The Digiday Podcast

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

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 underre

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, sh

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

If Snapchat wants to prove to creators that they can make serious money by posting videos on its short-form vertical video platform, it may not need much more evidence than Alyssa McKay. “I’m on this Snapchat mid-roll [ad] program, which I’ve been part of since last May. I’ve made over a million dollars from Snapchat mid-roll,” McKay said in the second episode of the Digiday Podcast’s four-part series on short-form vertical video creators. She added, “Snapchat changed my life entirely.” Last week Snap expanded that mid-roll program to more creators who can receive a share of revenue from ads running against their Snapchat Stories. TikTok and YouTube Shorts have similarly stood up ad revenue-sharing programs for short-form video creators in the past year, but neither platform has yet had much to show for how much money creators can make directly from their platforms. With 2 million followers and an average 2.5 billion monthly views on the platform, McKay is showing the story may be different on Snapchat. “I de

In the possible scenario in which TikTok gets banned in the United States, TikTokers like Kat Stickler will need to rely on other platforms to maintain their followings and their brand partnerships. But Stickler, who has almost 10 million followers on TikTok, isn’t worried. That’s partially due to the fact that she already has over 1 million Instagram followers, 268,000 YouTube subscribers and 116,000 followers on Facebook. She's also heartened by brands already shifting their influencer marketing dollars to other platforms for fear that the ads they buy on TikTok won’t be as evergreen as they once were. On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Stickler kicks off the third-annual Creator Series — a four-week-long span of episodes — that will look at the rise of short-form vertical video and how creators, like Stickler, have been able to grow sizable followings.

Publishers' events businesses have been a bright spot in an otherwise grim economic climate. While trade publishers and consumer publishers have different approaches to how events fit in their portfolios, both are benefiting from advertisers wanting face-to-face impressions with prospective customers. VentureBeat’s total revenue increased by 50% year over year from 2021 to 2022. And despite having an events business for more than 15 years, the company’s events revenue increased by about 100% during that same time period, said Gina Joseph, the company’s newly appointed chief strategy officer, who was promoted last month, though she did not provide exact figures. In Joseph's five years at VentureBeat, she implemented VB Lab, a structure for how the company’s sales team custom would build campaigns for each individual advertiser. During the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, she discussed how VB Lab’s impacted VentureBeat’s bottom line in the four-and-a-half years since its launch, as well as how her appoint

Advertising has been a tumultuous business for some time now, but the one section of that market that’s been holding its own for publishers is events. Part of the reason for that is that brands themselves are realizing that they need to differentiate themselves with consumers, which — according to Lindsey Abramo, the recently appointed CRO of Leaf Group, who was a guest of a live taping of the Digiday Podcast during the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado last month — has opened up an opportunity for Leaf Group to sell it’s existing event franchises to sponsors. Leaf Group’s art and commerce side of the business, which includes art marketplaces Society6 and Saatchi Art, is not reliant on advertising revenue, according to Abramo. That’s a revenue stream that’s pretty much specific to its media arm, which includes its editorial brands Hunker, Well + Good and Livestrong brands. But now, advertising is being added to Leaf’s other art- and commerce-based events including The Other Art Fair, and through tha

Lynette Kaylor’s background does not mirror that of a traditional TV ad sales boss. But her history in data and identity technology does indicate the makeup of a modern TV ad sales boss. Before joining Fubo as the streaming pay-TV service’s svp of advertising sales last August, Kaylor worked at Dentsu’s data arm Merkle where she worked on identity tech partnerships with publishers and platforms — which is kind of a perfect pedigree for someone overseeing a streaming ad business today. “Data is only going to become more and more important. And given my background, obviously I feel that way. But it makes sense to me from a buyer and seller [perspective],” Kaylor said in the latest Digiday Podcast episode. “From a seller perspective, let me show you why you want to buy my audience, look at what makes them unique and great. From the buy side, it’s like, ’Oh yeah, I want to stop wasting money,’” she added. Among Kaylor’s most immediate tasks is building Fubo’s first-party data strategy as advertisers seek to make

As The Guardian’s fiscal year concludes on March 31, Luis Romero, the publication's svp of advertising in North America, acknowledged that his team has had a “late start” to receiving RFPs and budget planning with advertisers and agencies for the rest of 2023. However, those conversations picked up in the “last couple of weeks,” with several of last year's major advertisers starting to talk about renewing deals this year. Outside of the macroeconomic pressure on advertisers’ budgets, Romero’s team has been challenged by keyword blocklists. Advertisers’ brand safety concerns outweigh the desire to market to news publishers’ large and lucrative audiences, causing them to all but eliminate news content from their programmatic buys. But for advertisers still willing to place ads on news publishers’ sites, like The Guardian, third-party verification firms are added to the equation, putting the publishers through the brand safety ringer to grade how safe and reliable that content ends up being before advertisers ar

At the end of this month, publishing executives from around the country with gather together in Vail, Colo., for the three-day Digiday Publishing Summit to discuss the various challenges facing the media industry, including how the economic downturn has affected advertising revenue, how the launch of new artificial intelligence technology is impacting content production and how more privacy laws mean it's time to buckle down on first-party data practices. During those three days, publishers will also be learning from each other about different strategies to navigate this tumultuous time. In this week's episode of the Digiday Podcast, Digiday's senior media editor Tim Peterson, senior reporter Sara Guaglione and media editor Kayleigh Barber share some of the on-stage sessions that they are most excited about and chat through the trends they expect will come up at DPS. Digiday will have a variety of coverage around the summit, including session recaps, overheard round-ups and a live podcast recording with Miche

NBC News has taken a two-pronged approach to TikTok. In addition to adapting news videos posted to other platforms for the short-form vertical video app, the Comcast-owned news organization creates original videos specifically for TikTok. NBC News executive producer of original social video Devan Joseph and director of social platforms Stephanie Scrafano joined the Digiday Podcast for a deep dive into the news outlet’s multi-faceted TikTok strategy. The primary poles of that TikTok strategy are the newsier videos produced by Scrafano’s nine-person team and then the feature-esque explainers created by Joseph’s six-person team. Overall, the work spreads across the teams — into more of a spectrum. “It’s kind of like the news will start with my team and that step-forward, that deeper dive will come from Devan’s team. So it’s a nice split between our teams because we can do it all in some way,” said Scrafano. “We’re live-clipping moments as they happen and then Devan’s team might come in and do the explainer or pu

Nearly three years after advertisers and agencies pledged to diversify their spending to support Black-owned media companies, there remains a shortfall in the amount of money actually making it to Black-owned media businesses. “We’ve definitely seen movement and momentum. But without question, I think that they have fallen very short from the promises that they’ve made. And even this year, with all the talk about the recession and with all of the cuts, I think even their desire to deliver on those commitments are even smaller,” said Detavio Samuels, CEO of Revolt on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast. As a Black-owned media company that was founded by Sean Combs and operates a TV network as well as streaming and digital properties, Revolt has worked to address one of advertisers’ top complaints: “That there was not enough inventory in Black-owned media in order to deliver against the commitments,” Samuels said. Among those efforts have been Revolt’s launches of free, ad-supported streaming TV channels

At the beginning of February, advertising agency Reset Digital launched a new programmatic marketplace for the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), a trade organization that represents more than 200 Black-owned newspapers in the U.S., including the Sacramento Observer, The Philadelphia Tribune and the Dallas Examiner. The goal of the marketplace was to connect large advertisers like Procter & Gamble and Verizon with publications that hadn’t been equipped to run national programmatic ad campaigns, which ultimately led them to miss out on critical revenue. On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Reset Digital’s CEO Charles Cantu said that this collaboration with the NNPA went beyond the creation of a marketplace, to provide these news publications with the tech stacks necessary to run ads, as well as teach them how to sustainably build their online audiences.

A reckoning that most media companies contend with, Blavity Inc has started the revenue diversification efforts of moving from a display advertising-first business model to include more reader revenue options, like commerce. To help with the transition, Melody Brown was hired as Blavity Inc’s new associate vp of consumer media in Sept. 2022 from Travel + Leisure to help with the construction of this revenue stream, including launching a new home interior brand “Home & Texture.” But the push into commerce doesn’t stop there. Brown said on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast that the company’s lifestyle brand 21Ninety and travel title Travel Noire were both also pivoting to a commerce-first business model to both bring in a new revenue stream, but also to give readers more assistance from the content they’re already reading. “We're shifting from display first advertising, because we've seen that the effectiveness of that form has really dropped. Readers and audiences are focused more on the content that t

Last September, The Athletic introduced ads to its business model for the first time (aside from podcast and newsletter ads that've been in the mix since the publication's origins in 2016). This opened a door to revenue diversification, something the subscriptions-centered business had been lacking. The path to profitability was originally set for 2023, and was later pushed back to 2025 after The New York Times bought the sports publication. To achieve this profit goal, The Athletic's chief commercial officer Sebastian Tomich is focused on more than just selling ads directly to prospective advertisers. Programmatic advertising, ticket sales, sports betting partnerships, and licensing intellectual property to streamers to produce documentaries and scripted series are all priorities for 2023, he said on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.

For as big as the short-form vertical video market has become over the past few years, 2023 is poised to be a monumental one. YouTube will start sharing ad revenue with Shorts creators on Feb. 1, as TikTok continues to open the revenue-sharing program it introduced last year to more creators. TheSoul Publishing -- the media company behind 5-Minute Crafts and 123 Go! -- is among the short-form video makers welcoming the capital infusion. “The important thing here is that kind of direction where platforms are putting more effort into wanting to reward creators for the economic creation and so they can reinvest some of the earnings into what they do and continue to grow with this format,” said Victor Potrel, vp of content distribution at TheSoul Publishing, in the latest Digiday Podcast episode. Excited as TheSoul Publishing may be, the company isn’t about to overhaul its strategy to capitalize the YouTube Shorts revenue-sharing program. Part of the reason for that is it remains to be seen how much revenue Short

Earnings season is officially under way, and Eunice Shin has her eye on streaming service owners’ abilities to retain their subscribers. “In a world where economic uncertainties still exist, where the quality of content continues to be hits-based and a lot of bombs, how are we thinking about churn and how are these streaming platforms keeping the customers they’ve worked so hard to gain in an increasingly competitive and price-competitive world?” said Shin, a partner at strategy consulting firm Prophet who has consulted for companies including Disney, Warner Bros. and NBCUniversal, in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast. It’s a big question, made all the more urgent considering the streaming market’s shift in emphasis from subscriber growth to profitability. Following the pandemic-induced streaming subscriber surge, that growth started to slow in 2021 and further in 2022, to the point that Netflix actually shed subscribers. Then, with the economic downturn and looming threat of a potential recession, in

Many publishers pivoted to short form vertical video in the past year as platforms prioritized those content formats in their algorithms. Betches Media, however, invested more in its social-first content strategy that it’s had since its creation in 2011, according to co-founder and CEO Aleen Dreksler, to continue reaching its audience of primarily millennial and Gen Z women. It seems to have paid off in 2022, despite how challenging the ad market was for many publishers’ businesses. Betches Media saw a 40% increase in revenue year over year, according to David Spiegel, the recently appointed chief revenue officer who joined the company last July who did not provide specific figures. Despite having a long history of producing short form vertical video, Dreksler and Spiegel both said on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, that there is more learning that needs to be done, especially on emerging platforms like YouTube Shorts — which has been particularly helpful in the company’s launch of video podcasts.

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 p