Digiday Daily

August 04, 2026

After the runaway success of creator-led films this year, Hollywood is hungry for creators and is looking to gobble up more and more of their IP.

But the Backrooms and A24 copyright show there could be some bumps ahead. Acquiring IP that has been planted, cultivated, and propagated online calls into question the nature of its ownership.

TOP STORY

The Creator Economy

As Hollywood studios chase creator culture, ownership gets complicated

OTHER THINGS TO KNOW

Enter the Digiday AI Awards by Aug. 7 to showcase the innovative AI strategies, tools and campaigns transforming media, marketing and advertising. Join past honorees including Canva, Vidmob, Bloomberg Media Studios and McDonald’s by submitting your entry today.
Instead of experimentation, marketers are testing ideas fast and scaling what’s successful. By prioritizing AI that works alongside marketers, leaders are improving workflows, reducing burnout and ensuring consistency — all while maintaining the human component of their creative. Partner insights from Contentful.
Many purported paradigm shifts have come and gone. While most are simply old ideas with new packaging, there’s a genuine signal front and center that the industry has consistently underutilized and overlooked: carrier data. Partner insights from Blis.

MEDIA & PLATFORMS

The Business of AI

WTF is a stealth crawler?

As AI bot traffic surges, lawmakers are cracking down on stealth crawlers, which scrape publisher content while masking who they are.

Marketing on Platforms

Ad Tech Briefing: Q2’s Big Tech earnings, small-scale concessions, and frustrated dealmakers

PE eagerly looms, but despite appetite, stats show dealmaking is flat.

The Programmatic Marketer

Stagwell’s Curate launch puts agencies’ ad tech ambitions in focus

Agencies want more control over the pipes of programmatic advertising. Stagwell’s Curate is the latest example.

PARTNER INSIGHTS FROM MOLOCO

The problem with last-touch for CTV

Measuring CTV on last-touch alone tells only part of the story. Across hundreds of advertisers, 30% of campaigns are significantly undervalued by last-touch models alone.

PARTNER INSIGHTS FROM CELTRA

Live session: Building real-time campaigns in highly regulated industries

Join this virtual session on Aug. 5 at 10 a.m. ET for insights into fast-moving and highly regulated industries, like gaming, finance, healthcare and crypto, and why marketers need tech stacks that keep up. Can’t make it? Register and we’ll send you the on-demand recording.

PARTNER INSIGHTS FROM OPTABLE

How agent-ready publishers set themselves up for long-term success

To adopt agentic AI at scale, organizations need to prioritize critical areas of agentic readiness. Publishers who have invested in identity infrastructure for privacy compliance are already ahead, as agent readiness and identity readiness are the same project.