Claim OwnershipThe Digiday Podcast
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The Digiday Podcast is a weekly show on the big stories and issues that matter to brands, agencies and publishers as they transition to the digital age.
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CMOs are once again grappling with the age old question of their role in the C-suite. The job has gotten more difficult in today’s business landscape as marketers face increasing pressure to tie marketing to business results (all while being asked to do more with less money). In some cases over the last few months, companies like Hyundai and Starbucks, have eliminated the CMO role entirely.
The role with all of its changes can be challenging, but Jackie Jantos, CMO of Hinge dating app, says it’s a challenge she welcomes, pushing back on short-term metrics in favor of long-term brand building.
“But ultimately, if your goal as a CMO is to build a sustainable long-term business, then you need to be shooting the arrow sort of 10 years out,” Jantos said on a recent episode of the Digiday Podcast, “and better understanding how your product will navigate that and how your brand will stay relevant along that way.”
The Walt Disney Company plans to automate 75% of its advertising business by 2027. And the company took a further step toward that end in this year’s annual TV and streaming advertising upfront market.
“Of the streaming dollars that came in, of those billions of dollars, more than half of them are transacted programmatically,” Disney’s svp of addressable sales Jamie Power said on stage during the Digiday Publishing Summit in a session that served as a live recording for the Digiday Podcast.
A catalyst to the growth of Disney’s automation efforts this year was the parity that the company has created in making the breadth of its streaming inventory available for purchase programmatically. That includes, more recently, its interactive ad formats.
“Once we finally were able to enable them, within six weeks the spend was eight times the spend than the year before,” Power said.
WNBA's New York Liberty is having a moment. It just finished the regular season last Thursday with the best record in the league, defeating top teams like the Las Vegas Aces and the Connecticut Sun. Meanwhile, the team’s mascot Ellie the Elephant has become a celebrity in her own right, known for her dance moves and fashion.
But it hasn’t always been that way. Five years ago, the team was struggling, playing in Westchester County Center, a smaller court far away from home. But then things started looking up. Joe Tsai, co-founder of Alibaba and owner of NBA's the Brooklyn Nets, purchased the Liberty and paved the path for the eventual move to the team's current home at the Barclays Center. Then in 2021, Shana Stephenson started as the team’s full-time chief brand officer.
In this episode of the Digiday Podcast, Stephenson talks about what it was like building the team’s brand, how Liberty is tapping into the women’s sports hype and, of course, Ellie the Elephant’s viral videos.
1In the age of disrupted digital audiences, media companies are incentivized to constantly be counting clicks, pageviews and engagement — all while optimizing for how those metrics can be best monetized.
But Long Lead, a long-form journalism production company, wants to redefine the journalism business model to bring art back into the craft of journalism. Launched in 2020 by founding editor and longtime journalist John Patrick Pullen and hedge fund manager Bill Perkins, Long Lead’s mission is to give journalists the ability to tell their story in the most effective way possible — not the most efficient way possible.
So rather than publishing stories as quickly as possible and monetizing them with advertising or paywalls, a freelance journalist can come to Long Lead with a pitch and work with the team to determine its best format: be it a documentary, a podcast, a book or a performance piece. Long Lead then provides the journalist with the technical resources, staffing, time and — most importantly — funding to create the project.
Granted, that’s not a cheap feat. And while Long Lead has the luxury of being funded without having to fulfill a revenue goal just yet, Pullen explained that the expense of operating a business like this won’t detract from the journalists themselves. In fact, the journalists are all able to keep their own IP from the projects they create with Long Lead once it’s finished.
On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Pullen shares why Long Lead is focused on supporting the art of journalism and how his team determines the best format for different stories that come across his desk.
Marketers’ attention to the industry’s latest shiny object, generative AI, has yet to shift out of focus. Some agencies have moved to ink enterprise-level deals with major AI players, like OpenAI, Runway and soon, Perplexity. As these AI-powered tools continue to flood the marketplace, agencies and brands alike say they’re creating auditing policies to ensure data security, stability and fairness. It’s a similar story at Babylist, a baby registry company, according to Lee Anne Grant, chief growth officer of Babylist.
“Even before AI, when we tried to build things in-house, our founder and CEO would always say, ‘I always want to see the recommendations of the machine against a human and just gut check it’,” Grant said.
On this episode of the Digiday Podcast, Grant talks about how babylist is navigating the AI hype cycle and what the roadmap ahead looks like. Also on this episode, Digiday catches up with Grant about Babylist’s retail media network efforts and its value proposition to advertisers.
The retail media network space is shaping up to be a competitive one. With countless retailers vying for ad dollars, which retailer gets the bulk of said dollars depends on size and scale. With an expansive brick-and-mortar footprint in the U.S., size and scale are what Sam’s Club Member Access Platform (MAP), the company’s retail access and ad platform, is banking on to draw in advertisers.
In this episode of the Digiday Podcast, Ryan Burns, head of strategy at Sam's Club Member Access Platform, talks about Sam’s Club’s pitch to advertisers, standing out in a crowded retail media landscape and plans to continue growth.
Even billionaire-backed media companies are not immune to the challenges facing the media and digital advertising industries.Last week, 22 staffers were laid off from Time — which is owned by Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff and his wife and philanthropist Lynne Benioff — as part of a larger reduction of operational costs amid ad revenue declines. Cuts were made to the editorial, sales, marketing, technology and TIME Studios teams, according to a memo from CEO Jessica Sibley sent to Time staffers last week that was shared with Digiday. And more cost cutting measures are coming down the pike, including limiting contractors and downsizing its New York headquarters.At the center of these changes is focusing the company’s editorial and business strategy on its “most commercially successful work” and the “biggest opportunities for growth” at Time, which is its coverage of leadership – particularly in the categories of AI, climate and health — Sibley wrote. That, in part, has played a big role in the transition to the sales team’s B2B revenue strategy.On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast (which was recorded on July 22, prior to the layoff announcement), Sibley discusses why she views Time’s B2B revenue strategy as the best path forward for growth, as well as other areas of revenue opportunity, including partnerships with AI technology companies like OpenAI and Perplexity.
Big changes came for the media industry in 2024.
Between generative AI technology companies spending millions of dollars to license their content and Google flip-flopping on third-party cookie deprecation plans, publishers have had a lot to sort through.
When asked which has been the bigger concern to him, Future plc’s CEO Jon Steinberg said, “The cookie thing keeps me up at night more than the AI thing. The AI thing used to keep me up more at night, but [now] … I have more optimism … The cookie thing — every cookie conversation begins and ends with, ‘Well, there's so much uncertainty.’”
On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Steinberg discusses both these topics, as well as why Future hasn’t inked a content licensing deal with an AI tech company … yet.
With so many changes happening across the digital marketing landscape, sometimes the best strategy is to have no strategy at all — at least when it comes to social media, according Melissa Ben-Ishay, co-founder and CEO of dessert company Baked By Melissa.
Instead, Ben-Ishay props her phone up on her kitchen counter at least once a week, where she walks her TikTok followers through everything from how to make crispy rice to gnocchi, and, of course, a catalog of desserts.
Ben-Ishay is one of many founders-turned-influencers who are navigating the booming influencer marketing space and putting a face to their brands to more authentically connect with followers. The founder-influencer pipeline is standard at this point, and perhaps the trend is most commonplace in the small- to medium-sized business and direct-to-consumer brand spaces, where founders are cranking out content to keep up with the likes of influencers who are launching their own brands.
In this episode of the Digiday Podcast, Ben-Ishay talks about being a founder-influencer, and shares her thoughts on the ever-looming TikTok ban and why Baked by Melissa’s social strategy is no strategy at all.
In the midst of a booming creator economy, where U.S. marketers are expected to shell out $7.14 billion on influencer marketing by the end of this year, according to Goldman Sachs Research, livestreaming platform Twitch is making a play for creator and advertiser attention, competing against other big tech platforms.
Last year, the company was reported to have lost its way with the streaming community, which could be seen as its most valuable asset. At the same time, culture is changing, becoming more fragmented in a way where fewer monocultural moments exist. All said, it’s harder than ever to keep people’s attention, said Rachel Delphin, CMO at Twitch.
“Attention feels so divided and it also feels really short as a person, but also as a professional,” she said on the most recent episode of the Digiday Podcast. “Creating content and programs that really capture attention to the point where people want to engage with it, share it, comment on it, that’s a really high bar.”
On this week’s Digiday Podcast, Delphin talks about Twitch’s plans to stay in the cultural zeitgeist all while keeping attention from creators and advertisers in a fragmented digital marketplace.
Google may have changed course on its approach to third-party cookie deprecation on Chrome, but that doesn’t mean brand marketers should take their foot off the pedal when it comes to testing cookie-less targeting solutions.
At least that’s what Rachel Cascisa, vp of platform adoption at Publicis’ marketing tech company, Epsilon, believes. As it is, recent studies from Adobe and Epsilon have found that marketers are “considerably less ready” for third-party cookies to disappear from the advertising ecosystem in 2024 than they were in 2022. And while Chrome may not experience total deprecation after all, by and large industry executives are estimating a steep drop off, upwards of 70% to 80%.
“I think that you can liken it to procrastinating to study for an exam,” said Cascisa. But instead of waiting to study, she said Google’s announcement “gives opportunities for [marketers] to focus on things that are third-party cookie deprecation adjacent. Things like first-party data strategy. That is just a good strategy for marketing, regardless of whether cookies will be deprecated or not.”
On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Cascisa discusses the different strategies that brand marketers should be putting to the test now, prior to Google firming up its proposed cookie deprecation plan, including clean rooms, data collaboration and ID bridging. She also discusses why or why not these solutions are working for marketers right now, and where cookie-less targeting is still lacking.
GoDaddy has been known for its irreverent and racy spots with models — perhaps, most notably, its Super Bowl ads featuring former professional race car driver and model, Danica Patrick, back in 2010. It could be fair to say the web hosting and domain registration company knew how to make waves in the sports marketing space.
But the company has sat out the Big Game for the last few years. It’s also moved away from its cheeky, sports-related spots to focus on small businesses and entrepreneurs, said GoDaddy CMO Fara Howard.
“I could answer this question in a lot of different ways,” Howard said on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast when asked about the shift in marketing strategy, “but I believe that we need to tell that story by showcasing actual customers using our products and having success.”
On this episode of the Digiday Podcast, Howard talks about the push to boost product awareness, focusing on customers instead of celebrities, how it’s incorporating AI into its products, and the roadmap ahead.
Tubi is having a good run. As of May, the free, ad-supported streaming service was taking 1.8% of monthly television viewing across streaming platforms, tying with Disney+ and beating Max, Paramount+ and Peacock, according to Nielsen. It could be considered a win in the streaming wars. Tubi, though, doesn’t consider itself to be part of said wars, according to Tubi CMO Nicole Parlapiano.
“I feel like we’re watching the war,” she said. “The relationship in entertainment [between streaming platforms], which took me a lot to understand was, we're not all at war because we all need each other in a way.”
On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Parlapiano shares her perspective on the so-called streaming wars, pitching Tubi’s multicultural viewers and the streaming platform’s growth track.
It’s been a busy summer for Bon Appétit and Epicurious’ editor-in-chief Jamila Robinson, who stepped into the top editor role last September.
Amid changing algorithms and impacts to search traffic, Robinson is prioritizing relationship building between audiences and Condé Nast’s cooking brands by expanding the coverage of food to include categories like sports and relationships, challenging the idea of “traditional” cooking and building new subscriber products.
Bon Appétit took a page from its sibling brand Allure to create a subscription business similar to Allure’s Beauty Box, but with a cooking twist. This month, the Cook with Bon Appétit monthly subscription box launched, priced at $34 per month, $96 per quarter or $336 per year, providing subscribers with five editorially selected ingredients, five recipes using each ingredient, video instructions and a digital subscription to Bon Appétit and Epicurious.
On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Robinson talks about the new Sports issue of Bon Appétit, hitting newsstands today, as well as widening the aperture of cooking culture and lifestyle that the magazine covers to appeal to a modern audience.
As the creator economy grows, the very definition of what makes a creator or influencer changes. It has expanded to be inclusive of everything from college athletes under the name, image and likeness (NIL) policy change in 2021 to the latest crop of virtual influencers, springing up alongside generative AI advancements.
For Nicole Dye Anderson, svp, head of media relations and influencer strategy at Wells Fargo, influencers can extend to anything from celebrities to media personalities.
“[Traditional influencers] might have a strong social following and that's extremely important, to have that strong social following as well,” she said. “But then again, as the newsrooms are shrinking, [shoppers] are looking to these [media influencers] as the experts.”
In this week’s episode, Anderson shares more about Wells Fargo’s influencer marketing strategy, how the financial institution mitigates backlash and defines authenticity.
Making the digital advertising ecosystem more sustainable has been a burgeoning topic for the past couple of years, but the biggest excuse that’s been holding back companies from making moves to actually reduce carbon emissions is the lack of standards around measuring emissions in the first place.
But the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) and Ad Net Zero aimed to remedy those concerns with its Global Media Sustainability Framework, launched ahead of the Cannes Lions Festival earlier this month.“
We’ve reached a bit of an inflection point to sort of say, ‘Let’s do the right thing by the industry, and make sure that there is a voluntary, flexible framework that basically can enhance transparency, drive consistency and introduce rigor in a way that drives confidence in the work,’” said Rob Rakowitz, co-founder and initiative lead at GARM.
On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Rakowitz shared how the framework and standards came together and how their existence should influence the way stakeholders implement carbon cutting initiatives and measure carbon emissions in the advertising ecosystem going forward.
Instacart is on a mission to make every surface shoppable, pitching that to advertisers at this year’s Cannes Lions festival. Notably, there’s been an increased presence of retail and commerce media networks on the ground with brands like Chase and United having a presence here at Cannes on the heels of launching their own networks.
“This last year has been about moving off-platform. So now, we’re making our data available on an aggregated, anonymized basis to other media platforms,” said Instacart CMO Laura Jones.
As things begin to close down today, Jones joins this episode of the Digiday Podcast at Cannes to talk about Instacart’s beefed-up retail media offering, presence at Cannes, and more.
We’ve made it to the halfway point of Cannes Lions, where Lee Brown, global head of ads business and platform at Spotify joins this episode of the Digiday at Cannes Podcast.
The audio streaming platform has spread its wings a bit, taking a swing at visual content, like music videos and lyrics to follow along with music content. In expanding its content offerings, it has also expanded its opportunity to take in more ad dollars. Keeping pace with the AI boom, Spotify recently announced the launch of its first AI ad format, where marketers can leverage AI for voice ads.
For the last 10 years, Spotify Beach has been a Cannes Lions staple, most notably for its concerts on the beach, featuring big-name performers like Dua Lipa or Foo Fighters. For this episode of the Digiday at Cannes Podcast, Brown talks about Spotify’s Cannes anniversary, its play for more ad dollars and becoming a main line item in advertisers’ budgets.
We’re on day three of Cannes, joined by Megan Ramm, global director and head of CPG partnerships at Uber, for this episode of the Digiday at Cannes podcast.
This is Uber Ads second year in business and simultaneously, second year at Cannes. Just a few days ago, the company announced that it was expanding its programmatic ad business to include partnerships with demand-side platforms like The Trade Desk, Yahoo's DSP and Google’s Display & Video 360. As of late, programmatic has had a rough go with shrinking ad budgets, uproar around made-for-advertising sites and more.
As Uber Ads continues to grow its business, Ramm stopped by the Digiday Podcast at Cannes to talk about Uber's approach to challenges in programmatic, the rise of artificial intelligence and the company’s trajectory.
Recorded in Spotify’s studio on the beach at Cannes Lions, tune into the conversation with Ramm.
On day one of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the Digiday Podcast is joined by Dow Jones CMO Sherry Weiss live from the Wall Street Journal’s new location — WSJ has relocated from on the pier to its new location next to the famous Carlton Hotel.
Thus far, it's been the usual wheeling and dealing of Cannes Lions with dinner parties and happy hours. Much of the conversation at Cannes has been dominated by the topic of artificial intelligence, a focal point for Weiss. On the ground here at Cannes, Weiss said she's looking to chat with partners about leveraging AI tools for the creative process, something that's become mainstream amongst marketers at this point. But as the AI hype cycle continues, data privacy, safety, and return on investment become bigger talking points.
"Honestly, that's going to be a lot of what I'm gonna be doing this week," Weiss said, "is talking with some of our tech partners to figure out how we can start using some of their technology."
In the second episode of the Digiday at Cannes podcast, Weiss talks about AI tools in marketing, data privacy within AI and WSJ’s new ad campaign to boost readership.
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Sad, sad joke. Steven I'll concede seemed genuine in his goals. But the fact MSM & new tech STILL can't even see & acknowledge the reprehensible journalistic criminality of the past decade from a near-religious fervor & hate (pretending both sides are equal offenders and victims of fake news ... is beyond soul-crushing. Every. Day.
"Print"??? Like....SERIOUSLY?? You. Hate. Earth?
This is my favourite media podcast. They always get the best interviewees