The Digiday Podcast

Digiday is proud to present The Return, a podcast about what the return to the office can look like as corporate America adapts to the new, not quite post-pandemic normal. The Return follows the staff at one Atlanta-based advertising agency through Covid outbreaks, as well as the highs and lows of transitioning to hybrid work after two years of pandemic lockdown and working remotely. While the future of work is still under construction, employees across the country are forging their own paths to determine what that future looks like amidst parenthood, corporate mandates, long commutes and an ever-looming pandemic. The Return is hosted by Kimeko McCoy, senior marketing reporter at Digiday, and produced by Digiday audio producer Sara Patterson.Listen to The Return on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Wall Street Journal is finally entering the commerce space after spending a year figuring out what that business will look like for Dow Jones.Launched last month, Buy Side from WSJ is a standalone site whose newsroom operates separately from the Journal, but has the same focus of helping people make financial decisions -- a shared mission for Dow Jones’ other properties including MarketWatch and Barron's, according to the company's chief revenue officer Josh Stinchcomb.The timing of Buy Side's launch -- which is likely taking place right before a recession -- could be a unique challenge for most commerce publishers, with audiences starting to pinch their pennies and brands reconsidering their affiliate marketing budgets. But Leslie Yazel, head of content for Buy Side, believes that these circumstances could benefit her team's editorial strategy, thanks to the personal finance focus featured in each article.On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Stinchcomb and Yazel discuss how Buy Side is balancing consumer product recommendations with detailed budgeting breakdowns to help readers make purchase decisions through the lens of value, as well as setting sights on striking up affiliate partnerships with financial institutions.

Heading into this year’s annual TV advertising upfront negotiations, the big story was whether TV ad buyers and sellers would move en masse away from using Nielsen’s measurements as the currency for their upfront deals. They didn’t. However, that doesn’t mean the measurement makeover wave has ebbed, GroupM executive director of research and investment analytics Bharad Ramesh said in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.“I don’t know if things have quieted down. They may be quiet publicly, but we know internally — and I know speaking for some of our other agency peers — internally there’s a lot of work going on in terms of lining up tests or talking to networks about shadowing currencies or even, in the case of another agency, piloting for the upfront with an alternative currency,” said Ramesh.Much of the industry’s measurement work currently revolves around testing the various measurement providers in order to assess their pros and cons. For example, GroupM has been running tests with more than a dozen of its largest clients to evaluate measurement providers — including iSpot.tv and Comscore as well as Nielsen’s upcoming revamped measurement system Nielsen One — so that in the first quarter of 2023, WPP’s ad buying arm and its clients can decide on which to use as currencies in next year’s upfront market.“Essentially we’re taking a campaign that’s scheduled to run in Q2 and Q3 of this year, and we want to be able to capture the campaign with the alternate providers where possible,” said Ramesh. However, he added, “the goal is not to compare and contrast as much as to understand where each of these currencies are in terms of their readiness.”

BDG has been on a mission to revamp the brands in its lifestyle division for the past few years, by increasing the exclusivity in its events business, acquiring new luxury-focused fashion brands and adding shoppable elements to its content.But editorially, BDG’s namesake brands Bustle and Bustle UK have been undergoing a content transformation too, led by editor-in-chief Charlotte Owen. Taking a page from the tried-and-true playbook of magazines in the industry, Owen’s team has started going after a higher caliber set of celebrity interviews in the form of monthly digital covers, only her strategy for interviewing goes against the standard formula she sees practiced by other publications.Owen, who helped launch Bustle UK in May 2018, was promoted to lead both the U.S. and U.K. editions of the site in January 2020, and two years later in April 2022, was tapped as the editor-in-chief of BDG’s Gen Z-focused media brand Elite Daily as well.Elite Daily, which was acquired by BDG in April 2017, after its former parent company Daily Mail General Trust deemed it all but worthless at the end of 2016, has been on a steep uphill climb to regain the authority it once had over 18-24-year-olds. The site had achieved profitability one year after its launch in 2012, leading it to be bought for over $40 million in January 2015 by DMGT, but like many digital publications of the time, fell victim to Facebook’s algorithm changes shortly thereafter.On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Owen discusses how she is applying the leadership lessons and editorial strategy that’s worked at Bustle to Elite Daily in hopes of restoring the brand’s authority within the college-aged demographic once again.

In the final installment of the Digiday Podcast from the 2022 Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, I was joined by Rob Pierre, the irrepressible CEO and co-founder of Jellyfish, a network of agencies and marketing services that specialize in digital work and transformation.Pierre distinguishes Jellyfish's operating philosophy from the agency holding companies on a two key levels. For one, Jellyfish operates off one single P&L — no regions, no divisions — and for another, the network prioritizes the major platforms as importantly as it does its clients."It sort of started with us thinking that we would love our clients to treat us like partners, not vendors. And, of course, if that's what we would like for us, you know, we can't treat our vendors any differently," said Pierre, who started Jellyfish in 2005. "And then it became apparent that if they're both partners, why would you treat them any differently? ... So yeah, I actually think our business turned around when we decided, as an example, to treat Google like our best client."New forms of connecting with consumers have gotten Pierre's, and consequently Jellyfish's, attention, and he said he wants to be sure to put in the work to figure out how and when to reach them. "If advertising is the monetization of attention .. it's much harder to grab someone's attention because it's so disparate," he said. "It's on so many different platforms on different devices for very short periods of time. So, but where are people going to spend? Where are the eyeballs going to be in the future? [W]e're thinking the metaverse is one of them."

The Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity is well underway, as the crowds along the Croisette clearly indicate. But a lot of the action, and heady conversations, are also taking place in the suites and conference rooms of the big hotels that dot the main boulevard of Cannes -- not to mention in the yachts parked in the Vielle Port alongside the Palais where Cannes content and awards are taking place.I was fortunate to have one of those conversations with Arun Kumar, chief data & marketing technology officer for IPG, who's also CEO of IPG's marketing intelligence engine Kinesso, who was my guest on the latest installment of the Digiday Podcast. He's essentially the principal data architect for the entire holding company.Kumar is an outspoken defender of marketers' right to gather data on consumers in ethical ways, and is a big believer that now is the moment for marketers, agencies and ad-tech companies to speak up before further privacy legislation is crafted that could limit or hamper the ability to understand consumer patterns. His concern is that, without input from the industry, legislators will craft rules promoted mostly by privacy advocates."As an industry we've let ourselves down by not being present at the table," said Kumar, who thinks there should be national standards for privacy rules. "What the marketing industry has done is stood up, and basically put its head over the parapet, got itself shot at, and not done anything to disabuse anyone of those notions [of abuse of data] ... We've now conflated cookies with privacy."If only the marketing world had devised some sort of Hippocratic oath at the outset of the digital era, the industry wouldn't have come under the degree of scrutiny it is getting from legislators. He looked to the medical world as an example to be emulated, where all doctors are held to the fundamental ethical base of do no harm, which influences all their actions."One of the places we should look forward to is medicine," said Kumar. "No matter where you go in medicine, no matter what you discover, there are certain ethics surrounding it, which come from the principles [the Hippocratic oath]. We as an industry ... have not aligned on what those principles are, we're asking ill-prepared legislators and bureaucrats to solve the problem, and the reality is when you step into the metaverse or other places ... there is going to be more data exhaust that comes out of that."

The Digiday podcast this week is coming to you live from the Cannes Lions, where the media, marketing, ad tech and creative worlds have come together for the first time in person in two years.The guest for today's podcast is Joanna O'Connell, vp and principal analyst with Forrester Research, who offered an unvarnished view of the ills of the industry while crediting some corners of ad tech for trying to make things better."In the 25 years of digital advertising, innovation has outpaced thoughtful, methodical, careful assessment of what could be done versus what should be done," said O'Connell, sitting in the lobby of the famed Martinez hotel at the far end of the Croisette, the main boulevard that links all major hotels to the Palais (where Cannes-Lions-sanctioned content is held)."There's a lot happening that's shining a light on what we do that gives us a moment, or should give us a moment, of pause," added O'Connell. "And I say this to the biggest brands and to the biggest media platforms in the world because it is their responsibility, ultimately, to be shepherds of great experiences for consumers."O'Connell also address the flood of new tech innovations that create "a lot of noise," the causes of continued fraud in the industry, what the walled gardens may face from brands, and why the idea of consumers ultimately owning data is a much more nuanced issue than it appears.

Welcome to the Cannes Lions, which is meeting in-person for the first time since 2019. This week is going to be equal parts exhausting and exhilirating. Although the Lions celebrate all of advertising, the media agency world has taken more of a center-stage position in recent years."Rather than just talking about servicing our clients and understanding our clients' business, what we're really doing more about and talking more about now is how we can help them in their journey of transformation, and I think that has been the thing that I've really seen the language shift over the years," said Brown, a 15-year veteran of Omnicom.Brown addressed the realities of dealing with scope creep from clients, citing the need to be straightforward and honest when having those discussions. "We need to be paid fairly ... More and more clients today realize they're asking a lot of us, and realize that we're not a charity -- that we do need to pay our people fairly and also have a return for our shareholders like they have to have a return for their shareholders."Brown has had to adjust to a new boss in Florian Adamski, who took over less than a year ago from Daryl Simm as global CEO of Omnicom Media Group. Flo, as he's known in the company, "is very much in the detail .. and very much a roll-up-sleeves executive, which I appreciate," said Brown. "He's also incredibly future facing, which again is really important, and sets a very clear vision for us moving forward."The digital industry's focus on performance marketing that comes so easily with a lot of newer innovations can be a dangerous path to go down if one overlooks the importance of brand, Brown explained."A couple of the watch-outs are that you move too far into performance marketing and you forget about the brand, the strength of the brand," she said. "And that's what you'll see coming through in Cannes, I hope. The brand hasn't gone anywhere -- it still needs to have great ideas behind it, [and] it needs to capture the imagination of consumers and cut through. Sometimes I do worry that over the years we've gone too lower-funnel, performance, and we've forgotten about the brand."What does she hope to get out of Cannes Lions most of all? Connecting with people in-person again. "The number one thing for me is to see people," Brown explained. "There are some clients who are going to be there that I've only seen ever on a screen because they started their jobs during the pandemic ... so for me, that's one of the most exciting parts of the festival."Check out other upcoming podcasts from Cannes with agency leaders and analysts this week.

In February, digital video publisher Team Whistle unveiled Magnet. The Eleven-owned media company billed Magnet as a social content agency rather than the more typical branded content studio label that publishers have opted for in the past.In the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Magnet lead Danielle Johnsen Karr explained that the company felt the studio label could constrain the roughly 35-person agency’s prospective client base.Magnet provides a lot of the same services as the typical publisher branded content studio, such as short-form video production and editing down clients’ long-form content, Johnsen Karr acknowledged. But the social content agency also provides influencer marketing and channel management services and is looking to secure longer-term relationships with advertisers that extend beyond the scope of a given campaign.“We felt like if we landed in that studio space, while we do all have those offerings, it might just sort of limit us in where we were going to reach some prospective clients, especially when we wanted to get into those longer-term remits with certain opportunities,” said Johnsen Karr.If Magnet does not fashion itself a branded content studio and describes itself as a social content agency, does that put it in the realm of traditional creative agencies? That designation would fit Johnsen Karr’s background, having come from the agency world and worked for agencies including McCann NY, Deutsch NY and 360i.“Good question. We’re probably not seeing ourselves as your typical creative agency. We do offer a lot of the services. What we don’t want to be doing is more of that day-to-day management,” Johnsen Karr said.Social content agency it is.

Google is keeping to its end-of-2023 deadline for disabling the use of third-party cookies in its Chrome browser, the company’s senior director of product management, ads privacy and user trust David Temkin said in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.Of course, that timeline could still change, as it has before. But part of Google’s decision to extend its previous deadline was to give the company time for testing and tweaking, said Temkin. “We’ve got a pretty good line of sight to the endpoint. We’ve got a good plan to get there, and we’re making rapid progress,” he said.Much of that plan centers on Google’s Privacy Sandbox, which spans the company’s collection of cookie-replacing technologies. That includes contextual targeting proposal Topics and retargeting tool FLEDGE. And technically, Google has two Privacy Sandboxes: the web-oriented Privacy Sandbox for Chrome and the recently introduced mobile-minded Privacy Sandbox for Android.Considering the development of the connected TV advertising ecosystem and CTV’s reliance on the cookie-like IP address, CTV would seem ripe to eventually receive its own Privacy Sandbox — a possibility that the Google executive entertained.“At some point in time, could solutions be delivered on CTV that would deliver the same kind of relevant advertising that you can see on these other identifier-free platforms? Yes,” said Temkin.