The Digiday Podcast

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Duolingo's head of global social strategy, Katherine Chan, talks about making unhinged content work and learning from mistakes Jan 02, 2024

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Social media is in its so-called unhinged era, where social media managers are breaking the digital fourth wall and speaking the language of the internet from branded accounts. At the helm of the unhinged social media movement is a big green owl, Duo, brand mascot for the language learning app Duolingo.

Duo has made a name for itself on TikTok with funny skits as the social media team behind the owl works to humanize the brand. But sometimes, like Icarus, Duo sometimes found itself flying too close to the sun. Last year, the brand came under fire for a comment on a TikTok about Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s defamation trial.

It’s been a lesson in toeing the line, learning what works and what doesn’t. Experimentation may be the cornerstone of Duolingo’s social media strategy, but Duo’s unhinged personality is here to stay for now with the company planning to explore other character personalities from the Duolingo universe in the future, said Katherine Chan, head of global social and influencer strategy at Duolingo.

“We have a running rule that we have no rules,” Chan said on the most recent episode of the Digiday Podcast. “We basically have a set of guardrails in terms of absolute no's for the brand. But outside of that, there’s a lot of freedom and empowerment to try to draw the shortest line from ideation to post.”

‘More volatile now’: Digiday editors share top takeaways from 2023 Dec 26, 2023

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This year was another one for the advertising and media history books, but not for the ways that marketers and media execs hoped for at the start of 2023.

Brands’ advertising budgets never quite found their footing and the competition for ad revenue only got steeper. On top of that, the platforms are no longer reliable places to drive traffic or revenue but competing with their scale is a losing game. Plus generative AI is quickly finding its way into virtually every facet of the industry — for worse or better.

In this final episode of the year of the Digiday Podcast, senior marketing editor Kristina Monllos and senior media editor Tim Peterson join co-hosts Kimeko McCoy and Kayleigh Barber to discuss some of the top trends from the past year and which challenges and opportunities are expected to continue in 2024.

Digiday’s History of Ad Tech: Episode 4 with Ana Milicevic Dec 22, 2023

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The final episode of Digiday’s History of ad tech discusses how the digital media industry has moved faster than those charged to keep it in check, with Ana Milicevic of Sparrow Advisers sharing her insights.

In this episode, she discusses how the blurred lines between data management platforms, customer data platforms, and now, data clean rooms have only served to confuse matters.

Now that legislation such as GDPR and CPRA have come into force, privacy is a top-line matter. Digiday’s History of Ad Tech charts its development.

In this episode, she discusses:

How data management and ad tech started to blur
How the creeping tide of privacy legislation influenced investment in ad tech
Big Tech’s role in the future of the space

Justin Smith explains how Semafor achieved profitable months in its first full year Dec 19, 2023

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Semafor is about to close the book on its first full calendar year, having launched in October 2022 as a media and events company. And despite launching during a tumultuous time for any media organization, Semafor’s co-founder and CEO Justin Smith said that his team had profitable months this fall, even coming close to breaking even in the fourth quarter of 2023.

This accomplishment was made possible thanks, in part, to a combination of designating events as a core segment of the business as well as keeping the team as lean as possible for as long as possible, Smith said on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.

And in the coming year, a continued focus on events, expanding the brand to additional international markets and investing in the website are all central to Semafor’s second year growth strategy.

Digiday’s History of Ad Tech: Episode 3 with Joanna O'Connell Dec 18, 2023

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Joanna O’Connell is one of the most recognizable names in ad tech, a fame she built over the course of three decades as an industry analyst, and marketer, among other roles. O’Connell is now evp of innovation at R3.

In this episode of Digiday’s Oral History of Ad Tech, she speaks with Seb Joseph about her role in helping to build one of the media industry’s first agency trading desks at Publicis Groupe during her role at Razorfish in the mid-to-late 2000s.

In this discussion, she covers

The desire to illuminate the black box of programmatic advertising
Holding companies’ desire to use ad tech as a means of carving out new revenue in austere times
How the ‘agency-friendly’ model of ad tech prevailed

In the coming weeks, Digiday’s History of Ad Tech, produced by Digiday Media’s audio producer Sara Patterson, lifts the lid on some of the key undercurrents in ad tech over the last 20 years with Seb Joseph, senior news editor, and Ronan Shields, senior reporter, advertising technology, in conversation with some of the key players during that time.

Airbnb’s global head of marketing Hiroki Asai talks returning to big, bold campaigns and owning the brand narrative Dec 12, 2023

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In the wake of measurement woes and data privacy initiatives muddying digital targeting capabilities, a number of companies have pivoted to become less reliant on targeting customers via third-party cookies to generate quick sales via performance marketing. Instead, they've become more focused on boosting brand awareness to re-familiarize customers with their brand.

Airbnb is one of those companies that has made that pivot, moving up the marketing funnel to more brand awareness tactics to bring new customers to Airbnb, said Hiroki Asai, global head of marketing at Airbnb. Notably, the company has recently been grappling with local government efforts to squash short term rentals and consumer backlash over increased pricing. In the midst of those things, the company is looking to carve out its own share of voice and better own its brand narrative.

“We have a lot of messages that we want to put out there that are our messages,” Asai said on the most recent episode of the Digiday Podcast. “When you’re over reliant on those performance channels, you end up either reacting to other people’s messages, or in that vacuum, other people will just create stories and messages about you that you can't control."

Digiday’s History of Ad Tech: Episode 2 with Ari Paparo Dec 11, 2023

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There are few better placed to critique and narrate the history of the digital media landscape, never mind the sub-sector of ad tech, than Ari Paparo.

The serial entrepreneur and ‘first influencer of ad tech’ – sorry @AdtechGod – now helps to demystify and humanize the often dry milieu of digital media PR in his missives over at Marketecture.

This week, he speaks with Digiday reporter Ronan Shields in the second installment of Digiday’s Oral History Of Ad Tech in a conversation that focuses on the state of the industry during the opening decade of the 21st Century. His insights include:

The hustle that was ad tech in the 1990s
Paparo’s input to DoubleClick’s turnaround, and eventual sale to Google
The incredible business model of ad networks in the 2000s
How the rise of the ad exchange became the fall of the ad network
And just who invented what in ad tech

Spill co-founder Alphonzo Terrell on attracting advertisers to marginalized social communities Dec 05, 2023

Show notes

Big advertisers are seemingly ready to abandon X (formerly Twitter) for good this time thanks to owner Elon Musk’s latest antics and an uptick in anti-semitic posts on the platform.

In X’s absence, advertisers may once again find themselves looking for the social media’s next town square after failing to be wooed by X alternatives like Mastodon and Bluesky earlier this year.

Enter Spill. It’s been just over a year since the iOS social media platform with a ‘meme-forward’ aesthetic launched with former Twitter employees Alphonzo "Phonz" Terrell and DeVaris Brown at the helm. It’s not that the duo are trying to re-create Twitter. In fact, Terrell says Spill is an online safe space for LGBTQIA+, POC and other historically marginalized communities. The two have spent the last year on product developments for users as well offerings for advertisers in hopes to mark Spill’s territory in a rapidly changing social media landscape.

“There's been some very organic integrations and opportunities for brands to plug in and put some shine on what the [Spill] community is already doing,” Terrell said on the most recent episode of the Digiday Podcast, “and also create some new opportunities to just have really rich, fun conversations.”

Digiday’s History of Ad Tech: Episode 1 with Brian O’Kelley Dec 04, 2023

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One of the Godfathers of ad tech on creating an industry, competing with Big Tech, and exactly why he didn’t join AT&T, plus much more

Few would argue Brian O’Kelley’s right to claim the title of being one of the Godfathers of ad tech, for what is still one of the nascent spaces of the media industry, his tenure in the sector dates back three decades.

During this time, O’Kelley has helped build two of the most notable independent ad tech companies that later sold to the biggest names in telecoms and internet history, and now at the helm of Scope3, he aims to decarbonize digital media.

However, in the first episode of Digiday’s four-part history of ad tech podcast, hear his first-hand, candid account of some of the most crucial industry developments. These include how O’Kelley:

– helped build the first ad exchange at Right Media, only to feel the burn after its $680 million sale to Yahoo, and then later built one ad tech’s most iconic companies

– brushed shoulders with (as well as ruffled the feathers of) Madison Avenue titans in AppNexus’ toe-to-toe battle with Google in the ad tech power game

– walked away from AT&T, after its $1.6 billion purchase of his company, over concerns on the telco’s strategic misalignment

In the coming weeks, Digiday’s History of Ad Tech, produced by Digiday Media’s audio producer Sara Patterson, lifts the lid on some of the key undercurrents in ad tech over the last 20 years with Seb Joseph and Ronan Shields in conversation with some of the key players during that time. Subscribe to the WorkLife podcast now on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Google’s 2024 cookie deprecation deadline is still on, says vp of global advertising Dan Taylor Nov 28, 2023

Show notes

Between the Department of Justice’s antitrust suit against Google and the impending self-imposed deadline for removing third-party cookies from its Chrome browser, there is a lot on the technology megacorp’s plate.

But Dan Taylor, the company’s vp of global advertising, is confident that nothing will change the timeline that Google has set for cookie depreciation: “Cookies will be phased out completely from Chrome at the end of 2024.”

On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Taylor discusses how he and his team are continuing to get the third-party cookie alternative solutions off the ground and testing their efficacy ahead of the end of year 2024 deadline. He also speaks on why he’s confident that the ad business will remain intact despite the DOJ lawsuit addressing its dominance in ad tech infrastructure.

“We disagree with the DOJ’s claims. We have no intention of selling or divesting this business. In fact, we’re focused more than ever on helping our publisher partners and our advertiser partners deliver great ROI and great monetization, especially in a time of economic and geopolitical and many other types of uncertainty that we’re all living in today,” said Taylor.

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