As the trade war escalates, narratives about how brands’ goods are made, the factories that produce them and whether they’re worth the price are unfolding across social media. Call it the trade war’s meme war.

Narrated videos and AI-generated memes are flooding consumers‘ feeds across TikTok, X and YouTube as the U.S. and China battle over tariff increases. This Wednesday, the U.S. imposed a 125% tariff on China.

Some Chinese-based influencers and manufacturers are taking to social media in an attempt to expose how luxury goods are made and allegedly shipped off to European countries for labeling and significant mark-ups. They’re hoping consumers instead buy directly from China’s manufacturing facilities.

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Tasked with steering their brands down a winding and slippery road, automotive marketers are prioritizing flexibility and speed. To capture consumers buying cars ahead of an anticipated price hit from tariffs, Hyundai has launched a campaign pledging to hold sticker prices steady until June.

The campaign was assembled just a week before its April 11 debut, highlighting the agility required of marketers in this sector right now. Currently, automotive manufacturers are preparing to weather a 25% tariff on imported cars — though President Trump is reportedly considering another stay of execution, adding further uncertainty to an already unpredictable spring. Per MediaRadar, the sector accounted for $14.3 billion of U.S. ad spend last year and according to Statista, Hyundai alone invested over $600 million in advertising in 2023.

The ad itself is a 30-second spot highlighting a pledge to hold its recommended retail price steady until the beginning of June, and features workers at assembly plants located in Georgia and Alabama — a wink to being American-made, and a nod intended to reassure consumers over tariff fears.

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This story was first published by Digiday sibling WorkLife

After scooping up a shelfful of journalistic honors at Zalando’s online fashion and lifestyle publication Highsnobiety (four National Magazine Awards, anyone?), Willa Bennett is rewriting the rulebook of print and digital magazine brands as the editor in chief of Hearst’s Cosmopolitan and Seventeen.

Since taking charge last September, Bennett has brought her tech-savvy, generationally engagement from Highsnobiety, as well as the social team at Condé Nast’s GQ and Bustle Digital Group, to two of consumer publishing’s most iconic titles. Her secret weapon? Parenting books, of all things.

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For years, Apple has played the role of the bystander in advertising — wealthy, capable and largely disinterested. It had the reach, the hardware, the data, the closed loop ecosystem, it had everything but the need.

Now, that’s starting to change. 

Apple’s quiet rebrand of its search ads business to the more assertive “Apple Ads” may seem like a modest semantic update but in the context of platform power plays, language rarely shifts without intention. The move suggests that Apple is no longer content to just collect rent from the ad tech ecosystem it reshaped through privacy policies. It wants a larger piece of the action. 

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Google has been ruled a monopolist for the second time within a year, but now the industry is asking how long will it have to wait for an actual outcome, and what measures are necessary to make any real difference?

In a landmark ruling, Judge Leonie Brinkema has found Google guilty of antitrust violations in two of the three markets at the heart of the Justice Department’s long-running case against the tech giant’s ad tech business.

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U.S. Judge Leonie Brinkema just called it: Google broke the law to cement its monopoly over online advertising. Four weeks in September laid bare exactly how it did it. But if you missed the courtroom drama or need a refresher, here’s the unfiltered story of how Google boxed out rivals and took over online advertising — straight from the people who were caught in the crossfire.

But for those who were there from the beginning, the story of Google’s rise in ad tech was already written in the margins — long before any courtroom showdown. 

Matt Wasserlauf, now the CEO of Blockboard, remembers it well. 

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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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