The Digiday Podcast

In this episode, Digiday senior marketing reporter Sam Bradley joins Digiday Podcast co-hosts Tim Peterson and Kimeko McCoy to break down Netflix's massive ad business glow up, and how the streaming giant is rewriting the streaming ad business playbook.

The AI ad race is heating up. OpenAI is staffing up and cutting deals to win brand budgets from Meta and Google. On this episode of the Digiday Podcast, Digiday senior platforms reporter Krystal Scanlon joins hosts Kimeko McCoy and Tim Peterson to breakdown the ad business playbook.

Major agencies are pulling back ad spend from The Trade Desk’s OpenPath platform, citing concerns of hidden fees and lack of transparency. Meanwhile, TTD is shifting its payment model for identity providers, like LiveRamp and Experian. All said, The Trade Desk is facing a new set of rising tensions with agencies over transparency — and more importantly, programmatic control.

Mondelez vp of global digital commerce, Andrew Lederman, joins the Digiday Podcast to talk through how the CPG giant is aggressively shifting its digital commerce strategy to optimize for AI, ensuring brands like Oreo dominate agentic search.

The Guardian didn’t want to build an AI chatbot. Not a reader-facing one anyway. Not at the risk of that chatbot misrepresenting the news publisher’s journalism and undermining readers’ trust.

“We’re not going to die if we don’t build a chatbot tomorrow. We need to be really clear about what the threats are externally, but ultimately what we have is something that’s worth protecting,” said Chris Moran, head of editorial innovation at The Guardian, during a live recording of the Digiday Podcast at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado, on March 23.

While not a chatbot, The Guardian has begun to roll out its first reader-facing AI product. But it doesn’t really look like an AI product.

Called Storylines, the product is an AI-generated spin on the related links module common to publishers’ pages. It currently appears on a subset of The Guardian’s so-called “tag” pages, which typically list articles related to a given topic, such as “Trump,” in reverse-chronological order. Amid this article feed is an unassuming box with a selection of related articles threaded to a given narrative or storyline.