The Digiday Podcast

Spotify’s ad business is trying to evolve beyond audio. At this year's Cannes Lions, Digiday senior marketing reporter Kimeko McCoy catches up with Brian Berner, VP of advertising partnerships at Spotify, about automation, AI, video and Spotify’s push for bigger media budgets.

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.

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.

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. 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 rate higher or lower than you’d expect. Check out Jess and Sara’s written scorecard here: https://digiday.com/media/publishers-scorecard-for-big-techs-ai-licensing-deals/