Over the last few months, it’s been widely chronicled that generative AI already requires massive amounts of energy to run, leading the International Energy Agency to recently project that global data center electricity demand will more than double by 2026, including in the U.S. 

This realization directly counters the efforts media agencies have made in recent years to reduce carbon emissions for themselves, their clients and even the media companies whose ad time and space they buy. 

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Media agencies are increasing their use of digital out of home channels in new ways as different data engagement and emerging technologies become a part of their arsenal, making the space increasingly attractive to maturing and legacy brands alike to think beyond traditional billboards.

With experimentation in digital and immersive displays to live feeds, agencies and clients are able to integrate live consumer data, heat mapping or location tracking and measurement in order to focus on other elements of performance – rather than just using OOH for brand awareness.

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In the case of integrated agency CG Life, the impetus is keeping stride with the faster pace of social media and communications with consumers as the health and life sciences space has grown in recent years. David Ormesher, CEO of CG Life, said this growth is sparked by a current “renaissance in life science innovation” — making health care communications and personalization for consumers an integral part of a health agency’s digital strategy.

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The latest iteration of that reality came out earlier in May when the ANA published the report, “The Acceleration of Principal Media (What Marketers Need to Know),” which tackled the growing practice among agencies of investing in media at non-disclosed prices to then resell to their clients, presumably at a markup to the agency.

The use of principal media is on the rise, notably by the agency holding companies, which are looking for profit wherever they can find it. As Jay Pattisall, vp and senior agency analyst at Forrester puts it, “That’s what’s driving the growth among those agencies that are demonstrating it.”

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The digital media agency network in early May launched Gradiant, an agency offshoot that focuses on brand visibility across the entire marketing funnel, and G-Comm, a retail media accelerator aimed at addressing the challenges in the retail landscape.

The two new units add to the agency’s umbrella of existing brands CvE, a marketing advisory firm, Tuff, a performance marketing agency, and Goodway, its managed service media and analytics business.

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When it comes to securing their portion of the $20 billion or so of advertising spend from marketers, per eMarketer estimates, independents have to employ creative strategies to ensure they can still get clients access to optimal inventory. That’s no easy task when holding companies come armed with hundreds of millions in spending power on behalf of those marketers.

At Media Culture, for instance, responding quickly to market changes and customer expectations “[gives] clients a degree of responsiveness that bigger holding corporations may struggle to match,” said Christena Garduno, Media Culture’s CEO.

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Publishers’ Q1 earnings showed a lot of promise this year compared to last. But that doesn’t necessarily mean things are all right as rain when it comes to the ad market. 

For nearly all of the five public publishers included in this report, digital advertising grew in the first quarter of 2024, with the exception of BuzzFeed. Digital subscriptions revenue also fared well in the first three months of the year for the three publishers that report that revenue line: Gannett, Dow Jones and The New York Times. Meanwhile, licensing and commerce revenue were two boons for Dotdash Meredith in the quarter as well. 

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A presidential election year has the potential to be a boon for news and politics publishers when it comes to drawing in and monetizing audiences. But even though 2024 is a lot like 2020 on paper, platform performance issues and an unreliable ad market may make this election cycle less lucrative than hoped. 

For Newsweek’s global chief commercial and growth officer Kevin Gentzel, this means testing out new audience growth strategies and revenue streams to get back to growth this year.

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Attendance was up more than 1,000 over 2023 to hit 3,600, and by and large attendees felt they were able to network and catch up with colleagues and clients just as, and in some cases more, effectively there as other tentpoles – be it CES, Cannes Lions, Dmexco or Advertising Week.

Some people in the know at Possible said they see the potential of the conference taking a bite out of Cannes’ attendance, most acutely by U.S.-based marketers who could save money by staying on this side of the Atlantic. Others, meanwhile, believe the event may move to earlier in the year, as a possible competitor to CES’ C Space attendance (which, given Kassan’s current contract spat, would be a jab at Medialink).

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The accompanying images of your professional peers, or vaguely familiar faces at least, resemble a dress rehearsal for the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity–the bougie-zenith of the ad industry’s annual calendar, which takes place in June each year.

However, what exactly drew thousands of the ad industry’s finest to Miami’s Fontainebleau, where they got to rub shoulders with their professional peers plus stars such as Ashanti, Janelle Monae, and Pitbull?

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“It’s less the promise and beginning to be the practical,” she said in a video interview with Digiday, adding, “I still don’t think it’s finite. We need many more use cases, many more examples, many more opportunities where we can show effort, result — effort result.”

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Boff pointed to market research as an example of where the practicality of AI is beginning to have an impact, in a good way, on an industry feature that has lingered too long on traditional methods.

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The combination doubles CG Life’s size, now totaling 150 employees together, and will allow the agencies to strengthen their focus on commercial life science brands and digital omnichannel strategies. Toolhouse, founded in 1995, specializes in working with biopharma companies to organize and strategize data, user-centric design and marketing technologies.

Financial terms of the acquisition, which closed on March 22, were not disclosed.

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The 10-year-old independent agency will handle all digital media buying and planning, reporting and optimization for the core Foot Locker brand as well as Champs Sports and Kids Foot Locker.

CEO Joe Yakuel said its success with current clients including The North Face and Rite Aid and previous work running digital media for Nike helped win over the new business despite the agency’s smaller size and resources compared to a holding company. Marketing at larger agencies is often focused on short-term revenue and siloed programs, Yakuel said.

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Early on this year, Digiday+ Research predicted that publishers would depend less on subscriptions as a revenue driver as they moved further into 2024. According to surveys conducted among publisher professionals every six months (including in the first quarter), that prediction might be coming true.

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IPG’s Magna unit, which issues quarterly ad-spend forecasts including its latest today, bumped up its 2024 expectations a full percentage point from December last year to 6.7%, excluding political ads. Independent media analyst Brian Wieser has increased his expectations (also ex-political) from 5.2% to 5.6%, a small percentage but when applied to hundreds of billions of dollars, it makes a difference. Finally, Forrester released its 2024 forecast two weeks ago, citing 6.6% growth this year to $357.3 billion.

Vincent Letang, Magna’s evp of global market intelligence, based the increase on a few factors: a rise in GDP expectations for the year, as well as slowing inflation and strong job numbers so far. 

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