The Digiday Podcast

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.

What does it take to sell an influencer agency right now? This week on the Digiday Podcast, Digital Voices founder Jennifer Quigley-Jones joins Kimeko McCoy and Tim Peterson to break down her agency’s sale to PMG. Plus, what it says about the booming creator economy M&A moment.

A decade after the ANA’s bombshell report, the WPP debacle has forced a new standard of clarity in media buying. This week, Digiday executive editor of news Seb Joseph and Michael Burgi, senior editor of media buying and planning, join the Digiday Podcast to discuss why agencies are leaning into principal trading, and why some brands are finally reining them in.

Since its legal woes have been resolved, and the U.S. app was spun out earlier this year, TikTok has taken a muted approach to business. Digiday senior platform reporter Krystal Scanlon joins this episode of the Digiday Podcast to discuss why what looks like business as usual on the surface is more likened to hushed plight for more ad dollars, creators and users.

Ads in ChatGPT have entered their trial run period. Instead of agency partners, it's brands like The Knot Worldwide that find themselves at the helms of OpenAI's ad push. Marketers like The Knot's CMO Jenny Lewis are navigating everything from performance metrics to infrastructure.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

“It works. It is a functioning technical proof-of-concept that accurately represents what the buyer wants to buy and what the seller has to sell,” said Ryan McConville, chief product officer and evp of ad products and solutions at NBCUniversal on the latest Digiday Podcast.

Despite the successful test, NBCU isn’t about to outsource its entire ad sales process to AI agents anytime soon. “We are a ways away from having this fully productionalized where multiple agencies are using this day in and day out to replace current workflows,” he said.

That said, NBCU is now a lot closer to what McConville calls”premium automation,” as he explained in the episode.

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.