The Digiday Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Even billionaire-backed media companies are not immune to the challenges facing the media and digital advertising industries.Last week, 22 staffers were laid off from Time — which is owned by Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff and his wife and philanthropist Lynne Benioff — as part of a larger reduction of operational costs amid ad revenue declines. Cuts were made to the editorial, sales, marketing, technology and TIME Studios teams, according to a memo from CEO Jessica Sibley sent to Time staffers last week that was shared with Digiday. And more cost cutting measures are coming down the pike, including limiting contractors and downsizing its New York headquarters.At the center of these changes is focusing the company’s editorial and business strategy on its “most commercially successful work” and the “biggest opportunities for growth” at Time, which is its coverage of leadership – particularly in the categories of AI, climate and health — Sibley wrote. That, in part, has played a big role in the transition to the sales team’s B2B revenue strategy.On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast (which was recorded on July 22, prior to the layoff announcement), Sibley discusses why she views Time’s B2B revenue strategy as the best path forward for growth, as well as other areas of revenue opportunity, including partnerships with AI technology companies like OpenAI and Perplexity.

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.

Instacart is on a mission to make every surface shoppable, pitching that to advertisers at this year’s Cannes Lions festival. Notably, there’s been an increased presence of retail and commerce media networks on the ground with brands like Chase and United having a presence here at Cannes on the heels of launching their own networks. “This last year has been about moving off-platform. So now, we’re making our data available on an aggregated, anonymized basis to other media platforms,” said Instacart CMO Laura Jones. As things begin to close down today, Jones joins this episode of the Digiday Podcast at Cannes to talk about Instacart’s beefed-up retail media offering, presence at Cannes, and more.

Vice Media Group ended 2022 behind where it thought it was going to be — about $100 million short of the revenue goal of $700 million set by its leadership at the beginning of the year. But Geoff Schiller, VMG’s global EVP of commercial & sales strategy is optimistic that events, intellectual property and digital video will be the sellable assets that carry the company forward in 2023. That’s because in his first quarter on the job (Schiller joined VMG in September after leaving Group Nine/Vox Media in June after almost three years), those products were the top areas of focus for advertisers, including partnering with VMG’s brands at Art Basel in Miami. Where other publishers reported growth in quick-turn campaigns and ads, like programmatic during the fourth quarter, Schiller said branded assets were still top of mind for Vice’s clients. In the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Schiller discusses his team’s strategy for selling new products in 2023, like Refinery29’s Twitch programming, as well as his philosophy on how hard to lean into revenue-share programs on social media.

The media industry is heading into 2023 faced with a lot of uncertainty, thanks to a less than stellar 2022. But based on the conversations Digiday Podcast co-hosts Tim Peterson and Kayleigh Barber have had with media executives and brand-side leaders, the murky waters could be tricky to cross without taking on collateral damage. Hear from the editors on Digiday's media beat about the top trends they'll be following in the new year.

This year ended up looking quite different from what was predicted by Digiday’s editors at the beginning of 2022, but it made for a fascinating saga to follow. In this final episode of the year of the Digiday Podcast, hear from some of our reporters and editors on the media and media buying beats chat about their top takeaways and trends from 2022, ranging from the struggling advertising market to the ongoing battle between publishers and platforms.

Group Black launched in June 2021 with the goal of getting advertisers to deploy $500 million in ad dollars to Black-owned media businesses by the end of 2022. And the media company has further indicated its ambitions with multiple reports this year that it’s looking to buy either BDG, Vice Media Group or Vox Media. “We hired J.P. Morgan [Chase] and Lazard to help us in our efforts a couple months ago. We’re actively out in market looking at acquisitions to make,” said Group Black co-founder and CEO Travis Montaque in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast. During the interview, Montaque laid out how acquiring a scaled media company would fit into Group Black’s strategy. The company’s strategy splits into three core areas: creating access to ad dollars and audiences for Black-owned media businesses; providing infrastructure — such as Group Black’s own ad exchange — for those businesses; and investing in growing Black-owned media businesses. But, you might be thinking, BDG, Vice Media Group and Vox Media are white-owned media businesses? Correct. But they are also large, general-interest media businesses that have built up the means of distributing content to large, general-interest audiences. In other words, acquiring a media company of their scale would be an investment that would help to create access and provide infrastructure to help grow the Black-owned media businesses that Group Black supports, with Group Black among them. “We are actively in market looking at scaled assets to acquire for the purpose of creating larger infrastructure for our collective to be able to grow their business. That growth means scaled distribution and other assets that will enable us to accelerate the reach and scale of Black-owned media overall,” said Montaque.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau provides a set of standard terms and conditions governing digital advertising deals. And starting next year, those standards will be in the process of being updated for the first time since 2010. “It’s time for a refresh,” said IAB CEO David Cohen in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast. “We started this year with a survey to the industry [asking] what are the things that need to be changed, what are the things that need to be fixed, what should we focus on? We are starting an endeavor in 2023 to redo the terms and conditions.” Updating the IAB’s terms and conditions is “a pretty gnarly process,” Cohen said. The process involves other industry trade organizations, including the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) and establishes a set of generally accepted provisions that ad buyers and sellers can adopt in their contracts, such as payment terms and cancelation options. To be clear, the IAB’s terms and conditions are more recommendations than requirements. Companies can choose to not adopt them. For example, some TV network owners have opted not to support the IAB’s cancelation terms for their streaming inventory. That cancelation option is among the terms on the table for an update, though any changes are unlikely to be introduced ahead of next year’s upfront negotiations. Cohen said he expects the forthcoming update to be a two-year effort. “We’re kicking off the project in earnest in Q1, and I think just realistically it’s going to be more than a year to get this done. So it will be a 2023-24 initiative,” he said.

Wikipedia for all things fictional, fantasy and entertaining, Fandom has unique insight into how passionate internet users are about different shows, movies and video games. But the data doesn’t stop at the behavioral data around those curiosities. Fandom’s plethora of user generated content and community boards have also lended itself to the company’s first-party data collection. And after 18 years of accumulating data on favorite characters, plot lines and cross-over interests, that first-party data, called FanDNA, is sold to advertisers to inform everything from traditional ad campaigns to research & development on new projects and merchandise. On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Stephanie Fried, CMO of Fandom, discussed how her team started categorizing this data into four, affinity-based groups to help clients understand where to invest and how to best reach their target audiences. She also covered why Fandom is interested in developing the top-of-funnel, discovery side of its business. This year, the company acquired seven brands from Red Ventures, including TV Guide, to start building out data around how audiences find new programming, and is also building a new personalization tool to help recommend content and ads based on previous searches.

For Apartment Therapy, it just makes sense to bridge its events business with commerce. Not because the expectation is to make $10 million from affiliate commissions, according to the company’s president Riva Syrop, but because it’s only fair to give attendees every opportunity to make a purchase as possible – the struggle she often faced when attending industry trade shows. So during this year’s flagship shopping event Small/Cool, as well as smaller co-sponsored events like Dine By Design, Sryop’s team worked to figure out how this model worked both for consumers and sponsors alike, including using transaction data as a KPI. That said, as the economy toughens and advertisers look for more bottom-of-funnel advertising strategies, experiential – regardless of how transaction-focused it is – is one campaign type that might get put on the back burner until late 2023. “[2022 has] definitely not been my favorite year, if I’m being honest. It has been a slog.” said Syrop during the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast. “Advertising was very difficult. A lot of our normal, big partners pulled back in the back half. So we did fine this year, but I feel much more optimistic about what's to come [in 2023] than what we're coming out of,” she added. Apartment Therapy earns about 70% of its revenue from advertising, equally split between the direct and programmatic businesses. Commerce contributes 15% and events contributes another 10%, with the remaining 5% coming from the company’s licensing businesses, which includes product and content licensing through a number of partnerships. To give more “breathing room” to both advertisers and consumers, Syrop said that Small/Cool will be moved from its Q2 timing to the back half of the year in 2023, with the hope that the economic downturn will have bounced back by then. “What we often see is consumer content consumption behaviors change, you sometimes see consumer purchasing behavior change, sometimes the advertiser behaviors change, but rarely do they all change at the exact same time. So this was definitely a readjustment year for us,” she said.