Next in Media spoke with Drew Muller, VP and General Manager of House of Highlights, about how the Warner Discovery-owned property is looking to bridge sports fandom with top creators' content via the Creator League. The event, founded in 2023, features top creators such as Kai Cenat, Jesser and FaZe Rug playing a series of tournaments in sports such as slamball, dodgeball and basketball for big prize money, both on social platforms and streaming services like HBO Max.

💡Takeaways:

• 🔄 Evolving Beyond Aggregation: Media brands are transitioning from being simple content aggregators to becoming original content producers to keep their audience engaged. 
• 🎯 Prioritizing the Youth Audience: Despite reaching a mass scale of over 100 million followers, House of Highlights focuses on its core under-34 sports fan base to maintain its brand voice and avoid being diluted by trying to appeal to everyone. 
• 📈 The Rise of CTV and YouTube: The growth of YouTube consumption on TV devices (CTV) signifies a new "lean-back" viewing environment for younger audiences, which presents a significant opportunity for advertisers. 
• 🤝 Partnerships Beyond Traditional Ads: Brands are moving past traditional ad placements and integrating themselves into the "fabric of the competition" within custom content. 
• 🏆 Creating Owned Sports Leagues: Instead of only covering traditional sports, media companies can create their own leagues, like the "Creator League" by House of Highlights, featuring creators and personalities. 

🎙 Guest: Dan Muller

🎤 Host: Mike Shields

📺 Sponsor: VuePlanner

🎬 Producer: FEL Creative

Next in Media chatted with Rich Bloom, GM, Creator Programs & EVP, Business Development at Tubi, about the Fox-owned streamers new creator program, which has quickly expanded for five to 50 participants. Bloom also talked about Tubi's overall growth, Gen Z misconceptions, and whether TV needs to adopt more YouTube-like qualities.

💡Takeaways:

• 🎬 Creator Content is Blurring the Lines with Traditional TV: The distinction between content from native digital creators and traditional Hollywood content is becoming increasingly blurry, with creators now producing longer-form, high-quality content that is being watched on television.
• 🤝 Collaborative Partnerships are a New Path to Hollywood: Tubi is creating a program called "Tubi For Creators" that provides native digital creators with a path to elevate their careers and businesses by giving them a way to work with Tubi.
• 📈 Success Comes from Leveraging Existing Audiences: The success of Tubi’s original movie Sideline was a result of bringing together the built-in fandoms of a popular Wattpad novel and a huge TikTok star, Noah Beck, who was eager to cross over into acting.
• 🚫 Accessibility and Low Friction are Key to Attracting Young Viewers: The absence of a paywall on Tubi makes it an accessible platform that encourages young audiences, like those on TikTok, to easily transition from a clip on their phone to watching the full content on Tubi.
• 💰 Creators Are the New Media Startups: Creators are seen as sophisticated media startups that produce content, own their own IP, have large distribution channels, and have huge, loyal fan bases.

🎙 Guest: Rich Bloom

🎤 Host: Mike Shields

📺 Sponsor: Elemental TV & Linkedin

🎬 Producer: FEL Creative

Next in Media spoke with Marketecture CEO Ari Paparo, author of the new book "Yield: How Google Bought, Built, and Bullied Its Way to Advertising Dominance" about how Google was able to build a monopoly on programmatic ads, despite so many people in the ad industry shouting about it for years - and whether we can stop the next one.

💡Takeaways:

• 🏛️ The initial small scale of programmatic advertising in the early 2000s made it difficult for regulators to foresee its future dominance, allowing Google's DoubleClick acquisition to proceed with less scrutiny than it might warrant today.
• ⚔️ Google's ownership of the ad server provided a significant competitive advantage, enabling it to "snipe" bids and secure ad inventory by having insight into auction prices.
• 🔍 Regulators initially overlooked the critical advantage of Google's ad server being connected to its exchange, a factor that proved more significant than simply a company selling ads also owning a marketplace.
• 🤫 Google's acquisition of Invite Media (which became DV360) for a relatively low price (around $80 million) reportedly allowed it to avoid significant antitrust scrutiny, highlighting a potential loophole in regulatory oversight based on transaction size.
• ⚖️ The lack of specific regulations governing advertising market transactions, unlike financial markets, meant that the ad industry operated largely on "best behavior and contract law," creating vulnerabilities for anti-competitive practices.
• 🗣️ Publisher dissatisfaction with Google's actions, such as removing features like UPR, played a significant role in fueling antitrust scrutiny and demonstrating the company's "total arrogance".
• 🌍 Unlike the US, the Digital Markets Act in Europe provides regulators with tools to intervene based on a company's scale of power, offering a potential model for preventing future monopolies in the digital advertising space.

🎙 Guest: Ari Paparo

🎤 Host: Mike Shields

📺 Sponsor: Elemental TV

🎬 Producer: FEL Creative

Next in Media spoke with WPP Media's Jessica Brown and Spark Foundry Worldwide's Kelly Metz, focusing on YouTube's growing role in the TV marketplace, the shift towards holistic video measurement, the increasing importance of AI and streamlined approaches in media buying, and the evolving challenges and opportunities in creator partnerships and cross-platform attribution.

💡Takeaways:

• 📺 YouTube's Growing TV Presence: YouTube is increasingly seen as a significant part of the TV landscape, with viewership numbers supporting its inclusion in TV consumption.
• 📱 Short-Form Content on TV: YouTube Shorts are surprisingly popular on television, prompting discussions on whether short-form content like TikTok and YouTube Shorts should be considered alongside traditional TV in video strategies.
• 🚀 Social-First and Short-Form Strategies: Brands should consider starting with social-first and short-form content, depending on their audience and message, as there are various options for reaching consumers.
• 🤝 Streamlined Creator Partnerships: While finding and activating creators at scale remains challenging, companies are making strategic acquisitions and developing agile processes to simplify creator deals and get campaigns to market quickly.
• 📊 Need for Holistic Measurement: There's a strong demand for better, more comprehensive, and consistent measurement across all media platforms, including walled gardens, to compare performance effectively and understand ROI.
• 🤖 AI and Tech in Media Buying: Technology and AI are becoming increasingly important for media buying, helping to streamline approaches, inform product choices, and create more effective and impactful campaigns.

🎙 Guests: Jessica Brown & Kelly Metz

🎤 Host: Mike Shields

📺 Sponsor: Elemental TV

🎬 Producer: FEL Creative

This episode is brought to you by Walmart Connect. From homepage to home improvement. Win Carts and Minds with Walmart Connect.

Next in Media spoke with Sarah Hofstetter, chairwoman of Profitero, a division of Publicis, about the haves and have nots in retail media, whether the big players TV presence is going to cause a bifurcation in the market, and what agentic shopping might do to the whole category.

💡Takeaways:

• 💸 Retail Media Explosion & Consolidation: The retail media sector has seen significant growth, with major players like Amazon and Walmart developing substantial advertising businesses, leading to a tiered market with a few dominant players and a long tail of smaller networks.
• 🔄 Buyer vs. Seller Disconnect: There's a fundamental disconnect between media buyers who desire consolidation and retailers who view retail media as a crucial revenue stream from suppliers, creating tension in the market.
• 🛍️ Shifting Budget Allocation & Mindset: Traditional shopper marketing budgets, historically controlled by sales teams for in-store presence, are now clashing with digital media spending, requiring a shift in mindset within brands to prioritize "digital end-caps" like search and display.
• 🛒 Omnichannel Attribution Complexity: Measuring the impact of digital shelf presence on in-store purchases and vice-versa is a significant challenge, as current attribution models often fail to connect these fluid customer journeys.
• 🤖 AI's Impact on Shopping & Search: Agentic AI is poised to disrupt traditional search and shopping behaviors, compelling retailers, agencies, and brands to collaborate on co-creating future shopping experiences and leveraging AI for workflow automation and efficiency.

🎙 Guest: Sarah Hofstetter

🎤 Host: Mike Shields

📺 Sponsor: Walmart Connect

🎬 Producer: FEL Creative

In this episode of Next in Media, Mike Shields interviews Dani Mariano, CEO of Razorfish, about their research into Gen Alpha, highlighting this generation's unique media consumption habits, brand maturity, and influence on household purchasing decisions, as well as Razorfish's "creator collab" program designed to meet the evolving demands of creator-centric marketing.

💡 Takeaways:

• 👶 Gen Alpha is more "Gen Z than Gen Z" at age 10 and will fundamentally change marketing, moving beyond the "mini-millennial" or "mini-Gen Z" expectations that marketers had for previous generations.
• 🤝 Gen Alpha seeks co-creation with brands, desiring to be part of shaping a brand's future rather than just earning loyalty through transactional means.
• 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Gen Alpha, referred to as the "gateway generation," holds significant influence over household purchasing decisions, including major items like smart refrigerators and cars, due to their consumption of influencer content.
• 📈 Gen Alpha exhibits extreme brand maturity, favoring sophisticated brands like Nike, Apple, and Samsung at age 10, unlike previous generations who preferred typical young-people brands such as cookies and cereal.
• 🎯 Gen Alpha has twice as many interests as Gen Z did at the same age, requiring marketers to consider how influencer programs can scale and break through a high volume of content consumption.
• 📝 Razorfish utilizes an in-house "creator collab" with on-staff creators to quickly produce polished, on-brief social content for clients' organic feeds, distinct from traditional influencer programs focused on creator followings.
• 🤖 AI-powered decisioning tools, like those at Publicis Groupe, are crucial for understanding audiences at an individual level, enabling marketers to match content format with media platforms for targeted reach and efficient media strategy.

🎙 Guest: Dani Mariano

🎤 Host: Mike Shields

📺 Sponsor: VuePlanner

🎬 Producer: FEL Creative

Grace Kao, CMO of Snap, discusses Snapchat's unique position as a platform focused on authentic connection and creativity, highlighting its diverse audience (consumers, B2B, developers) and innovative features like Promoted Places on the Snap Map and opportunities for brands in Chat, emphasizing the platform's ease of use and its appeal to a generation valuing real self-expression.

💡Takeaways:

• 📸 Camera-First Communication: Snapchat's core design, opening directly to a camera, has fostered a culture where anyone can create and easily share their point of view, emphasizing connection over curated perfection. 
• 🤝 Diverse Audience Engagement: Snap's CMO, Grace Kao, emphasizes that Snapchat serves multiple audiences, including consumers, B2B marketers/advertisers, and developers, indicating the importance of a multi-faceted marketing approach for platforms.
• 🔄 Beyond Single-Use Platforms: Snapchat's integration of various functionalities like video, messaging, and maps into one experience provides diverse canvases for advertisers, moving beyond the limitations of single-use platforms.
• 🗺️ Social Maps & Promoted Places: The surprising social use of Snap's map feature, where users connect by seeing friends' locations, has led to "Promoted Places," allowing brands to appear on the map for real-life experiences and discovery. 
• 💬 Brand-Friendly Chat: Snapchat is opening its chat feature for brands to have one-on-one conversations with their audiences. 
• 🧘‍♀️ Authenticity and Imperfection: The "Snapchat Generation" prioritizes authenticity, embracing imperfect and uncurated content (e.g., blurry snaps, empty food plates). 
• 🎙️ Rise of Voice Memos & Mini-Podcasts: An unexpected trend is the significant growth of voice memo usage on Snapchat, with users creating "mini intimate one-on-one podcasts" with friends. 

🎙 Guest: Grace Kao

🎤 Host: Mike Shields

📺 Sponsors: Elemental TV & Linkedin

🎬 Producer: FEL Creative

Chief Media Officer at Known, Kasha Cacy, discusses YouTube's growing prominence against traditional television, despite challenges for brands regarding content predictability and measurement. Cacy, also touches on the evolving landscape of big creators acting as media companies and the current economic outlook from a business perspective.

💡Takeaways:

• 📈 YouTube's Continued Growth: YouTube consistently gains viewership from traditional television, stealing audience year over year. 
• 🤷‍♀️ Content Predictability Challenges: A key hurdle for brands on YouTube is the less predictable nature of its content compared to TV, leading to uncertainty about ad placement. 
• 👴📺 Generational Perception Gap: There's a "snobbiness in media" where older generations may perceive YouTube content as "not high quality," despite younger audiences (like 14 and 16-year-olds) spending significant time on the platform.
• 🤝 Evolving Creator Ecosystem: Large creators are now operating like media companies, with "creator studios" producing content that can jump from YouTube to other platforms like Netflix. 
• ⚖️  Embrace "Good Enough" Measurement: Media professionals are often too "precious" in seeking perfect measurement solutions. 

🎙 Guest: Kasha Cacy

🎤 Host: Mike Shields

📺 Sponsor: Elemental TV

🎬 Producer: FEL Creative

Next in Media discusses the evolving role of influencers in marketing with Megan Pagliuca, Chief Product Officer at Omnicom Media Group, and Khurrum Malik, Head of Marketing for Walmart Connect, focusing on how data and new strategies are integrating influencers into broader media plans to drive sales and brand building.

💡Takeaways:

• 🛒 Retail Data for Influencer Selection: The integration of retail data, particularly from large retailers like Walmart, is revolutionizing how brands select influencers. 
• 📈 Shift to Niche and Rising Influencers: There's a growing recognition that niche and rising influencers can offer more resonance and relevance due to their authentic connections with smaller communities, leading to more impactful campaigns compared to relying solely on celebrity endorsements.
• 💡 Influencers as Content and Performance Channels: Influencers are no longer just a PR function or a branding tool. 
• 🔗 Convergence of Social Commerce and Retail Media: The lines between social commerce (driven by influencers) and retail media (focused on direct outcomes) are blurring. 
• 📊 Influencer Marketing Becoming Programmatic: The process of working with influencers is becoming more programmatic and scalable, moving away from purely custom, one-off integrations. 
• 🤖 AI's Role in Content Creation: AI is emerging as a significant factor in content creation, particularly for small to medium-sized businesses, by simplifying content generation and enabling one-click buying. 

🎙 Guests: Megan Pagliuca & Khurrum Malik

🎤 Host: Mike Shields

📺 Sponsor: Walmart Connect

🎬 Producer: FEL Creative

In this episode of Next in Media, Mike Shields interviews Ann Harrell, Head of Product Enablement at Pacvue, about the evolving landscape of retail media. Harrell explains the challenges of data availability and cross-channel attribution in retail media, highlighting the role of data clean rooms and the blurring lines between retail, social, and traditional search as all become channels for commerce.

💡Takeaways:

• The Challenge of Cross-Platform Attribution: While closed-loop attribution is effective within single retail platforms, the major challenge lies in attributing performance across various retail media channels and broader marketing channels due to data silos and retailers' reluctance to share data outside their own networks.
• 🔒 Data Clean Rooms as a Solution: Data clean rooms are emerging as a key tool to overcome data availability challenges. 
• 💰 Cross-Channel Measurement Drives Budgets: Demonstrating cross-channel measurement to retailers is crucial because it often leads to increased and sustained budgets for brands. 
• 🛍️ Evolution of Social Shopping: Social platforms like TikTok are actively integrating commerce features, moving beyond organic social strategy to offer "shop ads" that link creative content directly to products. 
• 🌐 Building Retailer Ecosystems: Major retailers like Walmart are building comprehensive ecosystems that span various media touchpoints, including on-site display, off-site programmatic (e.g., through Trade Desk), and connected TV (CTV) via partnerships like Vizio. 
• 🎯 Custom Incrementality Models: A one-size-fits-all approach to incrementality modeling is ineffective due to varying data and attribution capabilities across retailers. 

🎙 Guest: Anne Harrell

🎤 Host: Mike Shields

📺 Sponsor: Walmart Connect

🎬 Producer: FEL Creative