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, […]
How Has Pokémon Captured Live Streaming Audiences?
TL;DR Takeaways by Stream Hatchet: _ Mainline titles are still the biggest drawcards for Pokémon despite many spin-offs, with Pokémon Scarlet/Violet’s highest 30 day period seeing nearly twice the hours watched of the next most popular game Pokémon Legends: Arceus Nostalgia is a huge driving factor here: In the last year and a half, Pokémon […]
OpenAI is betting on consent as it brings ChatGPT ads to Europe
OpenAI is bringing ads to ChatGPT in Europe and is starting where Meta ended up. It is building its European ad business on consent from the start. OpenAI detailed how it will process user data across the region once ads go live later this month in a new European Union privacy policy, posted on Friday […]
European publishers are getting hit harder by AI bot scraping
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 […]
Instrument taps tech-driven creative immediately with new clients.
This Media Buying Briefing covers the latest in agency news and media buying for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Monday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series → No one can dispute that technology has muscled its way into the world of marketing in such a strong way, it’s now a […]
Are Battle Royales Really Becoming Unpopular?
TL;DR Takeaways by Stream Hatchet: The Battle Royale genre is still going strong, but it depends upon just five franchises: Garena Free Fire, PUBG, Call of Duty, Fortnite, and Apex Legends Although Battle Royales hit a low of just 340M hours watched in Q4 2025 due to competition from Extraction Shooters, they’ve since rebounded Battle […]
WPP’s boss looks toward ‘mixed economy’ business model
Loud as the chatter about outcome-based remuneration is across the holdco space, the reality of it is still some way off, according to one of its most vocal proponents, WPP CEO Cindy Rose. It’s a notable admission given Rose has made outcome-based pay a core pillar of WPP’s turnaround plan, overhauling how global client leaders […]
Compute is about to become the next big commodity in advertising
Compute is about to become the next big commodity in advertising. The economics demand it. AI has gotten expensive enough, fast enough, that holdco CEOs are now being asked outright how funding it won’t come at the expense of staying profitable. The IAB Europe’s chief economist Daniel Knapp put it plainly: “No one really knows […]
How Can Chinese Game Publishers Find Viewers on Streaming?
TL;DR Takeaways by Stream Hatchet: TikTok Live brings in over half of all viewership for the top 10 Chinese-published games South East Asian audiences are the biggest supporters of Chinese-published games, mainly due to the overwhelming popularity of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang esports Newer releases show promise for exported titles in big franchises, with Marvel […]
‘The marketplace hasn’t seen what the cost of this AI is’
Omnicom CEO John Wren just said the quiet part out loud: nobody’s actually priced AI yet. The admission came on the holdco’s Q2 earnings call yesterday, in response to an analyst question on where AI is driving the biggest cost savings, and, more pointedly, whether those savings are flowing back into client marketing budgets or […]