Why publishers are building their own creator networks

This time, the pivot to video hits differently.

News publishers have been here before, chasing the promise of video, shifting strategies to appease the algorithm gods, hoping to reinvent themselves before the ground beneath them shifts again.

But this latest pivot involves news publishers trying to take more control into their own hands. They’re curating groups of creators to form networks and membership programs that they can use to collaborate on personality-led video, and written content.

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‘Less pitching, more listening’: What Amazon is really doing at CES

CES has become the ad industry’s first real gut check of the year. For Amazon’s ad team, that means less pitching and more listening.

That posture can read as contrarian given the concentration of big agency leadership and CMOs. Internally, however, Amazon treats the show less as a sales opportunity and more as a read on how closely agency and advertiser priorities track with its own plans for the year ahead.

If the gap is too wide, there’s still time to adjust. That was the case last year, when marketers said they wanted Amazon’s performance data and closed-loop signals but could only use them partially because upfront budgets were locked into publisher-specific deals and flexible dollars were scattered across too many systems to manage intelligently. Amazon’s response was telling. It built tools that let advertisers keep their upfront deals intact while quietly repositioning Amazon as the brains behind how those budgets are paced, optimized and measured. 

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