The Digiday Podcast

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.

GoDaddy has been known for its irreverent and racy spots with models — perhaps, most notably, its Super Bowl ads featuring former professional race car driver and model, Danica Patrick, back in 2010. It could be fair to say the web hosting and domain registration company knew how to make waves in the sports marketing space.But the company has sat out the Big Game for the last few years. It’s also moved away from its cheeky, sports-related spots to focus on small businesses and entrepreneurs, said GoDaddy CMO Fara Howard.“I could answer this question in a lot of different ways,” Howard said on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast when asked about the shift in marketing strategy, “but I believe that we need to tell that story by showcasing actual customers using our products and having success.”On this episode of the Digiday Podcast, Howard talks about the push to boost product awareness, focusing on customers instead of celebrities, how it’s incorporating AI into its products, and the roadmap ahead.

CMO of Tubi, Nicole Parlapiano, shares insights on Tubi's success in the streaming industry, highlighting their unique approach as an ad-supported platform. She discusses Tubi's multicultural viewers, growth strategies, and the importance of community engagement. Parlapiano emphasizes the collaborative nature of streaming platforms and how they complement each other in the entertainment landscape.

Jamila Robinson, Editor-in-chief of Bon Appétit and Epicurious, discusses expanding Bon Appétit's coverage to include sports and relationships, launching a monthly subscription box, and appealing to a modern audience by challenging traditional cooking norms.

As the creator economy grows, the very definition of what makes a creator or influencer changes. It has expanded to be inclusive of everything from college athletes under the name, image and likeness (NIL) policy change in 2021 to the latest crop of virtual influencers, springing up alongside generative AI advancements.For Nicole Dye Anderson, svp, head of media relations and influencer strategy at Wells Fargo, influencers can extend to anything from celebrities to media personalities.“[Traditional influencers] might have a strong social following and that's extremely important, to have that strong social following as well,” she said. “But then again, as the newsrooms are shrinking, [shoppers] are looking to these [media influencers] as the experts.”In this week’s episode, Anderson shares more about Wells Fargo’s influencer marketing strategy, how the financial institution mitigates backlash and defines authenticity.

Making the digital advertising ecosystem more sustainable has been a burgeoning topic for the past couple of years, but the biggest excuse that’s been holding back companies from making moves to actually reduce carbon emissions is the lack of standards around measuring emissions in the first place.But the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) and Ad Net Zero aimed to remedy those concerns with its Global Media Sustainability Framework, launched ahead of the Cannes Lions Festival earlier this month.“We’ve reached a bit of an inflection point to sort of say, ‘Let’s do the right thing by the industry, and make sure that there is a voluntary, flexible framework that basically can enhance transparency, drive consistency and introduce rigor in a way that drives confidence in the work,’” said Rob Rakowitz, co-founder and initiative lead at GARM.On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Rakowitz shared how the framework and standards came together and how their existence should influence the way stakeholders implement carbon cutting initiatives and measure carbon emissions in the advertising ecosystem going forward.