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This story was originally published on sister site, Modern Retail. Launched in 2024, toy brand Sticki Rolls first took off through YouTube creators, unboxing videos and trading hauls before growing into a collectible brand and generating more than a billion YouTube views. Now, the brand is leveraging that success as it focuses on new channels. Sticki Rolls’ signature sticker books first launched in specialty toy stores and on Amazon, before entering Target. In late 2025, the brand exp

It wasn’t that long ago that a brand announcing a creator had taken up an internal role would’ve triggered an eye roll. Gemma Collins called herself creative director at Canva. Dhar Mann as the NFL’s chief kindness officer. Olivia Nell became “out of office” director at ASOS. Those examples were all recent, but something is shifting rapidly in the space. But as CMOs and now CEOs start taking creators seriously and the creator budget expands, that’s shifting, along with creators’

This story was first published by Digiday sibling Modern Retail. Tariff refunds continue to bolster the balance sheets of big retailers while consumers remain constrained by higher fuel prices and other macroeconomic factors. Walmart has received about $2.9 billion in tariff refunds, the company’s CFO John David Rainey told investors in the company’s second-quarter earnings call Thursday morning.Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest

Discord is taking its ads business further down the funnel with its latest ad format, Play Quest+. The format lets brands offer players rewards for completing in-game actions, such as finishing a match, completing a tutorial or playing with a friend. It marks a shift for Discord from simply putting brands in front of its highly engaged gaming communities to giving advertisers a way to drive — and measure — what those users do next. Here’s how it works: Players accept a Quest and link their

There’s a sneaker shop in my neighborhood where troops of lithe, late 20-somethings congregate for a weekly running club. The wall opposite the front door is dominated by long shelves holding 80 different running shoes and, by the bottom left corner, beneath the pairs of Adidas, Brooks, Hoka, On, New Balance, Salomon and Saucony sneakers, you’ll find the shop’s five pairs of Nikes. Running, a hobby and a category that Nike once ruled, is a huge retail concern once again; the U.S. running equi

By Adobe Over the past few years, B2B buying has changed dramatically. Buyers now expect relevant, connected experiences across every interaction, whether they’re searching for information online, attending webinars, downloading content or speaking to sales teams.  At the same time, AI has raised buyers’ expectations for speed, personalization and efficiency. Yet delivering a unified experience remains difficult for organizations when customer data, buying signals and campaign a

There’s a new deliverable on the creator brief: AI visibility. As more people start their shopping journey in AI chatbots, marketers are hoping creators can help put their brand names in front of those shoppers.  Brand visibility used to be what a brand said about itself via traditional SEO and paid media. In the age of AI search, LLMs are crawling social media platforms, blogs, news media and sites outside of a brand’s purview to answer search queries. It’s banking on creator

AI media buying tests are expanding to audio. Rochester, N.Y.-based independent media agency Butler/Till and iHeartMedia have been testing the use of AI media buying agents on streaming audio and podcast inventory, Digiday has learned. The two companies piloted an agentic buying solution for a four-week campaign running between July and August, on behalf of a U.S. client in the agricultural sector that Butler/Till declined to identify. The system used AI agents to activate media buys total

This story was originally published on sister site, Modern Retail. Tariff refunds were a massive tailwind for Target last quarter that could help it continue to lower prices. Target received $994 million in pre-tax tariff refunds during the second quarter, the company reported in its earnings release Wednesday morning. The tariff refunds boosted Target’s second-quarter operating income 94% year over year to about $2.6 billion, or 9.6% of sales. They improved the company’s full-

This week’s Media Briefing looks at the emerging race to measure and attribute ads served to AI agents — and why the industry is still far from agreeing on a standard way to do so. The AI attribution problem Forbes fires editor for $6 million payment, Taboola takes over NBC News’ programmatic display ads business, and more. The AI attribution problem As publishers and advertisers determine how to put ads in front of a new kind of audience — AI agents, not humans — they’

Earlier this year, YouTube made a major infrastructure play to help iron out the operational layer of the creator economy. In the last week, the platform announced two major changes that will affect how creators are monetized and measured. On August 24, YouTube will change how it counts views, registering a video view from the moment it starts to play (YouTube applied this to its Shorts views back in 2025). Its older, more strict view count metric was unknown, but was at least several seconds

OpenAI will begin serving ads to people using ChatGPT across 31 European markets on Monday (August 24), including Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Ireland, and the Netherlands. The timing lands at the six month mark for OpenAI’s ads business. What started as a U.S. pilot in February has already moved through Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea. Europe was always going to be slower. Regulation there (namely the General

This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at advertisers’ spending on YouTube Shorts inventory as the platform raises the revenue-sharing threshold for creators. Coming up Shorts YouTube’s view-counting change, Twitch’s AI opt-in, Apple TV’s golf game and more Coming up Shorts YouTube raising the bar for Shorts creators to join its revenue-sharing program raises the question: Is YouTube making it harder for Shorts creators to get a cut of ad dollars because there are fewer ad dollars

At a time when companies are using AI to automate work processes and build products faster, The Atlantic is taking an increasingly unusual approach to its latest game: building it by hand, every day. The Atlantic launched a new trivia game, called Rabbithole, this week. It’s the brainchild of Atlantic senior editor Drew Goins. A “Jeopardy!” champion himself (Atlantic managing editor Bhumika Tharoor called him “Jeopardy Drew” in an interview), Goins wanted to build a trivia game for the “incre

An agent buying ads sounds great in theory to a lot of advertisers. Less cost, less complexity and ultimately less need for a human in the loop at all. Georgia-Pacific knows that better the most. It’s just not buying it — not yet, anyway. According to its senior director of digital media Paras Shah it’s less that the tech isn’t ready and more that online advertising isn’t. And it will stay that way until the mess underneath it gets sorted. Drop an agent into that mess and it won’t autom

The uproar over OpenAI’s luxury creator trip to New York — in which around 30 creators stayed at a high-end farm resort, ate farm-to-table meals and learned beekeeping — has died down. The backlash exposed that brand trips can work, but the format needs to change. If brands continue to rely on in-your-face luxury or overly curated events as ways to activate creators and reach their loyal (and increasingly discerning) audiences, they could end up facing online backlash, too. That’s really why

The ad tech public era is over. Not literally, of course. A handful of scaled, still-growing platforms remain public. There just aren’t many of them, and the slower-growth, utility-margin names are dropping out one by one. Nielsen agreed to buy DoubleVerify for $2.15 billion in cash last week (August 6), taking it private less than a year after its biggest rival, Integral Ad Science, went the same route last December in a roughly $2 billion deal with Novacap. LiveRamp is next off the b

European publishers are getting hit harder than North American sites by AI bot scraping – and no one really knows why. A recent report from TollBit found that European sites get scraped more by AI bots, receive fewer referrals, and have their robots.txt rules – which websites use to communicate to crawlers what they can and cannot scrape – ignored more often. Here are the main findings from that report, based on TollBit’s analysis identified AI bots from 40 scraping vendors across 3,906 pu

Economic uncertainty and changing shopping behaviors are pushing brands to rethink how different channels work together. With the exponential growth of AI and the media landscape’s continued fragmentation, savvy CPG marketers are focused on connecting media, promotions and commerce to drive incremental sales. A new study from Circana and Ibotta Inc shows that promotions can deliver measurable incremental business outcomes. Circana used the same methodologies typically applied to media effecti

This story was first published by Digiday sibling ModernRetail In December 2024, Walmart did something perhaps out of character: It helped start a video gaming news website. Restart.run launched in December 2024 by gaming strategy and content marketing agency Moonrock. It prominently disclosed that it was created using funding from Walmart, with the initial tagline of “independent gaming news powered by Walmart,” according to worker-owned gaming news site Aftermath. Restart would