Digiday Sunday
—Digiday It was a very consequential week for the digital media and marketing economy. The TikTok ban is starting to become a reality for the platform as well as the brands that have marketed aggressively on it. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg ripped a few pages from Elon Musk’s X playbook in announcing plans to end its fact-checking program. Marketers we contacted about the policy change didn’t seem too concerned – we’ll see how that plays out. CES spanned the first full week back of 2025 and we were on the ground in Vegas to cover it. And we also published our annual Notebook special report that featured 11 pieces looking ahead, as best we can, into a new year that’s already proving to be transitional and disruptive. – James Cooper
Story highlights
Michael Burgi had the week’s most-read piece about Omnicom search-based pact with Google. He brokered and reported it as part of a?string of coverage of new search plans for OMG coming out of CES that also included Amazon and Roku. As he reported, ‘The Share of Voice planning solution, as OMG has dubbed it, gives planners accelerated visibility into a brand’s share of demand in a category versus its competitors, using Google’s Gemini AI product to provide targeted recommendations for how and where to expand or optimize campaigns. It launched in late 2024 in the U.S. and will expand to other regions over 2025. It taps into keyword data from Google Ads to show query volume for a product by the client’s brand name compared to competitor brands across a category —?looking for white spaces clients can harness by adjusting the keyword bid strategy.’
Tim Peterson was our one-man band out at CES providing excellent text and video coverage of 2025's first major tentpole event via four daily briefings. Here they are:
–Check out Tim’s ‘speedrun’ video from the CES floor here
Sara Jerde Did a fantastic job pulling together team reporting for our annual Notebook special report which is designed to look as deeply and insightfully as possible into the new year now rapidly unfolding before us. Click here to read the report
Seb Joseph and Sam Bradley partnered up on an important piece on Meta following Musk’s lead on a more conservative approach to censorship on the giant platform post U.S. presidential election. As they reported, ‘marketers are in wait-and see mode, hoping for clearer guidance on what content Meta will still police. So far, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has offered them little beyond vague assurances, leaving the details up in the air. What is clear, though, is that this marks Meta’s most significant shake-up to its political content policies in years, coinciding with Zuckerberg’s apparent effort to mend fences with the incoming Trump administration. In doing so, Zuckerberg is edging closer to Musk’s laissez-faire playbook — hardly surprising, given Musk’s new role as a Trump advisor.’
Ronan Shields and Seb Joseph team up reporting on the Acxiom data dilemma behind Omnicom’s market-making IPG acquisition. As they reported, ‘Billy (not his real name) is the kind of senior marketer who usually has a hot take for every occasion. Brand safety? He’ll unravel the industrial complex behind it. Transparency? Buckle up; he’ll spill it all. However, when it comes to Interpublic Group’s Acxiom, Billy’s take is conspicuously missing. It’s not because he’s uninformed; he just doesn’t think IPG has offered enough answers to form an opinion worth having.?That unvarnished view cuts through the noise surrounding IPG’s data business since Omnicom announced plans to acquire it and the rest of the group. The chatter positions as a centerpiece of the so-called “holdco of the future.” But whether it lives up to the hype is a whole other story.’
Alexander Lee took a smart angle into the TikTok ban contretemps?by reporting that TikTok creators are changing their approach to brand partnership contracts as the ban, now with the Supreme Court, looks increasingly likely to happen as of January 19. As he reported, ‘Creators’ caution around TikTok is a result of the force majeure clauses that are often standard for branded content work. Creators’ contracts with prospective sponsors typically include this type of clause, which specifies that creators will keep branded content on their pages for a set duration, often six or 12 months, before taking it down. But with no guarantee that TikTok or any of its content will be available to U.S. users in the coming months, some creators are pushing to remove this line from recent brand partnership contracts, fearing that they could be found in breach if users lose access to TikTok.’
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Krystal Scanlon wrote a very interesting ‘for and against’ piece regarding the use of AI agents in advertising. As she wrote in her lead, ‘Ads that target AI agents rather than humans might sound like something ripped from the pages of sci-fi, but it’s a concept that’s gaining traction among marketers thanks to recent musings by Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. On the “Marketing Against The Grain”?podcast, he painted a picture of a future where “users never see?an ad. Unlike Google, the different merchants are not competing for users’ attention. They’re competing for the AI agents’ attention.”’
Kimeko McCoy ’s edition of the Digiday Podcast featured an interview with Kate Trumbull, Domino’s evp and CMO in which she discusses her plans to revive the brand while navigating inflation's?impact on the brand and its customers.?Give a listen here
“Quote” of the week
“It took brands a while to realize that the uncertainty people had about the world wasn’t actually fully translating into how they spent their money."
— Jeremy Goldman, senior director of marketing, commerce, and tech briefings at eMarketer, when asked about how advertising's dealmakers are gearing up for a surge in 2025.
Here are the Digiday + Briefings for the week
See you next Sunday!