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This was the year AI went from being a future concern for publishers to being part of their daily reality. In 2025, generative AI was weaved into traffic analyses, licensing negotiations and product development.
Clicks from search waned. AI answers increasingly replaced blue links that drive people to publishers’ sites. Some companies struck AI content licensing deals, while others blocked AI...
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It’s been another year of ups and downs in the marketing and media businesses — and Digiday+ Research tracked them throughout the year, surveying publisher, agency, brand and retailer professionals at regular intervals throughout 2025.This is a member-exclusive article from Digiday....
This story originally published on sister site, Glossy.
When Pandora rolled out its first AI-powered service agent earlier this year, the goal wasn’t to showcase cutting-edge technology. It was to survive the peak holiday shopping season without sacrificing the customer experience or margins.
The agent, dubbed Clara, launched as a chatbot on the brand’s website in mid-February and now...
As programmatic means of investing in channels spreads further across the media landscape, there remain a few gaps where it’s neither efficient nor even doable. One of those less developed areas is product placement and sponsorship opportunities, which are either unwieldy or downright un-buyable.
But Omar Tawakol, CEO of Rembrand, has his eye on a bigger prize — trying to improve advertising...
Marketers hope that using AI technology will cut down on time spent producing creative assets, allowing them to cut costs — or scale up their operations. In the campaign to cut weeks into hours, however, hidden costs remain.
Top talent is scarce; human oversight and meddling eats into newly gained margins; and realizing meaningful economies of scale can mean investing considerable cash and...
This story was first published by Digiday sibling ModernRetail
Some may call this Target’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year. Others, sitting in Minneapolis, hope this year was when the retailer started to get back on track.
Much of the front half of the year for Target was defined by the company’s decision in January to pull back on some diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives...
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2025 was the year of loose ends, according to Digiday executive editor of news Seb Joseph. He and managing editor Sara Jerde joined Digiday Podcast hosts Kimeko McCoy and Tim Peterson to gather together those loose ends and assess which may be tied up in 2026.
Among those loose ends are Netflix’s planned acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery’s...
AI momentum papered over Google’s reset year
From an ad tech perspective, 2025 will be remembered as the year Google quietly recalibrated — retreating from some of its longest-running bets while accelerating decisively in others.
The most visible reversal came with the effective end of the Privacy Sandbox experiment and Google’s decision to walk back plans to fully deprecate third-party...
The tariff policies imposed by U.S. President Trump at the beginning of his second term in office turned 2025 on its head for marketers.
Joshua Scherz was among them. Scherz is the founder of Bela, a family-owned seafood brand based in Maine that imports canned sardines from Portugal. Hoping to take advantage of rising demand for premium canned seafood among U.S. consumers, Bela rebranded and...
Agentic AI has grandiose ambitions, promising marketers ideation and execution all in the same go with little oversight. The reality, however, is that humans still have the wheel.
For the better part of 2025, agentic AI has been the industry’s buzzword. It’s defined as “a situation where multiple AI agents work together to complete complex tasks, with minimal oversight or intervention from a...