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That may be a result of marketers championing a blend of performance and brand – rather than performance over brand – a shift that C-Suites are starting to embrace. There’s a slow recognition that marketers must invest in brand marketing to (hopefully) pay dividends in the long-term. Even agencies like Wpromote recognize the potential to cash in on the merging of brand and performance – with its new (aptly yet wonkily titled) “brandformance” practice. 

In a world where marketers are often pressured to prioritize metrics, algorithms and immediate ROI, marketing veteran and Kraft Heinz CMO Todd Kaplan seems to always bet on the brand.

There's one week left to save on entries to the Digiday Awards Europe. Showcase your company in front of judges from Politico, Havas, Mattel UK and more.

While it hasn’t formally launched a publisher program, over the last 18 months Reddit, Inc. has been steadily rolling out products and resources aimed at courting media companies to increase their presence on the platform. #reddit

Data owners are showcasing the value of inventory and audiences via standardized clean room approaches that appeal to all advertisers. Sponsored by LiveRamp.

Major advertising platforms are pushing marketers to use generative AI to make holiday ads. Agencies and brands, however, are still unsure about integrating such technology into their playbooks. Meta’s holiday marketing guide encourages advertisers to use its generative AI creative features within its Advantage+ ad platform to change backgrounds on images, expand ad image sizes to fit different aspect ratios or generate different versions of ad text to see what works best with shoppers. A Google Ads newsletter by Jyotika Prasad, Google’s senior director of retail ads, recommends brands use similar features to generate new holiday lifestyle imagery, create new image variations or automatically change headlines and descriptions within campaigns. In this piece by Mitchell Parton, we speak to Calla Murphy of Belardi Wong, Jacob Posel of Common Thread Collective, Ashvin Melwani of Obvi, and Katya Constantine of DigiShopGirl Media.

The world’s long list of large language models now includes a macropod. On Wednesday, Walmart debuted a new set of retail-specific AI models to help power the company’s “Adaptive Retail” era of personalized shopping and customer service. Called Wallaby, the LLMs were trained on decades of Walmart data with company-specific knowledge about customers, employees, Walmart terminology, its corporate values and other brand-specific data. Walmart also plans to integrate Wallaby with other AI models based on the goals for each application. In this piece by Marty Swant, we speak to Desirée Gosby, and Nigel Daley of Vantage Discovery.

Gone are the days when big brands were solely reliant on agencies to produce high quality content. Thanks to tools like #AI, creators can now get in on the action. With the rise of social media, short-form video, and the growing influence of AI, creators are now in a prime position to snag a slice of that lucrative pie. Whether through their own channels or self-made businesses, creators have become more important to these brands. One example is Brandon Baum, otherwise known as Brandon B — the YouTuber who is Europe’s largest visual effects artist on the platform with more than 14 million subscribers and 10 billion video views. Digiday caught up with Baum to gauge his perspective on whether AI is paving the way for creators to fully replace agencies for big brands. We also delved into how this shift might be fueling the ongoing debate about the evolving relationship between agencies and creators, as well as insights into his company and why he believes YouTube is at the forefront of this transformation. Story by Krystal Scanlon

Gaming’s presence at Advertising Week 2024 was less all-encompassing than in past years — but the presence of key industry players at this year’s conference shows that gaming companies still view advertising as a key potential growth area for 2025. After bonanza years fueled by the COVID-19 lockdown, ad industry excitement around gaming has subsided somewhat in 2024. At Advertising Week 2021, there were 15 dedicated gaming or metaverse sessions; in 2022, the number of gaming sessions peaked at 18. At this year’s event — as with last year — the number of gaming-specific panels stood at 10. Gaming is still making its voice heard at Advertising Week, but artificial intelligence is undeniably the belle of the ball. #AdvertisingWeek #gaming In this piece by Alexander Lee, we speak to Adam Bauer of Discord, Indy Khabra of Livewire, and Jody Rones of GAMURS Group.

When publishers fail to activate data properly, they leave money on the table and hand it to competitors. To overcome this challenge, publishers are using data activation to build deeper relationships with omnichannel audiences and generate revenue opportunities. Sponsored by Piano.