In 2020, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission put out a call for advertising experts to advise the regulatory body on advertising and privacy. Raashee Gupta Erry, then a director at GroupM’s Essence, answered that call.Gupta Erry initially took an interest in the privacy side of the ad industry in 2018 when working with clients to prepare for Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation privacy law. Joining the FTC offered an opportunity for her to get a U.S. perspective on privacy regulation from the inside — and for the government regulator to get a peek under the hood of the ad industry from an insider whose experienced spanned brand side at Volkswagen and Samsung, agency side at Essence and Digitas and ad tech side at Neustar.“The FTC wanted to have somebody from the industry who understands all the sides of the ecosystem, who understands how the players operate, what are the sort of systems [and] processes [and] workflows. So it was an opportunity for me to help them, educate them and strengthen their work as well as learn about the privacy world,” Gupta Erry said on the latest Digiday Podcast episode.Gupta Erry’s initial task at the FTC was mapping out the mechanics of the advertising ecosystem. Eventually her remit broadened to involve her in the organization’s investigation and enforcement efforts that related to advertising and privacy. “[I] got to dig into some of the topics that we all in the industry grapple with, like [Google’s] Privacy Sandbox or [Apple’s anti-tracking feature] ATT, algorithmic harm, AI bias,” she said.Having left the FTC last fall, she is now back to working with advertising companies on their privacy practices through her consultancy Uplevel Digital. And given the flurry of privacy laws taking effect in the U.S. this year, there’s no shortage of work that companies need to do to keep in compliance, especially as enforcement efforts by regulators including the FTC ramp up.“We’re looking at 11 or 12 [state-level privacy laws] at this point. So as more of them come into place, there’s going to be more regulators, state regulators, looking at these companies,” said Gupta Erry.

A lot has changed in the social media ecosystem over the last couple of weeks: Meta launched its Twitter competitor, Threads, Twitter was rebranded to X and TikTok announced its new e-commerce endeavor designed to compete with Shein and Temu. Understanding how these changes impact creators on those platforms, like publishers, can help shed some light on what the larger media and marketing industries will face in the fallout of these shifts.Enter BDG’s Wesley Bonner, svp of social and audience development, who has overseen the social strategy for the publisher’s portfolio of brands, including Bustle, Inverse, Romper and W, for the past six years. The launch of a new major social media platform has kept his team busy the past few weeks, but has also represented a new opportunity to connect with audiences in a more conversational way.On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Bonner talks about how his team is approaching posting on Threads to build engagement before monetizing, as well as how this new platform plays into the company’s larger strategy of creating original social media content both on set with celebrities and through its creator network.

This year’s Amazon Prime Day was a boon for many commerce publishers’ affiliate revenue streams.Take Wirecutter, for instance, which saw order revenue and overall earnings for Prime Day sales increase by “high double-digits” year over year, according to Leilani Han, executive director of commerce at The New York Times’s Wirecutter, on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast. While Han declined to share exact growth rates or revenue figures, she did say that this surpassed expectations for the two-day shopping event that took place July 11-12.Growth this year can be partially credited to the quality of deals that were available during the sale. “We were actually able to be even pickier than we already are with what we were going to choose to feature because the pricing was really that great,” said Han. Publishers, like Wirecutter, also focused on audiences who come from platforms other than search.Han said these shoppers, coming from social media platforms and on-site traffic coming funneled through The New York Times’s website, were particularly impactful to increase pageviews of commerce content. In addition to this, Han’s team leaned into a content franchise called Odes, which is “a short love letter to Wirecutter picks that have been beloved over time,” she said. When featured on Instagram Stories, these product spotlights were also particularly impactful in driving both traffic and sales.

Two years after Vox Media entered the podcast subscription business through the Cafe Studios acquisition, the publisher has “tens of thousands of active paying podcast subscribers,” said Vox Media svp and gm of audio and digital video Ray Chao on the latest Digiday Podcast.“We acquired Cafe a little over two years ago, and we’ve learned a ton from just operating that business over the last two-plus years,” Chao said.Vox Media’s broader subscription business continues to grow as it adds more podcast subscription options. In June, the publisher introduced a subscription program for narrative crime podcast “Criminal Plus.” And it followed with a subscription-based tier for “Where Should We Begin? With Esther Perel.”Vox Media is prioritizing acquiring subscribers directly but has been exploring third-party subscriber acquisition sources. For example, “Where Should We Begin?” sells subscriptions through Apple Podcasts at $4.99 per month or $41.99 per year. Chao said that third-party subscription sellers like Apple provide a means of capturing “lower propensity subscribers,” i.e. people who may be unwilling to go through the full direct sign-up funnel.Looking ahead, Chao has an eye on how Vox Media may differentiate the subscriptions it offers directly from those offered through third parties as a way to incentivize subscribers to sign up directly, such as by offering access to email newsletters and events, but still have a compelling pitch to those lower propensity subscribers, such as by providing access to exclusive audio content that is also available to direct subscribers. Vox Media has already implemented the dual-subscription option with Cafe Studios’ podcasts.“An early learning for us is how do we work with both [subscriber acquisition] paths and maximize our consumer revenue business and engage more of our subscribers,” Chao said.

Raffi Krikorian would have a better than average read on the artificial intelligence landscape, including as it pertains to potential regulation.Not only is the Emerson Collective CTO also the CEO of conversational AI company SpeakEasy AI, but the former Twitter and Uber executive was also the former CTO of the Democratic National Committee. And even Krikorian is unsure whether the U.S. Congress will be able to institute any guardrails around the new technology.“We are still so far away from being able to understand the nuances. I think there’s only one person in the House of Representatives right now [Rep. Jay Obernolte] that has an advanced degree in artificial intelligence,” said Krikorian on the latest Digiday Podcast episode.Nonetheless, Krikorian leans toward optimism, not only in the potential for Congress to regulate AI but in the potential for AI overall. His recently launched podcast is called “Technically Optimistic” after all. The show debuted in late June with a five-part series centered on AI and the nuances of the subject that could prove helpful not only to members of Congress but to anyone trying to wrap their heads around the technology’s implications for society.“The world divides itself in two ways when it comes to AI these days. There is the world [of] ‘We’re going to live in a sci-fi future where everything is miraculous,’ and then there’s the doom and gloom. And I think there’s a lot of gray in the middle,” Krikorian said. “However, I think that, as people learn to understand the gray, we can get to a place where we all can be optimistic.”

If you’re feeling a little punch-drunk by all the economic downturn talk through the first six months of 2023 (and really, through the last six-plus months of 2022), you’re not alone. Digiday editors and Digiday Podcast co-hosts Kayleigh Barber and Tim Peterson are feeling it too.At the year’s midway mark, the pair compare notes on the state of the media and advertising industries. The discussion ranges from the decline in ad spending to the rise of generative AI, with the duo delving into how the ad sales cycle has changed and to what extent those changes are temporary or permanent.

As the CRO of Salon.com, Justin Wohl is a self-proclaimed programmatic purist, meaning that when it comes to ad sales, the news publisher is almost entirely monetized through the open programmatic marketplace.After joining Salon in 2017, Wohl said that it was clear direct-sold advertising wasn’t performing and his team reconfigured to focus exclusively on the open marketplace. Two years later, Salon achieved profitability.Today, Wohl — who also serves as the CRO of TVTropes and Snopes — is using traffic shaping to maintain which ad inventory is being sold across each brand. n the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Wohl talks about why he’s willing to take a short-term gross revenue hit (of “a few percentage points”) to purify how his brands are sold in the programmatic open marketplace and ultimately improve the CPMs that his team can charge.

The final episode of the Digiday podcast at Cannes centered around a topic which everyone on the planet — but especially the digital marketing ecosystem — should be thinking and doing something on: sustainability and carbon emissions reduction.Recording once again from Spotify's podcast studio along the beach of the Croisette, Anne Coghlan, co-founder and COO of Scope3, explained not only all three "scopes" of emissions that companies must assess (and most have a handle on scopes 1 and 2), but outlined some steps that can be taken to reduce their scope 3 emissions. And those publishers that do not make serious attempts to mitigate their impact on the environment could see the business they hope to attract get reduced over time.The fact is, digital advertising is still reckoning with the fact that it's not only wasteful from an inventory point of view, but its massive need for energy to run itself is larger than many realized. And that will only get worse when — no longer if — generative AI gets adopted as quickly as Cannes conversations imply."There is this need to be skeptical and ask the right questions here, and be thoughtful about making sure that sustainability is brought into businesses decisions," Coghlan told Digiday, "and it's not a separate column at the side that has a checkbox at the end."And that wraps up the Digiday at Cannes podcasts. If you missed any of the first four, they include conversations with S4 Capital's Sir Martin Sorrell/HP's Tara Agen, Zambezi's Jean Freeman and Grace Teng, PMG's George Popstefanov, and programmatic analyst Tom Triscari.Till next year.

On a blustery day at Cannes Lions (which prevented us from recording outside), I walked along Yacht Row, well known for the plethora of ad-tech and mar-tech firms that rent the floating party boats moored in Jetée Albert Edouard just astride the Palais des Festivals. I was accompanied by Tom Triscari, an independent analyst who covers the programmatic and ad-tech scene -- and was once worked in the industry.Together we chose several companies for Triscari to assess in terms of potential and challenges, including IAS, DoubleVerify, Magnite, OpenX, Criteo, Cognitiv and Experian -- but the conversation naturally brought up some of the biggies that didn't rent yachts but still make their presence felt in the ad-tech market (such as The Trade Desk)."If you're on Yacht Row, you're there to close out some deals, because revenue is tight, there's consolidation, and you know, I think there's some concern out there around that top line growth," Triscari explained. "And therefore what what are you left with? You're left with maybe some cost cutting if you're going to make your number. So they're all out there trying to make deals for the investment they put into the yachts, which is not cheap."Tune in tomorrow for Digiday's final podcast from Cannes Lions. And if you missed them, please give a listen to Digiday's conversations with Sir Martin Sorrell and HP's Tara Agen, Zambezi's Jean Freeman and Grace Teng, and PMG's George Popstefanov. 

In our third episode of the Digiday podcast here in the south of France, I chatted with George Popstefanov, founder and CEO of independent agency PMG, which is best known for beating out several holding-company agencies for Nike's North American media business.Popstefanov is proud that his agency started in 2010 with several engineers as part of its core — and tech and engineering remain a vital part of what PMG does for its clients. But he's also very interested and active in finding ways to put generative artificial intelligence to use simplifying functions and helping to iterate the thousands of versions of content and advertising that personalized communication promises.Recorded in Spotify's studio on the beach at Cannes Lions, here's my conversation with Popstefanov.