This week’s Media Briefing looks at how the publishing industry’s fight against AI scraping is expanding beyond technical defenses into a transatlantic push for legislation requiring bots to identify themselves. AI scraping is growing at a rapid clip, and publishers are already fighting it at an enormous scale.  Scraping accounted for 70.9% of malicious bot […]

Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun said this week that he’s pitching directly to CEOs, and the industry hasn’t stopped chewing it on since. Some of the messages landing in Digiday’s inbox have him down as a leader in the fullest sense. Plenty of others aren’t buying it. How many chief executives, the doubters ask, decide […]

Even the annual report is brand copy now as far as the LLMs are concerned. They don’t separate the ad campaign from the investor documents. Put a question about a retailer to one of them and it pulls from the company’s site, product pages, press coverage and financial filings with little regard for who wrote […]

The biggest creators are cutting their brand rosters. The partners they keep are being asked for equity, product input and, in some cases, a job title.  That was my read after following Advertising Week New York from afar this week, through the panel livestreams, recordings and conversations with sources who were there. Alix Earle put […]

Last year, Dhar Mann was just another speaker at AWNY; this year, he’s the main event.  The mega creator is the ad conference’s first chief creator officer, and his job this week is to broker deals between creators and brands. He and the event’s organizers want those introductions to produce $100 million in creator-brand business […]

AI is no longer a novelty in media planning. Everyone knows about it, and most organizations are already using it in some form. What’s more interesting is what AI is beginning to expose about the advertising industry itself. The industry has moved past the discovery phase, and the bar has moved. Campaign briefs now treat […]

Instacart is focused on value and affordability to unlock its next phase of growth.  Speaking at the Groceryshop conference in Las Vegas this week, CEO Chris Rogers laid out Instacart’s strategy to break down the cost barriers holding consumers back from purchasing weekly grocery hauls online. In working more closely with retailers on strategy, Instacart […]

The AI content licensing ecosystem has improved for publishers in the past few years, with AI companies now increasingly expected to compensate publishers for their content, or at least give them the ability to opt out of its use, Adam Greenberg, vp of strategic partnerships, said onstage at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Miami last […]

Give it a year, maybe less, and a pitch might spend as much time proving a video shows up when someone searches for something as it does proving how many people watched it. That shift traces back to how LLMs actually work. Some lean on creators more than others, but across the board, creators have […]

In an era when website visits are tanking, primarily due to AI-overviews, evaluating the value of website visits, and the associated price of ad inventory is in flux. And it’s within this context that Google – the entity which is concurrently the the largest provider of AIOs, ad tech offerings, and the industry’s most popularly […]