The fragmented social landscape continued to splinter in 2024, as traffic from social media platforms sent to publishers’ sites continued its steady decline this year.

The bright spot? Largely Google. Publishers saw increases in traffic from Google Discover — and Google Search’s generative AI feature hasn’t had a negative impact on the traffic to publishers’ sites.

Other than Facebook, social platforms like Instagram, Reddit and Threads are all driving marginal traffic to publishers’ sites, according to Chartbeat’s data from about 3,750 sites.

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Modern marketers know that any new work they put out into the world in service of their brand might be encountered by many different audiences.

There’s the target consumer audience, with whom marketers hope their latest campaign or activation will land. There’s competitors, keeping an eye on their rival brands’ every move. There’s online culture warriors waiting to turn an advertiser’s misstep into a cause célèbre. And now there’s another constituency marketers must keep in mind — large language models, the foundational tech upon which generative AI chatbots and applications are based.

With AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity gaining traction, tech firms are creating new ways to understand how large language models perceive their brands — and what AI answers say about them. One of the newest developments comes from Profound, an SEO startup focused on AI search platforms, which today is debuting a way to estimate conversation volume rather than just analyzing AI outputs.

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The time to reflect on the year is upon us, and for marketers in particular, it looks like 2024 turned out to be a good one overall. Revenues were up for most, and many marketers even grew their staff this year.

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Over the last few years, marketers have been trying to flip their position in the cultural zeitgeist — making moments themselves as opposed to retroactively marketing around them. That’s why e.l.f. Beauty has built out its own entertainment arm, e.l.f. made, tasked with creating of the moment content around music, movies, gaming and sports. 

Thanks to the short-form content boom, advertisers like e.I.f Beauty have been working to move at the so-called speed of culture. While key agency partnerships remain intact for brand activation, an in-house entertainment arm allows the beauty brand to produce branded content fast enough to keep up with trends. 

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Originally published on Nov. 15, 2024, this article has been updated to include an explainer video featuring interviews with industry executives filmed during the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit in December 2024.

After several years of fits and starts, curation in ad tech is finally having its moment in the spotlight. 

And if you need a clear sign of its mainstream arrival, even Google is jumping on board.

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Reddit’s sports fan communities grew rapidly in the last year.

Perhaps no great surprise, given 2024’s bumper sporting schedule, which saw the Olympic Games, Copa America and Euro 2024 tournaments catch the attention of audiences. The platform recorded a 35% year-on-year increase in engagement in over 1,000 sports-themed Subreddits, according to internal data that didn’t outline specific figures, shared with Digiday.

But that growth isn’t accidental. For the last year, Reddit has been working behind the scenes with the biggest organizations in American sports, including the National Football League (NFL), National Basketball Association (NBA), Major League Baseball (MLB), Professional Golfers’ Association of America (PGA) and NASCAR.

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Bluesky has entered the classic platform rite of passage: wooing publishers. 

Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok — they’ve all tried the same play over the years, luring attention-grabbing content that keeps eyeballs glued.

“Having publishers helps to make your platform a go-to place for news,” said Daoud Jackson, senior analyst at Omdia. “Having authoritative news means when people want to see what is going on, they come to your platform first.”

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This year, reality bent to the will of the meme. 

The shift has been building for years, fuelled by a potent cocktail of politics, creators and fandoms. But over the past 12 months, it finally crossed the threshold. 

Think that’s overstated? Just look around.

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Programmatic advertising methods like retargeting can be powerful for pushing interested customers over the line into making a purchase. But the approach can lose potency if the proverbial funnel isn’t regularly refilled with new prospective customers. 

“Over time, in order to compete and continue to grow, you need to expand your funnel. Otherwise you risk to optimize yourself to the ground and run out. If you continue to sharpen a pencil, at some point you run out of pencil,” TripAdvisor’s Matteo Balzani said on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, which was recorded live during last week’s Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit in Nashville.

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In the world of video games, “Call of Duty” is still king. Earlier this year, the series experienced its biggest launch weekend ever following the Oct. 25 release of “Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.”

The buzz around “Black Ops 6” showed how “Call of Duty” has successfully worked its way into mainstream popular culture. To back up the release, Activision ran a marketing campaign that injected the series’ popular “Replacer” character into a wide range of popular entertainment and sports properties, including Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, ESPN’s Sportscenter and Sky Sports. 

Activision’s marketing push for “Black Ops 6” appears to have paid off. Content featuring the “Replacer” character garnered 268 million impressions across platforms, according to data shared with Digiday by Activision. 

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Supply path optimization needs optimizing. 

The umbrella term for programmatic ad-buying upkeep has been around for more than a half-dozen years. In that time, SPO has increased in importance. Programmatic reselling has become more rife, ad tech has become more commoditized, and last year’s MFA mania called into question how much insight – not to mention control – brands actually have over where their ads appear.

Naturally then, as the programmatic marketplace evolves, so do advertisers’ methods of managing that supply chain. 

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When it comes to artificial intelligence technologies affecting the ad industry, programmatic marketers would naturally be toward the tip of the spear. After all, their roles originated as machines disrupted traditional buying methods. And now AI-based ad buying tools are similarly changing the nature of their roles. 

During this week’s Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit in Nashville, Tenn., agency executives convened behind closed doors and opened up about how the insertion of AI has impacted their abilities to optimize clients’ campaigns and how they are having to adapt and define the value they bring to the table. The executives were granted anonymity in exchange for their candor, and a selection of what they had to say is excerpted below.

AI-powered ad buying has a transparency problem

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On Thursday during a live demo as part of its "12 days of OpenAI" event, OpenAI announced a new tier of ChatGPT with higher usage limits for $200 a month and the full version of "o1," the full version of a so-called reasoning model the company debuted in September.

Unlike o1-preview, o1 can now process images as well as text (similar to GPT-4o), and it is reportedly much faster than o1-preview. In a demo question about a Roman emperor, o1 took 14 seconds for an answer, and 1 preview took 33 seconds. According to OpenAI, o1 makes major mistakes 34 percent less often than o1-preview, while "thinking" 50 percent faster. The model will also reportedly become even faster once deployment is finished transitioning the GPUs to the new model.

Whether the new ChatGPT Pro subscription will be worth the $200 a month fee isn't yet fully clear, but the company specified that users will have access to an even more capable version of o1 called "o1 Pro Mode" that will do even deeper reasoning searches and provide "more thinking power for more difficult problems" before answering.

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A new so-called “reasoning” AI model, QwQ-32B-Preview, has arrived on the scene. It’s one of the few to rival OpenAI’s o1, and it’s the first available to download under a permissive license. Developed by Alibaba’s Qwen team, QwQ-32B-Preview contains 32.5 billion parameters and can consider prompts up ~32,000 words in length; it performs better on […]

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