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This story was first exclusively published by Digiday sibling Glossy In October, CeraVe announced that it would become the official skin- and hair-care partner of the NBA. Now, the brand is launching its first hair-care campaign pegged to that announcement. In February 2025 — prior to becoming an official NBA partner — the brand debuted a campaign featuring NBA player Anthony Davis, WNBA player Paige Bueckers and creator Charli D’Amelio. This February, a

Agentic ad buying isn’t coming soon; it’s already here. And it was the dominant theme at the May 2026 edition of the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit, held May 6 to 8 in Palm Springs, Calif. Executives from brands including Duluth Trading Company and agencies such as Butler/Till discussed how they’re already using AI agents to buy ads. During behind-closed-door town hall sessions, programmatic marketers shared how they are incorporating AI agents into other parts of their programmatic wo

Amazon wants to turn creator-led video podcasts into the next generation of TV networks – multiplatform franchises that can soak up TV budgets and spin out into retail, live events and social clips.  That pitch was front and center at Amazon’s May 11 Upfront in New York City, where performances from Diplo and Kacey Musgraves bookended appearances from Ice Spice, Shaboozey, and Oprah Winfrey, who unveiled a new podcast deal with Amazon’s podcast studio Wondery. Amazon’s message to buye

The most important AI lesson senior marketers are learning: start with the process, not the agent.  Buried beneath all the noise about agents and autonomous workflows is something that actually cuts to the heart of why there are so many conflicting views about where AI adoption really is right now — and more importantly, why so much of it isn’t working.This is a member-exclusive article from Digiday. Continue reading it on digiday.com and subscribe to continue reading content like this.

Live sports could be described as one of the last bastions of live television. With so many eyeballs in one place at one time, marketers are desperate to embed their brands — especially in women’s sports.  Ally Bank’s chief marketing and PR officer Andrea Brimmer is one of those marketers. Back in 2022, the bank announced its five-year goal to reach parity in ad spend across men and women’s sports media. This year, Ally claims it met that pledge, but Brimmer did not provide specific spen

Tiahn Wetzler, director of marketing, Adjust A common challenge for mobile gaming companies operating at scale is adapting infrastructure without disrupting performance. With changes to measurement frameworks happening at a record pace — from privacy developments and signal loss to data complexity and integration of AI systems — migrating infrastructure is both logistically complex and operationally sensitive, meaning it’s often procrastinated or ignored. If the journey to better outcomes see

Drew Groner, svp, head of sales and marketing, DIRECTV Advertising Live sports remain one of the last true appointment-viewing experiences — audiences don’t just tune in; they plan their schedules around it. That kind of attention is increasingly rare in modern media, and it is precisely why advertising inventory during live sports commands a premium.  However, every new rights deal in which leagues and teams change distribution channels adds another app, another login and anoth

This story was first published by Digiday sibling Modern Retail. Heineken USA is pouring more marketing dollars into soccer this year ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The brewing company, which has trademarked itself as “the official beer of soccer,” is not an official World Cup sponsor. However, it’s getting in on the larger summer soccer hype by launching a limited-edition soccer-themed 12-pack and 24-pack in retail partners across the U.S., including Publix. Heineken is also

AI media buying agents steal the headlines, but some of the highest-impact applications of agentic technology by brand advertisers has been in the form of media mix modeling (MMM), systems that monitor the impact of ad investments and help to divine a marketer’s next move. Related Insights Marketing on Platforms Why brands are shifting toward ‘less precise, more accurate’ gauges for paid social Read More Hershey’s has been work

The latest quarterly earnings calls for the ad tech sector are largely over for the latest reporting period, with bluster over yet more senior departures at The Trade Desk, and AppLovin’s continued rise (generating nearly $2 billion in Q1) dominating Q1 headlines. Related Insights Strategizing for the Future The Trade Desk’s $689M revenue beat is blunted by the departure of CSO Jacobson to OpenAI Read More Such numbers pa

This week’s Media Briefing will unpack BuzzFeed’s sale to Byron Allen, and the collapse in value of platform-era media companies. A look at the post-boom BuzzFeed era NYT’s warning to freelancers about AI use, Gawker’s legacy and more. BuzzFeed’s post-boom era BuzzFeed’s $120 million majority-stake sale to Byron Allen may have been a lifeline for the publisher, but it also underscores just how dramatically the economics of platform-era publishing have

AI agents are evolving quickly. In theory, agents are autonomous decision makers — automating campaign creation, optimizing ad buys and drafting pitch decks. In reality, marketers aren’t ready to give up control, establishing guardrails to keep agents in check. Marketers don’t have a lot of trust when it comes to AI agents in ad buying yet. But that mistrust isn’t unfounded. Hallucinations are reason enough for guardrails, per execs. An incorrect CPM could make or break an ad buy, leaving the

This State of the Industry Report, sponsored by Optable, examines agentic advertising and how publishers, advertisers and agencies are interacting with the medium — from investment and readiness to barriers and impact. Agentic AI is the latest optimization tactic across media, supporting initiatives like agentic advertising. However, because agentic AI is described as “a situation where multiple AI agents work together to complete complex tasks, with minimal oversight or intervention from a h

TikTok is opening its ads platform to AI agents with its new model context protocol (MCP) server and developer toolkit, aimed at automating campaign creation, management and optimization. TikTok Ads Model Context Protocol (or TikTok Ads MCP) Server will “effectively enable marketers to connect their own AI agents directly to the Tiktok ads platform so their AI systems can plan, launch and optimize campaigns without manual intervention,” said global head of product marketing, platform and core

This briefing is made available to all Digiday readers through apartnership with sponsor DirecTV Advertising This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how WBD’s programmatic advertising business has evolved with programmatic playing a bigger part in its upfront deals. WBD’s biddable upfront Netflix’s privacy suit, the upfront’s overarching pitch, YouTubers’ growth gurus and more WBD’s biddable upfront Upfront advertisers already represent a major share of Warner Bro

The upfront is no longer just a shop window for content Amazon owns, it’s now one for its ad tech too.  That’s a shift from how this period usually works. The tech pitch used to come after the content deal was done — a separate conversation, often with different people. Not anymore.  “There’s this big shift from these content-first decisions into more of this integrated approach, where you have premium content, deterministic signals and AI-driven technology all

Ad tech’s shift from an industry littered with point solutions to one built around integrated stacks has been underway for a while. It was only a matter of time before the acronyms followed.  Unified advertising platforms (UAP) is one such term. It hasn’t fully landed in the industry’s vocabulary yet, but give it time. It may be the clearest indication yet of where ad tech is headed: fewer players, more consolidation and a structural power shift that makes the current debate over supply

Last month, a U.S. Special Forces soldier was indicted for insider trading — not on stocks, but on a prediction market. He had detailed knowledge of a military operation. He bet on it. The platform where he placed those bets responded to the indictment with something close to a shrug. That shrug tells you everything about the world marketers are only beginning to understand. It’s one where a meme can move a market, and a market can become a meme. Where the internet’s lingua franca — iro

The Trade Desk’s Q1 revenues of $689 million may suggest holding-company spats are a mere bump in the road, but confirming the exit of CSO Samantha Jacobson hours before its market disclosure shows complications can come from all directions. The demand-side platform’s earnings release came as supply-side platform PubMatic reported revenue of $62.6 million for the period, while The Trade Desk also forecast Q2 revenue of “at least $750 million.” This capped off a seven-

OpenAI’s ads business is going global. Over the coming weeks it will start testing ads in its ChatGPT AI-powered chatbot in the U.K., Brazil, Japan, South Korea and Mexico. Those countries join the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand as markets where advertisers can buy ads in the app, though not all markets are equal. In the U.S., for instance, capabilities are more advanced and advertisers can reach logged-out users as well as logged-in users. Moreover, they can do that themselves after