, and publishers still know very little about how it’s impacting their referral traffic.

Last week Google introduced AI Mode, an experimental feature for search, which lets users ask follow-up questions without leaving the page, as part of an overall AI Overviews update, which will now be powered by its Gemini 2.0 AI model.

AI Overviews, which provides generated summaries of information from multiple sources to answer a user’s search query, will also be available to more people, including teens and users not signed into Google accounts. AI Mode, which resembles the same kind of experience provided by Perplexity or ChatGPT Search, is only being made available to Google AI One Premium subscribers.

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Brian O’Kelley has made a career out of rewiring the ad tech machine. The AppNexus co-founder has spent much of the past two decades deep in the weeds of programmatic advertising — an industry that, for all its ubiquity, remains an opaque, arbitrage-fueled mess. Now, he’s back with a new mission: tear down its inefficiencies and rebuild something cleaner, leaner and, ideally, more honest.

How? By using AI to rebuild ad tech from the ground up, Scope3’s agentic advertising platform optimizes media buying for efficiency, sustainability and brand safety.

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The Programmatic Marketer

Scope3 aims to upend ad tech with an ‘agentic platform’ for ‘effective, responsible advertising’  Read More

If there were ever a moment for such a reckoning, this is it: marketers, long resigned to the system’’s flaws, are losing patience. Real-time bidding, the lifeblood of programmatic, is running low on both trust and liquidity. And then there’s the latest scandal, which landed like a bomb in the middle of an already shaky industry: revelations that major brands’ ads had appeared alongside child sexual abuse content. The fallout was swift. 

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YouTube is turning 20 next month and if there’s one thing the company wants you to know, it’s just how big it is. The numbers are staggering, but what do they really mean?

Digiday has sifted through the data to find the numbers that actually matter. Here’s what you need to know:

YouTube has become huge

Over the past 20 years, YouTube has cemented itself as one of the most dominant platforms in the digital landscape. Launched in 2005, the same year as Reddit and just a year after Facebook, it emerged at a time when social media was still a novelty.

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Creators are utilizing Substack’s live video co-hosting features to grow their audiences — and their subscriber counts.

It’s been one month since Substack enabled video posts — previously a desktop-only function — on its mobile app, and two months since the platform expanded live video to all creators, with the ability for creators to team up and pool viewers as one of the features.

It’s early days, but so far seven creators have told Digiday that they are pleased with the results. 

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There’s a talent problem in the media agency world, and it starts at the bottom — meaning the entry level. 

(There’s a whole different talent problem in the C-suite as well, as a steady dribble of executives leave one holding company for another — but that’s a story for another time.)

The rising use of AI for entry-level and sometimes menial tasks has started to jeopardize the ability of young people to break into the agency business. At a Town Hall discussion held during the Digiday Media Buying Summit in Nashville on March 12 — a meeting that was held under Chatham House Rules, which guarantees anonymity for the agency attendees — some media agency folks spoke of that very problem. 

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Today, Scope3 used its inaugural Landscape conference hosted in New York City to launch its new AI-powered “agentic advertising platform” and a host of partnership announcements.

Scope3 CEO Brian O’Kelley — widely regarded as a godfather in the space — and partners hope the initiative will help light a touchpaper that will upend the status quo in ad tech. 

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Brand Safety

How ‘The Godfather of ad tech’ aims to ‘reimagine’ brand safety and challenge the status quo Read More

Execs at Scope3 hope its “agentic advertising platform” will use AI to streamline the industry supply chain and address inefficiencies in the digital media buying space, such as brand safety concerns.

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In this week’s Media Briefing, Digiday’s executive editor of news Seb Joseph talks to publishers to find out what they think about Scope3, the ad platform AppNexus co-founder Brian O’Kelley is pitching as the answer to the ad tech ecosystem’s many problems. Turns out, publishers aren’t convinced this is the answer they need.

• Publishers have lots of questions about AppNexus co-founder’s Scope3 ad platform

• Dow Jones CEO defends AI licensing deals and Wall Street Journal tech coverage changes, The Washington Post reorgs its newsroom, and more.

Publishers have lots of questions about O’Kelley’s Scope3

Brian O’Kelley wants to rebuild ad tech — again. 

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Scope3 has unveiled a new adtech platform that aims to tap a trifecta of hyped ad tech topics: AI agents, curation and brand safety.

The Agentic Media platform, announced today, leverage large language models and other agentic AI capacities to help improve programmatic advertising and brand safety while also creating a more transparent supply chain. This ambitious goal for “AI-driven media optimization” also includes plans to integrate with publishers, agencies, demand-side platforms and supply-side platforms. 

Scope3 CEO and Co-founder Brian O’Kelley described it as a “universal custom algorithm platform” for custom algorithms across direct buys and via programmatic ads through SSP curation or deployment within a DSP. Although more significantly, it also shot across the bow of both the Walled Gardens and the brand safety giants.

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Perhaps sensing the opportunity that’s being created by agency holding companies getting bigger and broader — and leaving mid-sized marketers to feel like they’re being overlooked — another independent agency group is launching a new media agency extension.

BarkleyOKRP, which has long handled some of its own media work but is primarily known for its creative chops, has launched media agency MissionOne Media. It’s led by Sean Corcoran, a veteran media agency executive who most recently ran IPG’s Mediahub until last year, when he joined Barkley.

The new shop will handle all elements of a full-service media agency but with a focus on staying closely linked to the creative side of the business. Corcoran emphasized that being the right size is vital to its success. “We feel like it’s kind of Goldilocks size,” he said, as in neither too big nor too small. The perfect client spends somewhere in the $50 million to $100 million range, he added.

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Later this year, YouTube will make it easier for creators to organize their serialized and episodic content.

The plan was announced briefly at the Made in YouTube event last September, though YouTube did not put a date on it. While there’s still no confirmation on exactly when it will arrive this year, during a press event in Zurich on March 11, YouTube execs gave a little more detail about it. 

Shows will allow creators to structure their content on their channels as though they were fully-fledged, episodic TV shows.

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This is the first installment of a two-part series on the top ad-supported streaming services. This initial report provides an overview of the various platforms’ offerings, including pricing and plans, ad options and ad innovations, as well as an analysis of the platforms where brands and agencies distributed the bulk of their 2024 ad budgets and ad placements. 

The second installment will dive deep into the results of Digiday’s recent survey of brands and agencies to analyze how advertisers measure campaign success on the platforms and the challenges they face when placing ads on ad-supported streaming services.

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In Digiday+ Research’s first-quarter survey of marketing professionals, respondents told Digiday that Instagram and Facebook still hold the majority of their companies’ marketing budgets. YouTube and TikTok came out behind Meta’s platforms in third and fourth place. TikTok saw brands’ and retailers’ usage and marketing spend on the platform decline this year, according to Digiday’s survey. Marketers’ use of TikTok fell by 17 percentage points in Q1 2025 compared to Q3 2024, following the platform’s brief outage in January and as the April 5 deadline for a U.S. ban approaches.

What social media platforms will marketers focus on if TikTok is banned? Examining consumer usage of various social media platforms may help answer this question. According to the Pew Research Center, TikTok’s main users are Gen Z, or consumers aged 18 to 29. Gen Z uses TikTok at higher rates than other age groups, even though the group’s most-used social media platform is YouTube, followed by Instagram. Among all age groups, YouTube is the most-used platform, Pew’s study found. Gen Z uses Snapchat and TikTok more heavily than other generations.

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Brynn Brewer got in line around 9:30 a.m. last Saturday morning behind dozens of others — some of whom got there as early as 6 a.m. to be near the front of the line — for the chance to experience the Criterion closet like the filmmakers and artists featured on the entertainment company’s YouTube channel. The South by Southwest experience to Brewer, a content producer at Chubbies Shorts, felt like an “organic activation” and “more like an interactive art installment.” 

Brewer isn’t alone in her assessment. The three women around her in line shared similar sentiments, noting their love of classic film, while shielding themselves with an umbrella from the heat of the Austin, Texas sun. To them, the three minutes allotted to each group to enter the mobile Criterion closet truck, peruse the classic films featured in the collection, pick out a few of those films to take home on Blu-ray and talk about why they matter (as well as get a Polaroid of themselves in the closet) was worth the wait. 

As marketers, agency execs, filmmakers and musicians returned to Austin this past week for SXSW — which runs until March 15th — so too have the brands like Criterion, FX, Paramount, Amazon and Alaska Airlines with various experiential activations on the ground. In the past, marketers believed that having an experience was a must and brands faced irrelevancy without one. Now, after having experienced the shutdown of experiential efforts during the pandemic, marketers, agency execs and attendees believe experiential at SXSW (and elsewhere) shouldn’t solely be about relevance, but to give attendees a real way to interact with the brand.

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If I paid for ChatGPT Plus from my own pocket and used it to help me write this article, would my boss know — or care?

That’s the question surrounding “shadow AI” — which refers to the use of AI tools at work that haven’t been formally approved by companies.

The ongoing pressure to work faster, along with the proliferation of easy-to-use generative AI tools, means more editorial staff are using AI to complete tasks. And while using generative AI for minor tasks — like grammar checks, rewriting copy, or testing different headlines — falls into one bucket of offenses, there are other uses which could cause bigger problems down the line, if left unchecked.

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