The Digiday Podcast
The Digiday Podcast is a weekly show on the big stories and issues that matter to brands, agencies and publishers as they transition to the digital age.
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Why some creators are now back auditing their brand deals
<p>Hootsuite’s partnership with ICE sparked controversy earlier this year, leading creators to take a closer look at the companies they work with. On this episode of the Digiday Podcast, Tameka Bazile shares why she ended her deal with Hootsuite, how it prompted her to audit other brand partnerships, and what creators can learn about balancing ethics, audience expectations, and income.</p>
ChatGPT enters the ad game. Now what?
<p>The other shoe has finally dropped. After months of speculation, OpenAI officially began to test ads in ChatGPT in the U.S. Meanwhile, marketers are still trying to read the tea leaves around OpenAI's ad team, data insights and more as chatbot competition intensifies. Digiday's senior platforms reporter Krystan Scanlon joins the Digiday Podcast to make sense of it all.</p>
Digiday ranks the best and worst Super Bowl ads of 2026
<p>Anthropic took a jab at OpenAI's ad product launch and T-Mobile and Coinbase used The Backstreet Boys top play up millennial nostalgia. Now that the dust has settled around the 60-plus Super Bowl ad spots rolled out this year, Tim Peterson and Kimeko McCoy are joined by Sunny Bonnell, co-founder and CEO of global brand strategy and design agency Motto, to reflect on the best and worst commercials from Super Bowl 2026.</p>
Inside NBCUniversal’s test to use AI agents to sell ads against a live NFL game
<p>Traditional TV — let alone a live NFL playoff game — might be the last ad inventory type you’d think to test trying out AI agents against. And yet that’s exactly what NBCUniversal did last month.</p> <p>The media conglomerate ran a test with ad agency RPA, marketing analytics firm Newton Research and Comcast-owned ad tech firm FreeWheel to have AI agents participate in buying an ad against a live NFL playoff game. But did it work?</p> <p>“It works. It is a functioning technical proof-of-concept that accurately represents what the buyer wants to buy and what the seller...
Creators vs. influencers: Inside the divide
<p>Is there a difference between a creator and an influencer. If so, what’s the difference and why does it matter to marketers? On this episode of the Digiday Podcast, Digiday staffers debate the topic.</p>
The top AI platforms for publishers, ranked
<p>Two years after OpenAI signed its first content licensing deal with Axel Springer, the field of AI platforms doing business with publishers has expanded exponentially. Especially just in the past year.</p> <p>But then the publishers have to evaluate those options. Fortunately Digiday senior media editor Jessica Davies and senior media reporter Sara Guaglione have done a lot of that legwork in drafting a scorecard of the major AI platforms based on interviews with publishers. They joined the show to review the rankings and share the reasoning behind why platforms from Meta to Microsoft, Anthropic to OpenAI may...
CES 2026: Agentic AI hype vs. media buyers' pragmatism
<p>This year's CES was all about agentic AI and little else. Digiday executive editor Joseph was boots-on-the-ground for this year's show in Las Vegas. He joins this episode of the Digiday Podcast to make sense of this year's event, and what it means as 2026 gets underway.</p>
'The year where the dust settles': Digiday editors share 2026 predictions
<p>This week's episode takes a look at how 2025's cliffhangers—everything from Netflix's planned acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery to the ripple effects of the Omnicom-IPG merger—and how it all could play out in 2026. Digiday managing editor Sara Jerde and executive editor of news Seb Joseph join hosts Tim Peterson and Kimeko McCoy to try and read the 2026 tea leaves.</p>
‘A year of loose ends’: Digiday editors share top takeaways from 2025
<p>This year was filled with major developments, from Netflix’s planned WBD deal to Omnicom’s acquisition of IPG to the introduction of AI-only video feeds. But there were also developments that didn’t really happen, like the U.S. spinoff of TikTok and Google’s third-party cookie deprecation. Digiday editors Sara Jerde and Seb Joseph joined hosts Kimeko McCoy and Tim Peterson to recap the year that was (and wasn’t).</p>
The Disney-OpenAI deal and generative AI copyright concerns
<p>This week’s episode recaps Disney’s deal to open up its character library to OpenAI and Google’s reported plan to roll out ads in its Gemini chatbot. </p> <p>Then Davis Wright Tremaine partner Rob Driscoll joins the show to delve into the copyright concerns and potential trademark issues surrounding brands’ use of generative AI tools (16:40).</p>
