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Digiday magazine: Big ideas poised to upend media and marketing
At Digiday, we report on and examine the big and small ways media and marketing companies are modernizing. For this, our Big Ideas issue, we decided to dream big and identify the big ideas that could fundamentally alter media and marketing — for better or for worse.
In some cases, we looked at the ideas and people tackling big problems in the digital media ecosystem. Marketing reporter Seb Joseph looks at the promise of blockchain to bring integrity to online advertising. Media reporter Ross Benes imagines what it would take to turn off ad retargeting, that scourge of online advertising, and its implications for consumers. (They’re not all good.) We profile JavaScript inventor Brendan Eich and entrepreneur Tina Sharkey, who are trying to make the web safe for surfers and take on the “tax” marketers charge consumers in the form of marketing for packaged goods, respectively.
Amazon figures big in this issue. The retail giant has come a long way from selling books online and is now poised to disrupt multiple big industries, from fashion to entertainment to advertising. We asked what would happen if Amazon went all-in on advertising and entertainment, and what that would mean for publishers, Facebook and Google. Conversely, we look at what it would take for Amazon to be broken up — and even if that happens, why that wouldn’t solve all retailers’ problems.
The issue also features Digiday sister pub Glossy’s list of 50 insiders driving the modernization of fashion, luxury and beauty. The Glossy team highlighted everyone from the Teen Vogue digital editorial director who’s rethinking the role of fashion publications in today’s political environment to the LVMH digital chief who’s integrating tech into luxury fashion.
There are some treats for readers who get to the end. The back of the book features a peek at the inner sanctum of tastemaker Stella Bugbee, president and editor of The Cut; and a Q&A with Washington Post reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner David Fahrenthold, who reveals the questions he’s pursuing on Trump and the competitor he fears more than The New York Times.
We hope you enjoy this issue, our seventh, and the rest of the Digiday Plus benefits. If you haven’t become a member yet, you can learn more and sign up here. This year, we launched a members-only Slack channel and original research. Look for more research to come from us in the year ahead. If you’re already a member, let us know what you want more of — and what we can do better.
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