With TikTok’s potential U.S. looming ban as early as January, creators and agencies are split: some see it as inevitable, while others are convinced it won’t stick.
The rift has simmered since TikTok’s future was first questioned but has only intensified as the stakes climb — highlighted by the Supreme Court’s decision this week (Dec. 19) to take up the app’s appeal against a U.S. law that could pull the plug next month.
Last month, Clip It, Roblox’s version of TikTok, launched its first official ad products. Now, Sia has become the first musician to activate inside Clip It — and it’s already sparked an unprecedented uptick of user activity within the experience.
Much like TikTok, Clip It is a short-form video service located entirely inside Roblox, with users able to create, share and scroll through videos of their in-game avatars dancing to music inside a variety of virtual settings.
Sia’s Clip It integration, which launched on December 12 and runs through the end of 2024, gives users access to a free selection of holiday-themed songs, as well as a variety of settings, animations and virtual items based on Sia’s wardrobe and music videos. It’s the first time a prominent mainstream musical artist has placed their music and branding inside Clip It, although the experience also sells custom music and animation packs such as September’s Phonk Pack.
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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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Agencies aren’t platforms — and they never will be. Let’s not kid ourselves.
At best, they’ve dabbled in platform cosplay; a pinch of data here, a smidge of recurring revenue there.
But the idea that they’re about to shed their old-school holding company identity? Wishful thinking. Still, it’s a myth that just won’t die, enthusiastically recycled by holding company CEOs for years.
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The crusade to make everything an ad network continues as yet another player enters the space: real estate media.
On Wednesday, global real estate brokerage firm RE/MAX announced its own commerce media network, RE/MAX Media Network, a programmatic offering leveraging the real estate brand’s owned properties across its websites, email newsletters, and in-property digital displays.
The question is: Can media buyers be convinced to shell out on yet another retail media network (RMN) given so many of them already exist, like Zillow Group Media Manager, which could serve as direct competition to ReMax’s newly launched offering?
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Few creators have been able to export their star power beyond the walled gardens of the social internet.
And although the influencer sector hasn’t wanted for commercial growth in recent times, the marketing benefits of a creator partnership or influencer campaign have been largely restricted to channels like Instagram and TikTok.
But this year, brands including personal care and household product maker Arm & Hammer, toy brand Miko and tech firm Snapdragon began experimenting with the use of influencer-made marketing content, in place of traditional creative assets, in programmatic ad inventory accessed via Amazon, The Trade Desk and Google’s DSPs.
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Since the summer, Epic Games has invested in a marketing campaign promoting specific creator-made experiences inside Fortnite. So far, the effort has resulted in a serious traffic boost for the chosen experiences — but it’s also raised questions among some creators regarding how and why Epic decides to elevate certain games on the platform over others.
From at least June 2024 onward, Epic Games has selected specific creator-made Fortnite experiences developed by third-party studios — including “Lumberjack Heroes,” “Havoc Hotel” and “Mercenaries” — for a marketing campaign that has included trailers on the official PlayStation YouTube channel and paid promotions by TikTok creators and Twitch streamers, in addition to posts across Fortnite’s official social accounts on platforms such as YouTube and Instagram. Following the campaign, the concurrent user counts of all three experiences ballooned by the thousands.
“Fortnite creators have the ability to submit their islands for consideration across a variety of promotional opportunities, including the Epic’s Picks Discover row and through our social media channels,” an Epic spokesperson said.
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For 2025, Uber Advertising is sticking with what works: scaling up markets, doubling down on programmatic and adding new formats, according to Paul Wright, its head of international advertising. No need to fix what isn’t broken — especially when the ride-hailing app turned ads business already humming along.
So much so that the business hit a 1 billion annual net revenue run rate earlier this summer.. That’s double its 2022 run rate of $500 million. An impressive milestone for an ad business that’s just two years old.
And the way things are going, more milestones are bound to fall in 2025.
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LinkedIn may be chasing the deep pockets of mainstream brands these days, but it’s not neglecting the lifeblood of its ad business. B2B companies are still front and center of its latest market pitch.
Specifically when it comes to its own AI-powered campaign tool Accelerate. Unlike the offerings from Google and Meta, this tool is designed with B2B marketers in mind.
As LinkedIn’s vp of product management, Abhishek Shrivastava, explained: “B2B marketers have to make do with how to fit their own needs into the existing B2C tools.”
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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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After an ambitious, but abortive, effort to diversify its business in 2023, the esports team 100 Thieves refocused on brand partnerships in 2024 – and was rewarded by a significant rise in sponsor interest.
100 Thieves’ renewed focus on sponsorships has already paid off. After signing 11 new sponsors and achieving a 50 percent sponsorship renewal rate in 2023, the org managed to bring on 23 new sponsors in 2024, including brands such as Crocs, Adidas and Google Play, with a renewal rate of 75 percent over the past twelve months, according to numbers shared with Digiday by 100 Thieves. Company reps declined to specify the specific dollar value of its sponsorship deals, which typically involve the brand paying the team a fee in exchange for a set number of deliverables, such as social media posts, content pieces and jersey logo slaps, as well as more bespoke custom activations.
In spite of many esports companies’ attempts to escape the pain of brands’ shrinking marketing budgets, 100 Thieves’ evolution over the past year shows how the industry at large remains dependent on advertising to stay afloat, for better or worse.
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The holidays have long been the time when American retailers look for a bit of extra help in their stores. Most of the short-term gigs are of the shelf-stocking and checkout nature. And that makes one recent ad that Macy's posted to ZipRecruiter a standout. Requirements? "Always maintain a cheerful, upbeat demeanor," "assist with crowd...
The aspirations around experiential events have exploded in recent years. Activations used to be confined to physical spaces, and now entire worlds can be built in digital realms like Fortnite. And even physical events have reached ambitious new heights. Now in its sixth year, ADWEEK's 2024 Experiential Award winners know how to dazzle with interactive...
2024 feels like a year that can be split in two: In the first half we saw some expected marketing trends panning out in expected and unexpected ways (Google’s cookie confusion, retail media obsession and generative AI). In the second half, however, it feels like marketers were in the midst of a recalibration of culture, and everyone was trying to understand how to show up and where to show up and they had to do so with stranger than usual change.
A good way to sum up 2024 might be this: It was a year in which marketers (and everyone else) had to get comfortable with expecting the unexpected.
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If you’ve worked in marketing or media in some capacity over the last 25 years, there’s a chance you’ve come across Kevin Wassong, who seemingly knows everyone in the business thanks to his long agency resumé.
Since January, Wassong has been working with Greg McConnell, a longtime friend and fellow industry colleague with experience overseeing the Rolex business at WPP, among other roles, to develop what the pair are calling “the Bloomberg terminal for marketers,” a SaaS product called mktg.ai.
The duo are just now rolling out mktg.ai, to the market, offering up a service that aims to be the be-all end-all service for marketers to track the vastly increased number of assets they use in their efforts — along with a simplified means of knowing what’s worked, when it worked and easy access to it all in one place.
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Havas is now officially an independent, publicly traded business following a successful spin-off from parent company Vivendi. On Monday (Dec. 16), the agency network debuted on the Euronext Amsterdam exchange with a valuation of $2.6 billion (EUR2.5 billion). Havas has been under Vivendi's management since its acquisition in 2017, operating alongside sister companies including French...
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.
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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TikTok’s turbulent year in the U.S. barely rattled marketers — until now. As the app enters its final countdown, marketers are taking the ban more seriously than ever because it’s looking increasingly like TikTok, at least in its current guise, is on borrowed time.
Earlier this month, the app’s U.S. prospects hit a new low. A federal appeals court ruled that national security concerns outweigh First Amendment protections, forcing ByteDance to divest TiKTok if it wants to remain in the market.
Although TikTok plans to appeal, there’s no guarantee that the Supreme Court will take the case. Historically the court defers to Congress on national security matters, and a bipartisan coalition has framed TikTok as a risk to Americans’ data privacy and a potential tool for manipulating its powerful recommendation algorithms.
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In 2024, 17 creator startups raised at least $10 million in new funding, totaling over $900 million. A large amount of that investment went toward creator companies whose work overlaps with trendy categories, such as artificial intelligence or social shopping. But tried-and-true business models like influencer marketing and newsletter subscriptions also scored new rounds.
"For the second year in a row, the trends kind of stayed the same. AI, community, and revenue diversification for all creators," said Ollie Forsyth, a former senior manager at the investment firm Antler who now writes the newsletter New Economies.
Startups that offer automated dubbing, AI editing, or generative AI features — such as Captions, ElevenLabs, and OpusClip — all raised hefty rounds this year. Social-commerce startups like ShopMy and Levanta captivated venture firms, alongside newsletter companies like Beehiiv, Workweek, and Substack.
A few startups — Agentio, Beehiiv, and Captions — that raised capital in 2023, when creator-economy investments were at a low ebb, also raised again in 2024. Meanwhile, some venture firms have consistently tapped into the creator space, such as AlleyCorp, Inspired Capital, and Volition Capital.
Investor interest in the creator economy surged when social-media consumption spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, but then fell off dramatically. It's now steady, Forsyth said.
"We're no longer in the hype cycle," he said. "Maybe it has lost its trendiness a tiny bit, but it's stabilizing, which is needed."
Business Insider worked with data providers PitchBook and Crunchbase to sort through fundraising data in order to highlight big creator startup rounds from 2024. We focused on companies whose products significantly impact the businesses of creators and their partners.
Here are 17 of those companies, listed in alphabetical order:
Agentio, an ad platform streamlining creator-brand marketing on YouTube, raised a $12 million Series A. The round, announced in November, was led by Benchmark and included returning investors Craft and AlleyCorp (the latter firms co-led Agentio's $4.25 million Seed investment last year). Agentio's Series A is being used to scale the startup's go-to-market teams and expand its product offerings beyond YouTube creator ads.
Beehiiv, a newsletter platform competing with Substack, raised a $33 million Series B this year — $32 million from venture capital investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, and Sapphire Ventures, and $1 million from a crowdfund. Beehiiv will use the money to expand hiring, build its ad network, and continue its M&A strategy (the startup acquired Typedream in May).
Cameo, a video shout-out platform for celebrities and creators, raised $28 million with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Valor Siren Ventures, Endeavor Catalyst, and cofounders Steven Galanis, Devon Townsend, and Martin Blencowe. The aim of the raise was to build out Cameo for Business, an offering focused on connecting its creators with brands for promotional content, per a company spokesperson.
Already on its Series C round after launching in 2021, AI video startup Captions closed a $60 million round in July led by Index Ventures. The round included returning investors like A16z and Sequoia Capital, as well as new investments from Adobe Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, and Jared Leto. Captions will use its funding to grow its machine learning team and in-house research, and also shared plans to invest $100 million into generative video research.
ElevenLabs closed an $80 million Series B round at the start of the year, led by A16z, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross. Other firms, like Sequoia Capital, Smash Capital, and SV Angel, joined the round. The startup announced at the time that the raise would be used to "refine" its products and safety measures in the deployment of AI.
Flip, a social-shopping platform set up in a TikTok-like feed, raised $144 million in a Series C round led by Streamlined Ventures with participation from advertising firm AppLovin, the companies announced in April. Flip planned to integrate marketing tech from AppLovin as part of the deal.
Infinite Reality, a tech company that owns talent-management firm TalentX, Drone Racing League, and other holdings, closed a $350 million fundraise from an undisclosed family office, the company said. The investment was meant to support efforts in hiring, with a focus on tech and product, as well as allow the company to pursue M&A opportunities.
Influur, an influencer-marketing platform, closed a $10 million Series A in November, led by Point72 Ventures and HTwenty Capital. The startup will use its funding to develop products like AI tools to help brands predict campaign performance and fintech tools for its users.
Levanta, an affiliate-marketing company that connects Amazon sellers with creators and other affiliates, raised $20 million in a Series A round led by Volition Capital. The company said the round would help it grow its business development team and improve its user experience.
OpusClip, an AI video editing platform that helps creators turn long videos into short clips, closed its Series A in April, bringing total funding to $30 million, per the company. Millennium New Horizons led the startup's Series A with participation from other investors like AI Grant, DCM Ventures, Samsung Next, GTMfund, and Alpine VC, among others. The company said it plans to use the funding to build its products and grow its team.
Passes, a subscription and memberships platform for creators, raised a $40 million Series A round in February from Abstract Ventures, Crossbeam Venture Partners, and individuals like Alexandra Botez, Emma Grede, and Michael Ovitz. The funding will be used for hiring and product, CEO Lucy Guo told BI.
Podcastle, a content-creation platform for podcasters, closed a $13.5 million Series A round led by Mosaic Ventures, with participation from returning investors Sierra Ventures, RTP Global, and Point Nine, among others. The company is using the funding to expand its AI and video products and grow its team with a new base in London.
ProRata.ai, a startup focused on helping creators and media firms get compensation for contributing to generative AI products, raised $30 million in a rolling Series A that closed in Q4, led by Mayfield Fund and other investors like Revolution Ventures, Prime Movers Lab, and Calibrate Ventures.
ShopMy, an affiliate and influencer-marketing company, raised an $18.5 million add-on to its Series A in March, closing the round at $26.5 million. The startup previously told BI that it raised from firms like Inspired Capital and AlleyCorp to grow the platform and attract more brand and creator partners.
Slushy, an adult-content platform competing with OnlyFans, raised a $10.2 million seed investment that closed in June. The round included investments from The Chainsmokers' Mantis VC, Electric Feel Ventures, and individuals like Jon Oringer (the former CEO of Shutterstock) and Sean Rad (the former CEO of Tinder). Slushy will direct its new funds toward developing its product, onboarding more content creators to the platform, and expanding into new markets.
Substack closed an investment round of about $10 million (the company directed BI to Axios' reporting on the matter) in the fall. Substack recently announced that it had 4 million paid subscriptions on its platform. It has worked to ramp up in-person events this year.
Workweek, a business-focused newsletter startup, announced a $12.5 million Series A round in June led by Next Coast Ventures. It's using the investment to build out a professional networking service for Workweek's subscribers.
