2024 in review: From AI boom to election frenzy, Digiday editors look back

Hold on tight. The rollercoaster that was 2024 is finally coming to an end. Marketers may find themselves dizzy from the many ups and downs the industry experienced this year. 2024 saw more ads on streaming platforms, but also an ad price correction that favored ad buyers’ wallets. There was also the generative AI boom (or bauble, depending on who you ask). Of course, there was Google’s long kiss goodnight with third-party cookies, in which the tech giant decided to keep cookies after all but let users decide if they want to opt in or not. And who could forget the 2024 presidential election, the gift that kept on giving to news publishers. To help the industry make sense of this past year, this episode of the Digiday Podcast is a vignette-style look back at 2024. Hosts Tim Peterson, executive editor of video and audio at Digiday, and Kimeko McCoy, senior marketing reporter, revisit the biggest moments (and podcast episodes) of 2024. Here are the full episode interviews that they mention in the podcast: Third-party cookies are hanging on, but Epsilon says brand marketers should still focus on first-party data  Inside Dow Jones’s AI governance strategy, with Ingrid Verschuren  Duolingo’s head of global social strategy, Katherine Chan, talks about making unhinged content work and learning from mistakes  From scratch to slam dunk: New York Liberty’s Shana Stephenson on building basketball team’s brand and keeping fans in the game  A postmortem on this year’s TV and streaming upfront ad market with UM Worldwide’s Marcy Greenberger  How the Martin family went from part-time vloggers to a family of social media mavens  Digiday editors on Trump administration picks and the impact on the ad industry