The house built around diversity, equity and inclusion is coming apart brick by brick. Since last summer, brands, retailers, holding companies and, most recently the federal government, have been dismantling (or retooling) DEI initiatives, many of which were built up after the murder of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter Movement of 2020.

The “diversity” portion of diversity, equity and inclusion has become divisive, impacting multicultural marketing agencies, Black-owned brands and diverse publications. And they're starting to feel the ripple effects, according to Kirk McDonald, CEO of Sundial Media Group, holding company for brands like Essence magazine, Afropunk festival and Refinery29.

Although, he said, it’s too early to tell the full impact DEI’s retooling (or rebrand) will have on the industry in terms of media spend, marketing budgets or consumer habits.

McDonald recently sat down with the Digiday Podcast to talk about how Sundial’s diverse publications, geared toward women and other historically marginalized communities, are navigating the pushback.

Google’s long kiss goodnight with third-party cookies seems never-ending at this point, as the tech giant's cookie phase-out plans still remain unclear.

Seemingly, Google's plan to ask Chrome users to opt in to cookie-based tracking is reflective of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) move a few years back. Sure, marketers have long since seen the writing on the wall with this. But, as the future of third-party cookies remains rather ambiguous, marketing and brand executives, including Rankin Carroll, global chief brand officer at Mars Snacking, have started eyeing partnerships and leveraging artificial intelligence to fill in the gaps, with an eye toward a cookie-less future.

“We had what we had, and it was the norm for the standard for the industry,” Carroll said on a recent episode of the Digiday Podcast. “As we move beyond that, we're focused on innovating.”

In talking with Digiday, Carroll laid out Mars’ plans to scale its first-party data across brands like M&Ms and Snickers and the role partnerships play in scaling said plans. Carroll also talked about Mars' Super Bowl stunt and rehashed the company's plans to acquire the Kellanova family of snack brands.

Last year Architectural Digest switched up its e-commerce strategy. Having added affiliate links to its “Open Door” YouTube series showcasing celebrities’ decked-out abodes in 2021, the Condé Nast-owned publication started redirecting viewers from the Google-owned video platform to its own site to shop the decor.

“It’s a much, much deeper, richer experience for the user to go to our site. It’s more fully shopped-out there, and it’s more visual. We can put photos of all the items,” sad Amy Astley, global editorial director at Architectural Digest, on the latest Digiday Podcast episode.

The strategy shift has coincided with the publication doubling its commerce revenue in the past two years. And it’s not like the previous approach of embedding affiliate links on-platform in the YouTube videos’ descriptions wasn’t working. But having a place on AD’s own site for people to shop the products featured in the “Open Door” videos seems to be working even more.

“We saw a four-times increase in the revenue from ‘Open Door’ from shopping it out on the site,” said Astley, noting that AD highlights the link to the site in a pinned comment atop the videos’ comments feed on YouTube.

Now AD is prepping another major update to its commerce strategy. In March, the publication plans to relaunch the AD Shopping commerce property that it launched in January 2024 and is home to the “Open Door” product showcases as well as shopping selections hand-picked by AD’s own team, including Astley.

“The main overhaul that we look for this year is a lot more leaning into our staff picks, leaning more into the editors and to the designers, and integrating all the shopping content more fully across everything that we do,” said Astley.

(00:00) - Intro

(15:32) - Interview with Amy Astley

Remember when 2025 was supposed to be the first official year of the post-cookie era? Well, clearly that hasn’t happened and seems unlikely to happen anytime soon. And it certainly won’t happen until sometime after Google introduces its user choice mechanism in Chrome for people to allow or block third-party cookies.

“If there’s wild amounts of opt-in, then yeah, the third-party cookie in the Chrome ecosystem is probably alive and well. If there’s [a] wild amount of opt-out, if there’s no critical mass around the third-party cookie, then it is effectively dead, even if it lives on in some small percentage. We just — we don’t know how that’s going to shake out,” said Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, in the latest Digiday Podcast episode, which was recorded on the eve of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Springs, Calif., which concludes on Jan. 28.

If Katsur had his way, though, the third-party cookie wouldn’t be on the chopping block in the first place. Moreover, other technologies like the IP address would continue to be available to be used for identifying audiences and tracking them across devices. At least until more inherently privacy-friendly identity options gain adoption.

But it may be a while before the digital advertising industry’s post-cookie identity picture really comes into focus.

“It will be the year of identity solutions, the year of ID-less [solutions] for, I think, the next decade. I think this is a 10-year trajectory we’re on. And I think it’s a combination of regulatory forces, machinations of Big Tech is what I think is going to drive this,” Katsur said.

Interview begins at 13:52.

Over the last year, marketers have been shelling out dollars to show up in sports, the supposed last bastion of monocultural moments and opportunity to get ads in front of a massive audience. There's been an uptick of interest in unconventional sports like pickleball, and women’s sports. Streaming platforms like Netflix bet big on live sports in hopes to bring in more money from advertisers. Finally, since the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) approved its name, image and likeness (NIL) policy back in 2021, the lines between influencers and athletes is becoming more blurred.

That said, it’s getting more difficult for brands to stand out from one another as more advertisers flock to the space. That’s true even for a brand as big as Verizon, according to Nick Kelly, Verizon’s vp of partnerships. “We have to find something that we can own,” Kelly told Digiday.

In this episode of the podcast, Kelly sits down with co-host Kimeko McCoy, senior marketing reporter at Digiday, to talk about its revamped sports marketing strategy, venturing into NIL deals and this year’s Super Bowl plans.

Interview begins at 19:16.

Omnicom Group’s pending acquisition of Interpublic Group seems especially timely in the hindsight of last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

A major talking point among the brand and agency executives in attendance was the onset of the so-called agentic era of artificial intelligence, in which AI tools handle multi-step tasks for people like booking a full travel itinerary — or firing off a client brief. In this era, data will be at even more of a premium than it is today

“If you think about the IPG acquisition, we will have a broader platform to to do things. We will have the broadest dataset on the buy side anywhere in the world, and more expertise, more clients,” Jonathan Nelson, CEO of the agency holding company’s digital arm Omnicom Digital, said on the latest Digiday Podcast, which was recorded in person at CES.

The combined company will also have Omni AI, a product that Omnicom is developing to combine various foundational large language models. “We’re putting that on every employee’s desktop in Omnicom right now,” Nelson said.

Which gets at another aspect of how AI will affect agencies’ business. As agencies effectively outsource tasks to AI tools, the traditional agency compensation model — in which agencies are paid in accordance with the time it takes to complete client projects — will be under pressure. This is again where Omnicom is counting on the combination with IPG and the corresponding dataset — as well as its previous acquisition of commerce platform Flywheel — to be able to adopt a model in which its client fees are contingent on the results of its work rather than the time it takes to complete that work.

“Here we are sitting on this massive dataset. It’s coming together across audience, activation, outcomes. It has that purpose, which is driving towards outcomes remuneration,” said Nelson.

Fast food and quick service restaurant brands had a rough go over the past few years as shoppers have tried to save a few bucks amidst rising grocery prices and inflation. Seemingly, parts of the brand playbook are seeing a rewrite with things like $5 deals to make consumers feel they’re getting more bang for their buck.

It’s a tale all too familiar to Domino’s, the more than 60-year-old pizza brand that has marketed its way through brand lulls to try and win back customers who have pulled back on dining out. There were the “30 minutes or less” campaigns of the 90s, Pizza Turnaround in 2010 (when the pizza chain acknowledged the recipe needed work) Paving for Pizza in 2018, where Domino's paved roads to ensure pizzas arrived to customers in good condition, and today’s Emergency Pizza, a pizza giveaway for so-called emergencies like burned dinner.

In this episode of the Digiday Podcast, Kate Trumbull, Domino’s evp and CMO joins co-host, and senior marketing reporter, Kimeko McCoy, to talk about Domino’s brand playbook.

2025 is expected to be a hell of a year, if you ask the Digiday staff. After the whirlwind that was 2024, the new year seems to promise a cocktail of chaos and topics the industry can’t escape. Or as Digiday managing editor Sara Jerde puts it, “2025 will be the year of the Twinkies, the cockroaches, TikTok potential ban, and third-party cookies.”

Last year, several rocks were thrown in the water, ripple effects that’ll shake out in 2025 with everything from mergers and acquisitions, a la Omnicom’s proposed acquisition of IPG or BuzzFeed’s sale of First We Feast, to the proliferation of the social media landscape and the TikTok ban.

In this final episode of the year of the Digiday Podcast, host Tim Peterson, executive editor of video and audio at Digiday, is joined by Jerde and Seb Joseph, Digiday’s executive editor of news, to discuss what marketers, advertisers and the media need to know to ring in the new year.

Hold on tight. The rollercoaster that was 2024 is finally coming to an end.

Marketers may find themselves dizzy from the many ups and downs the industry experienced this year. 2024 saw more ads on streaming platforms, but also an ad price correction that favored ad buyers’ wallets. There was also the generative AI boom (or bauble, depending on who you ask). Of course, there was Google’s long kiss goodnight with third-party cookies, in which the tech giant decided to keep cookies after all but let users decide if they want to opt in or not. And who could forget the 2024 presidential election, the gift that kept on giving to news publishers.

To help the industry make sense of this past year, this episode of the Digiday Podcast is a vignette-style look back at 2024. Hosts Tim Peterson, executive editor of video and audio at Digiday, and Kimeko McCoy, senior marketing reporter, revisit the biggest moments (and podcast episodes) of 2024.

Here are the full episode interviews that they mention in the podcast:

• Third-party cookies are hanging on, but Epsilon says brand marketers should still focus on first-party data
•  Inside Dow Jones’s AI governance strategy, with Ingrid Verschuren
•  Duolingo’s head of global social strategy, Katherine Chan, talks about making unhinged content work and learning from mistakes
•  From scratch to slam dunk: New York Liberty’s Shana Stephenson on building basketball team’s brand and keeping fans in the game
•  A postmortem on this year’s TV and streaming upfront ad market with UM Worldwide’s Marcy Greenberger
•  How the Martin family went from part-time vloggers to a family of social media mavens
•  Digiday editors on Trump administration picks and the impact on the ad industry

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.