The Digiday Podcast

Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital, shares his expertise on the transformative impact of AI on advertising. He discusses the agentic era of AI, where tools streamline multi-step tasks for agencies, reshaping compensation models from time-based to outcome-driven payments. Nelson highlights the significance of Omnicom’s merger with IPG, allowing access to a vast dataset and the integration of Omni AI across all employees. This shift emphasizes the growing importance of data and strategic AI engagement in marketing.

Kate Trumbull, EVP and CMO of Domino's Pizza, dives into the fast-food brand's evolving marketing strategies amid inflation and changing consumer habits. She shares insights on innovative campaigns like 'Emergency Pizza' and the 'Hungry for More' initiative aimed at enhancing food quality and customer value. Trumbull discusses the importance of adapting to cultural trends and the brand's historical efforts to regain customer trust, while exploring the balance between engaging franchisees and responding effectively to market pressures.

Seb Joseph, Executive Editor of News at Digiday, shares his insights on the chaotic landscape expected in 2025. The discussion features topics like the impact of cookie deprecation and AI on advertising, as well as significant mergers, including Omnicom's potential acquisition of IPG. The looming TikTok ban and evolving market dynamics raise questions about transparency and accountability in marketing. Marketers are urged to adapt strategies for a future shaped by these turbulent trends and shifts in consumer expectations.

2024 was a whirlwind for marketers, marked by an ad price correction benefiting buyers and a surge in streaming ads. The generative AI boom raised eyebrows, prompting discussions on its real impact. Meanwhile, Google's uncertain relationship with third-party cookies kept everyone guessing. The 2024 presidential election created ripples in media spending, while concerns about TikTok’s future loomed large. Brands experimented with 'unhinged content,' embracing boldness while navigating cultural sensitivities. All this and more shaped a transformative year.

Over the last few years, marketers have been trying to flip their position in the cultural zeitgeist – making moments themselves as opposed to retroactively marketing around them. That's why e.l.f. Beauty has built out its own entertainment arm, e.l.f. made, tasked with creating of the moment content around music, movies, gaming and sports.Thanks to the short-form content boom, advertisers like e.I.f Beauty have been working to move at the so-called speed of culture. While key agency partnerships remain intact for brand activation, an in-house entertainment arm allows the beauty brand to produce branded content fast enough to keep up with trends.In this episode of the Digiday Podcast, Patrick O'Keefe, e.l.f. Beauty's chief integrated marketing officer talks about building out e.l.f. made, branded entertainment and how success will be measured with the new entertainment arm.

Programmatic advertising methods like retargeting can be powerful for pushing interested customers over the line into making a purchase. But the approach can lose potency if the proverbial funnel isn’t regularly refilled with new prospective customers.“Over time, in order to compete and continue to grow, you need to expand your funnel. Otherwise you risk to optimize yourself to the ground and run out. If you continue to sharpen a pencil, at some point you run out of pencil,” Tripadvisor’s Matteo Balzani said on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, which was recorded live during last week’s Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit in Nashville.As senior director of acquisition and retention, it is literally Balzani’s job to make sure the travel booking platform does not run out of potential customers. And so he plans to rejigger the company’s programmatic strategy in 2025.As the pandemic-era travel restrictions lifted, Tripadvisor found itself in the enviable position of fishing in a barrel. People were desperate to travel again, so all the brand had to do was prod people to book through its platform. “The focus was really on capturing all the pent-up demand that was there,” said Balzani.Tripadvisor still has one eye on capturing that lower-funnel demand, but it is also looking to get in front of potential customers much earlier in their travel-planning processes. To that end, this year the brand tested extending its programmatic buying to mid- and upper-funnel media channels, such as connected TV and podcasts. And heading into next year, it is weighing whether to adopt a media mix model to further inform its full-funnel approach.“What we want to do is to use Q1 and Q2 to figure out what works and what doesn’t and make sure we have everything in place. And then based on the results, then we figure out which direction we want to go,” said Balzani.

Yahoo News, like many news outlets, had expected this year’s U.S. presidential election to drag on a bit longer than it did. “You have people planning to stay in the office for several days after the fact,” said Kat Downs Mulder, gm and svp at Yahoo News, on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.Fortunately, news outlets are accustomed to adapting. And with Donald Trump set to retake the Oval Office, they are having to understand how they may need to adapt to either a similar Trump Bump to the traffic increases news sites saw during his first term or a potential drop off in news interest.“It’s hard to predict what’s going to happen in the future and whether increases will sustain and in what ways they are going to sustain. There’s readers who are leaning in; they want to know everything that’s going on. And then there’s readers who are leaning out, and they’re at that news avoidance,” said Downs Mulder, who had spent 14 years at The Washington Post before joining Yahoo News in 2022.To be clear, Yahoo News had seen audience interest in the news increase leading up to and after the election. But it had also seen some audience members indicate a bit of election burnout.“I think there’s probably more of that than there was in the 2016 cycle. And so our goal at Yahoo is just to try to figure out what level the person is at and customize the experience to that, meet them where they are and give them an experience that fits whatever level of interest they have,” said Downs Mulder.

In the age of social media, algorithms and viral content, social media users are increasingly looking for ways to stretch the concept of “15 minutes of fame” into full time careers as content creators, influencers and media personalities.Recently, thanks to TikTok, that arc has played out with viral trends like Jools Lebron, the creator behind the “very demure, very mindful” trend, or Haliey Welch’s “Hawk Tuah” viral moment. Both Lebron and Welch join a long list of names who are working to take bursts of notoriety into sustainable careers.Notably, Lauren Speed-Hamilton and Cameron Hamilton have had a five-year go at this since first appearing on the hit Netflix show “Love Is Blind” back in 2020. Since then, the couple has sketched out somewhat of a playbook for capitalizing on virality and turning it into a viable career path. Last month, the couple launched The Love Seat podcast with sponsorship opportunities for brands.“I remember Lauren saying that we don't know how big the buzz of this show is going to be, how long it's going to sustain itself. That was something we both understood early on,” said Cameron Hamilton, on a recent episode of the Digiday Podcast. “So we said, let's hit the ground running and create as much content as we physically can.”

Since the U.S. presidential election was called, the advertising industry has been parsing through the tea leaves, trying to understand exactly what a Trump presidency means for business. That picture is starting to come into clearer focus as Trump continues to announce cabinet picks and assemble the incoming administration. For example, last week, Trump picked Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic who has called for pharmaceutical ads to be banned, to potentially be named Secretary of Health and Human Services.On this week’s episode of the Digiday Podcast, executive editor, video, audio, Tim Peterson and senior marketing reporter Kimeko McCoy are joined by senior marketing editor Kristina Monllos and senior media reporter Sara Guaglione to talk about the incoming administration’s ripple effects on publishing, marketing and media.

It’s been roughly a week since Donald Trump was voted into his second presidential term and already, his return to the White House is expected to send ripple effects throughout the advertising world.Publishers are considering what a second Trump presidency looks like in regards to traffic spikes and subscription revenue, otherwise known as the Trump Bump. The brand safety playbook regarding where an advertiser shows up in media may soon need to be reconsidered as more brands look to avoid backlash in the so-called culture wars.All said, it won’t be until January’s inauguration that the full picture of Trump’s presidency comes into focus. But until then, executive editor of news Seb Joseph joins the Digiday Podcast alongside executive editor, video, audio Tim Peterson and senior marketing reporter Kimeko McCoy to discuss what a Trump presidency means for publishers on the heels of the Digiday Publishing Summit in Europe (DPSE). Also in this episode, a recap of Google’s antitrust case and what happens next with the incoming administration.