Author: Digiday Awards

This year’s Digiday Media Buying and Planning Awards winners reflect a media landscape increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, data-driven decision making and integrated audience strategies. Across categories, organizations used AI to identify and engage high-value audiences, while adapting campaigns in real time to improve performance. Successful programs also embraced omnichannel planning, coordinating activity across platforms to maximize reach and effectiveness. Strategic partnerships with publishers, platforms and creators played a central role, helping brands extend their influence through trusted voices and targeted collaborations. Together, the winners demonstrated how technology, data and partnerships are reshaping modern media strategy.

Kepler spent 2025 expanding beyond its roots as a media agency, positioning itself as an intelligence-led growth consultancy built around artificial intelligence, earning the Most Innovative Media Agency award. Central to that effort was Kip, its proprietary platform that combines audience data, media buying, creative production and measurement in one system. The agency introduced Kip AIR to help brands understand their visibility in generative AI environments such as ChatGPT and Gemini, while deepening partnerships with Amazon and Google. The strategy helped Kepler win new business across multiple sectors while maintaining strong client retention and long-term relationships.

Samsung Ads and media agency Havas partnered with Domino’s to launch the first European campaign using GameBreaks, an interactive CTV format designed to make ad breaks part of the entertainment. Viewers used their TV remotes to answer pizza-themed trivia before seeing a message promoting Domino’s Ultimate Gunpowder Chicken pizza. Running on Samsung TV Plus, the campaign turned passive viewing into active participation and tested whether interactive television could deliver stronger engagement and brand impact than traditional CTV advertising. The initiative exceeded industry benchmarks, helped establish a new model for audience interaction on streaming television and secured Samsung Ads the award for Best Connected/Streaming TV Campaign.

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By Mark Grether, svp and general manager, PayPal Ads 

There are three words in a group chat: “I’ll get it.” 
 
The person who wrote those words picked the restaurant, booked the tickets, fronted the cost and then collected payment from everyone afterward. Next weekend, when nobody else wants to make the call, they’ll do it again. 
 
Here’s what marketers have missed about that person: they didn’t just spend money. They got seven other people to spend money, too. 
 
There is already a word for someone who moves other people to act: an influencer. However, the influencers that brands spend billions of dollars chasing — the ones with followings, ring lights and rate cards — influence attention. They get consumers to notice a product or service, perhaps think differently about it and maybe eventually buy it. The person in a group chat does something rarer and far more valuable than that. They influence money — other people’s money — and they do it without posting a thing. 

Social influencers change what people think. But the other kind of influencer, visible only in payment data, changes what people spend. That’s the audience worth competing for. 

Influence over spend beats influence over attention

Influence over spend beats influence over attention. That is the most underused idea in audience strategy right now. A social influencer’s value is a bet: reach times engagement, with a long path to purchase, which then has to be attributed back to them. The group organizer’s value is the purchase. When they pick the venue and front the bill, the spend for themselves and everyone they bring with them happens. One influencer sits at the top of the funnel, and the other influencer is the funnel. 

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