The Digiday Podcast

Semafor technically had had a head of video before Adam Banicki stepped into the role this summer. But the role has changed with Banicki’s appointment. Instead of being strictly a newsroom role, Banicki’s position spans the editorial and business sides of Semafor.“I feel like I have like a really fun job where I get to talk to Ben [Smith, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor] every day about all the things that are going on in the newsroom, but then taking back a lot of that almost like programming to the commercial side and saying like, ’What can we do with this? How do we build out a revenue model?’” Banicki said during a live recording of the Digiday Podcast on Sept. 16 at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Key Biscayne, Florida.As Semafor’s head of video, Banicki reports directly to Smith but “with a dotted line to Rachel Oppenheim, our chief commercial officer,” he said. In addition to developing video programming ideas with Semafor’s newsroom, he collaborates with its commercial staff.“My first three months, I think, was really getting involved in the commercial side, helping shaping go-to-market decks, thinking about pricing strategy, joining kickoff calls to help close deals that were tied to video,” said Banicki.Soon his day-to-day duties will likely skew more toward video production. In October, Semafor will launch a new show focused on technology and hosted by its tech editor Reed Albergotti. That will bring Semafor’s portfolio to four shows, with plans to develop a daily news show “very soon,” said Banicki.

Ads are coming for smart refrigerator screens, car dashboards and AI search results. So what happens when everything becomes ad inventory? On this episode of the Digiday Podcast, hosts Tim Peterson and Kimeko McCoy dig into how far advertising can expand before the business of selling attention starts to break down.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit against Amazon’s on-platform search advertising business appears to be a tempest in a teapot. Amazon’s alleged opaque ad auction dynamics aren’t exactly beyond the pale when it comes to what ad buyers experience across platforms and the programmatic ad marketplace today. In this week’s episode, Digiday executive editor of news Seb Joseph joined the show to break down how ad buyers are reacting the Amazon-FTC case, what the situation reveals about modern ad auctions and how AI-powered ad platforms stand to remove even more transparency and control from ad buyers.

A lot can happen in a few months. A few months ago, NBCUniversal was secure within Comcast, LiveRamp was an independent ad tech company, Hank Green was unbesmirched, and publishers’ complaints about Google were simply that.

Then this summer happened.

In this week’s Digiday Podcast episode, hosts Kimeko McCoy and Tim Peterson recap the season’s biggest developments in the media and marketing industries and the questions they raise for the final stretch of 2026.

Google’s AI crawlers are eating away at publisher traffic by serving answers directly in search, but blocking them comes with risks. Digiday media reporter Sara Guaglione and executive editor of news Seb Joseph join this episode of the Digiday Podcast to break down what publishers actually stand to lose in the zero-click era—a core theme at the upcoming Digiday Publishing Summit in Miami this September.