All writers

Seb Joseph

digiday.com
30
articles (90 days)

Recent articles

Future of Marketing Briefing: The ad industry has an AI label problem
People no longer trust what they see, and the ad industry hasn’t agreed on what honesty looks like in response.
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What OpenAI’s TBPN deal reveals about branded entertainment’s limits
Brands are building in-house entertainment studios on the promise that great content earns the audiences advertising can’t buy.
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Future of Marketing Briefing: Horizon Media is building a platform to orchestrate ad tech from a single command center
Agency trading desks never really went away. Horizon Media wants to prove they grew up.
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‘Predictability has become a luxury’: As the Iran war drags on, ad markets are starting to sweat
Whatever hope remained that this would be a short war is fading. And with it, the assumption that the economic damage would be too.
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In graphic detail: The numbers making the case for what holdcos could be
What the data says about the CMO-agency relationship — and none of it is comfortable.
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Future of Marketing Briefing: A cynic’s guide to the most transparent dispute in programmatic history
No, the industry doesn't need another hot take on The Trade Desk's standoff with the agency holdcos. I'm going to give you one anyway.
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‘The processes are continuing forward’: Advertising’s dealmakers press on with M&A despite Iran uncertainty
War in the Middle East is a problem for advertising’s dealmakers. Just not yet.
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“It’s about change management’: Sir Martin Sorrell says the billable hour is dying, but getting clients to move in is proving harder
Sir Martin Sorrell says agencies can't fix the billable hour until brands fix their AI problem.
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A year after Unilever, the ad-funded creator economy is still catching up to its own ambition
Creators had already become too big to ignore. Now, for a different set of reasons entirely, it has become too important to get wrong.
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‘I’m not selling you hours’: PMG’s push beyond agencies
PMG never called itself an agency. Here’s why that matters now.
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Middle East conflict casts shadow of global ad outlook
The ad market had questions about 2026. Now, it has more.
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The Future of Marketing Briefing: a war, an oil spike and an ad market that can’t see what comes next
The assumptions underpinning ad growth just got a lot more complicated.
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The in-house entertainment studio is having its social media team moment
Brands are becoming media companies (again). This time they mean it.
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‘Brand safety is moving from fear to curiosity’: Zefr’s Raddon on content-level accreditation – and what it exposes about the industry
The threat is no longer a discrete piece of bad content that a keyword list or a domain block can catch. Its volume.
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‘Nobody’s asking the question’: WPP’s biggest restructure in years means nothing until CMOs say it does
WPP declared itself transformed. CMOs will decide if that’s true.
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The Future of Marketing Briefing: Epsilon’s quiet bet against the LLM goldrush
In advertising’s AI race, Epsilon says the winners won’t pick one mode. They’ll orchestrate many.
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‘Not a big part of the work’: Meta’s LLM bet has yet to touch its core ads business
Meta knows LLMs could transform its ads business. Getting there is another matter.
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The agency holdcos have an AI story, but not an AI business model
The holdco platforms need to deliver on the promises made — and so far, clients aren’t seeing it.
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Future of Marketing Briefing: The case for and against an agency subscription remuneration model
The real problem subscriptions solve isn’t pricing its cost absorption. As AI moves from pilot to scale, agencies are racking up real expenses.
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WPP is betting its future on getting paid for outcomes
At the presentation for its new strategy, WPP made the most explicitly public cases that the future of agency compensation look less like a staffing invoice and more like a performance contract.
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The fight over principal media has moved on but advertisers are still catching up
What advertisers are only now learning about where their money goes.
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The numbers behind the WPP whistleblower case tell a story of their own
Here's what the data actually shows, broken down by what it refers to.
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In fighting a whistleblower suit, WPP put its own account of media agecny trading on the public record
A former GroupM executive is suing WPP for $100 million, alleging he was fired for exposing a systematic scheme to pocket billions in client rebates.
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Future of Marketing Briefing: The mental gymnastics of principal media
Welcome to the psychological CrossFit class of modern marketing. Here’s how marketers are learning to move through it. 
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Future of Marketing Briefing: AI’s branding problem is why marketers keep it off the label
The reputational downside is clearer than the branding upside, which makes discretion the safer strategy.
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WTF are tokens?
When someone sends a prompt or receives a response, the system breaks language into small segments. These fragments are tokens.
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In the age of AI content, The Super Bowl felt old-fashioned
The Super Bowl is one of the last places where brands are reminded that cultural likeness is easy but shared experience is earned. 
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‘The billable hour does not allow for any meaningful innovation’: S4 Capital builds subscription model for the AI age
Subscriptions were supposed to save publishers. Now, they’re becoming part of the survival logic for agencies too. 
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Future of Marketing Briefing: The word ‘agency’ is costing the ad giants
What’s tripping up the holdcos isn’t just economics or technology. It’s semiotics. 
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In the shadow of Khaby Lame’s deal, marketers face hard questions about influence and value
Anyone in marketing gawking at the near-billion price tag attached to TikTok creator Khaby Lame and his deal with Rich Sparkle Holdings isn’t really looking at innovation
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