This is a developing story and will be updated throughout the day.

Google has been found guilty of antitrust violations in two of the three alleged markets, following a long-awaited ruling in its ad tech antitrust battle with the Justice Department.

Judge Leonie Brinkema partially sided with DOJ lawyers ruling Google guilty of violating U.S. antitrust laws by monopolizing the markets for publisher ad servers and ad exchanges, and by illegally tying its ad server to its ad exchange. However, Google was not found guilty of monopolizing the advertiser ad network market.

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This State of the Industry report, sponsored by Optable, examines how publishers and media owners are enhancing data monetization strategies while navigating privacy regulations, advancing targeting capabilities and embracing new opportunities for data collaboration.

As digital advertising navigates the loss of third-party data signals, the tools and tactics for targeting, measurement and privacy compliance are still being developed and established. For now, marketers are working with a patchwork of solutions, making it harder to buy, transact and deploy at scale. 

Digital publishers and media owners are responding by taking critical steps to collect and organize audience data to meet advertiser demand for new audience insights, prepare for new technology and seize this rare opportunity to build new revenue streams and grow existing ones. The way publishers structure their data today will directly impact their ability to collaborate with advertisers and monetize audience data in the future.

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With brand budgets under pressure, marketers are reaching for every lever they can pull to make their campaigns more efficient.

One area that’s often overlooked? The creative itself.

Creative quality contributes to nearly 50% of media impact, according to Kantar, ahead of reach or frequency control in the pecking order. Keeping quality consistent isn’t easy, though. For global advertisers with marketing teams and agency relationships sprawling across multiple markets, maintaining hard brand guidelines can be difficult, making creative and attached paid media spend less efficient. 

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In Digiday+ Research’s end-of-year survey in 2024, we learned that marketers expect to grow their investments in influencer marketing in 2025 compared with 2024. Of marketer respondents, 57% said their company would increase their budget for influencer marketing in 2025, the highest among the asked channels. Influencer marketing also had the lowest rate of marketers saying the budget would remain the same, at 38%, highlighting the focus marketers have for the strategy in the upcoming year.

But before they can dig into influencer marketing investments, marketers must first get a handle on social media use overall. In our Q1 survey, we found that brand and retailer pros’ use of TikTok fell by 17 percentage points in Q1 2025 compared to Q3 2024 — a number that will likely continue to fluctuate as the U.S. TikTok ban remains uncertain.

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This week’s Media Briefing looks at how publishers including Financial Times, Immediate Media and Reuters adopting AI tools to augment their journalism.

• AI-assisted newsrooms
• Gannett’s DE&I pullback, AP’s White House ban and more

— Jessica Davies, senior media editor, Digiday

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WPP’s acquisition of data clean room InfoSum has raised eyebrows both inside and outside the industry, not just because of what it signals about the holding company’s ambitions but also because of what it reveals about its anxieties.

Let’s start with the upside. 

The holdco has bought a business it believes, rightly or wrongly, can bolster its cash cow: GroupM. The media buying unit has faced those pressures for some time, and those cracks have played a role in several high-profile client departures over the past year. Yes, WPP has chalked up some headline wins recently — Amazon and Unilever, to name a couple — but there’s no denying that whatever GroupM is selling, CMOs aren’t buying it like they used to.

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When Temu sneezes, paid social advertising catches a cold. 

The Chinese e-commerce juggernaut has been one of the most aggressive spenders in digital advertising, blitzing Facebook and Instagram with a volume and velocity of ads few could match. But that spending spree is now showing signs of strain – thanks to a familiar force: President Donald Trump. 

The president’s renewed push for steep tariffs on Chinese imports has started to rattle the retailer – and much of the social ad business.

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Brands are increasingly feeling the impact of President Trump’s tariffs — particularly those sourcing from China, where U.S. tariffs have climbed to 145%, with more changes on the horizon.

One such brand is Bogg Bag, the brightly colored, Croc-inspired tote bag that was riding a wave of virality last year. Kimberlee Vaccarella, CEO and founder of Bogg Bag, is no stranger to economic headwinds, having launched her business amidst the 2008 financial crisis, managed tariffs during the first Trump administration and navigated a supply chain crisis during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Trump’s current tariffs, however, are new. The start and stop nature of the tariffs has made for uncertainty, leaving brands like Bogg Bag, well, uncertain of how to best brace for impact. In response, Vaccarella is considering expanding Bogg Bag’s supply chain out of China to set up a factory in Vietnam. 

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In the measured language of quarterly earnings calls few phrases say more with less than “cautious but competitive”. That’s how Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun described the mood among advertisers as tariffs cast a long shadow over the global economy and subsequently ad spending.

As President Trump administration’s tariffs keep the world guessing, marketers are starting to weigh the consequences: thinner margins, shakier pricing and the return of financial scrutiny across every marketing line item. No one’s pulling out. But no one’s doubled down either. 

“To be clear, our clients are going to wait to see if there is more visibility before starting to invest,” Sadoun said on the group’s quarterly earnings call on Tuesday.

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They say the third time’s the charm. The owner of Possible — the conference, trade show and event that’s hitting its third year — certainly hopes so and has invested millions into its scaled but careful expansion.

Hyve Group, an event and conference specialist that owns ShopTalk, Fintech Meetup and dozens of other events globally — and bought Possible’s owner Beyond Ordinary Events last year for a rumored $40 million — is bringing a signature feature of ShopTalk to Possible: scheduled meetings.

While ShopTalk schedules something on the level of 50,000 such meetings, the scaled down version for Possible is closer to 3,000 according to Mark Shashoua, CEO of Hyve Group. 

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how TV network and streaming service owners like AMC Networks are placing bigger bets on outcome-based measurement heading into this year’s upfront and the potential for outcome-based buying.

• The outlook for outcomes
• Nielsen updates The Gauge’s streaming rankings (again)
• Creators vs. deepfakes, MLB’s and F1’s rights talks and more

The outlook for outcomes

Outcome-based measurement is becoming more commonplace in the TV and streaming ad market. So how long until business outcomes – which range from search and sales lifts to online and in-store visits – become the currency on which TV and streaming ads are bought and sold?

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This is the first installment in Digiday+ Research’s 2025 CMO Strategies series that analyzes key marketer strategies and challenges across leading marketing channels, including ad-supported streaming, retail media, display advertising and social media. In this edition we take a look at retail media.

Retail media advertising has been the subject of a fair amount of industry buzz, but there are signs that the marketing channel could be heading toward maturation. For instance, 27% of marketers said retail media is one of two marketing channels that took the highest portion of their company’s budget as of first-quarter 2025, down 4 percentage points from first-quarter 2024. This is according to Digiday+ Research surveys conducted annually among brands, retailers and agencies.

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Max Carranza, vp, technology and data partners, LiveRamp

Partnerships have long been a growth engine for brands. For decades, companies have used co-branding to grow their customer base, foster loyalty and reduce marketing costs. Yet now, retailers are becoming publishers, brands are evolving into data providers and companies like Disney are seemingly everything all at once. This shift marks the most significant transformation in partner-driven insights since Google and Facebook first demonstrated the revenue-generating power of data.

Instacart, for example, built a highly profitable ads business to boost revenue. Ticketmaster and Live Nation merged to combine ticketing, concerts, sponsorships and advertising into a data-rich powerhouse. Fandango leveraged its exclusive moviegoer data to provide insights that major studios can’t access alone. Each company has developed a hybrid business model that leverages the collaboration of first-party data to create unique value for partners and drive market stickiness for itself.

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WPP has rolled out more than 28,000 AI agents, but scale is only part of the story. The other: how to hardwire control into these systems even before they’re autonomous.

That’s the job of Daniel Hulme, the holdco’s chief AI officer. He’s not focused on flashy demos or one-off tools. He’s trying to engineer the infrastructure to keep tens of thousands of AI agents from drifting out of line — inside the company and beyond its digital walls.

This isn’t theoretical. WPP is already deploying agents to handle media planning, content generation, analytics and optimization. For now, their capabilities are limited to helping human employees without agency to full autonomy to access systems and data sources for safety reasons. But the promise of agentic AI involves coordinating numerous AI systems, orchestrating multiple intelligent systems to connect agents across teams, clients and platforms. Without it, the risk of conflicting behavior, redundancy, or outright failure goes up fast. 

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Negotiations in the upfront and NewFronts cycles can seem at odds with the fast-paced, individual-focused creator business model. But new sales presentations from creators and brands centered around the creator economy have agencies optimistic that they could create long-term, lucrative deals for creators.

The new sales pitches could also be a sign that the space is maturing as creators are expected to contribute to a global influencer market size of $32 billion in 2025, according to Influencer Marketing Hub.

Ongoing creator upfront deals are generally going to the large creators that have become celebrities and media companies (think MrBeast and Khaby Lame with followings in the hundreds of millions), according to four agencies Digiday spoke with for this story. Meanwhile, mid-tier and smaller creators have been shut out as they require more flexibility in their partnerships. Negotiations for upfront and NewFronts deals kick off next month, as networks pitch their shows and packages to advertisers to buy ad time in advance.

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A new addition to the S&P 500 officer class has emerged in recent months: the chief AI officer, a position defined not by control of key budgets or the size of their team, but their expertise in all things generative, agentic and automation.

IPG’s appointment of Yaniv Sarig as its global head of AI commerce last week was merely the latest in a string of C-Suite hires made by major advertisers and agencies.

In the last 12 months, brands like General Motors, Mastercard and ZocDoc have each appointed chief AI officers while agency holding companies like Stagwell, subsidiaries like Golin and indie shops like Luckie & Co. and Horizon Media have done the same. Adtech firms are in on the trend – Zefr hired a CAIO in February 2024 – as are B2B giants like PwC, S&P and Accenture.

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Despite the threat of losing her 10 million-plus TikTok followers, McKay typically receives 250 million views per month on Snapchat and has lately been garnering 50 million monthly views on Instagram

With more than 10 million followers on TikTok, Alyssa McKay would appear to have plenty to lose if the ByteDance-owned platform ends up being banned in the U.S. But she’s not all that concerned – and not just because the divest-or-die threat keeps getting delayed.

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If the last five years have taught us anything, it’s that chaos may be tough, trying and certainly worrisome — but it’s ultimately manageable. That’s the general sentiment among brand marketers, ad agency execs and industry analysts when you ask them to make sense of the current economic landscape amid tariff back-and-forth. 

“I’m expecting chaos,” said Jeremy Whitt, executive media director at Hanson Dodge. “One thing I want to make sure that we don’t have too short of a memory of what happened back on March 15, 2020.” 

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Streaming platform Kick is on a mission to onboard as many creators as possible in 2025. So far, the push appears to be succeeding — but the platform’s edgy reputation represents a challenge as it looks to scale up further.

March 2025 was Kick’s biggest month ever. The platform reached over 317 million hours watched during the month, according to numbers shared by a Kick representative, and achieved its highest-ever average concurrent viewership of 443,559 viewers.

At the moment, Kick boasts over 57 million total users, according to the representative, and is rapidly gaining market share against rival platforms such as Twitch. Although Twitch does not publicly share its total user count, the platform averaged over 2.5 million active users at any given time in 2023, according to a blog post by Twitch CTO Christine Weber. Third-party estimates put Twitch’s monthly user count at roughly 240 million.

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Google built its empire on media dollars. Now, it’s eyeing the other side of the equation — creativity — with AI as its way in.

The signs have been piling up over the last 18 months but the clearest signal yet came last week at the annual Google Cloud Next.

In Las Vegas, the giant unveiled an expanded suite of content creation tools: Veo 2 for video, Imagen 3 for images, Lyria for music and the Chirp 3 model for custom voice tech, all designed to turn minimal input into maximum output. Execs did this throughout the event not just by talking about the technical capabilities of the tools but also showcasing how brands and agencies are already adopting them to create and scale multimedia content.

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