By Tim Peterson  •  September 2, 2025  •

From Paramount’s Skydance Media sale and Omnicom-IPG’s merger milestone to a new CEO at WPP and fresh competition for Google, the past few months have been pretty momentous. But also incredibly messy. Again, see the situation at Paramount and the pressure on Google. And that’s not to mention the topsy-turvy tariff-related state of affairs.

But as the summer fades to fall, the events that transpired this season have set the conditions for what’s likely to be an even more eventful — to use a euphemism — end to the year. To that end, Digiday managing editor Sara Jerde joined Digiday Podcast hosts Kimeko McCoy and Tim Peterson to recap the stories of the summer and analyze what they portend for the rest of 2025 and beyond.

“It’s been chaos, but the good kind of chaos where there’s a lot of interesting news to dissect,” said Jerde. She added, “We look forward to having slower days and to enjoy the beach or the nice sunsets, but that’s not really where we found ourselves this summer. It’s definitely not been a slow one.”

The blurred line between streaming and the traditional TV bundle

Peterson: “Streaming services are just the extension of cable now. We have these TV network companies getting rid of their cable network businesses and kind of recreating them, but with streaming services now.”

An inflection point for publishers and AI companies

Jerde: “There are too many views and differing perspectives on how to use AI and how to partner with these AI companies for publishers to actually get their shit together and bring about change.”

Everyone’s coming for Google’s crown

McCoy: “Does somebody like a Perplexity, or some of the smaller AI players, have the infrastructure to maintain what Google has? You pass the baton to somebody who can’t catch it. Now what?”

That long, looming shadow of tariffs

Peterson: “I don’t think we’ve really seen a direct impact from these tariffs just yet. We’ve seen prices go up and there’s been a lot of concern from advertisers, but all of that felt more preemptive.”