Brittany Blackford, director of growth partnerships, buy-side, Experian

For travel and hospitality brands, the challenge isn’t only about reaching potential guests, it’s also about proving that marketing efforts lead to actual bookings.

Windstar Cruises, a luxury small-ship cruise line known for its intimate and unique itineraries, faced this exact challenge. The brand’s marketing efforts generated engagement — impressions, clicks and quote requests — but lacked a clear connection between digital advertising spend and confirmed reservations.

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Creator funds are back en vogue thanks to platforms like Substack and the Billion Dollar Boy agency launching fresh versions this year. And what better way to pique creators’ interests than by offering them cash rewards? Or so they thought.

TikTok introduced creator funds to the scene back in 2020, which led to its platform peers trying to outdo each other by offering bigger pots of cash. But over the years, social media apps including YouTube and Snapchat have wound down their funds in favor of the more sustainable revenue-share deals – an offering which required a hefty upfront investment, (far more than a creator fund), but is considered to provide creators with more consistent earnings.

Still, while creator funds appear shiny and new again, Digiday busts the most persistent myths about them, and sheds light on the truth behind those payouts.

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A year after leaving Substack in early 2024, newsletter writers are making more money peddling their words on other platforms.

Across the board, writers such as Marisa Kabas, Luke O’Neil, Jonathan M. Katz and Ryan Broderick — all of whom exited Substack in early 2024 following the publication of an open letter in December 2023 decrying the presence of politically extreme voices on the platform — told Digiday that they are receiving a higher share of subscription revenue after making the switch from Substack to rival newsletter services such as Ghost and Beehiiv.

Broderick, for example, estimated that revenue for his newsletter Garbage Day had increased by roughly 20 to 25 percent year over year since he left Substack in January 2024, though he didn’t provide exact figures. 

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Interpublic Group (IPG) may be navigating an uncertain future, but it’s still hiring top tech talent in a bid to remain competitive.

The U.S.-based holding company has appointed tech entrepreneur Yaniv Sarig as its global head of AI commerce, with a brief to rapidly integrate agentic AI into its commerce and performance media offering.

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Generative AI

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It’s the latest top AI position created by an agency group in recent months. Last week, IPG’s crosstown rival Stagwell appointed IBM and Microsoft veteran John Kahan as its chief AI officer (CAIO), while Monks (formerly Media.Monks) recently made founding exec Wesley ter Haar, already the challenger group’s tech pointman, its own CAIO.

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how the mounting economic uncertainty has started to color considerations heading into this year’s TV and streaming upfront negotiations.

• The F-word
• Is the currency changeover over?
• Tariffs and Hollywood, tariffs and TikTok, TikTok and Amazon and more

The F-word

I get that the advertising market is cyclical. But could it not have taken a little longer until the economic uncertainty narrative came back around to cloud the annual upfront negotiations? Alas, here we are.

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Professional basketball team the Atlanta Hawks have launched the NBA’s first formalized creator collective.

The Atlanta Hawks Creator Collective is a group of 25 content creators that the NBA team has granted special access to home games and events such as training facility tours. The team soft-launched the program last year, with Atlanta-based creators including Dayna Bolden and Roxanne Kaiser attending — and posting about — Hawks events throughout the 2024-2025 basketball season.

The collective spans across both platforms and genres, and includes non-sports creators such as Kaiser and Julio Angel Muñoz. Members of the collective are paid a fee to create content about the games they attend, in addition to a mixture of other paid and unpaid opportunities. The past year represented a beta test of sorts for the program. Pleased with its performance, Hawks executives plan to officially announce the collective tomorrow, at Atlanta’s State of Creators of Color summit.

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The Monday after President Trump’s tariffs rattled global markets and raised the specter of a recession, global agency group Dept did what few in advertising are built to do: it pivoted to policy. The shop stood up a 10-person team of strategists — not to pitch an idea but to translate Trump’s policies on tariffs into something a marketer could act on.

And not a moment too soon. Unlike past macroeconomic crises, this one put marketers at the center. The ripple effects hit every part of their remit: media budgets, pricing models, procurement timelines. The usual buffers between policy and marketing disappeared overnight. 

So Dept adapted. Less about campaigns, more about contingency. A team of Trump policy interpreters helping clients contort their way through the chaos. They’re working along two tracks: with marketers based in the U.S. and with those outside it looking to sell into the country — each facing a different set of questions and a shared sense of uncertainty.

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This year’s Digiday Media Buying and Planning Awards winners demonstrated a trend toward personalized, inclusive campaigns that leveraged high-impact creative and cross-channel integration to drive impactful results. Brands and agencies are also increasingly leaning on strategic partnerships and influencer marketing to amplify brand messaging and foster brand loyalty. 

Critical Mass showcased the value of personalized creative in a campaign for Harley-Davidson. The effort, which earned the agency a win in the Best Use of Technology category, aimed to boost bike sales through a dynamic creative optimization program reaching specific audiences at various stages of their customer journey. Critical Mass optimized media efficiency by targeting on-site actions most likely to result in bike sales, lowering the cost-per-sale by 51%. By emphasizing loan applications and tailoring retargeting messages to individual behaviors, the campaign drove a 2x increase in loan submissions. A test-and-learn approach continuously improved performance, with dynamic, customized messaging significantly boosting engagement.

In the Strategy Executive of the Year category, Wondery’s head of global marketing, Bladimiar Norman, is recognized for an approach tailored to specific audience segments. Norman, who is responsible for overall content marketing for Wondering podcasts, began 2024 with “Wondery Means Business,” the first of six innovative marketing campaigns. The month-long campaign was built around a coordinated cross-functional effort to lift listenership across the entire business genre. By focusing on real business success stories, Wondery connected with new, younger audiences and fostered a deeper connection with the genre. 

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The 2025 Digiday Streaming and Video Awards finalists reflect a clear trend: brands and agencies are prioritizing measurable results, personalization and creative collaborations to deliver high-impact campaigns. From AI-enhanced contextual targeting to personalized content powered by data, the work honored this year showcases how emerging technology and smart partnerships are redefining marketing success.

Amazon joined the list of finalists in the Best Brand Film or Series category with Boy Room, a short-form TikTok series that debuted as a comedic exploration of twenty-something guys’ messy bedrooms. After the first season, there was overwhelming viewer demand for transformations, not just observations. Using Amazon Prime to fuel 24-hour renovations, Boy Room evolved into a Gen Z home makeover show, blending humor, emotional connection and brand utility. The new approach resulted in more than 50 million organic cross-platform views — doubling the previous season’s numbers. The series resonated especially with audiences under 34, showcasing how Prime can fuel passions while solving everyday problems.

In the Best Use of AI category, Disney Advertising is a finalist for Magic Words, an AI-powered targeting tool designed to align brand messaging with the emotional tone of Disney content. The platform uses proprietary metadata tagging and machine learning to identify specific moods and moments within live and scripted programming, enabling advertisers to deliver more relevant and emotionally resonant ad placements. Tested through live sports partnerships and media agency collaborations, Magic Words demonstrated measurable lifts in viewer attention and brand favorability, particularly during key in-game moments. In one campaign, Chipotle reported double-digit gains in ad perception when using the tool, underscoring the potential of emotion-based targeting to drive engagement and improve ROI.

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Mark Zohar, CEO, Viafoura

The publishing industry is at an inflection point. After one decade of over-reliance on platform-driven growth, declining social media referrals and AI-driven traffic shifts are forcing publishers to rethink their audience strategies. Community is the way forward. It’s more than a buzzword — it’s a proven driver of engagement, retention and revenue.

Communities far outperform standard audiences

Publishers that successfully activate a community strategy are seeing measurable impact. According to data from Viafoura, community members generate 5.3x higher dwell time, are 45x more likely to subscribe and make 3x more site visits compared to standard audiences.

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In this saturated market, brands are hoping new mascots will tickle consumers’ nostalgia and help them stand out from the competition.

In the last few months, Domino’s pizza launched Mac Scott, a penne-shaped mascot, fast-casual restaurant chain Cava rolled out Peter Chip, a pita chip with googly eyes, and candy brand Hi-Chew introduced Chewbie, the brand’s first official, self-described “ambiguous mascot with a big personality.” This is after Instacart’s first-ever Super Bowl ad this year featured notable brand mascots like Chester Cheetah, the Old Spice man, Mr. Clean, the Energizer Bunny, and the Kool-Aid Man.

“They make more sense now than they ever did because everyone’s attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and there’s so much more saturation in the market,” said Colleen Masters, executive creative director at Aloysius Butler and Clark ad agency.

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After years of lamenting the decimation of Facebook referral traffic, some publishers are starting to see that traffic return this year.

It’s nothing like the heyday of Facebook referral traffic in the late 2010s. But this new wave of growth is noteworthy, according to five publishing executives.

Facebook referral traffic quadrupled in March 2025 compared to March 2024, according to Josh Awtry, svp of audience development at Newsweek. He declined to share raw monthly visitor figures. (Newsweek’s referrals from all social platforms are up almost 10 times compared to the average day in March last year, Awtry noted.)

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Something is amiss in India, when it comes to the media agency landscape. 

By now you’ve most likely heard of mid-March raids by the Competition Commission of India’s on the offices of all of the agency holding companies operating in the country, as well as a few independent media agencies. Holding companies raided include GroupM, Interpublic, Omnicom, Publicis, Dentsu and Havas across Mumbai and Delhi.

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Marketers have to move on from their  “decision paralysis.”

With President Trump’s sweeping tariffs taking effect last week, and an additional 50% tariff threat to China yesterday plunging the stock market, companies are now tasked with the short order effects of the tariffs: Understanding how their brands will be impacted, what the increased costs will be and how they should manage those costs.

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For an industry expected to rake in nearly $62 billion U.S. ad dollars this year, or about 18% of digital ad spend, per eMarketer’s reporting, only one thing seems to be certain when it comes to retail media networks — and that’s uncertainty.

No doubt, retail media is booming. But when it comes to defining measurement in retail media, (or even what constitutes as a retail media network in a sea of more than 250 RMNs for that matter) or who pays for retail media network campaigns, the industry is still figuring things out. Meanwhile, economic headwinds and tariffs loom, causing marketers to push for more flexibility in their retail media spend commitments, in which retailers have been asking for bigger commitments year over year.

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As client demands grow more complex and timelines shrink, agencies are turning to new AI-powered research tools to streamline workflows and supercharge insight development.

In recent months, tech giants and startups alike have released new “deep research” tools that are already helping teams within holding companies and indie shops to move faster, think deeper and deliver better work. Agencies are integrating the capabilities across strategy, media, creative, and comms teams — with some seeing benefits in helping craft pitches, shape creative briefs, and even simulate audience personas. 

Unlike basic search or dashboards, deep research tools from Perplexity and others use AI-enabled reasoning autonomously run multi-step workflows — scanning the open web, proprietary datasets, and niche databases — to generate rich, synthesized insights in minutes. As OpenAI put it, deep research equips ChatGPT to perform “at the level of a research analyst.”

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Publishers are perpetually staring down an armada of obstacles. But the challenges they contend with are constantly changing.

During the spring 2025 edition of the Digiday Publishing Summit, executives from Dotdash Meredith, Punchbowl News, TelevisaUnivision and more spoke out on the most urgent challenges facing publishers today.

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On March 31, YouTube changed how it counts views for short-form videos. So far, brands and agencies are celebrating — but creators’ reactions range from indifferent to openly skeptical. 

The update — which means YouTube now counts every time a Short starts to play or replay as a view, with no minimum time requirement — has caused some cheer among creators, like Dkdynamite and The Rich Nobody, who have seen their view counts spike as a result. But for the most part, creators see the change as having little to no impact on their earnings or daily workflows — and some are concerned it might sacrifice engagement quality in favor of higher numbers. 

Following the update, there has been no change to the way creators’ actual revenue is calculated; the only change is to the way the view counts displayed beneath Shorts are calculated. Creators’ revenue share payouts are still determined by YouTube’s “engaged views” metric — which uses the same view definition previously used for normal Shorts views. In fact, as a result of the change, creators anticipate that their revenue per thousand views (RPMs) will decrease somewhat as their overall view counts rise.

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For years, the dominant platforms of the internet have treated content moderation as both shield and scalpel — eulogized as “trust and safety,” enforced by a mix of algorithmic blunt force and human discretion, and backed by sprawling bureaucracies tasked with adjudicating whether a buttock or a stray word crosses the invisible line.

Substack, the subscription publishing platform, is taking a different tack. 

Rather than tinkering with the machinery of enforcement, it’s betting that the real problem lies not in the rules, but in the incentives — that a system built around advertising and virality will inevitably reward outrage, and that no amount of moderation will fix that. Its solution? Change the business model, and let trust between writers and readers do the work that moderation never could.

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Advertising industry professionals have been eyeing the creator economy — not only to understand it for their work with clients but also for themselves, as more agency employees consider becoming creators.

Agency-based creators aren’t limited to the creative departments, either. Some employees outside of creative, like one marketing associate who works for a digital agency, have dabbled in becoming creators too. “It turns you into a hybrid,” said the marketing associate. “You’re a copywriter, you’re an art director, you’re an editor.”

In the latest edition of Digiday’s Confessions series, in which we trade anonymity for candor, we hear from this marketing associate and creator about the difficulty of the strictly-defined lanes that exist at agencies, why today’s social media landscape requires more flexibility than in the past and what she wishes the agency world understood about the creator economy.

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