Month: October 2026

SharkNinja got a taste of F1 fandom when its products turned up in Brad Pitt’s racing film last year. Fans warmed to the brand and plenty finally twigged that Shark and Ninja were the same company. Then the buzz faded.  “The movie was great but it spiked and then it left,” said Laura Dyer, svp […]

Advertisers funneling media dollars into social platforms, video and retail media channels in the final months of 2026 are boosting year-on-year media spending — but buyers and clients have their guards up for political shocks that could knock confidence during the run-in to Christmas. At a glance, the ad industry has entered the year’s final […]

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 […]