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CES has become the ad industry’s first real gut check of the year. For Amazon’s ad team, that means less pitching and more listening.
That posture can read as contrarian given the concentration of big agency leadership and CMOs. Internally, however, Amazon treats the show less as a sales opportunity and more as a read on how closely agency and advertiser priorities track with its own plans for...
After spending 2025 in regulatory limbo, TikTok is entering 2026 with a clearer ownership path in the U.S. Now, whether the new ownership structure is enough to satiate marketers (and continue to garner their ad dollars) is still an open question.
The deal, which was announced in late December and set to close on Jan. 22, according to Axios, ends the years-long saga of TikTok’s Chinese parent...
The ad industry’s job market has ended 2025 on a low note, following job cuts at the market’s largest employers. Jobs in the U.S. ad industry fell by 3,700 year-on-year, according to the latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Ad agencies are still hiring — but the skills they’re hiring for, and where they’re finding them, are beginning to change.
Unsurprisingly, generative AI...
TikTok existing in the U.S. beyond the realms of a legal ban, Meta winning its antitrust trial, and Omnicom partnering with X were not quite on Digiday’s bingo card for 2025.
Which is to say that trying to predict, especially in the world of tech and platforms, what might actually materialize at any time, let alone next year, is nearly impossible. After all, a lot of what the industry thought...
A number of tech companies signed their first AI content licensing deals with publishers in 2025. New players in this space means we will likely continue to see more agreements in 2026, as publishers look for ways to make money from their content being used to train AI systems.
Meta, Microsoft and Amazon all signed licensing deals with publishers in the last six months.
Digiday tracked all...
After a three-year hiatus, Cheez-It has officially brought its mascot Prince Cheddward out of retirement in time for this year’s Citrus Bowl. As sports marketing gets more crowded, Cheez-It hopes its revived brand mascot will drum up enough fan nostalgia to drive more sales.
“He’s a fan-favorite asset who helps us stand out without needing to ‘out-spend’ or ‘out-shout’ anyone,” said Cara...
For publishers, disintermediation isn’t a one-off — it’s a pattern.
Now, publishers are watching agentic AI browsers closely because they’re a new kind of middleman: instead of sending readers to sites, they can read, summarize and act on information inside the browser itself. And that could further cut publishers out of both clicks and the audience relationship, just as AI search is already...
AI-powered search rewrote the rules of SEO this year with diminishing click-through rates and referral traffic upending decades of SEO strategies. In kind, publishers shifted from optimizing headlines and keywords to brand visibility and attribution tracking to appear in AI search results.
The shifts are still underway as publishers head into 2026: KPIs are changing, more AI search data is...
Even in the era of the 20-person Microsoft Teams meeting, some advertising execs rack up the air miles.
Andrea Timmerman, global chief client officer at media agency Assembly, heads out from her Minneapolis, Minn. base to the agency’s offices and those of its clients in Singapore, Dubai, London and New York between two and four times a month.
“I’m a strong believer of [being] in person and...
2025 — what a ride in media.
Even for battle-worn publishers already so well accustomed to rewriting their playbooks to adapt to whatever hot plate has been flung at them (the print-to-digital crash, endless Google algorithm swings, Facebook’s pivot away from news, the cookie collapse, to name a few), 2025 was pretty rough.
The stomach-dropping moments are easy to pinpoint: copyright hell...