2024 will see the start of the ad-supported streaming war

Four years after Disney+’s debut set off the subscription-based streaming war, the introduction of Amazon Prime Video’s ads tier in 2024 heralds the ad-supported streaming war.

Additional coverage:

• Take a look at our take on what's not in the picture as we welcome in the new year.
• Brands have always wanted to be where culture is happening. But increasingly, especially amongst Gen Zers, culture seems to be cultivating in ad-free, closed-off group chats and more private online communities.
• To kick off the New Year, we’ve asked folks to predict what they expect will be big in marketing this coming year. Read their predictions in this Digiday+ Marketing Briefing.
• With more focus on data standardization and metrics, companies are turning to anomaly detection as a way of finding outliers and abnormalities in data points. But WTF is anomaly detection?
• Experimentation may be the cornerstone of Duolingo’s social media strategy, but brand mascot Duo’s unhinged personality is here to stay for now, with the company planning to explore other character personalities from the Duolingo universe in the future, exec Katherine Chan said on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.
• Agencies are pushing heavily into offering retail media expertise to harness a piece of the hundreds of billions of media spend at stake.
• From an unstable economy that shifted how budgets were allocated to the continuous turmoil at platforms that drove how users use them — and how brands shift dollars either away or toward them, the year is set up for even more movement. Here's what's in and out for advertising in 2024.