Digiday

Marketers’ post-cookie preparedness has dropped by 23% since 2022 🍪 While publishers are attempting to quell marketers’ concerns about the state of the open programmatic ad market, the buy-side is indicating that there are bigger factors at play that are contributing to their lost appetite than just MFA and fraud scares alone. A study from Adobe found that fewer marketers are feeling prepared for third-party cookie deprecation than in years prior, with nearly half (49%) of their marketing strategies still reliant on third-party cookies. This is despite the fact that up until April, it looked like Google was finally going to close the cookie jar this year once and for all. Adobe’s study found also that only 28% of respondents spend at least half of their marketing budgets on cookie-based activations (down from 45% two years ago), but the majority of spend is being allocated to environments that help replicate the easy audience targeting experience, like social platforms’ walled gardens. ■ 62% of survey respondents said they plan to shift their spend primarily to walled garden ecosystems like social media platforms ■ 49% said they’re prioritizing activating first-party data ■ 42% said they are working directly with publishers Read more: https://buff.ly/4bmc06A

Inside Linda Yaccarino’s first 12-months as X’s CEO 👀 Let’s start with the good, and the most important: Yaccarino’s ambitious plan to transform X from a micro-blogging site into a full-fledged entertainment platform. She’s secured entertainment partnerships with WWE, NBA and WNBA. There’s also been a big push for creator collaborations with stars like Paris Hilton, MrBeast (Yaccarino interviewed MrBeast’s president Marc Hustvedt on stage at Cannes), and Khloe Kardashian. The latter was announced during the festival, alongside a distribution deal with multimedia platform Verzuz, co-founded by Swizz Beatz and Timbaland and a six-episode Offseason reality sports docuseries about players in the National Women’s Soccer League that’ll stream on X. But in her bid to keep X in sync with the evolving social media landscape, Yaccarino has faced her fair share of hiccups along the way. Read more: https://buff.ly/4eE7W4D

As Oracle’s ad business collapses, layoffs and uncertainty ripple through the industry 📝 Any hope of Oracle’s advertising division continuing under new ownership is fading fast, as the company’s bosses show zero interest in selling it off. They’re done with advertising, leaving its executives to face the fallout. Digiday understands several hundred layoffs were involved in Oracle’s advertising division’s closure, with the majority of those staffers learning of the plans when they were announced publicly during the tech company’s latest earnings call earlier this month. The layoffs actually started last week, leaving a skeleton crew with just two weeks’ notice before they’re also gone. By then, Oracle will have axed 900 execs. However, many might not have to search far for new opportunities, as ad tech CEOs were already scouting talent during the Cannes Lions festival last week. Read more: https://buff.ly/3zkJWDz

In this edition of the Digiday+ Research Briefing, we examine how Amazon is facing retail media competition from Walmart and Target, how publishers are preparing for Amazon Prime Day despite a drop in affiliate commerce revenue and how X’s CEO was on a mission to drum up business at Cannes, as seen in recent data from Digiday+ Research.

Back in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement, agencies picked up the hiring of DE&I executives in 2021 to follow through on their diversity commitments and, ultimately, keep them accountable. Since then, a number of those executives have departed from those roles on their own terms, with many citing bureaucratic red tape and burnout. Others, however, have been pushed out of their roles, with higher-ups blaming economic headwinds and financial pressure. In 2022, 22% of marketing leaders said their top priority was diversity, equity and inclusion. Since then, that number has decreased to 18%, according to MediaLink’s 2024 Marketer’s Forecast report.

We are entering the era of the autonomous AI workplace. In other words, some of us officially have AI co-workers. Autonomous AI is a branch of AI in which systems and tools are advanced enough to act with limited human oversight and involvement. That means that as we continue to use more AI tools and delegate work to bots, they will become workers themselves and end up being self-sufficient in many ways. They are AI agents, that interact with their environment, collect data, and use the data to perform self-determined tasks to meet predetermined goals.

Digiday’s survey found that, outside of Amazon, a whopping 85% of marketers invested the most in Walmart’s retail media platform as of the first quarter of this year. Just six months prior, 54% of marketers said they were spending at least a very small portion of their marketing budget on Walmart’s #retailmedia network. And a year ago, Digiday’s survey only had nine respondents out of more than 180 say they invested in RMNs outside of #Amazon. So clearly there’s been a lot of growth in the space, and it’s possible that marketers are starting to see #Walmart's RMN as a given when it comes to allocating their retail media spend. #retailmedianetwork #RMN Story by Julia Russell Tabisz

As platforms such as Fortnite and Roblox become full-service platforms for digital life, the music industry is moving beyond virtual concerts. These days, musicians are integrating more deeply into virtual worlds to promote their album releases and bring in new fans. Music has been a key element of the #metaverse from the start. In 2020, Travis Scott’s virtual concert inside #Fortnite was many of its participants’ first introduction to the metaverse concept. But although Scott’s concert reportedly grossed roughly $20 million through in-game item sales, it was a one-off event that was not tied to an album release or marketing campaign. Since the concert, Scott has never returned to Fortnite. #Roblox In this piece by Alexander Lee, we speak to David Cushman of Warner Music Group, Joseph Khoury of Atlantic Records, Yonatan Raz-Fridman of Supersocial Inc., and Bryan Biniak of Songtradr.

There are many puzzling aspects to Oracle’s choice to wind down its ads business, but the scramble by competitors to fill the gap isn’t one of them. The race kicked into high gear last week when it became clear there would be no life after #Oracle for its ad divisions. Advertisers, publishers and ad tech vendors had to find alternatives fast as a result, sparking a swift (albeit reluctant) response from plenty of companies. And who could blame them? Sure, it’s opportunistic, but Oracle’s ads business made $300 million in its last financial year. Few ad tech bosses would turn their noses up at even a slice of that, especially in today’s tough market. In this piece by Ronan Shields and Seb Joseph, we speak to Mario Diez of PEER39, Adam Schenkel and Peter Wallace of GumGum, Nick Reid of DoubleVerify, Rachmiel (Rocky) Moss of DeepSee.io - Publisher Intelligence, and Scott Cunningham.