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Kelsey Sutton

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a collage of things related to measurement (ruler, measuring tape, etc)

To support diversity on TV, media orgs are looking to develop more metrics

Measurement firms and agencies are trying to tie representation to performance outcomes.

Ryan Barwick

Audiences are spending more time watching just about everything but traditional TV, report finds

Adults in the US are watching the equivalent of nine episodes of “Friends” in digital video each day.

Streaming industry: What to expect in 2023, according to experts

Only “the fittest of the fittest” will survive in a year of more ad-supported tiers and media consolidation, analysts predict.

What to expect from the streaming industry in 2023, according to experts

Employee at desk with charts and graphs with billboard and buildings and boombox

Media

Alyssa Meyers

It’s no secret that sports fans love content about their favorite teams. These days, that doesn’t just mean live games on legacy TV networks.

Some major US leagues, it seems, are well aware. As football season kicked off, the NFL inked a content partnership deal with sports newsletter and media company The Gist, plugging the league directly into The Gist’s 

, many of whom are millennial and Gen Z women. Earlier this week, The Gist announced a similar content deal with the NWSL.

Both partnerships are designed not only to serve the media startup’s audience with deep dives into their favorite sports, but also to drive fandom for the leagues beyond the audiences they’ve already been reaching for years, The Gist co-founders Jacie deHoop and Ellen Hyslop told Marketing Brew.

“We really saw that traditional sports media was very much focused on an avid male sports fan, and we really felt like there was an opportunity for us to engage with this next-generation female fan and create a community and create a media platform for her,” Hyslop said. “We knew that this audience…was going to be valuable to the teams and to the leagues that wanted to reach her, but didn’t necessarily have the right way.”

Both the NFL and NWSL were, according to deHoop, “dream partners” for The Gist, which was founded in late 2017 as a sports newsletter covering men’s and women’s sports equally. The NFL, which is the biggest league in the US, could have easily “laughed in our faces,” deHoop said, but she said league execs were “open and receptive” when talks started at the Super Bowl this year.

For The Gist’s readers, the NFL is their “No. 1 favorite sport,” according to Hyslop. Through the partnership, subscribers will have access to more NFL content, including a 

 that allows participants to guess which team will win each matchup of the season for the chance to win prizes.

“Women are so often left out of any fantasy league, the office pool, the survivor pool, and a big reason why we want to be that source is because we actually want to create a community where they feel welcome,” Hyslop said. For its part, the NFL, she said, gets to “continue to grow and lean into that female fandom.”

To further support the content partnership, The Gist will also up its presence and coverage around NFL tentpoles like the draft and the Super Bowl, Hyslop added; earlier this year, Gist staffers 

 the Super Bowl in person through a partnership with Verizon.

For Servi Barrientos, director of media partnerships at the NWSL, working with The Gist opens an avenue not just to acquire new fans, but to turn casual fans into avid ones through storytelling, he said.

On one level, Barrientos said he hopes to see the partnership drive game tune-in, which could also stand to benefit the league’s legacy media partners, including CBS, ESPN, Prime Video, and Scripps Sports. The Gist’s support will mean even more media coverage for the league, he added, keeping it in the news cycle more often than just during major games.

“We want to make sure that fans know where to find us and where to watch the game,” Barrientos said. “It’s important to have the right storytellers to be able to tell these stories of not only the players, but the leagues themselves, and continue to put out content…We live in a digital world now. The more content, the better.”

On a deeper level, Barrientos said he thinks that content can help create league superfans. The NWSL is giving The Gist an “inside look” at the league and access to players with the intention of driving more emotional stories that can “turn fans into passionate fans or avids,” he said.

Increased content coming out of the partnerships also opens up more branded content opportunities, which could benefit The Gist and the leagues. League sponsors already have access to tentpole moments like championship games; now, The Gist can cover those same moments more deeply and offer that content up to its brand partners, deHoop said. Meanwhile, new content, like the pick ’em challenge, is also sponsorable real estate.

“It gives our marketing partners an opportunity to extend their programming,” Barrientos said.

The content partnerships represent more than an opportunity for brands to target 

 sports fans—they open the door for marketers to tap into content that’s geared toward modern fans.

“Audiences are changing; their relationship with fandom is changing,” Hyslop said. “The folks at all of these leagues…are recognizing what they need to be doing to set up the league for success five, 10, 15 years down the line.”

NFL, NWSL are looking to reach next-gen fans with new media partnerships

Content deals with sports media startup The Gist come as both leagues look to reach millennial and Gen Z women fans.

More than two decades ago, the online service provider AOL bought Time Warner for $183 billion, marking what was then the largest merger in American business history. The goal—to bring a traditional media company into the digital age—was ahead of its time.

It was also, for all intents and purposes, 

. Over the next decade, layoffs, federal investigations, and executive departures galore ensued as the two companies combined about as well as hair and bubblegum do, and before the decade was done, Time Warner opted to spin AOL off into its own company.

Despite the disastrous result, the merger ushered in a quarter-century of even more frantic concentration in the media and tech space, where newly established and fast-growing giants like Meta and Google looked to extinguish the competition through absorption, while traditional media stalwarts have increasingly looked to compete against them.

Take Google buying YouTube and DoubleClick within a year of each other, or Facebook acquiring Instagram in 2012, which can in retrospect be viewed as some of the most consequential acquisitions in the digital media space. Or look at the TV side, where Disney bought 20th Century Fox (after acquiring Pixar and Marvel Entertainment), CBS and Viacom reuniting after an earlier split (and rebranding to Paramount), or AT&T’s 2018 acquisition and 2022 spinoff of Time Warner, which then merged with Discovery Corp., 

There are other major acquisitions that have reshaped tech and media, too, like when Amazon bought the studio MGM 

 and became the new owner of franchises like James Bond, and deals that could, like Walmart’s recent 

 of Vizio, which gave the retailer a foothold in connected TV after previous failed efforts.

Some mergers have been undisputed successes, like the House of Mouse getting its hands on Pixar, while others have been deemed outright failures—and there are plenty more cases in between. And amid the major cornerstones are countless other smaller transactions and sales. And for many of the past 25 years, a more laissez-faire approach from regulators meant that these deals, for the most part, breezed through.

The result is an industry that has spent 25 years and counting gobbling itself up, creating, paradoxically, a landscape that is both more vertically integrated and somehow more fragmented than ever before. 

Advertisers, meanwhile, are left trying to balance reaching as many eyeballs as possible while benefiting from enough competition to keep costs down.

“Advertisers need to balance efficiency with leverage in their ideal world, meaning they want to have as many possible suppliers who have as much scale as possible, so that they can ideally play as many of them off against each other,” said Brian Wieser, an industry analyst and principal at Madison and Wall. “That’s not what happens in reality.”

When it comes to owning global advertising, two decades of acquisitions have given some companies a bigger leg up than others. As of 2024, Google, Meta, and Amazon together accounted for 41% of global advertising revenue, according to GroupM, and just about 

 of all ad revenue in the US, according to Madison and Wall.

This has been partially achieved through seemingly countless acquisitions, like Amazon purchasing Twitch and Wondery; Meta acquiring Oculus and WhatsApp; and Google buying Waze and AdMeld. On the other side of the equation are traditional TV companies, where, through a series of mergers, HBO is now corporate cousins with the 

In TV, advertisers once only had three major networks to navigate, but the success of Silicon Valley behemoths in the digital space kicked off a proverbial arms race for eyeballs, where broadcasters, networks, streamers, operating systems, and even retailers are left pitching both audiences 

 efficiency—something that has rarely been the strong suit of linear television, outside of live sports.

“It was pretty obvious even in the ’90s that many of the analog, old-guard businesses weren’t going to transform fast enough,” Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital, told Marketing Brew.

Those old-guard businesses continue to face even more pressure as audiences shift their own preferences. In 2019, when US adults engaged with media, they spent 51% of that time with digital media and 49% with traditional methods, according to eMarketer. Today, those figures are 66% and 34%, respectively—and when consumers do stream, it’s usually to watch 

All of that has benefitted tech companies like Google and Meta that are able to sell the more precise, data-driven, heat-seeking targeted advertising that marketers love. Traditional media companies, previously able to only really compete with scale, have rolled out their own ad-tech solutions, which are often facilitated through—you guessed it—acquisitions. In 2014, Comcast acquired the video ad server FreeWheel, and in 2018, AT&T acquired the ad-tech platform AppNexus, though it sold it to Microsoft three years later.

For buyers, consolidation isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “We can look across the landscape a little bit more seamlessly,” Samantha Rose, a strategic investment lead at Horizon Media, told Marketing Brew.

Traditional TV networks aren’t looking like the future of the media business, Rose said, which is perhaps why companies like Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery are attempting to sell off their weaker cable channel businesses. Wieser called this move “deconsolidation,” and said that in some cases, the move can further complicate things for advertisers.

“There’s no reflection of reality in a business strategy that says this is a positive thing,” he said.

For media companies, the period of acquisition after acquisition has been met with little resistance—up until relatively recently, that is.

“It’s been decades of relentless consolidation that really has not been challenged up until the last Trump and Biden administrations,” Tom Blakely, a contributor to the Big Tech on Trial newsletter, told Marketing Brew. “It’s going to take maybe as long to see progress in the other direction, to unwind these monopolies and see new market participants.”

Though the first Trump administration wasn’t exactly a 

, under the Biden administration, tie-ups were under more scrutiny with Lina Khan as chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). A skeptic of corporate power, Khan, who was appointed in 2021, sued Amazon and Meta for alleged antitrust violations and sought to 

 Kroger from acquiring rival grocer Albertsons (which, if combined, would have created 

 to retail media networks owned by the likes of Target and Walmart) as well as Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, though that deal 

 in 2023. The FTC also challenged Adobe’s acquisition of the design software company Figma, which eventually fell through.

Perhaps more importantly, the more aggressive FTC had a brief chilling effect 

, often stopping deals in the boardroom rather than the courtroom.

It’s unclear exactly how the Trump administration might proceed. FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson 

 warned executives in mid-March that if a company’s conduct or a merger hurt consumers, “I’m taking you to court,” per Axios.

 has cooled dealmaking. David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, recently told investors that further media consolidation might just look like more cross-platform streaming bundles.

That’s a far cry from what he optimistically shared in November. “This is an industry,” he said then, “that really needs to consolidate.”

photo of executives announcing the AOL/Time Warner merger

How 25 years of consolidation changed the media landscape for good 

Years of megamergers across tech and media have made some media buying easier, but buyers and experts alike say a reckoning is on the horizon.

Katie Hicks

America’s finest news source hasn’t been a print news source since the “Harlem Shake” was trending.

Over the last 11 years, the state of print media hasn’t exactly 

. But as of last month, the satirical publication The Onion, which G/O Media sold to a group of media executives and journalists earlier this year, began circulating hard copies once again.

Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, told the 

 that the hope is for the paper to begin turning a profit later this year. To help achieve that, CMO Leila Brillson told Marketing Brew that the plan is to lean heavily into memberships, which begin at $99/year for print subscriptions. Those who pay less can still gain access to “member-exclusive emails and other periodic benefits,” some of which Brillson said the publication is still deciding on.

“Print is a huge part of it, and it’s the primary product, but we want to be able to also do really fun, cool things with the archive, the digital edition, bizarre things you’ll find in your inbox, weird mailers, just really Onion stuff,” Brillson said.

Since the membership became available last month, Brilson said her team’s expectations around sign-ups “have been blown out of the water,” although she declined to share specific numbers. We spoke with her about what readers and advertisers can expect next—and whether a print newspaper can make it in 2024.

Returning to print despite a tough media market was driven in part by fan fervor and the desire to lean into The Onion’s historical legacy, Brillson said. At the same time, The Onion has invested in social, and Brillson said the publication is seeing promising engagement on its TikTok content, particularly among Gen Z.

“I think of it as a real moving-forward-while-looking-back moment,” she said, adding that The Onion’s TikTok is “not any less of a priority for us than the printed paper.”

So far, she said, there have been some indications that social engagement has helped drive membership growth. The publication has been advertising on TikTok to promote its return to print, in addition to posting organic content, she said.

Brillson, who previously worked at TikTok, as well as at brands like Bumble and Netflix, said she’s learned from her experience the power of identity-based products. Like how vinyl records became popular again in the last decade, newspapers and magazines can also act as personal identifiers, she said.

But in the same way that few listeners exclusively listen to vinyl, she doesn’t expect anyone to only read print.

“I don’t necessarily think print is the future,” Brillson said. “I think that a really well-curated object that people want is the future. Meeting people where they are is also the future. These two things are not mutually exclusive.”

Brillson acknowledged that it can be challenging to build out monetization strategies beyond memberships. Since leaving G/O Media, the site has ended its business with the 

 Taboola, but it continues to run Google Ads, execs told 

 last month. In print, Brillson said the team is exploring everything from full-page to backpage ads—ideally funny ones, she said—and has also floated the idea of hosting events.

While her team has received “a lot of inbounds” to date, she said, they’ve been “really picky” about the advertisers entertained. “The majority of our advertisers are mission-driven, but we’re looking for anybody who really aligns with The Onion,” she said. “We’re never going to be a straightforward ad partner, so if you’re interested in display media and display media only, there’s probably bigger and better and more efficient places you can go.”

There are some digital media strategies that Brillson does not want to explore. For instance, The Onion will “never be paywalled as long as I’m here,” she said, because the publication has historically been free, which allows it to spread far on social media.

“I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I have never seen [social] shares to this level,” she said. “We don’t want to discourage that.”

 about whether a print newspaper can be revived in 2024, but Brillson said she’s encouraged by one major change in the last decade.

“Ten years ago, impressions-based advertising ruled the world,” she said. “The Onion is not going to win with impressions-based advertising, and print is not going to win with impressions-based advertising because its CPM is way too high…But now with the niche being mainstream and mainstream not really existing, we found that we have a real opportunity to more meaningfully connect brands with our audience.”

The Onion publication in a newspaper distributer

Why The Onion is returning to print—and betting big on memberships

The publication is using TikTok to market subscriptions to Gen Z and is exploring the possibility of print ads, CMO Leila Brillson said.

There was some amazing reporting and writing published this year, and we compiled a list of some of our favorite stories we read in the past 12 months from publications other than our own. We broke it down based on the subjects we focus on the most—and we hope you take the time to read some of these great stories from across the web.

 “the lie of ‘deinfluencing,’” ending all hope that anyone on social media will ever try to help curb our shopping habits.

 with brands turning everything into a joke, and also explored more serious topics like internal documents about how TikTok was 

 that found “YouTube ads may have led to online tracking of children.”

Rolling Stone reported on HBO CEO and chairman Casey Bloys’s habit of directing staffers to use 

 to troll “television critics with snarky responses from a fake Twitter account—and [drop] pro-HBO comments on trade publication stories.” (After the report, Bloys ended up apologizing.)

CNBC’s Alex Sherman dug deep into Bob Iger’s 

 at Disney, the ouster of former CEO Bob Chapek, and the executive turnover and company turmoil that accompanied it all.

, senior vice president of Apple’s services division, who is leading Apple’s aggressive push into live sports rights.

The WNBA had quite a year, and on the heels of the league’s finals, the Washington Post 

 at the strained relationship between some of its players and the media.

Speaking of the WNBA, the New York Times put one of its biggest stars on everyone’s radar: 

, the “twerking mascot” of the New York Liberty.

Aaron Rodgers’s torn Achilles was one of the biggest stories of this NFL season so far, and the Wall Street Journal quickly reported out 

,” The Information declared in its report that the tech giant overestimated the audience for its Thursday Night Football games when negotiating with some advertisers.

Bloomberg noted that, with several big broadcast rights deals expiring, ESPN may have to 

 to keep showing some of the biggest women’s sports. Several months later, that network, along with CBS, Amazon Prime Video, and Scripps Sports, signed a four-year media rights deal with the NWSL worth $240 million.

, perhaps best known as Flo from Progressive.

Bloomberg reported on signs that “the golden era of celebrity beauty brands” may be 

The Atlantic covered the (somewhat surprising) success of in-person shopping, as illustrated by 

 between AMC Theaters’s Nicole Kidman ad and Regal Cinemas’s pre-movie promo filled with film quotes.

,” fueled by trends like “girl dinners” and “hot girl walks.”

Lisa Simpson thinking, zooms into her head, where a green Lisa Simpson looks angry wearing a sash that reads "jealousy"

Marketing Brew’s favorite reads of 2023

The marketing and media stories we wish we wrote. 

Robins joined the New York Times as global chief advertising officer in May after serving as CRO at the Washington Post for four years. Prior to that, she was CRO at Quartz and has also held leadership roles at NBC News and the BBC.

She joined the publication at a time when it’s 

 into advertising to monetize its different offerings, which range from games to The Athletic, the sports outlet it bought last year for $550 million.

With a few months at the Times under her belt, a new ad format released last month, and 

, Robins tells us she’s just getting started in her new role.

 for advertising in media, including for the Times, which saw its ad revenue 

After Q1, Robins said the Times focused on the positives, like the company’s direct-display advertising. And that decision may have paid off: In Q2, the Times saw its digital ad revenue grow 6.5% to $74 million.

It also added 180,000 digital subscribers during the quarter, bringing its total count to nearly 10 million. The Times has spent many years building its subscription business; in addition to its journalism, people can subscribe to NYT Cooking, Games, and Wirecutter, the product-review platform it acquired in 2016, either individually or as part of a bundle. This month, it 

 on the New York City subway that promotes its various offerings.

While Robins said it might be easy to think that the Times’ focus on advertising is a “nice-to-have,” or is “second class” to subscriptions, that hasn’t been the case in her time there. “Every conversation I have with leaders across the company is focused on how we grow our ambitions in advertising,” she told us.

What excites her, she said, is “how strong [the Times’] house of brands has become,” she said. “Now we have the opportunity to really bring that to the [ad] market at scale, which is really exciting,” she said.

Last month, the Times released a new video 

 in the mobile web version of Wordle for nonsubscribers, with DoorDash as its first sponsor. Citing the more than 2 billion times the game was played last year, Robins said this is an example of finding new, premium ad opportunities across the Times portfolio. DoorDash’s VP of Consumer Marketing Gina Igwe told 

 that Wordle’s weekly active users and engagement rates were what sold the company on the new offering.

“We’re very happy with the initial results so far,” Robins said. Prior to releasing the new format, she said the Times conducted qualitative testing to test player “experience and satisfaction,” and minimize disruption.

According to Robins, the Times plans to continue optimizing its Wordle ads while also working to build out the teams, resources, and ad formats to fit its other brands like The Athletic, which started 

 in September, as well as Cooking and Wirecutter.

“The Wordle campaign with DoorDash was a thrilling new ‘first,’ but we are just getting started,” she said.

In addition to bolstering its advertising business, Robins told us she’s excited about forthcoming collaborations which “involve new applications of tech.”

 to prevent its editorial content from being used to train AI algorithms. With the AI craze also taking over advertising, Robins told us she “[sees] an opportunity to deliver authentic, deeply human creative stories in a time when others might be outsourcing their ideas.”

At the end of the day, she said, “Brands are always going to want to tell their stories.” She cited the Times’ 2018 partnership with Google, in which they digitized the Times’ archives and photojournalism with Google Cloud, as an example, adding that it’s about “really connecting that reader-need with what a brand has to offer.”

As for what the Times has to offer? “I want New York Times Advertising to be the essential partner for every brand looking to engage with an elevated consumer,” she said. “We’ve got the foundation of the audience already there. Now, it’s really creating the products that are ultimately meant to meet them.”

A conversation with the NYT’s global chief advertising officer

“I want New York Times Advertising to be the essential partner for every brand looking to engage with an elevated consumer,” Joy Robins told us.

Jasmine Sheena

The New York Times saw subscriber and revenue growth in Q2, another data point suggesting that the broader ad market could be 

Total revenue grew 6% to $591 million, and the publisher added 180,000 new digital subscribers, bringing its total subscriber count to almost 10 million. The publisher reported $47 million in profit during the second quarter, beating analyst expectations.

Digital advertising revenue grew 6.5% to $74 million, while print advertising revenue fell 8.6%. The company said “higher revenues from direct-sold and open-market programmatic advertising” were key to boosting its digital ad revenue.

Subscription revenue from digital-only offerings grew 13% to nearly $270 million. The Times attributed the growth to more subscribers paying higher subscription prices in addition to a rise in digital-only subscribers, as well as subscribers “upgrading to the bundle,” a product that provides access to Times properties like Wirecutter, The Athletic, and Cooking.

The earnings come as the publisher continues building on its 

 in an effort to bring in more subscribers; it bought Wordle last year to boost its games segment.

“Our second-quarter results confirm our view that our essential subscription strategy is working as designed, with momentum in several key areas,” Meredith Kopit Levien, president and CEO of The New York Times Company, said in the earnings report, noting that “more than a third” of its subscribers “are now bundle or multiproduct subscribers.”

The Athletic, the sports outlet the publisher acquired last year, lost $7.8 million in the quarter, while its revenue grew 55% to $30 million. The sports-focused publisher started offering 

 in September. In June, it laid off close to 4% of its newsroom, or nearly 20 people, as part of internal restructuring efforts; the following month, the Times said it was disbanding its sports department and planned to rely on coverage from The Athletic instead.

In March, the Times hired Joy Robins as global chief advertising officer, who was previously CRO at the Washington Post. Last year, it hired former Amazon exec Mohit Lohia as SVP and head of digital advertising as part of the company’s effort to scale ads across its different properties.

New York Times digital advertising revenue grows in Q2 

The company hired a new global advertising head earlier this year, who joined from the Washington Post. 

Chris Licht, the former executive producer and showrunner of CBS’s 

who replaced CNN head Jeff Zucker in May 2022, has stepped down after just over a year at the network, the company said in a statement Wednesday morning.

The surprise departure ends a tumultuous reign marred by controversies, including a disastrous town hall held with former President Donald Trump last month, and 

 for the cable network. But the proverbial nail in the coffin seems to have been a 

 published in The Atlantic on Friday, a close chronicling of Licht’s attempts to turn the network’s fortunes around. The profile detailed Licht’s criticisms of CNN’s tone and coverage of major events like the Covid-19 pandemic, along with his decision to move his office away from the newsroom and his obsession with negative press.

 and said he would work to win back their trust. That was apparently not enough. “Licht has lost the room,” CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy 

Before Licht joined CNN, the company was undergoing changes stemming from Zucker’s departure following the revelation that he was 

 of host Chris Cuomo. Warner Bros. Discovery had also 

 less than a month after it officially debuted.

During Licht’s time at CNN’s helm, he had stated his intent to restore viewers’s trust, particularly among conservatives and Republicans. CNN underwent 

 and a number of high-profile talent changes, including the tepid rollout of 

 following sexist remarks he made on air. Last month, Kaitlan Collins, a former conservative blogger who joined CNN as a White House correspondent in 2017, was 

There is an “active search” for a replacement for Licht, the company said in a statement. In the meantime, four executives will handle Licht’s duties: EVP of talent and content development Amy Entelis, EVP of editorial Virginia Moseley, EVP of US programming Eric Sherling, and chief operating officer David Leavy.