Digiday

Gaming is the next big ad medium after social, CTV and retail media. That’s according to Electronic Arts’ vp of advertising and sponsorship, Alex Dao, who’s building out their ads business. The unit launched last month and covers brand partnerships and gameplay integrations, ad units in 3D sports simulations, enhanced targeting and measurement capabilities as well as an EA Sports partner program. Making money from ads isn’t new to EA — it put billboards in Need for Speed: Underground 2 bac

Bose Studios launched last month. But the music company’s entertainment division is the culmination of a strategic shift that has been years in the making. It already accounts for one-third to 40% of the brand’s marketing, CMO Jim Mollica told Digiday at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity last week. He expects that to reach 60-65% by the end of this year or next. The reason, he said, comes down to one question: when was the last great TV ad you saw? This is a member-excl

In a bid to associate themselves with the vanguard of professional practice, marketers are ever-eager to embrace new technologies, though in highly regulated sectors, the shock of the new has a little extra resonance. Intuitively, healthcare advertisers are among the most conservative, as the downside risk of getting marketing wrong is materially higher than for their counterparts in other verticals, such as CPG, given regulatory oversight from bodies such as the Food and Drug Administration

Three weeks into the 2026 FIFA World Cup, brands aren’t just buying media around the tournament – they’re building entire creator-led activation machines, from local microcreators selling host cities to influencer-heavy sidelines content that turns every match into a days-long stream of social posts.  Together, these efforts show how creator marketing around global sports has moved beyond one-off influencer posts to complex, multi-city activation programs designed to drive cultural relev

This story was first published by Digiday sibling ModernRetail Nike says it’s in a better financial position as it awaits nearly $1 billion in refunds related to tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. On Tuesday, Nike shared that its growth margin for its fiscal fourth quarter of 2026 increased 890 basis points to 49.2%, “primarily due to the expected recovery of the IEEPA tariffs.” The company added that its North America business expects to recov

This week’s Media Briefing looks at whether the era of quietly charging subscribers different prices for the same news subscription may be coming to an end, as a lawsuit over “surveillance pricing” and new legislation in New York put publishers’ subscription pricing tactics under fresh scrutiny. WTF is “surveillance pricing” for subscription publishers? Google threatens to cut publishers out of new AI partnerships, New York Times amends lawsuit against

Marketers were hoping for a quiet week to recover from the hangovers and heat of Cannes Lions before the 4th of July weekend. Instead, they’re scrambling for information to better understand how the break-up of Comcast and NBCUniversal might affect them. To quickly recap, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts announced Monday (June 29th) that the two businesses, which were merged following a 2009 deal, would separate as part of a tax-free spinoff. Comcast spun out its cable TV business Versant back in Ja

Keeping the complexities of marketing channels in mind, Digiday+ Research has analyzed strategies and challenges across leading marketing channels — like retail media, CTV and social media — to identify key trends and best practices in our CMO Strategies series. In this installment, Digiday+ Research focuses on an analysis of creator marketing and its role in marketers’ playbooks. 01 Introduction Creator marketing is booming, and it’s no longer confined to social media feeds. U.S. b

This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks back at the most significant developments — or non-developments — in the TV, streaming and digital video industry during the first half of 2026. The mid-year review 2026 has been a weird year. This is a member-exclusive article from Digiday. Continue reading it on digiday.com and subscribe to continue reading content like this.

As AI bots flood their sites, publishers are no longer just trying to keep them out – they’re starting to re-engineer content for them.  In doing so, publishers are preparing for an agentic web – a future in which AI agents make decisions and perform tasks on behalf of users. To stay visible in AI search, Time, The Economist and another major news publishers are already experimenting with parallel, agent-readable versions of their sites, stricter controls on which bots can crawl them and

This story was first published by Digiday sibling ModernRetail Brands are increasingly looking to replicate their TikTok Shop success when entering overseas markets. Modern Retail spoke with three brands — gaming consoles business Nex Playground, K-beauty company MBX and luxury resale platform Fashionphile — about how they are using TikTok Shop to expand internationally, and why they believe the momentum they have experienced on the platform in the U.S. will translate to success abroad.Con

This story was first published by Digiday sibling Modern Retail Just when brand marketing seemed to have reached a fever pitch at the 2026 World Cup, more companies are finding their niche at the global event. Beauty and skin care in particular have taken a bigger spotlight this year, exemplifying just how closely beauty and sports have become intertwined.Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing

OpenAI has spent its first four months laying the groundwork for its ad business. Now it’s turning its attention to the various formats that will power it. Three job listings on OpenAI’s careers page point to text, image, video, native, conversational and interactive ad formats in the works.  The company is looking for an ad formats software engineer with at least seven years experience — a role described as a “foundational role” across the full stack — that sits within the monetizat

Marketing is becoming entertainment. Creators are its stars.  Cannes didn’t so much reveal that shift as rubber-stamp it. The ad industry’s annual gathering in the south of France felt unfamiliar in ways it hasn’t in years.  UTA threw a dinner for creators, a slot once reserved for CMOs to play belle of the ball. OpenAI’s ads boss Dave Dugan made his way to the Influential villa, not to talk to brands, but to creators. Bose CMO Jim Mollica went as far as c

The Economist has begun offering a lower-priced subscription tier for its audio and video journalism, called Economist Play, as part of a broader effort to pull in younger and more diverse audiences. For about $15 a month – roughly $10 less than an all-access premium subscription – Economist Play bundles the publisher’s long-form Insider video shows, paywalled podcasts, daily audio briefings, short-form videos, subscriber-only newsletters and games into a standalone product aimed at people wh

Publishers spent years learning how to engineer Google. Now they’re trying to do the same for AI answers – and sell it as a brand product.  Germany’s BCN, the joint-venture commercial arm of three major publishing houses – Hubert Burda Media, Funke and Klambt – is rolling out a commercial product that helps brands get properly surfaced and described inside ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI assistants, not just on traditional search results pages. Called GEO Brand Impact, the offering bundl

Forbes has launched an AI-powered audio experience on its homepage that turns its top three stories of the day into a five-minute podcast. “The Daily Brief,” uses a combination of summaries submitted by writers into Bertie, Forbes’ internal AI tool. Bertie selects three stories to summarize and voice the brief, which is then reviewed and additional selections made by Forbes’ product and editorial team. The Daily Brief, which launched on May 29, is also a signal that publishers are still wi

In the fight for visibility in an AI-powered search era, USA Today Co. is betting that speed can still beat the machines. After using AI-assisted, pre-written “shell files” to help boost traffic to Winter Olympics coverage, it’s rolling out the same strategy for this summer’s FIFA World Cup 2026. The race to win Google search now starts before AI can get there. USA Today Co. is pre-writing articles — with the help of AI to pull related content from its archive — so it can be ready with breaki

As advertisers grow increasingly anxious about AI governance, transparency, and platform concentration, Yahoo is positioning its demand-side platform as an alternative to the industry’s emerging black boxes. Yahoo DSP has today unveiled a new Agent Network that connects advertisers with AI-powered tools from 23 ad tech partners across a number of different ad campaign parameters: audience targeting, campaign activation, creative, and measurement workflows. Related Insights

This week’s Media Briefing looks at why the World Cup is no longer the easy search traffic win it once was, and how publishers are adjusting their strategies to pull people in. The new World Cup playbook Reuters Institute report shows people are swapping news sites for social, video platforms U.K. publishers move to charge tech companies for AI scraping, Washington Post gets hit with class-action lawsuit around subscription pricing, and more The new World Cup playbook The W