Author: Geek Planet

[ad_1] This research is based on unique data collected from our proprietary audience of publisher, agency, brand and tech insiders. It’s available to Digiday+ members. More from the series → In Digiday+ Research’s first-quarter survey of marketing professionals, respondents told Digiday that Instagram and Facebook still hold the majority of their companies’ marketing budgets. YouTube and TikTok came out behind Meta’s platforms in third and fourth place. TikTok saw brands’ and retailers’ usage and marketing spend on the platform decline this year, according to Digiday’s survey. Marketers’ use of TikTok fell by 17 percentage points in Q1 2025 compared to…

[ad_1] Brian O’Kelley has made a career out of rewiring the ad tech machine. The AppNexus co-founder has spent much of the past two decades deep in the weeds of programmatic advertising — an industry that, for all its ubiquity, remains an opaque, arbitrage-fueled mess. Now, he’s back with a new mission: tear down its inefficiencies and rebuild something cleaner, leaner and, ideally, more honest.How? By using AI to rebuild ad tech from the ground up, Scope3’s agentic advertising platform optimizes media buying for efficiency, sustainability and brand safety. If there were ever a moment for such a reckoning, this…

[ad_1] YouTube’s social commerce push in the West has hit a few bumps, but it’s far from waving the white flag. Platform executives say they’re still refining products to make shopping while watching as seamless as hitting the share button. “We’re certainly investing a lot in making shopping successful,” YouTube’s vp of engineering Geoff van der Meer told Digiday at a press event last week in Zurich. “We obviously try to launch products globally. But shopping is inherently a country by country game, because it really comes down to us working with local merchants on a country by country basis,…

[ad_1] Nvidia GTC (GPU Technology Conference) 2025 is taking place this week in San Jose, Calif., and the giant chip manufacturer has unveiled a range of AI capabilities across a range of industries, with marketing companies like Accenture and S4 Capital’s Monks both showcasing their partnerships.  On Tuesday’s keynote, Nvidia CEO and founder Jensen Huang detailed numerous updates, claiming AI and machine learning has “reinvented the entire computing stack,” which requires different processors, operating systems, applications and data orchestration. “The way you access data will be fundamentally different from the past,” he said, citing Perplexity’s model of fusing traditional search…

[ad_1] By now, publishers’ skepticism toward curation is less a hot take, more a hard truth. The same old story of middlemen, murky margins and the nagging sense that someone else is getting rich off their inventory. But justified cynicism doesn’t pay the bills. So rather than rehash familiar frustrations, what follows is about something more pragmatic: how publishers are learning to work the curation game without buying into it, making peace with a system they don’t trust but can’t afford to ignore.  Because at this stage, sitting it out isn’t a statement, it’s a financial risk. Programmatic dollars keep…

[ad_1] Boston’s Charles River may be famous for rowing, but it can be a single-person or multi-person sport. And, as Boston agency Boathouse’s fourth installment of its CEO study on marketing and the CMO revealed, the team sport can yield better results for companies, while individual efforts can sometimes fall short.  The big picture, the quantitative report that surveyed the CEOs of 150 companies in tech, healthcare, finance, retail and other areas, sheds light on a general improvement in relationship and trust between the CEO and his or her CMO, while still pointing out sizable gaps in a couple areas…

[ad_1] Uncertainty around TikTok’s future in the U.S. led many advertisers to slam the brakes on their advertising there. Others treated the turmoil as a green light.  Walmart, Coca-Cola, Comcast, PepsiCo, Warner Bros Discovery, Google and Amazon have increased their U.S. social media spend on the platform by two percentage points, on a year-over-year basis in the first quarter of 2025, according to Sensor Tower.  Those seven brands were also some of TikTok’s top spending U.S. advertisers in 2024, per the market intelligence firm. However, PepsiCo and Amazon declined to comment on this, while the other five companies did not…

[ad_1] This article is part of our Confessions series, in which we trade anonymity for candor to get an unvarnished look at the people, processes and problems inside the industry. More from the series → Advertising industry professionals have been eyeing the creator economy — not only to understand it for their work with clients but also for themselves, as more agency employees consider becoming creators. Agency-based creators aren’t limited to the creative departments, either. Some employees outside of creative, like one marketing associate who works for a digital agency, have dabbled in becoming creators too. “It turns you into…

[ad_1] For years, the dominant platforms of the internet have treated content moderation as both shield and scalpel — eulogized as “trust and safety,” enforced by a mix of algorithmic blunt force and human discretion, and backed by sprawling bureaucracies tasked with adjudicating whether a buttock or a stray word crosses the invisible line. Substack, the subscription publishing platform, is taking a different tack.  Rather than tinkering with the machinery of enforcement, it’s betting that the real problem lies not in the rules, but in the incentives — that a system built around advertising and virality will inevitably reward outrage, and…

[ad_1] In this saturated market, brands are hoping new mascots will tickle consumers’ nostalgia and help them stand out from the competition. In the last few months, Domino’s pizza launched Mac Scott, a penne-shaped mascot, fast-casual restaurant chain Cava rolled out Peter Chip, a pita chip with googly eyes, and candy brand Hi-Chew introduced Chewbie, the brand’s first official, self-described “ambiguous mascot with a big personality.” This is after Instacart’s first-ever Super Bowl ad this year featured notable brand mascots like Chester Cheetah, the Old Spice man, Mr. Clean, the Energizer Bunny, and the Kool-Aid Man. “They make more sense…