Feed Items
Here and gone before you know it, here’s what you might have missed from Cannes Lions 2025 across our coverage areas. A fun thing: compare the themes to how they were discussed last year.
Media
DoubleVerify casts itself as news ally in Cannes — as scrutiny mounts.
Marketing
Marketers demanded actual, tangible case studies of AI in efficient meetings.Continue reading this article on...
Spotify’s video podcast partner program is gaining traction with independent podcast creators drawn to its direct payouts — but major podcast networks remain hesitant, citing the lack of dynamic ad support for subscriber-only content.
Spotify launched its Partner Program in January, giving creators their first opportunity to share video content, and receive a cut of its ad and premium...
Media Buying Briefing: What Dentsu’s synthetic audiences deal reveals about future of media planning
Much of the chatter at Cannes Lions last week (heard and overheard by my colleagues) fixated on AI’s ability to generate content faster or reduce production costs.
That’s all well and good, but timesheet and dollar savings don’t tell the whole story when it comes to the practical applications of AI already taking hold within the ad industry, especially within media planning and buying. This is...
Digital ad spend is plateauing, with growth rates slowing considerably between now and 2028, especially when compared to the boom times such as the immediate post-pandemic era.
EMarketer research further predicted the days of double-digit growth rates will soon be over with year-on-year growth to be just 8.7% in 2028 — compared that to the market conditions of 10 years earlier when growth was...
When podcast networks started using AI to translate shows into other languages last year, media buyers were skeptical. Voices ranged from awkwardly robotic to wildly inaccurate.
The tech has come a long way since then — which is why iHeartMedia chose to take its time. More than a year after iHeartMedia execs told Digiday they planned to debut a handful of translated podcasts to grow their...
AI was the buzzword of the week at Cannes Lions but platforms behind it were largely out of the public eye. CMOs suspect that won’t be the case for long.
Perplexity, ChatGPT and others may be holding off on the full-blown ad pitch but the economics say that will shift. GPUs, cloud computing, data pipelines, top-tier engineers — it’s a high-burn business. At some point, the math forces the...
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After a week defined by contradictions — lavish $10 million beachfront activations against a backdrop of economy anxiety, AI buzz alongside quiet budget cuts — the industry seemed to settle on an unexpected but familiar note: optimism.
That’s the Cannes trick after all. It’s a place where tensions coexists with...
Creators are increasingly turning to agentic AI to streamline communication with fans — saving time and money — but raising new questions for brands and influencer marketers.
The term “agentic AI” refers to artificial intelligence tools that can autonomously pursue goals, take actions and make decisions without requiring constant human input. Unlike prompt-based AI tools like ChatGPT, which...
As more ad dollars become digital dollars, brands are changing how they use more traditional marketing methods.
Marketers at Coca-Cola’s Sprite have been relying on digital out-of-home (DOOH) to cut through the summer heat, for example.
Alongside paid social activations on Meta, as well as online video and digital display units, the brand is running digital out-of-home (DOOH) work triggered...
What started as a weekend experiment is now a fully-fledged AI voice assistant on Hearst’s recipe site Delish, helping home cooks follow recipes hands-free.
Hearst’s senior director of AI initiatives, Alexandria Redmon wanted a personal chef assistant — something she could talk to while cooking, without smearing her phone with batter. Using OpenAI’s GPT large language model (Hearst has a...