5 questions facing advertisers, publishers and creators heading into fall

Then this summer happened.

In this week’s Digiday Podcast episode, hosts Kimeko McCoy and Tim Peterson recap the season’s biggest developments in the media and marketing industries and the questions they raise for the final stretch of 2026. Here’s a sample of what they discussed.

Will publishers cut off Google?

McCoy: Long story short, you’ve got a lot of [publishers’] traffic being absolutely decimated by Google and AI. So the question that’s coming from publishers like USA Today and others [is] do we cut off these organic search crawlers, and if so, what happens then to our readership? It’s a big question they’re having to tackle.

Has the AI backlash become mainstream?

McCoy: OpenAI hosted a brand trip with creators. And people got pissed. The pushback was pretty quick and pretty swift. To me, this is becoming a litmus test, if you could call it that, where if there’s any association with AI at all — regardless if you do vibe-coding or anything like that — it becomes a point of discourse and tension on the internet. And I think at this point creators are going to have to consider how much they reveal about their AI usage for risk of pushback.

Is an influencer marketing correction looming?

Peterson: You have brands like Unilever and L’Oreal working with 300,000 and 500,000 creators. An insane number of creators. When you really think of the number, you wonder how much money is actually going to these creators. How dilutive is the size of this? Is the creator economy starting to resemble the programmatic advertising industry, which is not a favorable semblance?

Is the era of independent ad tech ending?

Peterson: This summer Publicis announced it’s going to acquire LiveRamp. Nielsen announced it’s going to acquire DoubleVerify. Digiday has reported that Criteo’s in talks to be taken private by Vista Equity Partners. Last year you had Integral Ad Science taken private. The Trade Desk and AppLovin, their businesses aren’t doing horribly; they’re actually growing; but their stock market performance is doing terribly. All of which is raising this question of how long can independent ad tech players survive on the stock market? And increasingly in the marketplace in general?

Is there another wave of media consolidation coming?

Peterson: One thing I’m thinking about with these deals that we outlined, none of them feel like necessarily transformative deals. Paramount-WBD is a huge deal and have some potentially transformative impacts, but it’s not on the level of AT&T-Time Warner. We haven’t seen anything on the level of an Apple acquiring NBCUniversal. When it comes to the traditional digital publishers, if we do see deals, I would imagine they’ll be in reaction to or anticipation of how that broader conversation [with Google] plays out.