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Urban Outfitters last week rolled out ME@UO, its latest bet on micro-creators, joining brands like American Eagle, Express, Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Sephora that are reworking affiliate marketing into always-on, gamified creator programs.
These creator programs reward smaller creators for consistent content, signalling a shift in how brands engage and scale influencer marketing.
“It...
What if the agency holdcos have got it wrong?
Over the past month, the groups have settled on a familiar investor script when framing their financial fortunes: AI as margin defense, integration as operating leverage, scale as a moat and automation as productivity.
It’s a tidy frame — a way to signal that generative tools won’t hollow out the model and EBITA can be protected.Continue reading...
Developing AI content licensing marketplaces are introducing new pay structures for how publishers could be compensated for the content they allow AI systems to access.
Publishers and tech companies are determining how to scale compensation to match the value of the content publishers are allowing AI systems to access. It’s another sign of the evolution from flat-fee AI content licensing deals...
Now that the three major agency holding companies have issued their 2025 earnings results and set their strategies in place for 2026 and beyond, it’s fair to ask a few questions. Which will end 2026 in the best shape? And which one is truly built to last, in a media world dominated by platforms and inexorably altered by generative AI?
Clearly the holding company that adapted its model the...
Agencies have a compute problem. As AI takes over more of their day-to-day work, from writing copy to generating performance reports, it’s introducing a new and deeply unpredictable cost center. Every prompt, every output, every round of agentic back-and-forth costs tokens, and those tokens are variable in ways that neither agencies nor their clients know how to forecast yet.
The question...
Edward Jones is beginning to test agentic AI to make its marketing more efficient. The financial institution has recently entered into a handful of multi-year pilots with multiple AI companies, but is hesitant to commit long-term before seeing results. It’s a quiet, measured approach that speaks to a larger industry trend: agentic AI is still in its probationary period.
Within the last few...
This story was first published by Digiday sibling Modern Retail.
Shoe brands, which are out billions of dollars from U.S.-imposed duties, are trying to find their footing after recent tariffs whiplash.
On Friday, the Supreme Court dealt a major blow to President Donald Trump’s trade agenda, ruling that his sweeping tariffs last year — issued under the International Emergency Economic Powers...
Content marketplaces promise publishers potential wins: more distribution, increased visibility, reduced unlicensed AI scraping and new revenue opportunities. But without meaningful demand on the buy side, the model risks becoming another supply-heavy experiment that doesn’t shift the revenue needle for publishers.
A variety of content marketplaces are emerging. From TollBit’s licensing...
The idea of agencies selling subscriptions instead of billable hours has kicked up significant debate over the past week. It started when S4 Capital’s Monks told me it expects roughly a quarter of its revenue to come from subscriptions by year end. Cue the hot takes that are nearly unanimous in one verdict: subscriptions aren’t the answer to the pricing problem facing agencies in a world of...
For decades, the agency business has run on a simple, if imperfect logic: clients pay for time and the people who fill it. Hours logged, heads counted, invoices sent. Nobody particularly loved it but it was predictable enough that nobody moved to change it.
That may finally be shifting. At the presentation for its new strategy in London on Thursday (Feb. 26), WPP made the most explicitly...