Author: Geek Planet

[ad_1] The agency has called the city home for 53 years, according to GSD&M CEO Duff Stewart, and the party is a way to participate in the the South by Southwest festival and represent its hometown. What started as backyard concerts in 2009 has morphed into a mini-festival on the Monday night of SXSW, where somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 attendees will make a stop at the agency’s fete. Throughout the years, acts like The Hold Steady, Gary Clark Jr., Toro y Moi, Charley Crockett and Reggie Watts have taken the stage at GSD&M’s party. The shop will kick off…

[ad_1] The presence of leading executives, including Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, at President Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration led many to believe that Big Tech would have a smooth course in the coming years, especially in any antitrust trial.  So, when it emerged that Google met Justice Department execs, encouraging them to roll back earlier proposed remedies, including the divestiture of web browser Chrome, in its search antitrust trial, many assumed its political influence would win out.  However, developments later in the week suggest those efforts — Bloomberg claimed last week that Google’s arguments centered on maintaining the tech…

[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 → Interested in sharing your perspectives on the media and marketing industries? Join the Digiday research panel. It’s been just over two years since YouTube started a revenue share program for Shorts. Last year saw a growth in brands’ usage of YouTube, but this year usage has dropped off. At the same time, more brands are spending just a little on marketing on YouTube while a lot fewer are spending a…

[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…