Traditional ad models may no longer deliver the revenue publishers need, but better audience strategies can. With privacy regulations tightening, the role of third-party cookies evolving and digital platforms capturing a greater share of advertiser spend, it’s harder than ever for resource-strapped publishers to monetize through legacy channels. With a digital landscape as complex and fragmented as it is today, many publishers are unaware of how much revenue they lose due to stagnant or inefficient ad strategies. 

“Traditional advertising models are increasingly misaligned with how audiences engage today,” said Georgia Gkolfinopoulou, senior marketing strategist at Marigold. “Static ad formats, untargeted messaging and siloed monetization efforts limit publishers’ ability to create meaningful, revenue-driving experiences.”

Publishers can find a path forward by rethinking how they use owned channels like email, mobile and on-site experiences not just as communication tools, but as engagement and data-collection vehicles. Hearst UK, for example, recently modernized its email marketing strategy with real-time personalization and embedded dynamic content to improve consumer engagement and maximize revenue. 

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YouTube has been making overtures to agencies and brand advertisers in the hope they’ll increase their media investments with the Google-owned video platform.

The platform’s execs have been underlining YouTube’s new position at the top of the TV pyramid in conversations with media buyers, while emphasizing ad products like Peak Points and YouTube Select, as well as its TikTok competitor Shorts.

“Everything in the sales pitch from Google right now to agencies is YouTube, YouTube, YouTube,” said Kris Tait, chief business officer at media agency Croud. He didn’t reveal specific figures, but told Digiday that spending by Croud’s clients on YouTube had risen almost 50% in the first half of 2025. Neither company responded to requests for comment.

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This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at the tensions bubbling up in the TV ad market as some TV networks press Nielsen to postpone its decision to deprecate panel-only measurement.

• A measurement mess
• The modern creator career path
• Apple’s F1 bid, YouTube’s AI slop sweep and more

A measurement mess

Likely one of the more contentious meetings of this year’s upfront cycle happened on June 12. That was when more than two dozen TV network executives and industry trade organization VAB sat down with Nielsen.

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The IAB Tech Lab is working to assemble a task force of publishers and compute edge companies to kick off its plan to create a technical framework that helps publishers gain better control of, and be paid for, LLM crawling. 

So far, it has roughly a dozen publishers on board for the task force, who will meet for the first workshop in New York City on July 23 (next Wednesday), to discuss next steps for what it has called its LLM Content Ingest API framework. Edge compute company Cloudflare will also attend and speak at the meeting, and the IAB Tech Lab is working to get edge compute company Fastly on board as well, according to CEO Anthony Katsur.

It’s early days, so next steps entail writing the specification — essentially the blueprint or technical guide that will help the different stakeholders (publishers, tech vendors, platforms) build toward the same standard. IAB Tech Lab has an internal draft specification that it’s in the early stages of reviewing with publishers, according to Katsur. Over the last six weeks, it has pitched the overview of this specification (see below) to around 40 publishers globally. 

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At this point, it’s clear generative AI adoption has reached critical mass among marketers and advertisers in everything from ideation to content creation. What’s less clear, however, is AI’s return on investment.

For an industry that’s obsessed with ROI, few businesses have developed straightforward frameworks for measuring and understanding the impact their AI investments are having. 

CMOs are measuring the benefits of AI across a range of metrics: time saved, payroll cost reductions or consumer sentiment. Each has their pros and cons, but few can be applied across the breadth of a business. And so far, a standard dashboard hasn’t yet emerged.

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Holdcos keep talking up AI. Omnicom put it on the record. Its chief technology officer took a lead role on the earnings call on Tuesday (July 15), putting the tech — and the business case — squarely in focus.

Like its peers, Omnicom is in flux. A solid second quarter, with revenue up from $4.02 billion from $3.61 billion a year ago, followed a sluggish start to the year. Blame the usual suspects: a jittery macro economic climate, a slowdown in digital ad growth. But the real shift — the one reshaping the ground beneath them — is AI.

Which explains why Paolo Yuvienco, Omnicom’s chief technology officer, was on the call.

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What began as a supposed rebellion against traditional media is now increasingly modeled after it — the creator economy — complete with middlemen, agency layers, and bundled tech stacks promising growth, monetization, and brand safety. In other words: business as usual.

Managing creator relationships at scale is still marketers’ biggest challenge

Around a third (33%) of U.K. marketers spend between £746,000 and £2.3 million per year on creator marketing, while 34% of U.S. marketers spend between $1 million and $3 million, annually, according to data from Billion Dollar Boy. Furthermore, 37% of U.S. marketers invest more than $3 million in creator marketing, compared to just 19% of U.K. marketers, per Billion Dollar Boy.

Still, the more cash they commit, there’s a lot more riding on it being a success.

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The long-running, often technical, debate over brand safety — once confined to ad tech insiders and programmatic buyers — has erupted into one of advertising’s most politically charged and high-stakes issues.

To underline this, it has now emerged at the center of a regulatory storm that could shape the fate of Madison Avenue’s largest-ever (proposed) merger: Omnicom’s proposed $13.5 billion acquisition of Interpublic Group.

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At this point, it’s clear that creators have become a line item in marketing budgets and media plans. What’s less clear, however, is the longevity and lifespan of a content creator in an ever-changing digital landscape. And that’s the space creators like Brandon Edelman are navigating right now.

“I’m super happy to forever be a TikToker, but who even knows if TikTok is going to be around next year,” Edelman said. 

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This story was first published by Digiday sibling Modern Retail.

Shopify is drawing a line in the sand on agentic AI — a type of bot that autonomously completes tasks on its own, without human inputs — with new language across merchant websites that appears aimed at blocking agentic AI systems. 

Shopify now includes a warning in the code that powers merchant storefronts, telling bots what they can and can’t do. The message appears in each site’s robots.txt file — a standard tool websites use to give instructions to automated crawlers like search engines. The new line states: “Automated scraping, ‘buy-for-me’ agents, or any end-to-end flow that completes payment without a final review step is not permitted.” The change was spotted over the last few days and appears across Shopify storefronts, including Alo Yoga, Allbirds and Brooklinen. The change is visible by appending /robots.txt to any merchant’s URL. 

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Despite years of pledges to diversify their ranks, major publishers are making barely perceptible progress, and in some cases — none at all. 

Overall, staff diversity at The New York Times, Hearst and Condé Nast has either marginally improved or stalled in 2024, according to their annual workforce diversity data this year. 

Lauren Winans, CEO of an HR consulting practice Next Level Benefits, said this means DEI efforts are moving in the right direction, “just not very quickly.” This slow but steady progress has been the case for years now.

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There was a time when landing on the first page of Google meant you were in business. Traffic followed, strategies scaled, and entire models were built on the back of those clicks.

That foundation is cracking. The era of “Google Zero” — industry shorthand for a world where Google keeps users inside its own walls — is here. At the center of it: AI Overviews. Years of SEO strategy are now colliding with a system dishes to answer, not refer. The result: for many publishers traffic is slowing — and in some cases falling off entirely.

Here’s where things stand. 

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The business of being a creator isn’t a solo show. They have become full-on productions.

In the two decades since YouTube’s debut, creators such as Smosh’s Ian Hecox as well as Mythical Entertainment’s Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal have helped to map out the path to becoming full-time creators. They have built out teams and eventually entire companies around themselves.

Now other creators like Dhar Mann and Savanah Moss are following suit by erecting what are effectively the new generation of Hollywood studios and production companies. Meanwhile, the likes of McLaughlin, Neal and Hecox are charting the next phases of the creator career trajectory, as covered in the video below.

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News UK, The Independent, and magazine publishers Immediate Media and Future are teaming up with retail media network Ocado to test clean room-powered data matching. 

The goal: to match Ocado’s shopper data with the publishers’ audience behavioral and contextual data and unlock more granular ad targeting for advertisers without giving up user control.

The move reflects a growing push by publishers to lean deeper into first-party data strategies and gain a foothold in the fast-expanding retail media space, where advertisers are eager for better targeting outside of the walled gardens. For Ocado the partnership provides valuable access to upper and mid-funnel data to inform its existing customer data. 

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AI platform wars are about to become the browser wars and advertising will be a key battleground.

Or at least it will be for two companies. 

OpenAI and Perplexity, two of the biggest players in alternative AI, are making browsers central to their next act. It’s a natural, albeit seminal, move for both companies — one that will have major implications for how advertising is sold, served and measured in an AI-first internet. 

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TripleLift, the self-styled creative supply-side platform, implemented significant layoffs late last week, as the industry prepares itself for a more lean second half of the year. 

Digiday was unable to precisely quantify the scale of the cutbacks, with the company unable to comment on Digiday’s clarification request by press time, although sources indicate the number of roles impacted by the cuts is likely in the mid-to-high double-digits. Prior to the official revelation of the reduction-in-force, TripleLift’s homepage stated that it had “400+ talented workers.” 

The latest round of layoffs is understood to have impacted all departments at the SSP across multiple geographies, with the measures interpreted as a means of weathering a challenging economic outlook for the remainder of 2025. They’re not alone. For example, even before it downgraded its 2025 profit forecast last week, WPP’s media arm lowered its estimates for global ad spend by 1.7%, citing clients’ collective concern about U.S. President Donald Trump’s ongoing trade wars.

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Last week may have ushered in the first moments of a shift in balance among the holding companies.

WPP named its new CEO — breaking barriers along the way by naming the first female holdco CEO ever in Microsoft executive Cindy Rose — just a day after revealing that its first half 2025 earnings are scarier than a Stephen King horror novel.

At the same time, as Omnicom and Interpublic Group approach the final stages of the former acquiring the latter, the slow but steady brain drain continues — with Omnicom set to lose a key architect of its Omni orchestration platform right when Omni is about to absorb IPG’s data assets and tools, housed in Acxiom and Kinesso. And although Omnicom moved immediately to ensure a smooth transition on that front, the timing isn’t ideal for either company, as two different massive data and tech systems have to learn to integrate.  

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Slavi Samardzija is exiting Omnicom’s Media Group’s Annalect in September, with sources interpreting the CEO’s exit as indicative of pending changes within the holding company’s technology and analytics division. 

Separate sources familiar with the developments, all of whom requested anonymity to maintain their relationships with the holding company, told Digiday that news of Samardzija’s exit first surfaced during the opening week of July. He will be replaced by Adam Gitlin, who has served as Annalect president under Samadzija since 2016.

An Omnicom Media Group spokesperson confirmed Samardzija’s departure from the holding company, although it remains unclear if the CEO’s exit was part of a broader restructuring. The spokesperson declined to say where Samadzija is going once his time at OMG is finished.

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AI is on the cusp of upending the way people search and discover information online. For small to mid-sized brands, that means rethinking not just how they show up, but what teams (and what budgets) are responsible for the work.

Historically, paid search was a performance game, focused on keywords, page optimization and rankings. AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, however, have flipped the script. As people ask search engines conversational questions instead of keywords, the lines are blurring between search as a performance function and as an awareness channel, according to two marketing execs Digiday spoke with for this piece. 

“In my mind, the performance and brand world is really starting to intersect together and we have to start being more data-driven around: how is this meeting the overall goals of the business?” said Katya Constantine, CEO of performance marketing agency DigiShop Media. 

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In 2025, esports events are increasingly putting individual content creators front and center to keep both fans and brands interested. 

Yesterday marked the opening ceremony of the Esports World Cup, the annual competitive gaming championship owned by the Saudi American government and held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Like last year’s inaugural event, this year’s Esports World Cup — and its record-breaking $70 million prize pool — has attracted many of the world’s top pro gamers to the Middle East.

But this time around, individual content creators are soaking up much of the focus, both through the Content Creator League, which features teams led by top creators such as BanderitaX and SHoNgxBoNg, and in sponsorship activations by advertisers such as Spotify, whose partnership with the Esports World Cup includes a dedicated hub for on-site content creation. Thus far, the event has announced 22 sponsors for 2025, with categories spanning across consumer brands, tech platforms and endemic gaming companies.

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