Jamie Power, senior vice president of addressable sales at Disney, shares insights on how Disney aims to automate 75% of its ad sales by 2027. She highlights the remarkable shift towards programmatic advertising, revealing that over half of streaming dollars are now transacted this way. Power discusses the rapid growth following the introduction of interactive ad formats, with spending skyrocketing eightfold compared to the previous year. The conversation also touches on innovations in ad tech and the integration of sales teams to enhance client interactions.

WNBA's New York Liberty is having a moment. It just finished the regular season last Thursday with the best record in the league, defeating top teams like the Las Vegas Aces and the Connecticut Sun. Meanwhile, the team’s mascot Ellie the Elephant has become a celebrity in her own right, known for her dance moves and fashion.But it hasn’t always been that way. Five years ago, the team was struggling, playing in Westchester County Center, a smaller court far away from home. But then things started looking up. Joe Tsai, co-founder of Alibaba and owner of NBA's the Brooklyn Nets, purchased the Liberty and paved the path for the eventual move to the team's current home at the Barclays Center. Then in 2021, Shana Stephenson started as the team’s full-time chief brand officer.In this episode of the Digiday Podcast, Stephenson talks about what it was like building the team’s brand, how Liberty is tapping into the women’s sports hype and, of course, Ellie the Elephant’s viral videos.

In the age of disrupted digital audiences, media companies are incentivized to constantly be counting clicks, pageviews and engagement — all while optimizing for how those metrics can be best monetized.But Long Lead, a long-form journalism production company, wants to redefine the journalism business model to bring art back into the craft of journalism. Launched in 2020 by founding editor and longtime journalist John Patrick Pullen and hedge fund manager Bill Perkins, Long Lead’s mission is to give journalists the ability to tell their story in the most effective way possible — not the most efficient way possible.So rather than publishing stories as quickly as possible and monetizing them with advertising or paywalls, a freelance journalist can come to Long Lead with a pitch and work with the team to determine its best format: be it a documentary, a podcast, a book or a performance piece. Long Lead then provides the journalist with the technical resources, staffing, time and — most importantly — funding to create the project.Granted, that’s not a cheap feat. And while Long Lead has the luxury of being funded without having to fulfill a revenue goal just yet, Pullen explained that the expense of operating a business like this won’t detract from the journalists themselves. In fact, the journalists are all able to keep their own IP from the projects they create with Long Lead once it’s finished.On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Pullen shares why Long Lead is focused on supporting the art of journalism and how his team determines the best format for different stories that come across his desk.

Marketers’ attention to the industry’s latest shiny object, generative AI, has yet to shift out of focus. Some agencies have moved to ink enterprise-level deals with major AI players, like OpenAI, Runway and soon, Perplexity. As these AI-powered tools continue to flood the marketplace, agencies and brands alike say they’re creating auditing policies to ensure data security, stability and fairness. It’s a similar story at Babylist, a baby registry company, according to Lee Anne Grant, chief growth officer of Babylist.“Even before AI, when we tried to build things in-house, our founder and CEO would always say, ‘I always want to see the recommendations of the machine against a human and just gut check it’,” Grant said.On this episode of the Digiday Podcast, Grant talks about how babylist is navigating the AI hype cycle and what the roadmap ahead looks like. Also on this episode, Digiday catches up with Grant about Babylist’s retail media network efforts and its value proposition to advertisers.

The retail media network space is shaping up to be a competitive one. With countless retailers vying for ad dollars, which retailer gets the bulk of said dollars depends on size and scale. With an expansive brick-and-mortar footprint in the U.S., size and scale are what Sam’s Club Member Access Platform (MAP), the company’s retail access and ad platform, is banking on to draw in advertisers.In this episode of the Digiday Podcast, Ryan Burns, head of strategy at Sam's Club Member Access Platform, talks about Sam’s Club’s pitch to advertisers, standing out in a crowded retail media landscape and plans to continue growth.

Jessica Sibley, the CEO of Time and a leader in media innovation, shares insights on navigating challenges in the industry, particularly amid layoffs. She discusses the company's shift towards a B2B sales strategy to focus on commercial strengths like AI, climate, and health coverage. Sibley also emphasizes the critical importance of partnerships with AI firms and addresses the evolving advertising landscape. She highlights the necessity for durable investments and strategic shifts to enhance audience engagement and maintain journalistic integrity.

Big changes came for the media industry in 2024.Between generative AI technology companies spending millions of dollars to license their content and Google flip-flopping on third-party cookie deprecation plans, publishers have had a lot to sort through.When asked which has been the bigger concern to him, Future plc’s CEO Jon Steinberg said, “The cookie thing keeps me up at night more than the AI thing. The AI thing used to keep me up more at night, but [now] … I have more optimism … The cookie thing — every cookie conversation begins and ends with, ‘Well, there's so much uncertainty.’”On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Steinberg discusses both these topics, as well as why Future hasn’t inked a content licensing deal with an AI tech company … yet.

With so many changes happening across the digital marketing landscape, sometimes the best strategy is to have no strategy at all — at least when it comes to social media, according Melissa Ben-Ishay, co-founder and CEO of dessert company Baked By Melissa.Instead, Ben-Ishay props her phone up on her kitchen counter at least once a week, where she walks her TikTok followers through everything from how to make crispy rice to gnocchi, and, of course, a catalog of desserts.Ben-Ishay is one of many founders-turned-influencers who are navigating the booming influencer marketing space and putting a face to their brands to more authentically connect with followers. The founder-influencer pipeline is standard at this point, and perhaps the trend is most commonplace in the small- to medium-sized business and direct-to-consumer brand spaces, where founders are cranking out content to keep up with the likes of influencers who are launching their own brands.In this episode of the Digiday Podcast, Ben-Ishay talks about being a founder-influencer, and shares her thoughts on the ever-looming TikTok ban and why Baked by Melissa’s social strategy is no strategy at all.

 In the midst of a booming creator economy, where U.S. marketers are expected to shell out $7.14 billion on influencer marketing by the end of this year, according to Goldman Sachs Research, livestreaming platform Twitch is making a play for creator and advertiser attention, competing against other big tech platforms.Last year, the company was reported to have lost its way with the streaming community, which could be seen as its most valuable asset. At the same time, culture is changing, becoming more fragmented in a way where fewer monocultural moments exist. All said, it’s harder than ever to keep people’s attention, said Rachel Delphin, CMO at Twitch.“Attention feels so divided and it also feels really short as a person, but also as a professional,” she said on the most recent episode of the Digiday Podcast. “Creating content and programs that really capture attention to the point where people want to engage with it, share it, comment on it, that’s a really high bar.”On this week’s Digiday Podcast, Delphin talks about Twitch’s plans to stay in the cultural zeitgeist all while keeping attention from creators and advertisers in a fragmented digital marketplace.

Google may have changed course on its approach to third-party cookie deprecation on Chrome, but that doesn’t mean brand marketers should take their foot off the pedal when it comes to testing cookie-less targeting solutions.At least that’s what Rachel Cascisa, vp of platform adoption at Publicis’ marketing tech company, Epsilon, believes. As it is, recent studies from Adobe and Epsilon have found that marketers are “considerably less ready” for third-party cookies to disappear from the advertising ecosystem in 2024 than they were in 2022. And while Chrome may not experience total deprecation after all, by and large industry executives are estimating a steep drop off, upwards of 70% to 80%.“I think that you can liken it to procrastinating to study for an exam,” said Cascisa. But instead of waiting to study, she said Google’s announcement “gives opportunities for [marketers] to focus on things that are third-party cookie deprecation adjacent. Things like first-party data strategy. That is just a good strategy for marketing, regardless of whether cookies will be deprecated or not.”On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Cascisa discusses the different strategies that brand marketers should be putting to the test now, prior to Google firming up its proposed cookie deprecation plan, including clean rooms, data collaboration and ID bridging. She also discusses why or why not these solutions are working for marketers right now, and where cookie-less targeting is still lacking.