The Digiday Podcast Digiday

Bonjour from day one of the annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and the kick-off of the Digiday Cannes podcast. Ahead of this year’s rosé-induced festivities, Hilton CMO Mark Weinstein, a Cannes Lions veteran attendee, joins us for the first episode of Digiday’s week-long podcast series.
Last year’s generative artificial intelligence hype cycle hasn’t quite fizzled out yet It's expected not only to show up this year, says Weinstein, but drown out other conversations. No doubt, marketers have found uses for gen AI beyond social copy and internal content creation, but it’s yet to be said if AI will reach an inflection point for brand at this year’s Lions.
“Unfortunately, a lot of the conversation will be just blustering and hot air,” Weinstein said. “We're not yet at a point where any of us know, including the people building the capabilities by the way, where this ends.”
Tune in to hear how Hilton is using AI internally and how Weinstein says the industry should be talking about AI at this year’s Cannes Lions on the Digiday Podcast at Cannes.
And Make sure to tune in tomorrow for the next Digiday podcast at Cannes.

Molly Burke and Tyler Oakley joined YouTube more than a decade ago and built their respective online followings by advocating for the causes and communities of people that were important to them — even if it wasn’t always the easiest way to rapidly grow given the platform’s algorithm.
Since then, Burke and Oakley both expanded to additional platforms, like Patreon and Twitch, to continue garnering meaningful relationships with their followers. While Burke said she’s been able to learn a lot about her viewers personally through Patreon, Oakley said that two-way direct communication on Twitch has been instrumental in how he creates content in the moment.
In the fourth and final episode of the Digiday Podcast’s Creators series, Burke and Oakley discuss why advocacy and speaking from the heart has always been central to their strategies as long-form video content creators, and why that’s helped grow their audiences and businesses.

In a world where video has become the predominant medium for content creators, Substack offers a reprieve in the form of the written word.
The subscription-based newsletter platform received a surge of interest during the pandemic, garnering hundreds of new creators — including Hunter Harris and Caroline Chambers — who were interested in monetizing their ideas without always needing to jump in front of a camera. And less than four years later, the platform has enabled these creators to monetize their content via thousands of paid and unpaid subscribers — not to mention advertiser sponsorship, affiliate links or even book deals.
In the third episode of the Digiday Podcast’s Creators series, Harris and Chambers discuss how they’ve transitioned their Substack subscriber bases into communities that ultimately help them feed the funnel of audience engagement.

 What started as a part-time, pandemic-induced pregnancy journey vlog has turned into a family business for social media creators Ben and Lazara Martin, and their three boys.
Since 2020, the couple has racked up nearly 8 million followers across social media, boasting family-friendly content to strike deals with brands like Huggies, Flexcar and Applebee's. But even as the influencer and content creator landscape continues to grow, changes in platform algorithms, the looming TikTok ban and more put pressure on creators.
In the second episode of the Digiday Podcast creator series, the Martin family talks being full time content creators, navigating said ban and more.

As a platform, X (formerly Twitter) has seen better days. After Elon Musk took over back in 2022, the platform has fallen from grace with advertisers and creators alike, due to the reinstatement of previously banned accounts, an increase in bots and simultaneous decrease in brand safety. However, X hasn’t managed to scare away everyone.
In fact, Jessica Davis, a part-time creator who focuses on career content, has managed to build out a following of more than 40,000 people since starting her account in 2021. Since then, she's been able to convince subscribers and brands to shell out for her tweets, pulling in revenue from monthly subscriptions and funds from the platform's ad revenue sharing program, which launched last summer.
In the first episode of the Digiday Podcast’s Creators series, Davis talks about being a text-based content creator in the short-form video era, navigating brand safety on X and the future of content creation in the ever changing landscape of social media.

Formed in 2020 after TPG bought Goal.com from DAZN, FootballCo has been steadily growing an international audience of soccer fans across its portfolio of nine brands.
But this year, FootballCo is making a concerted effort to appeal to the burgeoning fandom of U.S.-based soccer enthusiasts under the leadership of Jason Wagenheim, CEO, North America.
Wagenheim, previously the CRO of Bustle Digital Group, joined FootballCo having never before worked in sports media, but that’s what he said his bosses were interested in. Having led the advertising businesses for many lifestyle media companies in his career, Wagenheim said his goal is to convert “soccer curious” advertisers into active spenders by blending lifestyle and sports content into a video-dominant mix that appeals to non-sports native brands.
And with many global soccer sporting events coming up in North America over the next couple of years, culminating in the men’s World Cup in 2026, Wagenheim is hitting the ground running, using these tentpole moments to appeal to advertisers and audiences alike in this market.