Tariff turmoil: How marketers are dodging costs and shifting strategy

The tariffs have sent ripples through the industry, leaving publishers wary of ad budgets and print costs, marketers grappling with a possible recession and small brands scrambling to navigate supply chain shakeups. 

To try make sense of it all, senior marketing editor Kristina Monllos and senior reporter Sam Bradley join hosts Tim Peterson, executive editor, video and audio, and Kimeko McCoy, senior marketing reporter, on this episode of the Digiday Podcast. 

Also on this episode, Peterson and McCoy discuss big tech’s antitrust trials, including the long-awaited ruling in Google’s ad tech antitrust battle with the Justice Department, OpenAI’s rumored X-like social media network and Netflix’s latest earnings.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation with Owen, which have been edited for length and clarity. 

“Wait and see” and “no knee-jerk reactions”

Monllos: There’s just an expectation of chaos. That’s also the sense I’ve gotten from the folks that I’ve spoken to, where even as they’re waiting to see what’s happening and replanning and re-forecasting and spending time figuring out what could possibly happen, there’s also the sense of, ‘Oh, we know it’s going to be insane.’”

Monllos: The general sentiment from a lot of ad buyers is ‘Okay, if this had happened before Covid, I would feel a lot more screwed, but we know how to deal with this need for flexibility, to build in the outs on deals, and to have continuous need for flexibility and contingency plans.’” There’s almost this sense of like, ‘Oh, we’re flexing this Covid muscle again.’

Hesitancy around long-term spend commitments 

Peterson: [With upfronts coming up,] we’re going to have this two to three month period in which a lot of money is going to need to be committed. And falling right smack in the middle of all that is when these tariffs are supposed to take effect, or could be paused again, because who the hell knows what’s going to happen? 

McCoy: I have been talking to media buyers and head of investments that oversee the retail media negotiation process, otherwise known as the JBP process (joint business planning) … Long story short, there is a fear of committing long term to your point Tim …There’s a hesitancy to sign your name in blood with these things when there’s economic uncertainty and headwinds afoot.

Upended CPMs

Bradley: One company I’m keeping an eye on that I think is quite instructive about the early days of some decisions being made is Temu, the Chinese e-commerce giant, [that] between 2023 and last year spent huge amounts on Meta, in particular, in the U.S.

Bradley: We’ve seen some data just this week suggesting that they have tied off a lot of their ad spending in literally the last week, perhaps the last fortnight … One of the interesting things I’ve been looking at alongside colleague Krystal Scanlon this week was whether that represents any opportunity for the advertisers that are competing with them or which have been displaced by them. But it doesn’t seem to be as simple as that because, as we just discussed, everybody is on the hook, in some respect, in their supply chains.