The Digiday Podcast

Puck’s famed journalist-centric publishing model is changing. Sort of. The news outlet debuted in 2021 with its journalists as the company’s audience-facing focal point, not the publication. People would subscribe less so to Puck than to Matthew Belloni’s or Julia Ioffe’s newsletters via Puck. And Puck’s journalists were, in part, compensated directly for the subscribers they attracted. Lately though, Puck’s newsletters have come to resemble publications in their own right. “You almost have sub-brands under Puck that are franchises anchored by core talent versus in probably that first two years, it was a newsletter anchored by core talent,” said Puck CEO Sarah Personette on the latest Digiday Podcast episode. Belloni’s entertainment-oriented “What I’m Hearing” newsletter, for example, has enlisted contributors like legal expert Eriq Gardner and, most recently, former The Hollywood Reporter editor Kim Masters. Similarly, Lauren Sherman’s fashion-centric “Line Sheet” regularly features entries from retail writer Sarah Shapiro and beauty journalist Rachel Strugatz. This development has coincided with Puck’s paid subscriber base growing by 30% in the past year, with Personette expecting the company to become profitable this year. “Putting journalists at the center of our model still exists, but what we are trying to do, as our subscriber base has experienced incredible growth over the last few years, we want to make sure that we’re rounding out the stories and we’re rounding out the coverage by bringing other journalists in,” said Personette. The expanding nature of Puck’s newsletters raises the question of to what extent does Puck’s compensation model also have to change. Puck gained a lot of initial attention for paying bonuses to its journalists for the new subscribers their articles attract as well as for the subscribers they retain. But how’s that work if an article by Masters attracts a subscriber via Belloni’s newsletter? “So [Belloni] is a franchise manager, and there are different benefits to being a franchise manager. And he also is driving a ton of his own subs. And then we also want to make sure that the individuals that are contributing to that franchise also get bonus-ed,” Personette said.

In January, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission finalized an updated version of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. And for as much attention as the update may have received, it probably merits more. “It is a big deal. And I think because there’s been so much other activity in the news, people haven’t really paid attention to it,” Debbie Reynolds, a privacy expert and founder, CEO and chief data privacy officer at Debbie Reynolds Consulting, said on the latest Digiday Podcast episode. The primary reason the COPPA update warrants attention is that it requires companies to receive verifiable parental consent before they can target ads to children. Clear cut as that requirement may appear to be, complying with it may be more complicated. “Part of the confusion around privacy and the challenge companies will have with the update of COPPA is trying to figure out how to do things like how do you get verifiable quote-unquote parental consent beyond just having someone click a button to say, ’Hey, yeah, my parents said, “Yes,“’” said Reynolds. Case in point: Will ad-supported streaming services start asking for parents to share copies of their driver’s licenses before their families can sit down to watch a show? And will parents be willing to do that? “Anything that you give to these companies, they’re collecting, they’re storing. And then that brings up, do I trust this company enough to give them my ID, especially seeing the rash of data breaches,” Reynolds said. “It’s just going to be challenging going forward to see how companies really try to handle this issue.”

The house built around diversity, equity and inclusion is coming apart brick by brick. Since last summer, brands, retailers, holding companies and, most recently the federal government, have been dismantling (or retooling) DEI initiatives, many of which were built up after the murder of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter Movement of 2020. The “diversity” portion of diversity, equity and inclusion has become divisive, impacting multicultural marketing agencies, Black-owned brands and diverse publications. And they're starting to feel the ripple effects, according to Kirk McDonald, CEO of Sundial Media Group, holding company for brands like Essence magazine, Afropunk festival and Refinery29. Although, he said, it’s too early to tell the full impact DEI’s retooling (or rebrand) will have on the industry in terms of media spend, marketing budgets or consumer habits. McDonald recently sat down with the Digiday Podcast to talk about how Sundial’s diverse publications, geared toward women and other historically marginalized communities, are navigating the pushback.

Google’s long kiss goodnight with third-party cookies seems never-ending at this point, as the tech giant's cookie phase-out plans still remain unclear. Seemingly, Google's plan to ask Chrome users to opt in to cookie-based tracking is reflective of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) move a few years back. Sure, marketers have long since seen the writing on the wall with this. But, as the future of third-party cookies remains rather ambiguous, marketing and brand executives, including Rankin Carroll, global chief brand officer at Mars Snacking, have started eyeing partnerships and leveraging artificial intelligence to fill in the gaps, with an eye toward a cookie-less future. “We had what we had, and it was the norm for the standard for the industry,” Carroll said on a recent episode of the Digiday Podcast. “As we move beyond that, we're focused on innovating.” In talking with Digiday, Carroll laid out Mars’ plans to scale its first-party data across brands like M&Ms and Snickers and the role partnerships play in scaling said plans. Carroll also talked about Mars' Super Bowl stunt and rehashed the company's plans to acquire the Kellanova family of snack brands.

Last year Architectural Digest switched up its e-commerce strategy. Having added affiliate links to its “Open Door” YouTube series showcasing celebrities’ decked-out abodes in 2021, the Condé Nast-owned publication started redirecting viewers from the Google-owned video platform to its own site to shop the decor. “It’s a much, much deeper, richer experience for the user to go to our site. It’s more fully shopped-out there, and it’s more visual. We can put photos of all the items,” sad Amy Astley, global editorial director at Architectural Digest, on the latest Digiday Podcast episode. The strategy shift has coincided with the publication doubling its commerce revenue in the past two years. And it’s not like the previous approach of embedding affiliate links on-platform in the YouTube videos’ descriptions wasn’t working. But having a place on AD’s own site for people to shop the products featured in the “Open Door” videos seems to be working even more. “We saw a four-times increase in the revenue from ‘Open Door’ from shopping it out on the site,” said Astley, noting that AD highlights the link to the site in a pinned comment atop the videos’ comments feed on YouTube. Now AD is prepping another major update to its commerce strategy. In March, the publication plans to relaunch the AD Shopping commerce property that it launched in January 2024 and is home to the “Open Door” product showcases as well as shopping selections hand-picked by AD’s own team, including Astley. “The main overhaul that we look for this year is a lot more leaning into our staff picks, leaning more into the editors and to the designers, and integrating all the shopping content more fully across everything that we do,” said Astley. (00:00) - Intro (15:32) - Interview with Amy Astley

Remember when 2025 was supposed to be the first official year of the post-cookie era? Well, clearly that hasn’t happened and seems unlikely to happen anytime soon. And it certainly won’t happen until sometime after Google introduces its user choice mechanism in Chrome for people to allow or block third-party cookies. “If there’s wild amounts of opt-in, then yeah, the third-party cookie in the Chrome ecosystem is probably alive and well. If there’s [a] wild amount of opt-out, if there’s no critical mass around the third-party cookie, then it is effectively dead, even if it lives on in some small percentage. We just — we don’t know how that’s going to shake out,” said Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, in the latest Digiday Podcast episode, which was recorded on the eve of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Springs, Calif., which concludes on Jan. 28. If Katsur had his way, though, the third-party cookie wouldn’t be on the chopping block in the first place. Moreover, other technologies like the IP address would continue to be available to be used for identifying audiences and tracking them across devices. At least until more inherently privacy-friendly identity options gain adoption. But it may be a while before the digital advertising industry’s post-cookie identity picture really comes into focus. “It will be the year of identity solutions, the year of ID-less [solutions] for, I think, the next decade. I think this is a 10-year trajectory we’re on. And I think it’s a combination of regulatory forces, machinations of Big Tech is what I think is going to drive this,” Katsur said. Interview begins at 13:52.

Over the last year, marketers have been shelling out dollars to show up in sports, the supposed last bastion of monocultural moments and opportunity to get ads in front of a massive audience. There's been an uptick of interest in unconventional sports like pickleball, and women’s sports. Streaming platforms like Netflix bet big on live sports in hopes to bring in more money from advertisers. Finally, since the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) approved its name, image and likeness (NIL) policy back in 2021, the lines between influencers and athletes is becoming more blurred. That said, it’s getting more difficult for brands to stand out from one another as more advertisers flock to the space. That’s true even for a brand as big as Verizon, according to Nick Kelly, Verizon’s vp of partnerships. “We have to find something that we can own,” Kelly told Digiday. In this episode of the podcast, Kelly sits down with co-host Kimeko McCoy, senior marketing reporter at Digiday, to talk about its revamped sports marketing strategy, venturing into NIL deals and this year’s Super Bowl plans. Interview begins at 19:16.

Omnicom Group’s pending acquisition of Interpublic Group seems especially timely in the hindsight of last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. A major talking point among the brand and agency executives in attendance was the onset of the so-called agentic era of artificial intelligence, in which AI tools handle multi-step tasks for people like booking a full travel itinerary — or firing off a client brief. In this era, data will be at even more of a premium than it is today “If you think about the IPG acquisition, we will have a broader platform to to do things. We will have the broadest dataset on the buy side anywhere in the world, and more expertise, more clients,” Jonathan Nelson, CEO of the agency holding company’s digital arm Omnicom Digital, said on the latest Digiday Podcast, which was recorded in person at CES. The combined company will also have Omni AI, a product that Omnicom is developing to combine various foundational large language models. “We’re putting that on every employee’s desktop in Omnicom right now,” Nelson said. Which gets at another aspect of how AI will affect agencies’ business. As agencies effectively outsource tasks to AI tools, the traditional agency compensation model — in which agencies are paid in accordance with the time it takes to complete client projects — will be under pressure. This is again where Omnicom is counting on the combination with IPG and the corresponding dataset — as well as its previous acquisition of commerce platform Flywheel — to be able to adopt a model in which its client fees are contingent on the results of its work rather than the time it takes to complete that work. “Here we are sitting on this massive dataset. It’s coming together across audience, activation, outcomes. It has that purpose, which is driving towards outcomes remuneration,” said Nelson.

Fast food and quick service restaurant brands had a rough go over the past few years as shoppers have tried to save a few bucks amidst rising grocery prices and inflation. Seemingly, parts of the brand playbook are seeing a rewrite with things like $5 deals to make consumers feel they’re getting more bang for their buck. It’s a tale all too familiar to Domino’s, the more than 60-year-old pizza brand that has marketed its way through brand lulls to try and win back customers who have pulled back on dining out. There were the “30 minutes or less” campaigns of the 90s, Pizza Turnaround in 2010 (when the pizza chain acknowledged the recipe needed work) Paving for Pizza in 2018, where Domino's paved roads to ensure pizzas arrived to customers in good condition, and today’s Emergency Pizza, a pizza giveaway for so-called emergencies like burned dinner. In this episode of the Digiday Podcast, Kate Trumbull, Domino’s evp and CMO joins co-host, and senior marketing reporter, Kimeko McCoy, to talk about Domino’s brand playbook.

2025 is expected to be a hell of a year, if you ask the Digiday staff. After the whirlwind that was 2024, the new year seems to promise a cocktail of chaos and topics the industry can’t escape. Or as Digiday managing editor Sara Jerde puts it, “2025 will be the year of the Twinkies, the cockroaches, TikTok potential ban, and third-party cookies.” Last year, several rocks were thrown in the water, ripple effects that’ll shake out in 2025 with everything from mergers and acquisitions, a la Omnicom’s proposed acquisition of IPG or BuzzFeed’s sale of First We Feast, to the proliferation of the social media landscape and the TikTok ban. In this final episode of the year of the Digiday Podcast, host Tim Peterson, executive editor of video and audio at Digiday, is joined by Jerde and Seb Joseph, Digiday’s executive editor of news, to discuss what marketers, advertisers and the media need to know to ring in the new year.

Hold on tight. The rollercoaster that was 2024 is finally coming to an end. Marketers may find themselves dizzy from the many ups and downs the industry experienced this year. 2024 saw more ads on streaming platforms, but also an ad price correction that favored ad buyers’ wallets. There was also the generative AI boom (or bauble, depending on who you ask). Of course, there was Google’s long kiss goodnight with third-party cookies, in which the tech giant decided to keep cookies after all but let users decide if they want to opt in or not. And who could forget the 2024 presidential election, the gift that kept on giving to news publishers. To help the industry make sense of this past year, this episode of the Digiday Podcast is a vignette-style look back at 2024. Hosts Tim Peterson, executive editor of video and audio at Digiday, and Kimeko McCoy, senior marketing reporter, revisit the biggest moments (and podcast episodes) of 2024. Here are the full episode interviews that they mention in the podcast: Third-party cookies are hanging on, but Epsilon says brand marketers should still focus on first-party data  Inside Dow Jones’s AI governance strategy, with Ingrid Verschuren  Duolingo’s head of global social strategy, Katherine Chan, talks about making unhinged content work and learning from mistakes  From scratch to slam dunk: New York Liberty’s Shana Stephenson on building basketball team’s brand and keeping fans in the game  A postmortem on this year’s TV and streaming upfront ad market with UM Worldwide’s Marcy Greenberger  How the Martin family went from part-time vloggers to a family of social media mavens  Digiday editors on Trump administration picks and the impact on the ad industry

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. In this episode of the Digiday Podcast, Patrick O'Keefe, e.l.f. Beauty's chief integrated marketing officer talks about building out e.l.f. made, branded entertainment and how success will be measured with the new entertainment arm.

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. As senior director of acquisition and retention, it is literally Balzani’s job to make sure the travel booking platform does not run out of potential customers. And so he plans to rejigger the company’s programmatic strategy in 2025. As the pandemic-era travel restrictions lifted, Tripadvisor found itself in the enviable position of fishing in a barrel. People were desperate to travel again, so all the brand had to do was prod people to book through its platform. “The focus was really on capturing all the pent-up demand that was there,” said Balzani. Tripadvisor still has one eye on capturing that lower-funnel demand, but it is also looking to get in front of potential customers much earlier in their travel-planning processes. To that end, this year the brand tested extending its programmatic buying to mid- and upper-funnel media channels, such as connected TV and podcasts. And heading into next year, it is weighing whether to adopt a media mix model to further inform its full-funnel approach. “What we want to do is to use Q1 and Q2 to figure out what works and what doesn’t and make sure we have everything in place. And then based on the results, then we figure out which direction we want to go,” said Balzani.

Yahoo News, like many news outlets, had expected this year’s U.S. presidential election to drag on a bit longer than it did. “You have people planning to stay in the office for several days after the fact,” said Kat Downs Mulder, gm and svp at Yahoo News, on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast. Fortunately, news outlets are accustomed to adapting. And with Donald Trump set to retake the Oval Office, they are having to understand how they may need to adapt to either a similar Trump Bump to the traffic increases news sites saw during his first term or a potential drop off in news interest. “It’s hard to predict what’s going to happen in the future and whether increases will sustain and in what ways they are going to sustain. There’s readers who are leaning in; they want to know everything that’s going on. And then there’s readers who are leaning out, and they’re at that news avoidance,” said Downs Mulder, who had spent 14 years at The Washington Post before joining Yahoo News in 2022. To be clear, Yahoo News had seen audience interest in the news increase leading up to and after the election. But it had also seen some audience members indicate a bit of election burnout. “I think there’s probably more of that than there was in the 2016 cycle. And so our goal at Yahoo is just to try to figure out what level the person is at and customize the experience to that, meet them where they are and give them an experience that fits whatever level of interest they have,” said Downs Mulder.

In the age of social media, algorithms and viral content, social media users are increasingly looking for ways to stretch the concept of “15 minutes of fame” into full time careers as content creators, influencers and media personalities. Recently, thanks to TikTok, that arc has played out with viral trends like Jools Lebron, the creator behind the “very demure, very mindful” trend, or Haliey Welch’s “Hawk Tuah” viral moment. Both Lebron and Welch join a long list of names who are working to take bursts of notoriety into sustainable careers. Notably, Lauren Speed-Hamilton and Cameron Hamilton have had a five-year go at this since first appearing on the hit Netflix show “Love Is Blind” back in 2020. Since then, the couple has sketched out somewhat of a playbook for capitalizing on virality and turning it into a viable career path. Last month, the couple launched The Love Seat podcast with sponsorship opportunities for brands. “I remember Lauren saying that we don't know how big the buzz of this show is going to be, how long it's going to sustain itself. That was something we both understood early on,” said Cameron Hamilton, on a recent episode of the Digiday Podcast. “So we said, let's hit the ground running and create as much content as we physically can.”

Since the U.S. presidential election was called, the advertising industry has been parsing through the tea leaves, trying to understand exactly what a Trump presidency means for business. That picture is starting to come into clearer focus as Trump continues to announce cabinet picks and assemble the incoming administration. For example, last week, Trump picked Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic who has called for pharmaceutical ads to be banned, to potentially be named Secretary of Health and Human Services. On this week’s episode of the Digiday Podcast, executive editor, video, audio, Tim Peterson and senior marketing reporter Kimeko McCoy are joined by senior marketing editor Kristina Monllos and senior media reporter Sara Guaglione to talk about the incoming administration’s ripple effects on publishing, marketing and media.

It’s been roughly a week since Donald Trump was voted into his second presidential term and already, his return to the White House is expected to send ripple effects throughout the advertising world. Publishers are considering what a second Trump presidency looks like in regards to traffic spikes and subscription revenue, otherwise known as the Trump Bump. The brand safety playbook regarding where an advertiser shows up in media may soon need to be reconsidered as more brands look to avoid backlash in the so-called culture wars. All said, it won’t be until January’s inauguration that the full picture of Trump’s presidency comes into focus. But until then, executive editor of news Seb Joseph joins the Digiday Podcast alongside executive editor, video, audio Tim Peterson and senior marketing reporter Kimeko McCoy to discuss what a Trump presidency means for publishers on the heels of the Digiday Publishing Summit in Europe (DPSE). Also in this episode, a recap of Google’s antitrust case and what happens next with the incoming administration.

If generative AI is meant to be more tool than threat to media companies, publishers will need to come up with systems governing their use of the technology. For Dow Jones, that responsibility falls to the company’s AI steering committee. “The function of this cross-functional steering committee is really to ensure that whatever we do with gen AI fits with our core principles,” said Ingrid Verschuren, evp of data and AI and gm of Europe, Middle East and Africa at Dow Jones, in a live recording of the Digiday Podcast during Digiday Publishing Summit Europe in Barcelona, Spain, on Oct. 30. Formed roughly 18 months ago, the steering committee comprises 10 members from across Dow Jones’s organization, with representatives from the editorial and the commercial sides as well as its legal and technology teams. The committee members meet every two weeks to evaluate internal as well as external use cases for generative AI. Those use cases can range from how its own publications’ newsrooms implement the technology into their journalism to how AI companies may ingest that content into their large language models. “We want to be absolutely sure that we get fairly compensated for the content. We want also to be sure that it’s very transparent both to use [in] how our content is being used and similarly to the users [so] that they know where the content is coming from,” said Verschuren.

The retail media network space is booming to say the least. An there is a seemingly endless supply of retailers making everything an ad network, all competing for the same ad budgets. To sell its retail media network to advertisers, Walmart Connect placed its bet on Rich Lehrfeld, svp and general manager of Walmart Connect. He’s got a background in media buying, switching to selling media after a 25-year-run and giving him experience on both sides of the aisle. Lehrfeld joined Walmart as svp of brand marketing, creative and media back in 2019 before moving to Walmart Connect in October 2020, according to LinkedIn. “How do I work within a big retail company? And I feel very lucky because the leadership got it and understood if we do it the right way, we do it in a customer-centric way, it can really add value,” Lehfeld said, explaining how his background helps Walmart’s sales strategy.

“Community” is one of those words that has been co-opted by businesses and euthanized into a euphemism for “audiences,” “subscribers,” “customers,” etc. But Oprah Daily has created an actual community. Seriously, it’s called The Oprah Insider Community. The platform – which costs $55 a year to access – mixes aspects of YouTube, Facebook, Slack and Reddit. Oprah Daily posts videos of live audience recordings featuring Oprah Winfrey discussing topics like the teen mental health crisis, longevity and menopause with experts. And people can comment on the videos, pose their own questions in threads for other members to respond to and send private messages to one another. “Everything that you can do on the internet, we can embed in this platform,” said Oprah Daily editorial director Pilar Guzmán in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast. Of course, there’s plenty of things people can do on the internet that the Hearst-owned publication or its tens of thousands of paying subscribers may not want embedded in the platform. Having only officially launched The Oprah Insider Community in September after testing it over the summer, Oprah Daily is still sorting out its content moderation strategy. At the moment, the publication’s staffers are taking shifts – including working weekends – monitoring the platform. But Guzmán acknowledged that eventually the platform will need a more formal oversight operation. “Check in with me in six months, and I’ll tell you. But it’s definitely something that’s on the horizon and that we’ve been earmarking in terms of our org,” she said.