The Future Leader Awards, presented by Digiday, Glossy, Modern Retail and WorkLife, recognize the next generation of leaders making a big impact in their industry, with 10 years of experience or less. 

This year’s finalists stand out for their bold innovation, measurable impact and deep connection to the audiences they serve. Each has harnessed data to shape strategy, delivered campaigns that drive real results or pushed creative boundaries within their roles. From cultural relevance to community engagement, these leaders are not just keeping pace with the industry — they’re setting it.

Alice Severs, for example, associate strategy director at T Brand Studio of New York Times Advertising, is nominated as a Digiday Future Leader in the publisher category for her standout work shaping how financial brands communicate with audiences. 

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Ad spending held steady in Q1, but the rest of the year is shaping up to be a far murkier story.

With companies adjusting earnings forecasts and the upfront market losing steam, the signs are clear: Advertisers are easing off the gas. Blame the tariff effect, or more precisely, the anxiety they’ll get steeper and hit harder than expected. In an already fragile economy, even the boldest marketers are treading carefully.

“Normally, we get visibility on ad spending six to nine months ahead for CMOs whereas now that’s three months,” said Tal Jacobson, CEO of ad tech vendor Perion. “They’re not necessarily spending less so much as they’re being careful.”

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Alphabet’s AI advancements continue to wow Wall Street, but they’re raising eyebrows with regulators in Washington, D.C., and last week’s launches at Google Marketing Live should cause advertisers on Madison Avenue to reserve judgment. 

Despite several tussles with the Justice Department and hand-wringing over the fate of third-party cookies, the company’s stock price popped last week, as the markets gauged Alphabet’s revenue plans following the Google I/O and Google Marketing Live announcements. 

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When programmatic media buying first started heating up in the early 2000s, it promised scale, efficiency and more precise ad placements. But some of that promise has worn off. Programmatic marketers are weary, wading through an opaque web of ad tech middlemen, questionable inventory quality and murky measurement. Marketers are now looking at retail media networks with a similar sense of caution and a renewed feeling of déjà vu.

“We’re going to have the same challenges as you’re seeing [with DSPs]. We’re going to have the same desires as the brands and agencies want,” George Musi, chief business officer at Night Market, the retail and commerce agency at Horizon Media Holdings media agency, told Digiday at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit, which took place in Palm Springs, California earlier this month.

Marketers want solutions to off-site inventory quality, transparency and measurement, Musi said. “Hopefully, this time around, we can shorten the distance between the need and the reality much quicker,” he added.

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Google’s traditional search business is transforming for the AI era. Last week’s roll-out of AI Mode in the U.S. enables people to replace the traditional search engine results page with one that more closely resembles an AI chatbot. It’s a far cry from the days of 10 blue links.

“We are certainly far beyond those days,” said Dan Taylor, vp of global ads at Google, on the latest Digiday Podcast episode. “I’ve been at Google for 19 years, and as the ways that people search has evolved, Google has evolved search along with it. And we think that AI Overviews and AI Mode and these generative AI-driven experiences are a pretty transformational change.”

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No apocalypse yet: Google’s March core update has brought manageable search traffic dips for some publishers, with AI Overviews dragging and Discover picking up some slack.

Google’s rollout of its generative AI search experience, AI Mode, in a new tab last week has stoked referral concerns, but for now, search traffic remains relatively stable, according to four publishing execs.

Referral traffic data from over 4,000 global sites shows Google Search and Discover traffic hasn’t changed that much this year, according to Chartbeat media researcher Cynthia Vu. There was a 9% decrease in Google Search pageviews from January 2025 to April 2025, and about a 6% increase in Google Discover traffic during that same period, according to Chartbeat’s analysis, which showed pageviews were flat from March to April 2025. 

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Ad spend is under more scrutiny than ever as economic headwinds pressure marketers to stretch budgets, making every dollar count. Marketers are scrutinizing their ad spend more closely than ever and pressuring retail media partners for incrementality, a metric beyond return on ad spend (ROAS) to determine if the RMN media buys are paying off. That includes RMN partners like Lowe’s Media Network.

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Retail Revolution

ROAS vs. incrementality: Scrutiny around ad spend grows in booming retail media space Read More

To better compete and take in more ad dollars, Lowe’s Media Network has incrementality on the roadmap. Digiday recently caught up with John Storms, general manager and head of Lowe’s Media Network, to get details on the measurement plan going forward and how the retailer is navigating economic headwinds.

The Lowe’s executive has overseen the media network since 2023, guiding it through a rebrand last year where it was renamed Lowe’s Media Network instead of Lowe’s One Roof Media Network. Before Lowe’s, Storms spent 19 years at Target, serving as director of hardlines (products like appliances, sporting equipment, electronics, and home goods) strategy and sales at Roundel from 2019 to 2022, according to his LinkedIn.

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Over the past two years, clipping has quietly become a staple in some advertisers’ media mix.

The term “clipping” refers to the practice of sharing short clips from longer content such as podcasts, livestreams or YouTube videos on social media platforms, to boost the original content’s audience or promote a brand. Originally, the technique was championed by larger content creators, who paid other creators to share their clips.

In 2025, brands and advertisers are recognizing its potential — and are starting to pour more marketing dollars into clipping, according to three creators interviewed for this article.

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The bull case for OpenAI to build an ads business just got a lot more real. 

The company is developing a sleek AI companion device, born out of its acquisition of former Apple designer Jony Ive’s design firm, with plans to ship 100 million units, according to The Wall Street Journal. If it takes off, OpenAI could become as ubiquitous as the smartphone.

But moonshots like this aren’t cheap. OpenAI isn’t printing money, it’s torching it. The company told investors it won’t turn a profit until 2029, and expects to lose $44 billion along the way, per The Wall Street Journal. 

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In an era of programmatic investment and complex media marketplaces made more byzantine thanks to the crush of ad-tech and mar-tech firms offering their brand of “unique” or “proprietary” solutions, does a personal touch or the offer of being a “partner” media agency matter anymore? 

The agency holding companies embrace that complexity and offer their road maps to massive multinational corporations to help wend their way across the landscape, but it’s hard to say they’re a “partner” to anyone but their own sibling companies — at least that’s the criticism of them and their size and breadth. 

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Food and beverage brands are introducing new products that aim to address the questions raised by consumer usage of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Mounjaro and Wegovy. At the same time, they’re beginning to borrow from the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry in their media choices.

Danone is experimenting with “patient portal” digital out-of-home investments alongside a battery of other digital channels it’s deploying to debut a new product aimed squarely at health-conscious consumers.

According to CMO Linda Bethea, Danone launched Oikos Protein Shakes this month backed by media spending on paid search, paid social, digital display, influencer marketing, retail media and connected TV (CTV). The “ambient” (industry code for non-refrigerated) shake targets consumers who seek more protein in their diet, including patients using GLP-1 drugs.

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This story was originally published on sister site, Glossy.

TJX, parent company to off-price leaders like TJ Maxx and Marshalls, reported 3% sales growth during its Q1 fiscal 2026 meeting on Wednesday.

“The availability of merchandise we are seeing is outstanding, and we are in a great position to take advantage of the plentiful opportunities that the marketplace is offering,” Ernie Herrman, CEO and president of The TJX Companies, said during the call. “We are confident in our ability to navigate the current tariff and macro environment in the short term. Importantly, our vision for long-term growth, profitability and market share opportunities remains the same.”

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There are a lot of questions in this year’s upfront market negotiations: Will ad prices come down after last year? How will TV networks and streaming platforms price sports inventory? How will Amazon and Netflix play into the allocation of upfront dollars?

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Paul Woolmington certainly looks the part of an ad agency creative. But in actuality he’s one of the senior media-side executives with decades of experience under his belt, including at holding companies including IPG, WPP, and Stagwell precursor MDC Partners. Woolmington has also channeled that experience into startups. 

He co-founded Naked Communications Americas and founded The Media Kitchen before taking over the CEO reins of Canvas Worldwide, one of the largest independent full-funnel media agencies with clients ranging from Zillow Group to Hyundai Group.

Hitting its 10th anniversary this year, Canvas is now comprised of 600 staffers, with a full-funnel offering that has more recently heavied up on data-side and performance chops — but in a way that balances the need for upper-funnel wisdom and lower-funnel insights. Woolmington explained the approach Canvas is taking to maintain and cultivate that balance. 

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ChatGPT is sending more of its traffic to publishers’ sites. 

Of the traffic OpenAI’s generative AI platforms send to external websites, 83% went to news and media sites in April, up from 64% in January, according to Similarweb data shared with Digiday. 

Referral traffic from ChatGPT also continues to grow this year. ChatGPT sent 243.8 million visits to 250 news and media websites in April 2025, up 98% from 123.2 million visits this January, according to David Carr, senior insights manager at data analytics company Similarweb.

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Google on Trial

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Participants in the Google antitrust trial are entering the final furlong, with Google on Monday (May 19) countering the Justice Department’s remedy proposals after Justice Leonie Brinkema ruled its ad tech stack a monopoly last month.

Of course, Google’s advocates will point out how the DOJ only won two of the charges it brought against its ad tech stack in the April 17 ruling, using this point to undermine government lawyers’ push for a forced breakup. 

Specifically, the court ruled that Google illegally monopolized the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets and unlawfully combined those two services.

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AI may be fueling a fresh chapter in ad tech fraud — and not in ways the industry is ready for.

Generative AI content farms are stealing publishers’ ads.txt files to hijack ad revenue, according to DoubleVerify, which has been tracking the activity since January. 

The tech company has been investigating what it has dubbed “AI slop sites and networks” – one in particular called “Synthetic Echo” – which uses generative AI to mass-produce content and spoof ads.txt files to siphon revenue from legitimate publishers. 

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This week’s Media Briefing looks at what AI Mode, the latest generative AI search experience Google has rolled out, means for publishers’ search referral traffic.

• Users’ queries in AI Mode are two to three times the length of traditional searches, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during the company’s annual I/O developer conference on Tuesday. Google thinks this means users will discover more web content. Publishers aren’t convinced.
• Local newspapers’ AI-generated content makes up book titles, News Corp introduces mandatory AI training for journalists, and more.

Less clicks, more problems

After months of anxiety and speculation, the rollout publishers feared — Google’s AI Mode in search — has arrived.

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Publishers have long chased growth through social platforms and short-term traffic spikes. These tactics often prioritize volume over value, inflating reach without building meaningful relationships or translating into lasting engagement or revenue.

Without meaningful data or audience insights, personalization efforts fall flat, revenue is unpredictable, subscription offers miss their mark and ad performance suffers. Instead, savvy publishers are leveraging a valuable asset: their own audience data. With the right tools, audience data is the foundation for long-term revenue, activated by personalization and automation through owned channels.

“Given the ongoing challenges in the media and publishing space, such as subscription fatigue, news avoidance and declining trust, it’s increasingly clear that cultivating long-term loyalty is the right path forward,” said Georgia Gkolfinopoulou, senior marketing strategist at Marigold. “With younger audiences favoring new formats like podcasts and short-form videos, it’s vital that publishers adopt informed, channel-specific strategies. 

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WPP has retained its account with Coca-Cola, one its largest clients, according to the global beverage giant’s chief marketing officer Manuel Arroyo.

Writing on LinkedIn, the CMO said Coca-Cola had renewed its partnership with WPP and credited it with delivering “significant value” to the firm, which is one of the world’s largest advertisers.

“I’m happy to share that The Coca-Cola Company has renewed its partnership with WPP Open X as its global marketing partner,” he wrote. “We are living a special moment in marketing at The Coca-Cola Company, and I’m glad to have WPP Open X on our team to help us create the future of marketing.”

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