The gaming industry has experienced its fair share of ups and downs over the last few years, much like the rest of the media space. But it seems that the chips have fallen in a way in which gaming creators, specifically those who stream their content on live platforms like Twitch, YouTube and Kick, are in a position of power.At least, that’s how Damon Lau, head of gaming and esports at United Talent Agency, is measuring the recent trajectory of the industry. With video streaming platforms like Twitch constantly changing the revenue share models for creators on the platform, competing platforms like YouTube, Kick and even TikTok are stepping up to try and win over creators’ exclusive streaming rights.On the latest episode of the Digiday podcast, Lau discusses how his clients are thinking about their partnerships with streaming platforms, as well as how advertisers are starting to go to creators themselves for native advertising deals, rather than going through the platforms with their ad dollars.

Day two of the Digiday podcast at Cannes Lions, and our guests were Jean Freeman, CEO and principal of L.A.-based Zambezi agency, accompanied by Grace Teng, who runs Scale by Zambezi, the agency's media unit.In an era where rebundling is back on the table, creative shop Zambezi was a bit ahead of the curve by launching Scale by Zambezi back in 2018, and both Freeman and Teng shared their thoughts on how media innovation has made the creative stronger and more engaging, while creative inspired media to try new activations using data and analytics.On the hot topic of AI, Teng shared her experiences playing with Chat GPT for a health drink client. "We've actually just been playing around with it and had recommendations for clients recently, which have been pretty positively received," said Teng.Being a women-owned company hasn't come easily, but Freeman said that while she's in France, she's looking to expand on Own It, the group she co-founded to help raise awareness about the still-small number of women-run agencies.Make sure to tune in tomorrow for the next Digiday podcast at Cannes.

Welcome to The Digiday’s Podcast at Cannes.The first guests are Sir Martin Sorrell, founder and chairman of S4 Capital, parent of Media.Monks digital agency network, and Tara Agen, head of marketing operations and martech for HP, which is a Media.Monks client. In a wide-ranging conversation that touched on encouraging diverse hiring, economic prospects for the second half of the year and favorite Cannes restaurants, the topic that dominated was AI and its impact on the marketing ecosystem. In fact, Sorrell and Agen traded questions and insights with each other.Sorrell laid out five things he sees AI impacting, while Agen noted that AI already had been a part of HP’s processes for years. 

Spotify will head to this year’s Cannes Lions festival with a new product to peddle to advertisers: Spotify Ad Analytics. The measurement tool aims to provide advertisers with reporting on how their ads are performing on Spotify as well as the impact they are having on advertisers’ businesses outside the platform through the corresponding introduction of the platform’s own tracking pixel.“It’s taking the incredible understanding that we have from [Spotify-acquired podcast measurement service] Podsights and extending it beyond just pods, bringing it to music, bringing it to all regions and enabling it for free. And giving that service to advertisers to let them have better understanding, better depth of insights against how their campaigns are performing not only on Spotify but anywhere their audio is running with the opportunity to introduce the Spotify pixel to help them in one dashboard track all of their audio and all of their analytics against audio in one place,” Spotify vp and global head of advertising business and platform Lee Brown said on the latest Digiday Podcast episode.The new measurement tool is part of Spotify’s plan to get its advertising business to eventually represent 20% of its overall revenue. Since the fourth quarter of 2021, its advertising business’s share has hovered between 10% and 14%. Growing its advertising business will also be an important component to growing its podcast business, which has seen growth but contributes a smaller percentage of ad revenue compared to ads airing against music content. Spotify’s podcasting organization underwent a round of layoffs earlier this month that included the cancelation of six original shows.During the annual advertising confab, Spotify will also show off the AI DJ that it unveiled earlier this year and that is designed to provide personalized recommendations for the platform’s users. “The way I like to describe it is it’s like the voice of our algorithm,” said Brown.Spotify has yet to apply generative AI technology to its advertising business, but Spotify head of podcast innovation and monetization Bill Simmons recently teased that the company is developing an AI-generated ad product.Asked about Spotify’s AI-based ad plans, Brown said, “We’re still in the early stages of developing out the long-term strategy. I think we’re testing across several different vectors within that space, whether it’s automating translation, automating scriptwriting, automating the creative process.”

The TV and movie industry is once again on the verge of a production pause, at least for scripted projects.The Writers Guild of America’s ongoing strike has put the brakes on the pre-production process, and while the Directors Guild of America reached an agreement with film and TV studios on June 4 to avert a strike, the Screen Actors Guild could still strike and bring about a work stoppage come July 1.To break down the issues at hand and the strike’s (and potentially strikes’) implications for the industry, Project X Entertainment co-CEO Paul Neinstein joined the Digiday Podcast. [Editor’s note: This interview was recorded on May 31, before the DGA announced its agreement.]While not a member of the organizations on either side of the negotiating table, he laid out what issues are on that table, which can be distilled to writers being in a position where they are working more for less or limited money, as in the case of streaming services curbing the residual payments that writers can receive for the distribution of shows and movies.“One of the big categories is the residuals issue. This affects both film and TV writers and really is related to streamers more than the more traditional sort of avenues for release of films and TV series,” Neinstein said.Meanwhile, the strike and potential work stoppage is already affecting the broader film and TV industry. For example, Project X Entertainment — a production company whose credits include Netflix’s “The Night Agent” and the recent revival of the “Scream” film franchise — has already had to make adjustments.“We’re a small, independent film-and-TV company. We live and die on making stuff. And fortunately we had something [in production before the writers’ strike started], but we have three other projects that were lined up to start between August and September that are now uncertain,” Neinstein said.

Content creator, chef and soon-to-be restaurateur Tue Nguyen (who goes by @TwayDaBae on her social media accounts) started working with BuzzFeed as the host of its Tasty show, "Making it Big," in 2022. After filming two seasons of the show, and recording monthly videos for the cooking brand's channels as part of her role within the BuzzFeed Creator Network, Nguyen is now developing a new show with Tasty that will better showcase who she is as a content creator.In the past year, Nguyen has signed a cookbook deal, started the process of opening a fine dining restaurant in Los Angeles and both maintained and grew her owned-and-operated channels, all in addition to her partnership with BuzzFeed.BuzzFeed's CEO Jonah Peretti has stated that the company's path to growth will be largely dependent on its work with content creators like Nguyen, but Nguyen said during the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast that she has grown a lot as an individual creator because of what she learned while working with the digital media company.

Advertisers are beginning to see the financial benefits of reducing the carbon emissions created in their digital advertising businesses, but there is still a long way to go before sustainability becomes a shared point of focus across the media and marketing industries.Still, a lot of progress has been made by brands, agencies and publishers alike to at least begin measuring the scope of their carbon footprints. And the more carbon footprints are measured and discussed among digital advertising stakeholders, the easier it will be to create benchmarks and thresholds for the industry to ultimately reduce its impact on the environment. At least, that's how Kris Doerfler, head of innovation at CMI Media Group, sees it.On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Doerfler discusses how far the digital advertising ecosystem has come thus far in the journey to becoming more sustainable, and what's still left to accomplish — from helping smaller publications and brands make changes they can't make on their own, to creating shared standards for carbon emissions measurement.

The TV advertising industry is in the midst of a measurement overhaul, and Donna Speciale sees signs that the measurement landscape will more accurately account for diverse audiences.“With the current dataset, which is panel[-based], there has been underrepresentation for minority audiences, and everyone has known it. It was hard to quantify, but everybody realized it,” Speciale, TelevisaUnivision’s president of U.S. sales and marketing, said on the latest Digiday Podcast episode.But as TV’s measurement system shifts from panel-based measurement to measurements based on data — such as viewership tracked against logged-in audiences and smart TV’s automatic content recognition technology — and TV network owners like TelevisaUnivision test the latter measurement systems, Speciale said she has been able to quantify how much Hispanic audiences have been historically undercounted.“We’ve had like six to seven months of data that we’ve been analyzing, and it’s astonishing how much the Hispanic audience was underrepresented,” said Speciale. She added, “Now we know that there’s numbers that are basically showing that [panel-based measurement] was really off. And I’m not talking 2%. I’m talking 20-30-35%, depending on how you look at it. That’s not a statistical error.”In light of that undercounting, Speciale said she feels an urgency to adopt measurement systems that offer an alternative to the traditional panel-based methodology. And so it has become a focal point in her and her team’s conversations with advertisers and agencies heading into this year’s annual upfront negotiations.“Just like every negotiation, we’re going one by one, holding company by holding company, talking to each of their investment leads and their research leads and talking about leaning into the big data set,” she said.

For beauty influencer Sarah Palmyra, Instagram Reels has historically packed the most punch when it comes to driving sales of her favorite products.Last June, Palmyra posted an unsponsored, short-form vertical video about her love of Soft Service's Smoothing Solution product. It was originally posted on TikTok, and later republished on her Instagram Reels account, and according to the company, the product sold out due to an overwhelming number of customers coming to the site via her Instagram post.And yet, most of the brands Palmyra works with still want her to create ads for her TikTok channel, rather than Instagram. As of now, the platform where her brand deals run doesn't so much matter to her, given the fact that even viral videos, like the one about Soft Services, don't often translate to much in the way of affiliate commerce commissions. The inability to easily link to product pages within a short-form vertical video on TikTok or Reels tends to result in broken affiliate links and lost attribution, she explained."[Commerce] is just a small piece of the pie for me," said Palmyra on the fourth and final episode of the Digiday Podcast's Creator Series. But it's a revenue stream she said she'd like to see grow. "It would allow all of us to take on less sponsorships, which I know our followers would love as well. I only sponsor products that I absolutely love, but still I know that my audience would love to see much less," she said.In this episode, Palmyra discusses how Instagram is able to accomplish much of what advertisers in the beauty industry are hoping to achieve with their social media campaigns, but still seem to prioritize TikTok. She also covers how earning money as a content creator in the short-form vertical video boom is still heavily dependent on said brand deals.

Like many short-form video creators, Jorge Soto got his start on TikTok. But a year and a half after uploading his first video to TikTok in March 2020, he gave YouTube’s TikTok clone a try.“In two months, I gained a million subscribers, which is crazy,” Soto said in the third episode of the Digiday Podcast’s four-part series on short-form vertical video creators.Initially, Soto would repurpose his TikTok videos — skits and what he calls “storytimes” — as YouTube Shorts. But eventually he shifted to producing first for YouTube Shorts and repurposing those videos for TikTok.“I felt like, me as a creator, I was better off on YouTube because I had the access to long-form and the algorithm is a little — I don’t want to say it’s easier on YouTube Shorts, but it just makes sense,” said Soto. For example, his storytime format, in which he recalls a story from his life, performs reliably well on YouTube, and he’s able to see if one storytime video does well, then a similar one should perform similarly.But as Soto implied, Shorts is not the be-all, end-all of his YouTube strategy. Shorts are a means of driving viewership for his long-form videos. Those long-form videos bring in the bulk of the money Soto makes on YouTube, whereas through the YouTube Shorts ad revenue-sharing program, Soto receives five to six cents per thousand views.“It’s already a privilege to make money off short-form, so anything I’ll just take, frankly. But the way that I see it is short-form brings the audience,” Soto said.