I’ll be taking the next few weeks off so wont publish again till September 8th. Enjoy the rest of the summer.

-Steven

Headline Index

CTV

• Peacock Raises Prices on Every Tier, Including the Ad-Supported One

• Amazon Drops the Paywall on Alexa+ for Fire TV

• Ad Tiers Now Carry the Majority of North American SVOD Revenue

Programmatic

• A New DSP Bets That Fewer SSP Integrations Beat More

• NBC News Hands Its Entire Programmatic Display Business to Taboola

• Two AI Agents Negotiated an Audio Buy and Cut the CPM 42 Percent

Data / Identity

• The Ad Industry Files in Support of Google’s Age-Targeting Appeal

Measurement

• The Measurement Shakeout Is Now a Layoff Story

• YouTube Redefines a View, and Every Benchmark You Own Just Moved

Commerce & Retail Media

• Walmart’s Ad Business Grew 38 Percent and Pulled Guidance Up With It

• Target’s Profits Doubled. Roundel Added $279 Million.

• The ANA Puts a Number on Retail Media Attribution: 14 Days

AI

• ChatGPT Ads Land in 31 European Markets, Agency-Only

• Google Hands Publishers a Button and Calls It Traffic Relief

Corporate Strategy / M&A

• Omnicom Moves the People Who Built Its AI Platform Off Its Payroll

• YouTube Is Paying Creators Not to Take Netflix’s Money

• Theater Owners Break Ranks and Ask California to Settle With Paramount

Brand Safety / Legal

• New WPP Whistleblower Claims Put Principal Buying Back on Trial

CTV

Peacock Raises Prices on Every Tier, Including the Ad-Supported One

Peacock moved Select from $7.99 to $8.99, Premium from $10.99 to $12.99, and Premium Plus from $16.99 to $19.99. The two-dollar jump on the ad-supported Premium tier is the number to watch, because it says NBCUniversal thinks ad load plus subscription can both go up at once without churn. New subscribers pay immediately; existing ones after September 17.

Source: TechCrunch, August 18, 2026

Amazon Drops the Paywall on Alexa+ for Fire TV

Amazon made Alexa+ free on compatible Fire TV devices in the US, killing the $19.99 monthly fee for non-Prime households. The company says Alexa+ users have nearly twice as many conversations on Fire TV as users of the older assistant, and that conversation volume is the actual product here. Voice queries on a TV are intent signals, and Amazon just bought a lot more of them.

Source: TechCrunch, August 19, 2026

Ad Tiers Now Carry the Majority of North American SVOD Revenue

Ad-supported tiers hit $45.1 billion in North America in 2026, a tenfold increase since 2018 and 54 percent of total SVOD revenue. The subscription business quietly became an advertising business while everyone argued about password sharing. The same data set shows linear viewing climbing back above SVOD in New Zealand, a reminder that the streaming transition is not a straight line everywhere.

Source: VideoWeek, August 18, 2026

Programmatic

A New DSP Bets That Fewer SSP Integrations Beat More

Tuple launched in March with eight customers and one SSP integration, and plans to cap itself at three. Founder Doug Lauretano, formerly of OpenX and Media.net, is arguing that hundreds of SSP connections produce duplicate inventory and opacity rather than reach. That is a defensible thesis and a hard sell, because buyers have been trained to equate integration count with scale.

Source: AdExchanger, August 18, 2026

NBC News Hands Its Entire Programmatic Display Business to Taboola

Taboola will exclusively sell all programmatic display across NBCNews.com and TODAY.com through its Realize platform. A premium news publisher outsourcing its whole open-web display stack to a company built on content recommendation is the clearest signal yet that publishers no longer believe running their own programmatic operation pays for itself. For Taboola, this is the first real proof it can sell something other than native.

Source: Axios, August 18, 2026

Two AI Agents Negotiated an Audio Buy and Cut the CPM 42 Percent

Butler/Till and iHeartMedia ran paired AI agents over an MCP server to buy a streaming audio and podcast campaign, with a human planner supplying the brief. The result: CPMs 42 percent below direct-buy benchmarks and 48 percent premium mid-roll placement against a 33 percent norm. This is the first agency-to-publisher agentic buy without an SSP in the middle, and the disintermediation is the point, not the savings.

Source: Digiday, August 20, 2026

Data / Identity

The Ad Industry Files in Support of Google’s Age-Targeting Appeal

Two Californians over 60 sued Google for letting advertisers exclude older consumers from financial services ads, and a Santa Clara judge refused to dismiss it in June. Trade groups have now backed Google’s appeal with the argument that using age to find a receptive audience is not discrimination. If that argument loses, every demographic exclusion in every campaign setup becomes a legal question, not a targeting one.

Source: MediaPost, August 18, 2026

Measurement

The Measurement Shakeout Is Now a Layoff Story

Nielsen’s $2.15 billion purchase of DoubleVerify is already reshaping headcount across the category. VideoAmp cut 50 to 60 people including its CTO, and Comscore announced reductions targeting $20 to $25 million in annual savings. Standalone measurement point solutions are being repriced in public, and the survivors will be the ones with proprietary data plus the scale to aggregate signal.

Source: Digiday, August 18, 2026

YouTube Redefines a View, and Every Benchmark You Own Just Moved

Starting August 24, YouTube counts a view the moment playback begins, matching TikTok and Instagram. The old threshold becomes “engaged views,” visible only in analytics. Every year-over-year YouTube comparison in your decks is about to break, and the platform simultaneously raised Partner Program thresholds to 8,000 watch hours and 20 million Shorts views, so the inflation runs one direction and the payout bar runs the other.

Source: TVREV, August 21, 2026

Commerce & Retail Media

Walmart’s Ad Business Grew 38 Percent and Pulled Guidance Up With It

Global advertising rose 38 percent in Q2, with Walmart Connect up 43 percent in the US, and Walmart raised full-year EPS guidance to $2.80 to $2.87. The company also closed its Vibe.co acquisition and is folding it into Connect alongside Vizio. Walmart is assembling a full CTV performance stack inside a retail media network, which is a harder thing for Amazon to answer than another round of shopper marketing.

Source: Adweek, August 20, 2026

Target’s Profits Doubled. Roundel Added $279 Million.

Roundel booked $279 million in Q2, up 28.6 percent year over year, while total profits topped $1.87 billion on roughly $994 million in tariff refunds. Strip out the refunds and the ad network is doing the structural work: growing at nearly six times the rate of the retail business it sits on top of. That ratio is why every retailer with a loyalty file is building one.

Source: Adweek, August 19, 2026

The ANA Puts a Number on Retail Media Attribution: 14 Days

The ANA released guidelines standardizing retail media measurement, including a recommended 14-day attribution window, third-party validation, and shared definitions for “outcomes.” Walmart, Target, and Albertsons gave input. Amazon did not, which tells you how much of the market the standard can actually cover on day one.

Source: Digiday, August 18, 2026

AI

ChatGPT Ads Land in 31 European Markets, Agency-Only

OpenAI turns on ChatGPT ads across 31 European markets on August 24, six months after the US pilot. There is no self-serve tool; access runs through Publicis, Omnicom, WPP, Havas, Dentsu, and MediaPlus, with GDPR consent cited as the reason. Routing an entirely new inventory source through six holding companies is a distribution decision as much as a compliance one, and it hands those agencies a gatekeeping position they did not have in search or social.

Source: Digiday, August 19, 2026

Google Hands Publishers a Button and Calls It Traffic Relief

Google rolled out an embeddable “Preferred Sources” button letting readers favorite publishers across Search, Discover, and News, and says users are twice as likely to click through to a preferred source. More than 345,000 unique sources have been selected since May. It is a real feature and a small one, offered to publishers whose referral traffic Google’s own AI summaries are cutting.

Source: TechCrunch, August 20, 2026

Corporate Strategy / M&A

Omnicom Moves the People Who Built Its AI Platform Off Its Payroll

At least 468 engineers and product staff behind Omni were transferred to contractor Endava across the US, UK, India, and Malaysia, following roughly 50 US layoffs in the same division in June. Omnicom showcased that platform at CES in January as central to its client offering. Outsourcing the team that builds your differentiator is a cost decision that will be read by clients as a strategy decision.

Source: Adweek, August 20, 2026

YouTube Is Paying Creators Not to Take Netflix’s Money

YouTube is offering top creators millions for exclusivity and warning that cross-posting to Netflix means reduced marketing support and fewer brand partnership opportunities. No deals are finalized. The defensive posture matters more than the dollars: YouTube spent a decade insisting creators were free agents, and now it is buying lock-in the way a network buys talent.

Source: Bloomberg, August 19, 2026

Theater Owners Break Ranks and Ask California to Settle With Paramount

Cinema United called on Paramount and California Attorney General Rob Bonta to settle the suit blocking the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger, with Cinemark separately endorsing the deal. Exhibitors previously feared consolidation would shrink the release slate. They have decided that a year of legal limbo does more damage than a bigger buyer, which is a bleak read on the state of theatrical.

Source: Reuters via U.S. News, August 18, 2026

Brand Safety / Legal

New WPP Whistleblower Claims Put Principal Buying Back on Trial

Fresh allegations in the WPP whistleblower case involving Sony have reopened the argument over rebates, kickbacks, and principal buying. The specifics will take months to resolve. The reputational cost lands now, because every advertiser running a principal-based deal will get the same question from procurement this quarter.

Source: Adweek, August 20, 2026

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Headlines

CTV

• The upfront grew 9 percent and got cheaper at the same time

• Roku’s founder wanted a co-CEO. The board sold the company instead

• RTL proves a European broadcaster can make streaming pay

Programmatic

• Georgia-Pacific cut 80 percent of its SSPs and got a better outcome

• An agency running agentic buying says supply path still does the real work

Data and Identity

• Klaviyo’s signup form handed customer passwords to ad trackers

Measurement

• Nielsen’s CEO says buying DoubleVerify is offense, not conflict

• Women’s sports fans spend most of their screen time off social

Commerce and Retail Media

• Walmart Connect ships negative keywords seven years after Amazon

• Apple Maps opens for business, and it is a local ad network now

AI

• Perplexity kills the first real attempt to sell ads to AI agents

• A quarter of commercial ChatGPT prompts now carry ads, and many miss badly

• Apple is shopping for news, and it wants to pay by the use

• 300 French newspapers take Google’s AI Overviews to the regulator

Corporate Strategy and M&A

• Ad tech is going private, and the market is telling you why

• California’s AG calls Ellison’s exit threat what it is

• An activist tells Lionsgate to fix itself for AI or sell

Brand Safety and Legal

• Maryland’s digital ad tax is dead, and the refund bill is $535 million

• DOJ sides with X against the advertisers who walked

• WPP whistleblower says Sony ran its own probe and found rebate fraud

CTV

The upfront grew 9 percent and got cheaper at the same time

Volume is not the story here. Price is. Total 2026-27 TV upfront commitments hit $33.7 billion, up 9 percent, but every CPM fell: broadcast down 4 percent to $41.65, cable down 8.5 percent to $17.70, streaming down 5 percent to $25.90. Streaming carried the whole increase, jumping 30 percent to $17.2 billion while cable dropped 7 percent and broadcast dropped 5 percent. Ed Papazian of Media Dynamics put it plainly: buyers are spending more money in streaming and paying less per viewer, because FAST inventory keeps undercutting premium platforms. If you sell CTV, your unit economics just got worse while your revenue line got better, and that gap is the thing to explain to your board.

Source: MediaPost, August 11, 2026

Roku’s founder wanted a co-CEO. The board sold the company instead

The S-4 filed on August 7 shows how the $22 billion Fox-Roku deal actually happened, and it started with succession, not strategy. Anthony Wood told his board at a late-September 2025 meeting that he wanted to step back and proposed adding a co-CEO. The board did not like the risk of losing his judgment, ran a market check instead, and ended up with Fox. Combined, Fox gets Roku’s 100 million-plus streaming households alongside Tubi’s 110 million users, which puts an enormous share of free and connected TV inventory under one seller. Closing is expected in the first half of 2027.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter, August 10, 2026

RTL proves a European broadcaster can make streaming pay

American streamers keep explaining why profitability is coming. RTL just booked it. RTL+ turned profitable in the first half, and the group now expects streaming to contribute about 100 million euros to full-year operating profit on group revenue of 2.89 billion euros, up 3.9 percent. Digital ad revenue grew 10.9 percent and covered the linear decline. The mechanics are worth copying: bundled HBO Max subscriptions in Germany and Austria, an ad-sales tie-up with Warner Bros. Discovery, distribution inside Amazon Prime Video in France, and a single tech platform in Bedrock. After the Sky Deutschland acquisition, RTL raised full-year guidance to 7.1 to 7.2 billion euros, with advertising at roughly 39 percent of revenue.

Source: VideoWeek, August 12, 2026

Programmatic

Georgia-Pacific cut 80 percent of its SSPs and got a better outcome

This is the rare supply-path story with numbers attached, and the numbers are not small. Georgia-Pacific went from more than 30 SSPs to about six and reported CPM declines of 17 to 44 percent depending on the brand, viewability up 11 percent, video completion up 7 percent, and invalid traffic down about 8 percent, worth six figures a year in savings. The mechanism matters more than the cut: the company scores inventory pre-bid with SWYM using predictive signals rather than grading its own homework after the campaign ends, with Fou Analytics on fraud detection and Yahoo as the DSP. Paras Shah, senior director of digital media, said the future of programmatic sits on the supply side. Most in-house advertiser teams are years behind the holdcos on this, and this is what catching up looks like.

Source: Digiday, August 10, 2026

An agency running agentic buying says supply path still does the real work

Goodway Group is actually testing agentic media buying in production, feeding briefs to buyer agents and grading what the seller agents return. Andrea Kwiatek, the agency’s director of strategic partnerships, came back with a useful verdict: agents buy operational efficiency, they do not replace supply-path optimization, which is still where media quality and cost get decided. Her warning is the part to remember. If agents operate outside assigned guidelines and parameters, you have added another black box on top of programmatic, which already had one too many. Almost everything else you have read about agentic buying this year is roadmap.

Source: AdExchanger, August 14, 2026

Data and Identity

Klaviyo’s signup form handed customer passwords to ad trackers

A misconfigured signup form at Klaviyo leaked registration data, including passwords, emails, company names, websites and phone numbers, to third-party trackers from Facebook, Google, HubSpot, Microsoft, LinkedIn and X. It ran from February 2024 through November 2025, and possibly longer. Klaviyo says fewer than 200 people were affected based on its readily available active logs, then declined to say how long it keeps those logs or to share its breach notifications, which is not the answer of a company confident in its number. Researcher Sam Jadali of Melurna found it and planned to present at Def Con. Every marketer running third-party pixels on an authentication page should treat this as an audit trigger, not a Klaviyo story.

Source: TechCrunch, August 10, 2026

Measurement

Nielsen’s CEO says buying DoubleVerify is offense, not conflict

Karthik Rao gave the direct answer the industry has been waiting on since the $2.15 billion DoubleVerify deal was announced on August 6. His defense of independence is that Nielsen does not play in inventory, plus a commitment to methodology transparency, and he pointed at the 2015 eXelate acquisition as proof Nielsen can absorb a data asset without wrecking the measurement business. The strategic case is cleaner: killing the manual reconciliation between audience measurement and verification data, which nobody enjoys and everybody pays for. Mark Zagorski stays on after close, expected in Q1 2027. Whether buyers accept a referee that also sells optimization tools is the open question, and Rao has not answered it yet.

Source: AdExchanger, August 13, 2026

Women’s sports fans spend most of their screen time off social

Brands keep activating women’s sports on Instagram and TikTok, and the audience data says that is backwards. Research from The Trade Desk Intelligence and GoodQues found women’s sports fans spend 72 percent of their digital time outside social platforms and 8 percent more time with CTV than the average American, with CTV the primary viewing platform for 71 percent of them. The audience is 51 percent male and 49 percent female, younger than average, and 72 percent consume sports content daily, which beats male sports fans generally. If your women’s sports plan is a social buy with a highlight reel, you are reaching the audience where it spends the least time.

Source: The Current, August 13, 2026

Commerce and Retail Media

Walmart Connect ships negative keywords seven years after Amazon

Walmart Connect finally lets advertisers exclude search terms in sponsored products campaigns, through Ad Center and partners including Pacvue, Skai, Quartile, Teikametrics and DataCaciques. Amazon shipped this in 2019, the year Walmart Connect launched, and Sam’s Club has had it for years, so the honest read is that the second-largest US retail media network shipped a basic control seven years late. Ray Easley of Flywheel described paying for eyeglasses ads against wine glass queries. Expect a wave of ROAS declines as brands stop buying their own branded terms in automatic campaigns and their reported numbers start telling the truth.

Source: Digiday, August 12, 2026

Apple Maps opens for business, and it is a local ad network now

Apple opened Ads on Maps to US and Canadian businesses, delivering on its March promise of a summer launch, with placements in search suggestions and results. The pitch is over a billion monthly business searches, a 50 percent action rate on those searches, a user base that is 57 percent Gen Z and millennial, and roughly a quarter of US monthly navigation users. Advertisers buying by credit card before October 11 get 15 percent back monthly for a year, capped at $1,000 a month, which is Apple buying its way into the consideration set. Businesses with five or fewer locations buy direct through Apple Business, larger advertisers go through Apple Ads, and home services, alcohol, gambling, crypto, medical and religious categories are restricted. This is the first credible local search alternative to Google in years.

Source: MediaPost, August 14, 2026

AI

Perplexity kills the first real attempt to sell ads to AI agents

Time started selling ads embedded in the markdown versions of its pages, the versions AI agents read rather than humans, built by ad tech firm Mobian with Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute as early buyers. Perplexity blocked them from influencing its index and called the practice deceptive, warning that publishers who run markdown ads face a reputational downgrade. Perplexity has not defined the standard or explained the mechanism, which means the rule is whatever the platform decides it is. That is the real lesson for publishers building agent-facing revenue: you can invent the format, but the model providers decide whether it exists.

Source: Digiday, August 11, 2026

A quarter of commercial ChatGPT prompts now carry ads, and many miss badly

SE Ranking analyzed more than 50,000 commercial prompts across 20 niches and found sponsored placements on 25.94 percent of them, close to Google AI Mode’s 29.45 percent. The quality is the problem. About 14.35 percent of ads had no semantic relationship to the prompt, from 2.6 percent mismatch in pets to more than 50 percent in relationships and news and politics. Only 3.63 percent of advertisers were cited as sources in the answer above their own ad, so paying does not buy you into the response. The brand-safety numbers should stop anyone planning a 2027 test: ChatGPT served ads on 28.69 percent of healthcare prompts against Google’s 2.64 percent, and 28.76 percent of news and politics prompts against Google’s 6.8 percent.

Source: Search Engine Land, August 10, 2026

Apple is shopping for news, and it wants to pay by the use

Apple has approached publishers about licensing content to feed current news into its rebuilt Siri, due later this year, with a nine-figure budget behind it. The structure is the interesting part: variable compensation that pays when content is actually used, not flat licensing fees. Publishers who spent a decade optimizing for referral traffic they then monetized with display are being offered a usage-based royalty instead, which is a different business with different margins and far less control. Every publisher signing one of these is making a bet about which side of the AI content market has pricing power in three years.

Source: TechCrunch, August 13, 2026

300 French newspapers take Google’s AI Overviews to the regulator

APIG, whose members include Le Figaro, Le Monde, Ouest-France, Le Parisien, Les Echos and L’Equipe, filed a complaint with France’s competition authority seeking compensation for Google’s use of their content in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Their argument leans on French neighbouring-rights law, which requires large platforms to negotiate payment, and on the claim that AI products extract value beyond ordinary search indexing. Google was already fined 500 million euros in 2022 for breaching those obligations, so the precedent is unhelpful for Google. The traffic case is the sharp end: AI summaries are being blamed for 33 to 38 percent of publisher traffic losses in European markets where the feature is live, and that traffic was open-web ad inventory.

Source: VideoWeek, August 12, 2026

Corporate Strategy and M&A

Ad tech is going private, and the market is telling you why

Count the exits: Nielsen taking DoubleVerify private for $2.15 billion, Integral Ad Science going to Novacap for roughly $2 billion, LiveRamp leaving public markets by year-end, and Criteo in take-private talks with Vista. Now count the survivors. The Trade Desk’s growth fell from 22 percent in Q4 2024 to 3 percent in Q2 2026 with the stock off more than 20 percent after earnings, AppLovin hit a 52-week low despite 53 percent revenue growth, and Teads pulled Q3 guidance after a 17 percent decline, while Magnite and PubMatic each grew 11 percent and remain investor favorites. Growth alone stopped being a story public markets will pay for. What gets rewarded now is a defensible position, and companies without one are finding buyers instead of shareholders.

Source: Digiday, August 14, 2026

California’s AG calls Ellison’s exit threat what it is

David Ellison told Paramount executives he will move operations out of California starting October 1 unless the 12-state antitrust case blocking the Warner Bros. Discovery deal gets settled. Rob Bonta’s answer on X was that Paramount is trying to blackmail the state into letting an illegal deal through, and that Paramount has lost the plot as it keeps losing in court. The pressure is real on both sides: trial is set for March 2027, October 1 also starts a $7 million per day ticking fee owed to WBD shareholders, and Paramount says 68 jurisdictions have now cleared the transaction. The state suit is the only thing left standing between the largest media combination in years and a close.

Source: Variety, August 11, 2026

An activist tells Lionsgate to fix itself for AI or sell

Sagar Gupta, who runs activism at Anson Funds, wrote to the Lionsgate board arguing the company must reinvent itself for the AI era or put itself up for sale before it becomes an AI casualty. His evidence is market behavior, not theory: Lionsgate stock has moved sharply lower on releases of new AI video models including Sora and Seedance, which means investors are already pricing studios as losers rather than beneficiaries. Shares closed down about 4 percent at $11.87. With Paramount and WBD consolidating, this puts a second mid-cap studio in play, and the framing tells you what the next round of media M&A will argue about.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter, August 11, 2026

Brand Safety and Legal

Maryland’s digital ad tax is dead, and the refund bill is $535 million

Maryland’s Tax Court struck down the first state digital advertising tax in the country, ruling it violates the federal Internet Tax Freedom Act because digital and non-digital advertising services are not meaningfully distinguishable, and Maryland taxes no equivalent on billboards, newspapers, radio or TV. Apple, Google and Peacock each brought separate challenges and each won. The tax ran from 2.5 percent for companies above $100 million in global revenue to 10 percent above $15 billion, had collected $535.5 million through July, and the court ordered all of it refunded with interest. Comptroller Brooke Lierman signaled an appeal, and Washington State faces a parallel challenge to its own version. Any state still drafting a copycat levy just lost its template.

Source: Maryland Matters, August 14, 2026

DOJ sides with X against the advertisers who walked

The Justice Department filed an amicus brief backing X’s appeal to revive antitrust claims against 10 advertisers, calling the district court’s dismissal analysis flawed and arguing X sufficiently alleged antitrust injury. The defendants include Orsted, Shell, Mars, Nestle, Tyson, CVS, Abbott, Colgate-Palmolive, Lego and Pinterest, with the World Federation of Advertisers and GARM at the center of the alleged coordination. X says its ad revenue fell from $1.076 billion in Q4 2022 to $367 million in Q2 2026, and that at least 18 GARM members stopped spending in the November-December 2022 window. The position DOJ is endorsing, that a boycott meant to force operational changes can violate antitrust law, is a direct threat to any collective brand-safety action, and every trade body running one should be reading this brief.

Source: MediaPost, August 13, 2026

WPP whistleblower says Sony ran its own probe and found rebate fraud

Former WPP executive Richard Foster filed an amended complaint alleging that Sony, a major WPP client, ran its own investigation into the holding company and reached findings that back his claims of illegal media rebate schemes. The timing is deliberate, landing just before a hearing on WPP’s motion to dismiss. The claims trace to the 2023 GroupM China scandal in which authorities detained and later convicted three executives over a kickback scheme worth roughly 1.2 billion yuan, about $176 million, and Foster says he was fired for trying to expose rebate practices. A client running its own forensic audit and finding something is a different order of problem than a disgruntled executive, and every advertiser with a holdco media contract should be asking what their own audit rights actually allow.

Source: Adweek, August 14, 2026

Headline Scan

CTV

• Fubo finishes wiring itself into Disney’s ad stack

• Paramount’s streaming profit is doing the heavy lifting

Programmatic

• The Trade Desk’s growth engine stalled

• Magnite is the sell-side story of the quarter

• PubMatic proves the sell side isn’t one trade

• Criteo ran out of retargeting road

Measurement / M&A

• Nielsen buys its way into verification

Brand Safety / Legal

• Meta’s ad system kept selling the worst inventory imaginable

• Teads takes its Google grievance to court

• A UK tribunal cleared a £5B swing at Google

AI

• PubMatic put rules around autonomous buying before anyone asked

• TikTok doubled the length of its AI video generator

Corporate Strategy / M&A

• Disney hands its characters to TikTok creators

• WPP’s turnaround is still a promise, not a result

Publishers

• People Inc. held ad revenue flat while its traffic fell off a cliff

• The New York Times grew ads and lost the room anyway

Miscellaneous

• BMW put movie ads on the dashboard it swore it wouldn’t

• Snap rode the World Cup to a real quarter

CTV

Fubo finishes wiring itself into Disney’s ad stack

Fubo’s turnaround is now a Disney story. The company closed Q3 at $1.48 billion in revenue and cut its net loss to $25.7 million, but the number that matters is the completed integration with Disney’s ad server, which raises fill rates and pricing on Fubo’s inventory. Subscribers grew 2% to 5.75 million. Source: AdExchanger, Aug 6, 2026

Paramount’s streaming profit is doing the heavy lifting

Strip out the merger noise and Paramount’s quarter is a streaming quarter. Paramount+ profit jumped 44% to $366 million and the service added 2 million subscribers, enough for management to raise its full-year profit outlook. Linear TV ad revenue kept sliding, down roughly 14%. The company now makes its money where the audience actually is, and the earnings finally show it. Source: CNBC, Aug 4, 2026

Programmatic

The Trade Desk’s growth engine stalled

When the category’s bellwether prints 3% revenue growth, the whole open-internet thesis needs a better quarter to defend itself. The Trade Desk grew just 3% in Q2 and the stock cratered more than 20% after hours. CTV is now over half the business and still growing double digits, which means the drag is coming from everywhere else. This is the print bulls have to explain away. Source: The Motley Fool, Aug 6, 2026

Magnite is the sell-side story of the quarter

While the biggest DSP stumbled, the supply side compounded. Magnite beat, grew revenue 11%, and lifted full-year guidance to 13–14% on CTV revenue up 36% year over year. Owning the decisioning layer for connected TV inventory is turning into the better seat in programmatic. The sell side spent years as the junior partner; this quarter it didn’t read that way. Source: PPC Land, Aug 5, 2026

PubMatic proves the sell side isn’t one trade

Two SSPs beat the same week the largest DSP missed, and that tells you where the money is moving. PubMatic returned to double-digit growth, shares jumped 20%, and CTV rose 13% to a fifth of revenue. The company also flagged a CFO transition. Read alongside Magnite, it’s a clear signal: budgets are shifting toward supply, not away from programmatic. Source: Investing.com, Aug 5, 2026

Criteo ran out of retargeting road

Retargeting built Criteo, and retargeting is now the thing pulling it under. Revenue fell 11% to $428 million, the stock lost roughly a quarter of its value, and the company cut guidance after losing enterprise commitments from Uber Eats and Target’s Roundel. CFO Sarah Glickman is leaving. Retail media was supposed to be the next act, and it hasn’t arrived fast enough to cover the hole. Source: Investing.com, Aug 5, 2026

Measurement / M&A

Nielsen buys its way into verification

Nielsen agreed to acquire DoubleVerify for $2.15 billion, bolting fraud detection and viewability onto audience measurement in a single take-private deal. The pitch is one independent layer that both counts the audience and confirms the ad actually ran. The open question is whether buyers want their measurement and their verification owned by the same company, which is exactly the conflict the industry spent a decade trying to separate. Source: TV Tech, Aug 6, 2026

Brand Safety / Legal

Meta’s ad system kept selling the worst inventory imaginable

Automated ad review at Meta’s scale is still letting through content no human reviewer ever would. Researchers at the Tech Transparency Project found more than 50 paid ads carrying sexually exploitative images of minors, including AI-generated material, and a court hit the company with a $567 million child-safety fine, its largest in the case. The judge compared the harm to pollution from a factory. Scale is Meta’s defense on efficiency and its indictment on safety. Source: VideoWeek, Aug 7, 2026

Teads takes its Google grievance to court

Everyone downstream of Google’s ad stack is now testing whether the courts will do what the market couldn’t. Teads sued Google, arguing the tie between Google Ads and AdX shuts competing exchanges out of demand, and the suit asks for treble damages. It rides directly on the momentum of the federal antitrust ruling. Expect more of these; the ruling handed the plaintiffs’ bar a template. Source: AdExchanger, Aug 5, 2026

A UK tribunal cleared a £5B swing at Google

This is advertisers, not regulators, going after the auction directly. The Competition Appeal Tribunal certified an opt-out class action covering roughly 880,000 UK businesses over Google’s search-ad pricing and dominance, and Google lost its bid to block it. The £5 billion figure is large enough to change the calculus. Regulators move slowly and settle; a certified class of nearly a million advertisers does neither. Source: Bloomberg, Aug 5, 2026

AI

PubMatic put rules around autonomous buying before anyone asked

Governance, not autonomy, is where the agentic pitch gets real. PubMatic launched a five-step framework for agentic advertising: defined boundaries, business rules, approved asset libraries, approval workflows, and audit trails. The bet is that “let the agent buy the media” only works if someone can prove afterward what it did and why. The vendors racing to hand budgets to autonomous systems will need this part before buyers sign off. Source: VideoWeek, Aug 7, 2026

TikTok doubled the length of its AI video generator

TikTok’s Dreamina Seedance 2.5 now produces 30-second clips, twice the previous limit, after an earlier global rollout stalled on copyright disputes. Longer machine-made video means more of the feed can be synthetic, and more of it can look like a finished ad. The capability jumped; the copyright fights that delayed it did not go away. Anyone building creative on these tools is building on contested ground. Source: VideoWeek, Aug 7, 2026

Corporate Strategy / M&A

Disney hands its characters to TikTok creators

After last year’s OpenAI licensing talk, Disney is choosing distribution over exclusivity. The company struck a global short-form content-sharing deal with TikTok that lets creators use clips from Disney shows and films, with the output feeding back into Disney’s own short-form surfaces. It’s a bet that fandom fueled on TikTok is worth more than tightly held IP. The company that guards its vault harder than anyone just propped the door open. Source: Deadline, Aug 6, 2026

WPP’s turnaround is still a promise, not a result

The market bought the story this week; 2027 is when it has to become numbers. WPP’s like-for-like revenue fell again, with Q2 down 2.8%, though shares rose on signs the decline is easing and costs are falling faster than revenue. CEO Cindy Rose is rebuilding the holding company around AI and calling 2026 a stabilization year. Stabilization is the polite word for not growing, and investors will only extend that grace so long. Source: Campaign US, Aug 7, 2026

Publishers

People Inc. held ad revenue flat while its traffic fell off a cliff

The AI-search hit is real, but premium supply is proving it has pricing power the open web lost. Google Search sent People Inc. from roughly two-thirds of its traffic down to 21%, yet ad revenue stayed flat year over year as scarce quality inventory held its price. CEO Neil Vogel says the company still won’t block Google’s crawlers. When you can’t win on volume, you win on scarcity, and People Inc. is proving a premium publisher can. Source: Digiday, Aug 5, 2026

The New York Times grew ads and lost the room anyway

Growth in the wrong line item doesn’t hold the multiple. Digital ad revenue rose 20.7% to $114 million and total revenue climbed 11.2%, but the stock dropped double digits on slowing subscriber growth and rising video and ad costs. The ad business is working; the subscription engine investors actually pay for is what wobbled. The Times built its story on subscriptions, and the market grades it on that page first. Source: A Media Operator, Aug 6, 2026

Miscellaneous

BMW put movie ads on the dashboard it swore it wouldn’t

The car is the newest screen the ad industry wants, and the backlash is the first bill coming due. BMW rolled out Spider-Man takeovers on center-console screens in newer models through August 10, complete with animation and ambient lighting, tied to Sony’s film. Owners are not amused, and BMW had previously promised it wouldn’t run ads like this. The in-car ad opportunity is real; so is the trust it burns on the way in. Source: The Autopian, Aug 5, 2026

Snap rode the World Cup to a real quarter

One tournament doesn’t fix Snap’s position against the walled gardens, but it shows the demand is there when the event is big enough. Snap grew revenue 19% on World Cup ad spend and shares jumped about 10% after hours, with management pointing to better traction among large advertisers. The question is what the next quarter looks like without a global tournament pulling brand budgets in. Event-driven beats are nice; durable ones are the job. Source: CNBC, Aug 3, 2026

An AI agent is software that chases a goal on its own. You give it an outcome, not a question. It plans the steps, uses tools like a browser or email, and works until the job is done. A chatbot answers. An agent acts.

The Chef Analogy: Cookbooks vs. Personal Chefs

To understand how agents work, think about the difference between owning a cookbook and hiring a personal chef:

• The chatbot (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude) is the cookbook: Ask how to make dinner and you get a great recipe. The shopping, chopping, and cooking are still on you.

• The agent (e.g., ChatGPT Agent, Claude Code) is the personal chef: Say “dinner for six on Saturday” and walk away. It plans the menu, buys the ingredients, cooks, tastes, adjusts.

Why does this matter? Working with AI used to mean asking a question, copying the answer, and doing the rest yourself. An agent takes the whole job: pull the numbers, build the deck, draft the follow-ups. The skill is no longer writing clever questions. It is giving clear goals.

Quick scan: all links by category

CTV

• Netflix Pays AMC $500 Million and Gives Up Exclusivity to Keep The Walking Dead (Variety, Jul 30)

• AMC Shrinks in Q2 but Raises Guidance on the Back of Licensing and Distribution (THR, Jul 30)

• Women’s Sports Has the Audience, Not the Ad Inventory (AdExchanger, Jul 29)

Programmatic

• Holdcos Are Burying Unpriced AI Costs Inside Principal Media Deals (Digiday, Jul 29)

Measurement

• FreeWheel Finally Gives Programmatic Buyers Show-Level Reporting (Digiday, Jul 29)

Commerce & Retail Media

• Amazon Ads Nears $20 Billion a Quarter and Nobody Blinks (CNBC, Jul 30)

AI

• Time Is Now Selling Ads to Machines, Not People (Digiday, Jul 30)

• Meta’s Ad Engine Accelerates While Its P&L Absorbs the AI Bill (CNBC, Jul 29)

Corporate Strategy / M&A

• Omnicom Sells Off IPG Agencies and Wall Street Approves (AdExchanger, Jul 29)

• Stagwell Posts Record New Business and Doubles Down on Pitching (Adweek, Jul 31)

• Reddit Grows 61 Percent and Gets Punished Anyway (CNBC, Jul 30)

• EA’s $55 Billion Go-Private Deal Reaches the Finish Line (Variety, Jul 30)

Brand Safety / Legal

• The FTC Comes for Hims & Hers Over Pixels and Patient Data (TechCrunch, Jul 30)

Miscellaneous

• Microsoft’s Ad Business Keeps Growing While Its Consumer Segment Shrinks (Search Engine Roundtable, Jul 30)

• Sweetgreen Used Bar TVs to Turn the World Cup Into a Wrap Commercial (AdExchanger, Jul 31)

CTV

Netflix Pays AMC $500 Million and Gives Up Exclusivity to Keep The Walking Dead
Netflix just told you what it values in 2026: proven libraries, not second seasons of new shows. The Walking Dead franchise will stream on both Netflix and AMC+ beginning in 2027 under a five-year, $500 million co-exclusive licensing deal covering the original series and all six spinoffs, 371 episodes in total. The tell is the co-exclusivity. Netflix has been the exclusive U.S. streaming home of the show since 2011, and it chose to pay a premium to share rather than lose. Established franchises are the safe bet when engagement is under a microscope. Source: Variety, July 30 VarietyTechCrunch

AMC Shrinks in Q2 but Raises Guidance on the Back of Licensing and Distribution
AMC’s quarter proves the mid-size media playbook now: monetize the library, renew carriage, manage decline. The company reported net revenues of $547 million, down 9 percent year over year, with adjusted operating income down 58 percent, yet it raised full-year revenue guidance to $2.4 to $2.45 billion, citing the Netflix agreement and renewed distribution deals with Comcast, DirecTV, and YouTube TV. Licensing revenue is doing the work the ad market won’t. Source: The Hollywood Reporter, July 30 The Hollywood ReporterTech Times

Women’s Sports Has the Audience, Not the Ad Inventory
Demand is outrunning supply, which is the best problem a category can have. Women’s sports viewership is rising and publishers, advertisers and tech vendors are trying to capitalize, but ad inventory remains scarce because women’s sports still gets far less mainstream media exposure. For sellers, scarcity means pricing power. For buyers, it means the window to get in cheap is closing. Source: AdExchanger, July 29 AdExchangerAdExchanger

Programmatic

Holdcos Are Burying Unpriced AI Costs Inside Principal Media Deals
Nobody has priced agency AI yet, so the holdcos are hiding the bill in the one place clients already tolerate opacity. On Omnicom’s Q2 call, CEO John Wren admitted the market has not seen the true cost of AI, and Digiday’s reporting shows several holding companies are folding AI costs into bigger commercial structures like principal media deals rather than solving the pricing question directly, a workaround that exists because nobody has found a way to measure what AI actually delivers. If you sell against holdco buying, this is your transparency talking point for the next year. Source: Digiday, July 29 Digiday

Measurement

FreeWheel Finally Gives Programmatic Buyers Show-Level Reporting
A decade of buyer complaints just got a partial answer. Comcast-owned FreeWheel is rolling out show-level reporting for advertisers on its Buyer Cloud platform, free of charge roughly two hours after impressions deliver, limited to publishers that opt in. A+E Global Media, Fuse, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Spectrum Reach, Warner Bros. Discovery and Xumo have signed on. The catch is the phrase “opt in.” The publishers most confident in their content will disclose, and the ones that don’t will invite exactly the questions they’re avoiding. Over half of CTV advertisers say they would shift spend to publishers that provide show-level transparency, so the money will follow the disclosure. Source: Digiday, July 29 Digiday

Commerce & Retail Media

Amazon Ads Nears $20 Billion a Quarter and Nobody Blinks
The most remarkable thing about Amazon’s ad business is how unremarkable a 26 percent growth rate has become inside that company. Advertising hit $19.81 billion in Q2 against expectations of $19.43 billion, and net sales rose 20 percent to $200.6 billion, with a $53.4 billion gain from Amazon’s Anthropic investment pushing net income to $62.6 billion. An ad business bigger than most media companies’ entire revenue is now a footnote to AWS. That says everything about where the growth narrative sits. Source: CNBC, July 30 CNBCYahoo Finance

AI

Time Is Now Selling Ads to Machines, Not People
This is either the future of publisher monetization or an elaborate way to serve ads no one reads. Time has begun serving ads to AI bots, with Ally Bank and Project Management Institute among the first buyers. The ads live inside markdown versions of Time’s pages, formatted as FAQ-style sponsored content, and Time says it sees more bot traffic than human traffic most days. The logic holds: if agents are reading your content and shaping answers for millions of users, influencing the agent beats influencing one reader. The risk is that no AI company has said how its models treat sponsored content in markdown. Source: Digiday, July 30 Digiday

Meta’s Ad Engine Accelerates While Its P&L Absorbs the AI Bill
Separate the two stories and the quarter looks very different from the stock chart. Ad revenue grew 27 percent to $59.36 billion on impressions up 14 percent and price per ad up 12 percent. The demand side is fine. The problem was a 55 percent spike in costs to $42.03 billion, including $2.4 billion in legal charges and $1.18 billion in severance tied to an 8,000-person reduction, which compressed operating margin to 31 percent from 43 percent, and shares slid after a lighter-than-expected revenue forecast. Sellers competing with Meta should note: the auction is getting more expensive for advertisers, 12 percent price growth and counting. Source: CNBC, July 29 Stock Titan + 2

Corporate Strategy / M&A

Omnicom Sells Off IPG Agencies and Wall Street Approves
The largest agency merger in history is now a pruning exercise, and investors like the shears. Omnicom is halfway through a major sell-off of IPG agencies, eliminating certain specialist firms and overlapping agencies in certain countries, and investors cheered despite weak ad spend in Q2. The lesson for anyone selling to holdco teams: the org charts you mapped in January are stale, and the consolidation is nowhere near done. Source: AdExchanger, July 29 AdExchanger

Stagwell Posts Record New Business and Doubles Down on Pitching
While the big holdcos consolidate, Stagwell is running the opposite play: outwork everyone in the pitch room. The company posted 6 percent net revenue growth and a record $171 million in new business, up 45 percent year over year, including winning IBM’s account from WPP’s Ogilvy after a 32-year relationship. CEO Mark Penn now plans to double Stagwell’s new business unit. A 32-year incumbency falling is the real headline. Nothing about agency relationships is safe in the AI transition. Source: Adweek, July 31 Adweek

Reddit Grows 61 Percent and Gets Punished Anyway
Reddit’s quarter shows how fast the market reprices anything touching Google dependency. Q2 sales jumped 61 percent and beat on both lines with guidance above expectations, but shares sank around 11 percent after the company said search referrals were choppy, with referral traffic volatile late in the quarter. The ad business is not the concern. The user acquisition pipeline is, and it runs through a search engine that increasingly answers questions itself. Source: CNBC, July 30 CNBCYahoo Finance

EA’s $55 Billion Go-Private Deal Reaches the Finish Line
Gaming’s biggest buyout is about to close, and ad sellers should care because private owners need new revenue lines. Electronic Arts is set to close its $55 billion go-private deal next week. Watch what a leveraged EA does with in-game advertising and brand integrations once quarterly earnings pressure disappears and debt service pressure replaces it. Source: Variety, July 30 Variety

Brand Safety / Legal

The FTC Comes for Hims & Hers Over Pixels and Patient Data
Every advertiser using pixels on sensitive-category sites should read this complaint twice. The FTC alleges Hims & Hers placed pixel trackers from Meta, Snap, Microsoft, Pinterest, Reddit and X on its site, sharing customers’ health information with advertisers despite privacy promises. It’s the agency’s latest crackdown after actions against Cerebral, GoodRx and BetterHelp, and shares fell nearly 15 percent on the news. The pattern is now unmistakable: health data plus standard ad tech plumbing equals regulatory exposure, regardless of what the privacy policy says. Source: TechCrunch, July 30 TechCrunchCBS News

Miscellaneous

Microsoft’s Ad Business Keeps Growing While Its Consumer Segment Shrinks
Search ads are the only thing propping up Microsoft’s consumer division. Search and advertising revenue rose 10 percent in the fiscal fourth quarter, two points slower than the prior quarter, while the More Personal Computing segment fell 4 percent overall on Windows OEM down 7 percent and Xbox down 10 percent. Add LinkedIn up 12 percent and Microsoft quietly runs a meaningful ad business that nobody talks about, because Azure’s 43 percent growth eats all the oxygen. Source: Search Engine Roundtable, July 30 Search Engine Roundtablesec

Sweetgreen Used Bar TVs to Turn the World Cup Into a Wrap Commercial
Venue-based CTV is quietly becoming a real channel for brands chasing live sports without live sports pricing. Sweetgreen turned the World Cup into a marketing moment for its new wraps, running video ads in public viewing spaces through Atmosphere TV. The play is smart: co-viewing environments, guaranteed attention during matches, and none of the broadcast rights premium. Expect more QSR money to follow. Source: AdExchanger, July 31 AdExchanger

Based on your feedback from last week, I’m introducing a new section. Here is why:

• The Problem: In every training session I run, someone inevitably asks, “This might be a dumb question, but what does that actually mean?” I love that person. It takes confidence to speak up, and the truth is, half the room is waiting for the exact same answer but didn’t want to ask first.

• The Cost: We’ve all developed a habit of nodding along to jargon. But you can’t sell, evaluate a vendor, or push back on a bad idea in a language you don’t fluently speak.

• The Solution: Every week or two, I will break down a single industry term in plain English—often using a simple analogy or graphic.

If you already know the term, skip ahead to the news. If you don’t, this is where you catch up.

Have a term you want me to simplify? Let me know.

What is an LLM?

A Large Language Model (LLM) is a highly advanced prediction engine. It has analyzed massive amounts of text to master one specific task: guessing the most logical next word. When you ask it a question, it builds an answer piece by piece based on the patterns it has learned.

The Airline Analogy: Assistants vs. Models

To understand how AI tools work, think of the airline industry:

• The AI Assistant (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude) is the Airline (e.g., Delta, United): This is the brand you interact with. They provide the interface, the features, and the overall customer experience.

• The AI Model (e.g., GPT-4, Claude Opus) is the Aircraft (e.g., Boeing 757, Airbus 321) : This is the underlying engine that actually does the heavy lifting to get you to your destination.

Why does this matter? Just like an airline uses a small jet for a quick commuter trip and a wide-body jet for an international haul, AI Assistants route your requests to different models. “Lighter” models are fast and cost-effective for simple questions, while “heavier” models are slower but necessary for complex reasoning and large documents.

Quick Scan

CTV and Streaming

• Peacock posts its first profitable quarter as Comcast readies the NBCU split (The Hollywood Reporter, Jul 23)

• Warner Bros. Discovery turns paused screens into inventory (AdExchanger, Jul 23)

• Streaming apps are quietly keeping linear channels alive (MediaPost, Jul 22)

• Sports is closing the upfront and holding it up at the same time (Digiday, Jul 22)

• Creator video now accounts for a quarter of all TV and video time (MediaPost, Jul 22)

• LG turns its TVs into consoles with a free, ad-funded game service (Adweek, Jul 24)

Programmatic

• Google hands PMax buyers a lever they have wanted for four years (Digiday, Jul 24)

Measurement

• A browser-level attribution proposal splits the measurement world (Digiday, Jul 21)

• Product placement works on viewers, up to the point of purchase (MediaPost, Jul 24)

Commerce and Retail Media

• A wholesale marketplace flips retail media and targets the buyer, not the shopper (AdExchanger, Jul 24)

AI

• Havas says the AI-loser label no longer fits (Adweek, Jul 23)

• House bill would give Homeland Security a shutdown switch for AI models (Politico, Jul 23)

• Patreon cuts a fifth of its staff a week after tightening its AI crawler policy (404 Media, Jul 23)

Corporate Strategy and M&A

• YouTube ad sales clear $11 billion as Alphabet raises its AI spending target (Variety, Jul 23)

• Paramount agrees to leave the Warner deal frozen until 2027 (Deadline, Jul 24)

• Most independent agency owners now want out (Adweek, Jul 23)

• Amazon moves cloud gaming inside Prime Video (TechCrunch, Jul 23)

Brand Safety and Legal

• FCC scraps the rule forcing broadband providers to list their fees (Ars Technica, Jul 23)

CTV and Streaming

Peacock posts its first profitable quarter as Comcast readies the NBCU split

Six years after launch, Peacock finally ended a quarter in the black, reporting $189 million in adjusted EBITDA on $1.9 billion in revenue and adding 2 million paid subscribers to reach 48 million. The NBA playoffs, the FIFA World Cup and Love Island USA did the heavy lifting. The timing matters more than the number: Comcast is preparing to spin NBCUniversal and Sky into a separate public company within roughly a year, and Peacock now walks into that split as a business that can pay for itself rather than one that needs a cable parent to fund it. Executives warned that profitability will move around quarter to quarter and asked analysts to compare year over year instead. Source: The Hollywood Reporter, July 23, 2026

Warner Bros. Discovery turns paused screens into inventory

Scott Rossman, VP of product marketing at WBD, told AdExchanger that pause ads are “creating new ad space” that did not exist before, and the company is investing in targeting and shoppable formats to make that space sell. WBD blends its pause units into the programming behind a soft gradient rather than covering the screen outright. The catch is that advertiser adoption still trails publisher enthusiasm, partly because performance is hard to forecast when the viewer, not the platform, triggers the break, and partly because every publisher has built its own incompatible format. Programmatic standardization for pause ads is still pending, which keeps most of this inventory in direct deals. Source: AdExchanger, July 23, 2026

Streaming apps are quietly keeping linear channels alive

New results from the ARF’s DASH TV Universe Study show nearly 40% of linear audiences now reach linear channels through a streaming platform or app, up from 38% a year earlier. Households are getting there through virtual MVPDs, provider apps and bundled streaming services rather than a cable box. The study argues this is changing who a linear household is, not just how they connect, which cuts against the assumption that everyone still watching linear skews old and small. For sellers, it means a growing share of linear impressions are being delivered through digital pipes and should be priced and measured accordingly. Source: MediaPost, July 22, 2026

Sports is closing the upfront and holding it up at the same time

The 2026 upfront market is nearly wrapped, and sports inventory is the reason deals are getting done and the reason some are still open. Buyers want the guaranteed reach that live sports delivers, which pulls money to the table, but the premiums sellers are asking for on that inventory are also where negotiations stall. The result is a market that has moved slower at the top end while the rest of the portfolio cleared earlier. Sellers heading into scatter should expect sports to keep functioning as both the anchor and the friction point. Source: Digiday, July 22, 2026

Creator video now accounts for a quarter of all TV and video time

Creator content has reached 26% of total time spent with TV and video, according to new Media Dynamics figures. The same data puts the median age of a linear TV viewer at 61 against 43 for streaming, a gap that keeps widening. Ed Papazian of Media Dynamics added a useful caveat in the release: device-usage measurement counts time when the viewer is out of the room or paying no attention. Take the number as a directional read on where attention is moving rather than a precise share of eyeballs. Source: MediaPost, July 22, 2026

LG turns its TVs into consoles with a free, ad-funded game service

LG launched a beta partnership with cloud gaming startup Phynd on Friday, putting console-quality games into the gaming library of any LG smart TV made in 2021 or later. There is no subscription, no purchase and no controller required, since a downloaded mobile app turns a phone into one. Phynd monetizes with short pre-roll breaks, typically two 30-second spots, while a game loads. The ad opportunity here is a living-room audience in a lean-forward state, and it arrives with no hardware barrier between the viewer and the inventory. Source: Adweek, July 24, 2026

Programmatic

Google hands PMax buyers a lever they have wanted for four years

Google is testing a feature that lets media buyers exclude third-party search partner inventory and the Google Display Network from Performance Max campaigns. Buyers have complained since PMax launched in 2021 that the product spent their money in places they could not see or control, and both of those networks have long been treated as remnant supply that advertisers were forced to accept as the price of entry. Sam Clarke of Crossmedia called the change “fairly significant” given how much of the early PMax objection was about lost control. It follows a run of quieter concessions over the past year, including channel-level performance reporting, campaign-level negative keywords and first-party audience exclusions, which agencies say has already brought spend back to the product. Source: Digiday, July 24, 2026

Measurement

A browser-level attribution proposal splits the measurement world

The W3C’s Attribution API proposal would move ad performance measurement into the browser itself, giving advertisers conversion data without cross-site tracking. Supporters frame it as the practical replacement for what the industry lost when third-party identifiers broke down. Critics see a familiar shape, calling it Privacy Sandbox under a new name, and the sharper objection is structural: a measurement layer owned and operated by browser makers hands more control to the same handful of companies that already sell most of the advertising. The debate is worth tracking because whatever standard wins here will set the floor for open-web measurement for years. Source: Digiday, July 21, 2026

Product placement works on viewers, up to the point of purchase

YouGov research found that 44% of respondents took at least one action after seeing a brand inside entertainment content: 22% searched for the brand, 18% talked about it with someone, and 16% visited a website or social page. Only one in ten actually bought something. The gap between the top of that funnel and the bottom is the entire case for pairing placement with retargeting rather than treating it as a standalone performance buy. As streaming platforms open more of their libraries to integrations, expect brand teams to keep buying placement for awareness and to keep struggling to attribute revenue to it. Source: MediaPost, July 24, 2026

Commerce and Retail Media

A wholesale marketplace flips retail media and targets the buyer, not the shopper

Faire, the wholesale marketplace connecting independent retailers with brands, expanded its Promoted Listings ad product into Europe on Thursday. The premise inverts the standard retail media model: instead of targeting the shopper who eventually buys the product, Faire lets brands target the retail operators who decide what gets stocked in the first place. CRO Jen Burke described the efficiency of reaching buyers who purchase in a category by definition as “fishing with dynamite” compared with hunting shoppers across Google and Meta. Promoted Listings currently runs only on Faire’s own app and site, with video and takeover formats on the roadmap for later this year and an off-platform extension under discussion. Source: AdExchanger, July 24, 2026

AI

Havas says the AI-loser label no longer fits

On its Q2 earnings call, Havas CEO Yannick Bolloré told investors the holding company is no longer seen as one of the AI losers, pointing to internal tooling built since 2023 including its Converged.AI operating system, an LLM hub called AVA and the Vermeer.AI image generator. He put AI proficiency across agency teams at 90%. The numbers underneath are flatter than the narrative: 2.5% organic growth in Q2 and 2.5% for the first half, against 2.6% and 2.3% in the same periods last year. What AI does appear to be doing is winning work, with new US contracts at Farmers Insurance and Vinted, and a Skechers global media win across 31 markets through the Horizon Global joint venture. Source: Adweek, July 23, 2026

House bill would give Homeland Security a shutdown switch for AI models

A newly unveiled House bill, styled the AI Kill Switch Act, would authorize the Department of Homeland Security to throttle or shut down AI models it judges dangerous. The proposal arrived alongside reporting on an OpenAI security incident, which is doing most of the work of building urgency behind it. For anyone building products on top of foundation models, the bill is early and its odds are unclear, but it signals that model-level regulatory risk is moving from a European story to a domestic one. Vendor contracts that assume continuous model availability are worth a second look. Source: Politico, July 23, 2026

Patreon cuts a fifth of its staff a week after tightening its AI crawler policy

Patreon laid off 20% of its workforce, roughly a week after updating its policy to block additional AI crawlers from its free content. The company has not tied the two events together, and the layoffs read as a cost decision rather than a consequence of the crawler policy. Still, the sequence is a useful data point for the broader publisher question: platforms are choosing to defend their content from scraping at the same moment the traffic economics that funded that content are deteriorating. Blocking the crawlers protects the asset. It does not replace the revenue. Source: 404 Media, July 23, 2026

Corporate Strategy and M&A

YouTube ad sales clear $11 billion as Alphabet raises its AI spending target

YouTube posted $11.06 billion in Q2 ad revenue, up 12.6% year over year and ahead of the $10.8 billion analysts expected. Parent Alphabet reported $119.8 billion in total revenue, up 24%, with Google Cloud jumping 82% to $24.77 billion and net income inflated by a roughly $99 billion one-time gain on equity holdings that include Anthropic and SpaceX. Sundar Pichai pointed to World Cup viewing and to Ask YouTube, the Gemini-powered feature that drew more than 140 million users in June. The market’s attention went elsewhere: Alphabet lifted 2026 capital expenditure guidance to between $195 billion and $205 billion, and the stock fell in after-hours trading on concern that spending is outrunning return. Source: Variety, July 23, 2026

Paramount agrees to leave the Warner deal frozen until 2027

In a Friday court filing, Paramount agreed not to close its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery until June 1, 2027, or five days after the state and Writers Guild lawsuits are resolved, whichever comes first. The agreement scraps the August 3 preliminary injunction hearing and the existing briefing schedule, with a joint statement on trial scheduling due July 31. Paramount is framing the outcome as a win because it delivers a trial on the evidence, though CNN reported that Paramount’s lawyers had concluded the plaintiffs would likely have prevailed at the injunction stage. Paramount shares fell 3.3% to $8.21 on the day, touching a 52-week low. Source: Deadline, July 24, 2026

Most independent agency owners now want out

More than half of independent agency owners say they want to sell, according to the 2026 M&A sentiment report from Adweek and Evros Group. That is a striking number in a sector whose entire pitch is that independence buys freedom from holding company overhead and conflict. Read alongside the pressure AI is putting on billable hours and headcount, it suggests owners see the next few years as a worse time to be small and unbacked than the last few were. Expect a buyer’s market and more roll-up activity in the back half of the year. Source: Adweek, July 23, 2026

Amazon moves cloud gaming inside Prime Video

Amazon is folding its cloud-based game streaming service into Prime Video, putting games in the same interface where subscribers already watch. The move consolidates two products that were competing for the same living-room slot and gives Amazon’s ad business another engagement surface inside an app it fully controls. It lands the same week LG launched free ad-supported cloud gaming on its TVs, which is not a coincidence so much as a signal. The screen is being contested as a gaming platform, and the ad inventory that comes with it is the reason. Source: TechCrunch, July 23, 2026

Brand Safety and Legal

FCC scraps the rule forcing broadband providers to list their fees

The FCC struck down the Biden-era requirement that internet service providers disclose all of their fees in advertising, ending a labeling rule the industry had fought since it took effect. Providers argued the disclosures were burdensome and confusing to consumers. Consumer advocates had backed the rule precisely because hidden fees are what make advertised broadband prices misleading. The reversal is worth noting beyond telecom: it is a live example of a federal regulator narrowing what advertisers are required to disclose, at a moment when most of the pressure elsewhere runs the other way. Source: Ars Technica, July 23, 2026

I'm thinking about adding some educational content to the mix — plain explainers on how things in CTV and AI actually work, alongside the week's news. Before I do, I want to know if you'd read it.

If you have other ideas or comments on what you want to see, please reply to the email

Thx

-Steven

Quick Scan

CTV

• Netflix beats on profit but Q3 guidance sinks the stock as the ad business heads toward $3 billion

• Smartly connects to Roku’s ad API to run streaming like a social campaign

• IAB puts 2026 CTV ad spend at $29.3 billion, but buyers still distrust the supply

• Video ad budgets post their strongest quarter in two years

Programmatic

• Spotify folds Megaphone into its own ad server, rewiring podcast monetization

Measurement

• VideoAmp and Nielsen One both walk away from MRC accreditation

• Free open-source MMM from Google and Meta draws suspicion over hidden agendas

Data / Identity

• Collapsing match rates are undermining the whole attribution model, agency chief warns

• Study finds IP-based CTV targeting misses its mark three times out of four

AI

• Publishers get a ledger to track and get paid when AI uses their content

• AI search cuts publisher ad supply by up to 40% in Q2

Commerce & Retail Media

• AI-generated affiliate videos flood TikTok Shop, and SharkNinja pushes back

• Walmart-owned Vizio gates streaming apps behind a Walmart login

Corporate Strategy / M&A

• Stripe and Advent lob a $53 billion takeover bid at PayPal

• The Trade Desk poaches a Hershey marketing veteran for a client-growth push

Brand Safety / Legal

• Twelve states sue to block the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger

• EU forces Google to open Android AI features and search data to rivals

• UK’s Ofcom proposes a “one strike and you’re out” rule for scam ads

Miscellaneous

• TV’s upfront quietly closes with streaming up and linear down again

• Amazon becomes the second major to close upfront talks, riding live sports

CTV

Netflix beats on profit but Q3 guidance sinks the stock as the ad business heads toward $3 billion

Netflix turned in a clean second quarter on the numbers that usually matter and still got punished. Revenue came in at $12.56 billion, up 13% year over year (12% on a currency-neutral basis), with operating income of $4.19 billion, a 33.4% operating margin, net income of $3.40 billion, and diluted EPS of $0.80. Free cash flow was $1.525 billion for the quarter, and the company reaffirmed roughly $12.5 billion in full-year free cash flow.

The problem was the forward look. Netflix guided Q3 revenue to about $12.86 billion, below Wall Street expectations, and narrowed its full-year 2026 revenue range to $51.0 to $51.4 billion while holding its 31.5% full-year operating-margin target. Investors read the softer near-term outlook as a ceiling on the growth story, and the stock fell more than 8% after hours, touching a 52-week low. Management tied the quarter’s growth to a mix of membership additions, price increases, and accelerating ad revenue, with Netflix continuing to steer attention toward revenue and profit rather than subscriber counts, which it stopped reporting last year.

The ad business is the number the industry cares about. Netflix expects ad revenue to roughly double to about $3 billion in 2026, and said its domestic upfront negotiations are nearly wrapped. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos used the call to float a longer-term option, saying a free, ad-supported content offering “could make sense in some markets” while stressing there are “no near-term plans to launch something.” Netflix also said it will scale back its twice-yearly “What We Watched” engagement reports to once a year starting in 2027, a move that further shifts the company’s external story away from viewing metrics and toward the money.

The takeaway for advertisers: Netflix’s ad tier is now a genuine scaled buy heading into 2027, upfront money is largely committed, and the free-tier comment signals the company is still looking for ways to grow the ad-supported audience well beyond where its current pricing gate allows. Source: CNBC, July 16, 2026 · Source: TradingView, July 16, 2026 · Source: Quartz, July 16, 2026

Smartly connects to Roku’s ad API to run streaming like a social campaign Smartly wired its creative and media activation tools into Roku Ads Manager through the Roku Ads API, letting performance marketers apply social-style targeting and fast iteration to connected TV inventory. CEO Laura Desmond said “CTV’s performance era is here,” and the tooling was also embedded into Wpromote x Giant Spoon’s Polaris IQ operating system. Source: MediaPost, July 14, 2026

IAB puts 2026 CTV ad spend at $29.3 billion, but buyers still distrust the supply The IAB’s 2026 Digital Video Ad Spend & Strategy report, built on an Advertiser Perceptions survey of 360 media executives, projects CTV spend rising 11% to $29.3 billion, with social video up 13% to $31.9 billion and online video up 10% to $20.7 billion. Trust still drags on the channel: 56% of respondents cited fraud in open programmatic CTV exchanges and 48% flagged unverified publisher or content sources, while the share rating targeting as important jumped to 49% from 39% a year earlier. Source: MediaPost, July 14, 2026

Video ad budgets post their strongest quarter in two years The latest IPA Bellwether report, compiled with S&P Global Market Intelligence, showed video ad budgets at a net balance of +8.2% in Q2 2026, up from +5.7% in Q1 and the highest reading since Q3 2024. Video was the only media category revised upward, standing out against a softer backdrop where main-media growth slowed to +1.5% from +4.5% and industry financial sentiment fell to -25.1%. Source: VideoWeek, July 16, 2026

Programmatic

Spotify folds Megaphone into its own ad server, rewiring podcast monetization Six years after acquiring Megaphone, Spotify has fully absorbed the audio ad server into the Spotify Ad Server, forcing podcast publishers to update campaigns or watch Priority, Standard Guaranteed, and non-compliant PMP deals stop serving. The migration defaults demand to the Spotify Ad Network, makes Spotify’s first-party data primary for targeting, and demotes Nielsen to a secondary option where Spotify data isn’t addressable. Source: AdExchanger, July 15, 2026

Measurement

VideoAmp and Nielsen One both walk away from MRC accreditation The Media Rating Council removed both VideoAmp and Nielsen One from its accreditation pipeline, with VideoAmp cited for a “lack of intent to continue the audit” after a July 2024 pre-audit and Nielsen One withdrawing after entering the process in July 2025. The dual retreat lands as rivals Comscore and iSpot press ahead and the industry debates whether the US market can support more than two cross-media currencies, with the ANA-backed Aquila service also circling. Source: MediaPost, July 13, 2026

Free open-source MMM from Google and Meta draws suspicion over hidden agendas AdExchanger examined whether Google’s Meridian and Meta’s Robyn are neutral marketing-mix-modeling tools or a way to steer credit toward the platforms that built them, noting Meta appears to be winding Robyn down while Google pushes Meridian hard, even tying sales KPIs to it and baking it into Google Analytics as of May 2026. Critics including Mutinex CEO Henry Innis (who called Meridian “free in the sense that a puppy might be free, not like a free beer”) warned that platform-supplied measurement can embed self-serving assumptions, while Google’s Harikesh Nair defended transparent open-source measurement as good for trust. Source: AdExchanger, July 14, 2026

Data / Identity

Collapsing match rates are undermining the whole attribution model, agency chief warns Idea Peddler founder and CEO Cimin Ahmadi Cohen argues in a white paper called “The Attribution Illusion” that privacy rules and shifting behavior have pushed identity match rates below double digits, shrinking addressable audiences and inflating ROAS figures that credit conversions already set to happen. Citing GDPR, iOS 14, state privacy laws in California, Texas and Colorado, and AI-driven traffic loss, Cohen said his agency has largely dropped pure programmatic display for contextual targeting, CTV and premium placements. Source: AdExchanger, July 15, 2026

Study finds IP-based CTV targeting misses its mark three times out of four Research from identity vendor Adstra and InterMedia Advertising found IP-based CTV targeting reaches its intended geographic target only 23% of the time, while device-level identifiers held up 24% better over time (71% versus 57%). The findings echo Truthset data that nearly 40% of open-auction CTV spend is wasted on bad identity data, and accompany Adstra’s new ID Connection Strength framework, which scores identifier reliability across five criteria ahead of a wider Q3 2026 rollout. Source: Adweek, July 15, 2026

AI

Publishers get a ledger to track and get paid when AI uses their content AI licensing platform Next Net, working with Sundial Media & Technology Group (publisher of Essence, Refinery29 and Afropunk), launched SAIL, a Standardized Agentic Intelligence Ledger that records how AI systems use publisher content and pays out through a pay-per-query model. Backed by Sundial CEO Kirk McDonald and Next Net CEO Franklin Rios, the framework runs on NVIDIA infrastructure and is built to work with IAB Tech Lab’s CoMP AI framework, pitched as an alternative to one-off licensing deals or lawsuits. Source: AdExchanger, July 14, 2026

AI search cuts publisher ad supply by up to 40% in Q2 Data from Ozone’s premium publisher network, roughly 20 billion impressions, showed ad request volumes down 32-37% year over year in the US and 39-41% in the UK in Q2 2026, with combined programmatic spend off 30.6% as AI-powered search ate into referral traffic. Ozone COO Danny Spears pointed to platforms “particularly Google” stepping into the user journey, and while average eCPMs rose about 30% in the UK and 7% in the US, US spend still fell 44% across publishers including The Guardian, News UK and The Wall Street Journal. Source: Digiday, July 15, 2026

Commerce & Retail Media

AI-generated affiliate videos flood TikTok Shop, and SharkNinja pushes back A wave of AI-generated product videos and synthetic avatars on TikTok Shop’s open affiliate program is straining brand trust, and SharkNinja’s chief commercial officer told affiliates that using AI-made content to promote its products will forfeit their commissions, insisting on real people using real products. The tension is sharpened by adoption data in the piece: about 75% of creators now consider generative AI part of their workflow, roughly 40% say AI-assisted content performs better, and about 30% of US and UK creators fully hand content creation to AI. Source: eMarketer, July 15, 2026

Walmart-owned Vizio gates streaming apps behind a Walmart login Vizio’s new Mini LED TVs default to requiring shoppers to sign in with a Walmart account and consent to data sharing before they can reach streaming apps, and the operating system scans connected HDMI inputs even when a third-party device is plugged in. Users can dodge the gate by setting the TV to boot to its last-used input, though Walmart warns that disables certain smart features, showing how the retailer is using its 2024 Vizio deal to widen its commerce-data footprint. Source: AdExchanger, July 14, 2026

Corporate Strategy / M&A

Stripe and Advent lob a $53 billion takeover bid at PayPal Payments company Stripe and private equity firm Advent International submitted a joint offer worth more than $53 billion for PayPal, sending its shares sharply higher. A deal would pull together two of the largest players in digital commerce and payments, with implications for PayPal’s ads and commerce-media ambitions, and it lands amid a wider private-equity buying run across ad tech and e-commerce. Source: CNBC, July 15, 2026

The Trade Desk poaches a Hershey marketing veteran for a client-growth push The Trade Desk hired longtime Hershey marketing executive Vinny Rinaldi as vice president of client strategy and growth, a move aimed at deepening ties with big CPG advertisers. The hire is one of several executive shuffles across ad tech this week as platforms staff up around AI-driven buying and commerce. Source: AdExchanger, July 17, 2026

Brand Safety / Legal

Twelve states sue to block the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger A coalition of 12 states, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, filed an antitrust suit to stop Paramount Skydance from acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery, arguing the combination would kill competition and raise prices across film, TV and streaming. The suit moves ahead even though the Department of Justice has not tried to block the deal, and Paramount Skydance is reportedly weighing a headquarters move out of California to blunt the state-led challenge. Source: CNBC, July 13, 2026

EU forces Google to open Android AI features and search data to rivals The European Commission ordered Google to share 11 Android capabilities, including voice-command activation and app-based actions, with competing AI assistants such as OpenAI, and to disclose search optimization data under the Digital Markets Act. Google general counsel Kent Walker warned the mandate could weaken privacy and security guardrails, while regulators said strong safeguards remain, marking another step up in the EU’s antitrust pressure on the company. Source: Fortune, July 17, 2026

UK’s Ofcom proposes a “one strike and you’re out” rule for scam ads UK regulator Ofcom proposed enforcement rules that would hold social platforms directly accountable for fraudulent advertising, swapping warnings for a “one strike and you’re out” approach with designated law-enforcement channels and measures to stop repeat offenders from opening new accounts. The framework raises the compliance bar for platforms selling ad inventory in the UK and signals tighter brand-safety expectations around scam and fraud advertising. Source: AdExchanger, July 13, 2026

Miscellaneous

TV’s upfront quietly closes with streaming up and linear down again The 2026-27 upfront market wrapped with little fanfare, as streaming ad commitments rose 17.9% to $13.2 billion while broadcast primetime fell 2.5% to $9.1 billion and cable dropped 4.3% to $8.68 billion. Fox was the only major to publicly discuss results, pointing to high-single-digit gains, while buyers pushed hard for rate cuts on streaming inventory amid oversupply and NBCUniversal held comment ahead of its July 23 earnings. Source: Variety, July 14, 2026

Amazon becomes the second major to close upfront talks, riding live sports Amazon Ads said it beat its volume goals and held onto year-over-year growth from new and existing advertisers in its 2026-27 upfront, per VP of ad sales Alan Moss, becoming the second big presenter to wrap after Fox. Demand ran on live sports including Thursday Night Football, NBA on Prime and NASCAR, plus titles like The Rings of Power and The Summer I Turned Pretty, though Amazon named no dollar figures. Source: Adweek, July 15, 2026

Workflows (S tier): Every other item on this list is a single task. Workflows chain those tasks together and take you out of the middle. Meeting ends. Transcript feeds the AI. AI pulls action items. Action items become a personalized follow-up. Follow-up hits the buyer’s inbox before your competitor has finished their notes. Everything else on this list is capped by how much time a rep has. Workflows remove that cap.

Agents (A tier): An agent does not wait to be asked. You set the goal, define the guardrails, and it works through the steps on its own. Monitoring a prospect’s news feed for buying signals. Pulling CRM data and drafting a QBR without a rep touching it. Most sellers are not using agents yet. That is exactly why it is A tier. The teams that figure this out in the next six months will have a structural advantage over the ones still doing it manually.

Excel (A tier): Copilot in Excel removes the last excuse for not knowing your number. Pipeline modeling, commission tracking, stage-weighted forecasting, deals that have not moved in thirty days. Ask for any of it in plain English and get it in seconds. It sits in A and not B because it changes how sellers manage their business, not just how they prep for a call.

Questions on any of this, or have a team that could use it? Reach out.

-Steven

QUICK LINKS

CTV

• IAB Tech Lab Working on Standardizing Programmatic Pause Ad Signals — AdExchanger

• CTV Buyers Are Getting Show-Level Performance Optimization They’ve Always Wanted — AdExchanger

• Teads and TiVo Ads Partner to Expand Programmatic Access to HomeScreen Inventory — GlobeNewswire

Programmatic

• Omnicom Executes Live Agent-to-Agent Media Buys, Moving to Cut Out Ad Tech Intermediaries — Digiday

• Yahoo DSP Becomes First to Integrate Into Kochava’s Agentic StationOne Workspace — Digiday

Data / Identity

• Cloudflare Sets AI Bot Defaults; Google Refuses to Honor the Classification — AdExchanger

Measurement

• IAS Names Former Bumble and Slack CEO Lidiane Jones as Chief Executive — Axios

• MFA Ad Spend Climbs for First Time Since 2023 — AI Content May Be Fueling It — AdExchanger

AI

• OpenAI Moves to Expand ChatGPT Ad Pilot to France, Germany, Ireland, and Singapore — Digiday

• Agency Bosses Say the AI Knowledge Gap With Clients Is Getting Wider — Digiday

Commerce & Retail Media

• Dentsu and Meta Build Shared Infrastructure for Mass Influencer Activation — Digiday

Corporate Strategy / M&A

• Vista Equity Partners and Quinti Capital Bid to Acquire Criteo at 50%+ Premium — Reuters

• Sky Agrees to Acquire ITV’s Media and Entertainment Business for £1.6B — Deadline

• Intuit Launches US Media Agency Review With Omnicom Initiative Defending — Ad Age

Brand Safety / Legal

• FanDuel Faces Lawsuit Tied to Bryce Harper VIP Video as Gambling Addiction Claims Mount — Philadelphia Inquirer

• Google Begins Disclosing AI Creation on Ads Across Search, YouTube, and Discover — TechCrunch

Miscellaneous

• LinkNYC Kiosks Are Now Streaming World Cup Matches — TV Ads and All — AdExchanger

CTV

Pause Ads Are the Next Big Format — If Ad Tech Can Agree on Standards

The IAB Tech Lab is building standardized programmatic signals for streaming TV pause ads, and brands are not waiting. The appeal is straightforward: pause ads appear when a viewer stops playback, hitting them during a moment of deliberate engagement rather than passive viewing. Several major streamers have already introduced their own versions, but without standardized signals, buyers cannot activate them programmatically at scale. The IAB’s work here is an attempt to close that gap and move pause ads from bespoke deals into the open market.

Source: AdExchanger, July 2026

Three-Way Partnership Delivers Show-Level CPA Data Across 94% of CTV Inventory

A collaboration between InterMedia Advertising, Peer39, and Pontiac Intelligence gave CTV buyers something they have asked for since the channel became serious: show-level cost-per-acquisition data at meaningful scale. The partnership covered 94% of CTV ad impressions, mapping acquisition data to the specific programs where ads ran. That level of granularity has historically been available only in walled-garden environments, and getting it across the open market at that coverage rate is notable.

Source: AdExchanger, July 2026

Teads and TiVo Ads Join Forces on Programmatic HomeScreen Buying

Teads and TiVo Ads announced a partnership this week that brings TiVo’s home screen inventory into Teads’ programmatic stack, along with the company’s household graph targeting and CTV performance measurement tools. The deal targets brand advertisers looking for placements before viewers even land in a streaming app — a moment that carries real attention value because the user has not yet chosen what to watch. The integration covers the US, Canada, and UK markets.

Source: GlobeNewswire, July 8, 2026

PROGRAMMATIC

Omnicom Is Actually Executing AI Agent-to-Agent Media Buys — Not Just Testing Them

Omnicom confirmed this week that it has moved beyond proof-of-concept and executed real media buys for multiple clients using agent-to-agent purchasing, where software negotiates inventory directly with publishers rather than routing through DSPs and SSPs. The framework is built on the Ad Context Protocol, developed specifically for agentic media buying. Head of AI Paolo Yuvienco said the goal is explicitly to shorten the supply chain and reduce the margin taken by intermediaries. CEO John Wren has previously described those intermediaries as extracting a “toll” ultimately paid by clients. The move is underpinned by Acxiom’s Real ID data layer, acquired through Omnicom’s IPG deal, which gives the direct buys targeting credibility without relying on third-party cookie data or DSP signals.

Source: Digiday, July 9, 2026

Yahoo DSP Becomes the First DSP Inside Kochava’s Agentic Workspace

Yahoo and Kochava announced a partnership that embeds a dedicated Yahoo DSP workspace inside Kochava’s StationOne AI hub — the first DSP integration of its kind on the platform. The setup lets traders run buys across display, video, native, CTV, audio, and DOOH from a unified agentic layer, using pre-built skills and MCP connectors rather than toggling between tools. The deal lands as both DSPs and SSPs race to reframe themselves as agentic platforms before the next generation of media buying infrastructure locks in.

Source: Digiday, July 10, 2026

DATA / IDENTITY

Cloudflare Will Block AI Crawlers by Default in September — Google Won’t Honor It

Cloudflare announced that effective September 15, it will block by default all bots classified for LLM training or agentic use cases, while continuing to allow search bot access through its Content Signals for robots.txt system. The problem: Google won’t honor the classification because it uses the same crawler for both Google Search and AI-based responses like Gemini. Blocking Google’s AI crawler would also destroy search visibility, so publishers face a binary choice. Google search advocate John Mueller confirmed on Reddit that Cloudflare’s Content Signals have no effect on any Google crawler or LLM. USA Today CEO Mike Reed told The Rebooting he is now considering blocking Google entirely and relying on newsletters and social for distribution instead — a sign of how strained the publisher-search relationship has become.

Source: AdExchanger, July 8, 2026

MEASUREMENT

IAS Installs Lidiane Jones as CEO With Immediate Effect

Integral Ad Science named former Bumble and Slack CEO Lidiane Jones as its new chief executive on July 7, replacing Lisa Utzschneider, who led the company for more than seven years. Jones, who also served as EVP and GM of Digital Experiences at Salesforce following Slack’s acquisition, arrives as IAS sharpens its position as verification infrastructure for the AI era. Utzschneider took the company public in 2021 and through a $1.9 billion Novacap acquisition last year, and stays on as a board advisor through year-end. Jones said her starting priority is acceleration, not strategic reinvention, and that IAS’s goal is to become “a very critical part of the trust infrastructure of this AI era.”

Source: Axios, July 7, 2026

MFA Ad Spend Is Rising Again — and AI-Generated Dreck May Be Why

For the first time since 2023, the percentage of programmatic ad spend landing on made-for-advertising sites went up. The ANA’s Q1 programmatic benchmark report shows MFA’s share of member spend climbed from 0.6% in Q4 2025 to 1.1% in Q1 2026 — not catastrophic on its own, but notable as a reversal of a years-long downward trend. Industry researchers point to AI-generated content sites as a likely contributor: these properties often share MFA characteristics like high ad-to-content ratios and poor editorial quality, but are technically distinct from classic MFA because their traffic is organic rather than paid. The industry’s SSP-led anti-MFA enforcement has created pressure that’s slowing the problem without stopping it, particularly as established publishers begin using AI in their own workflows and blur the quality line further.

Source: AdExchanger, July 2026

AI

OpenAI Pushes ChatGPT Ads Into Europe and Asia

Less than three weeks after officially launching its ad pilot in the UK, OpenAI is moving to expand into France, Germany, Ireland, and Singapore. The company is actively hiring for a regional manager role to lead the European build-out, plus six additional commercial roles across Paris, Munich, and Dublin. The rollout follows the same staged approach used elsewhere: initial exposure caps at 10% of available audience, scaling to 50% and then 90% if user metrics hold. Criteo and StackAdapt are among the ad tech partners already integrated with the platform. The pace of expansion confirms OpenAI is treating its ad business as a near-term commercial priority, not a long-term experiment.

Source: Digiday, July 9, 2026

Agency Leaders Say the AI Gap Between Them and Their Clients Is Growing

Senior agency executives told Digiday this week that the gap in AI sophistication between agencies and their clients is widening in the wrong direction — clients in some cases are moving faster. The problem is structural: agencies are trying to absorb AI infrastructure costs internally as a business development tool while simultaneously being pressed by clients to prove return on that investment. Several executives noted that AI costs are beginning to shift off agency balance sheets and onto client contracts, which is accelerating renegotiations across the industry. The gap is partly a credibility problem — agencies promising AI-powered outcomes are under growing pressure to show the work, and clients who’ve been burned by overpromising are skeptical.

Source: Digiday, July 6, 2026

COMMERCE & RETAIL MEDIA

Dentsu and Meta Wire Together an Influencer Activation System for Scale

Dentsu struck a deal with Meta this week to build shared technical infrastructure for mass-scale influencer marketing, using AI agents to automate creator discovery, activation, and measurement. The partnership is initially operating in markets outside the US, with a US rollout described as imminent and similar deals being discussed with other social platforms. The context: brands like L’Oreal and Unilever are now working with hundreds of thousands of creators annually, and the back-end coordination required to manage that at scale has become a genuine operational problem. Dentsu’s move positions it as an infrastructure provider for brands that want creator-first marketing but cannot build the tooling themselves.

Source: Digiday, July 7, 2026

CORPORATE STRATEGY / M&A

Two PE Firms Submit Bid to Take Criteo Private at a 50%+ Premium

Vista Equity Partners and Quinti Capital have jointly submitted a takeover bid for Criteo, offering more than 50% above the company’s recent market cap of approximately $1.1 billion, per Reuters. The full equity valuation of the bid is reported around $3.7 billion. Criteo’s board has not yet responded. The company has explored a sale multiple times without closing one, including reported talks with Skai last year, and its Q1 2026 results showed a 6% revenue decline with two major retail media clients signaling reduced platform use. The bidders reportedly see Criteo’s AI capabilities for retailers and advertisers as the core acquisition rationale. Whether the board bites this time is genuinely uncertain, but the 50% premium is the most compelling offer the company has seen in years.

Source: Reuters, July 8, 2026

Sky Formally Agrees to Acquire ITV’s Broadcasting Business for £1.6B

Sky (Comcast) confirmed this week it has agreed to acquire ITV’s Media and Entertainment division — including ITV’s free-to-air channels and ITVX — for £1.6 billion, creating the UK’s largest commercial broadcaster. The combined entity would account for roughly 20% of all in-home viewing in the UK, second only to the BBC, and the combined Sky/ITV ad revenue represents approximately 44% of UK television advertising. Sky has entered a separate £2.1 billion content supply agreement with ITV Studios, which is not part of the acquisition. The deal still requires CMA regulatory approval. For UK advertisers, the combination of ITV’s audience reach with Sky’s AdSmart addressable targeting infrastructure is the meaningful change — it creates the type of data-driven premium TV environment that has been largely absent from the British market.

Source: Deadline, July 6, 2026

Intuit Opens US Media Agency Review With Omnicom Initiative Defending

Intuit is reviewing its US media investment, putting incumbent agency Omnicom Initiative at risk, with Wieden+Kennedy, PMG, and Dept also in the running. The review comes amid broader flux at the company: Intuit shut down its SMB ad network in April, switched to Mother New York from FCB as its creative agency last month, and has seen its stock drop nearly two-thirds. Despite all of that, its US marketing budget has held steady at over $900 million annually, and the company has run a Super Bowl spot every year for the past 13 years. The review signals that even resilient ad budgets are now up for reallocation as AI-driven media buying changes the value proposition agencies need to demonstrate.

Source: Ad Age, July 10, 2026

BRAND SAFETY / LEGAL

FanDuel Faces Lawsuit Tied to Bryce Harper Video Sent to Problem Gambler VIP

A Philadelphia-area man who wagered $18.5 million on FanDuel since 2020 and incurred $1.5 million in losses is suing the platform for contributing to his gambling addiction. The lawsuit centers in part on a personalized video that Philadelphia Phillies star Bryce Harper recorded for the plaintiff, who had been elevated to VIP status despite his compulsive betting. Rather than being flagged or cut off, the plaintiff received a personal manager, access to exclusive events, and the Harper video as perks. By 2025, the plaintiff had taken out multiple mortgages and was in crisis severe enough that his therapist called police for a wellness check. The case puts a spotlight on the business model of VIP programs at gambling apps, and the legal exposure created by using active professional athletes — who were prohibited from gambling associations entirely until 2022 — to market to high-risk users.

Source: Philadelphia Inquirer, July 10, 2026

Google Rolls Out AI Ad Creation Disclosures Across Search, YouTube, and Discover

Google began notifying users when ads were “created or edited” with AI through a new “How this ad was made” section in its My Ad Center panel, accessible via the three-dot menu on ads across Search, YouTube, and Discover. When advertisers use Google’s own generative AI tools to create ads, the disclosure applies automatically. For ads built with third-party AI tools, advertisers self-report via a toggle — a transparency system that runs on the honor system outside of Google’s own tools. For campaigns targeting the EU, India, and New York, AI-created ads also display a visible label on the ad itself. The move responds to state-level legislation (New York enacted disclosure requirements) and the broader shift toward AI labeling across major ad platforms, with Meta rolling out parallel disclosures in its “About this ad” panel the same week.

Source: TechCrunch, July 8-9, 2026

MISCELLANEOUS

LinkNYC Kiosks Are Streaming World Cup Games — TV Ads Included

New York City’s LinkNYC street kiosks have begun airing FIFA World Cup matches, complete with the same advertising that runs on broadcast TV. The kiosks, which replaced payphones and provide free public Wi-Fi across the city, have turned into something closer to a shared public screen during the tournament. For out-of-home advertising, it is a rare case of premium live sports inventory appearing outside traditional screens at street level. Whether it holds consumer attention long enough to be a meaningful ad environment is a fair question, but the format creates a natural test case for live sports in DOOH environments as the industry continues to blur the lines between CTV, broadcast, and outdoor media.

Source: AdExchanger, July 11, 2026

Her husband joined us a few minutes later. Somehow the conversation landed on AI. His name is Dr. Leopold von Gerlach, former global Chairman of Hogan Lovells, and he runs a podcast called “The Influencers.” He invited me on to discuss how organizations are adapting to AI. Link below. And of course a picture of Gigi.

Link to Podcast

LAST WEEK AT A GLANCE

CTV

• Comcast splits in two, spinning off NBCUniversal and Sky

• Mid-year review: five stories that defined the first half of TV and streaming

Corporate Strategy / M&A

• OpenX loses its CEO and starts the clock on SSP consolidation

Programmatic

• Agencies build AI agents while brands study how to cut them out

• Amazon pushes its shopping data into iHeart’s inventory and FreeWheel’s ad server

Data / Identity

• Buyers say Netflix’s IP data gap is quietly pushing spend elsewhere

• The industry starts shopping for a LiveRamp replacement

• Hightouch makes a $1.2 billion play for LiveRamp’s identity business

AI

• OpenAI’s job listings reveal what ChatGPT ads will look like next

• OpenAI’s ad chief says third-party verification is coming

• Anthropic’s 19-day model shutdown ends, but the precedent holds

Measurement

• Consumers are not ready to let AI buy things for them

Commerce & Retail Media

• Omnicom builds a streaming ad infrastructure across Netflix, Disney, Paramount, and NBCU

Miscellaneous

• Cannes 2026 winners: simple ideas outperformed technology-first campaigns

CTV

Comcast splits in two, spinning off NBCUniversal and Sky

On June 29, Comcast announced plans to separate into two publicly traded companies through a tax-free spinoff of NBCUniversal and Sky, expected to close in roughly a year. The standalone NBCU will include NBC, Telemundo, Peacock, Universal Pictures and theme parks, and Sky; the remaining Comcast will focus entirely on broadband, wireless, and business services. Comcast shares jumped more than 20% in pre-market trading, and analysts immediately drew comparisons to the WBD playbook: Warner Bros. Discovery announced a split before triggering the bidding war that ended with Paramount Skydance. Mike Cavanagh becomes CEO of the standalone NBCU; Michael Angelakis takes over a leaner Comcast built around connectivity.

Source: CNBC, June 29, 2026

Mid-year review: five stories that defined the first half of TV and streaming

Digiday’s July 1 half-year recap put Fox’s $22 billion acquisition of Roku at the top of the list, followed by the Comcast spinoff, NBCU’s AI-assisted NFL playoff ad sale, and the ongoing consolidation that left no clear industry structure by mid-year. But the most striking item was a non-event: Netflix’s reported pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery never closed, and the streaming giant is now seen as an active acquirer without a confirmed target. The recap also flagged that Disney’s new CEO Josh D’Amaro and his renamed advertising leadership team have moved quickly to position the company as the dominant ad-tech seller in the streaming market.

Source: Digiday, July 1, 2026

CORPORATE STRATEGY / M&A

OpenX loses its CEO and starts the clock on SSP consolidation

OpenX parted ways with CEO Matt Sattel, naming Joshua Metzger as interim CEO while its board searches for a permanent replacement. The board’s statement stressed it wants a “tested” CEO, and sources told Digiday the leadership change is a precursor to potential M&A activity. The departure follows a broader wave of C-suite reshuffles at competing SSPs, which observers are reading as the supply-side platform market positioning itself for a consolidation cycle in the second half of 2026. Sattel had taken the role following the death of longtime CEO John Gentry earlier this year.

Source: Digiday, July 1, 2026

PROGRAMMATIC

Agencies build AI agents while brands study how to cut them out

Holding company technology teams are accelerating investment in agentic AI tools for media planning, buying, and creative optimization, but they are doing so while brands ask the same question: if an AI agent can execute what the agency does, why keep the agency? Digiday reported this week that several major advertisers are running quiet tests of in-house agentic tools, using the same technology their agencies are selling as a differentiator. The dynamic puts agencies in the position of needing to demonstrate strategic value that cannot be replicated by the systems they are actively promoting.

Source: Digiday, June 30, 2026

Amazon pushes its shopping data into iHeart’s inventory and FreeWheel’s ad server

Amazon made two moves in the same week to put its first-party retail signals at the center of third-party ad transactions. Under an expanded deal, iHeartMedia will act as a local reseller of Amazon’s audio and video inventory across Prime Video, Twitch, Amazon Music, Fire TV, and Alexa, while iHeart advertisers gain access to Amazon DSP targeting across iHeart’s owned digital properties. Separately, Amazon launched Outcome Optimizer, a tool that uses shopping and streaming data to optimize programmatic guaranteed campaigns running through FreeWheel’s ad server, with Warner Bros. Discovery and A+E Global Media among the launch partners. Together, the two moves extend Amazon’s data layer well beyond its own inventory and into third-party publisher relationships.

Source: Digiday, June 26, 2026, covered June 28+

DATA / IDENTITY

Buyers say Netflix’s IP data gap is quietly pushing spend elsewhere

Ad buyers and buy-side ad tech executives told AdExchanger that Netflix provides inadequate IP address data for geotargeting and cross-platform measurement, a structural limitation that is affecting campaign performance. One CTV media buyer said Netflix passes truncated IP addresses to its SSP Magnite, which converts them into ZIP-code-level signals, while buyers accessing inventory programmatically receive no IP data at all. Netflix maintains it does not need to share IP addresses because it uses its own authenticated identity graph, but buyers say that argument does not address the frequency management and cross-channel verification gaps that are real barriers to committing larger budgets.

Source: AdExchanger, June 30, 2026

The industry starts shopping for a LiveRamp replacement

With Publicis’s $2.2 billion acquisition of LiveRamp still awaiting regulatory closure, agencies and brands have already begun evaluating alternatives to a platform that has served as neutral infrastructure across competing holding companies. Digiday reported this week that the search for a post-LiveRamp data collaboration platform is active, with WPP CEO Cindy Rose publicly stating at Cannes that WPP will stop using LiveRamp after the deal closes. The concern is straightforward: RampID is the most widely used shared identity currency in programmatic advertising, and its ownership by a competing holding company creates a conflict that other agencies and publishers are unwilling to absorb.

Source: Digiday, June 28, 2026

Hightouch makes a $1.2 billion play for LiveRamp’s identity business

Hightouch, an ad tech startup valued at $2.75 billion, offered Publicis between $800 million and $1.2 billion in cash and stock for LiveRamp’s identity business, according to a letter obtained by Axios. The offer was made before Publicis formally closes its $2.2 billion acquisition, and reflects industry pressure to prevent a holding company from owning RampID as a proprietary asset. Publicis did not respond to the offer publicly, but the bid illustrates how seriously competing agencies and technology vendors are treating the prospect of a Publicis-controlled identity layer at the center of the programmatic ecosystem.

Source: Axios, June 16, 2026, with follow-up coverage June 28+

AI

OpenAI’s job listings reveal what ChatGPT ads will look like next

Three engineering roles posted to OpenAI’s careers page show the company building infrastructure for image, video, native, conversational, and interactive ad formats in ChatGPT, well beyond the single sponsored-link unit it launched in February. The senior Ad Formats engineer role, paying $230,000 to $385,000 plus equity, is described as foundational to defining how ads are structured, rendered, and delivered across surfaces and media types. The postings confirm OpenAI is moving from a minimal viable ad product toward a full-format advertising system, four months into an ad business already projecting $2.5 billion in 2026 revenue.

Source: Digiday, July 1, 2026

OpenAI’s ad chief says third-party verification is coming

Dave Dugan, OpenAI’s head of global ad solutions, told Digiday that independent measurement is “a natural evolution” for ChatGPT’s ad platform, without specifying timing or naming verification partners. Right now, advertisers get bidding and outcome data from OpenAI’s own systems, with no independent audit of whether ads reached real users in brand-safe environments. Dugan added that the platform’s 50% drop in user ad dismissal rates since launch gives the company confidence that ads are not degrading the product, though he acknowledged that ChatGPT is a fundamentally different environment from search and that the industry will need to develop new measurement frameworks, not just port existing ones.

Source: Digiday, July 2, 2026

Anthropic’s 19-day model shutdown ends, but the precedent holds

The U.S. Commerce Department lifted export controls on Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models on June 30, restoring global access on July 1 after a shutdown triggered by a government directive on June 12. The resolution required Anthropic to deploy a new safety classifier, commit to pre-release government review of future frontier models, and co-develop a jailbreak scoring framework with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Enterprise clients who lost access to production AI systems during the 19-day shutdown are now reassessing vendor concentration risk: the episode demonstrated that a government agency can switch off a frontier AI company’s flagship products without advance notice, overnight, regardless of customer impact.

Source: TheStreet, July 3, 2026

MEASUREMENT

Consumers are not ready to let AI buy things for them

Research published by The Current on July 1 found that consumer comfort with AI-driven purchasing decisions remains low even as retailers accelerate deployment of agentic commerce tools. The gap between industry adoption timelines and actual consumer behavior suggests that “agentic commerce” as a retail media strategy is outpacing the trust consumers are willing to extend to automated systems. Brands building shopping agents should expect meaningful friction from users who opt out, and those opt-out signals are worth tracking as a leading indicator of where the trust ceiling sits.

Source: The Current, July 1, 2026

COMMERCE & RETAIL MEDIA

Omnicom assembled a streaming ad infrastructure across four major platforms in a single week

Post-Cannes coverage confirmed the scope of what Omnicom Media announced during the June 22-25 festival: a data partnership with Netflix integrating Acxiom audience intelligence into Netflix’s ad systems, a sequential storytelling deal with Disney Advertising powered by Innovid, a dynamic fixed-unit partnership with Paramount+ for streaming premieres, and a contextual content-matching pilot with NBCUniversal. Taken together, Omnicom now has direct data integration with the four largest ad-supported streaming services in the country, giving it a structural advantage in cross-platform CTV campaign measurement and sequential creative delivery that no other holding company has assembled at the same scale.

Source: Digiday, June 22-25, coverage continuing June 28+

JOB BOARD

Sales

Disney Advertising | Account Executive, Advanced Advertising Sales; Senior Manager, Programmatic Sales (New York, NY) disneycareers.com

NBCUniversal | Director, Streaming Ad Sales; Account Executive, Digital Revenue Sales; Manager, Programmatic Sales (New York, NY) nbcunicareers.com

The Trade Desk | Account Executive, Enterprise; Senior Account Executive, Streaming TV (New York, NY; Chicago, IL) thetradedesk.com/careers

Amazon Ads | Account Executive, Streaming TV Advertising; Senior Account Executive, Retail Media (New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA) amazon.jobs

Walmart Connect | Senior Account Executive, Omnichannel Media Sales; Account Manager, Commerce Media (San Bruno, CA; New York, NY) careers.walmart.com

TikTok | Account Executive, Brand Advertising; Senior Account Executive, Agency Partnerships (New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA) tiktok.com/careers

Warner Bros. Discovery | Senior Account Executive, Streaming Ad Sales; Account Manager, Programmatic Revenue (New York, NY) careers.wbd.com

Magnite | Account Executive, CTV; Senior Account Manager, Publisher Development (New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA) magnite.com/careers

Marketing & Business Development

Netflix Advertising | Director, Advertiser Marketing; Senior Manager, Agency Development (New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA) netflix.jobs

OpenAI | Business Development Manager, Advertising Partnerships; Senior Product Marketing Manager, Ads (San Francisco, CA) openai.com/careers

LiveRamp | Senior Director, Partner Marketing; Business Development Manager, Agency Partnerships (New York, NY; San Francisco, CA) liveramp.com/careers

Account Management & Client Success

Google (DV360 / YouTube Ads) | Agency Account Manager, Large Customer Sales; Programmatic Account Strategist (New York, NY; Chicago, IL) careers.google.com

PubMatic | Senior Account Manager, Publisher Development; Client Success Manager, CTV (New York, NY) pubmatic.com/careers

DoubleVerify | Account Manager, Programmatic Partnerships; Senior Account Executive, Agency Sales (New York, NY) doubleverify.com/careers

I’ve been spending a lot of time experimenting with Claude lately, and two tools I’ve been using more and more are APIs and MCPs.

An API (Application Programming Interface) is simply a way for different pieces of software to communicate with one another. It’s what allows an application to pull in weather data, display maps, process payments, connect to Spotify, and much more. (We’ll dive into MCPs in next week’s newsletter.)

To see what was possible, I started connecting Claude to a few APIs. One of my favorite projects was connecting it to the Spotify API and turning my listening history into an interactive visualization - all via prompts. Click below to check it out.

If you have questions about this—or want to brainstorm how APIs or AI could apply to your day-to-day work—feel free to grab 15 minutes on my calendar:

http://calendly.com/stevengolus/15

– Steven

CTV

Omnicom’s Acxiom Infrastructure Enables Cross-Platform Frequency Measurement for the First Time

Omnicom Media has added new capabilities to its cross-platform clean room that, for the first time, allow brands to measure ad reach, frequency, and performance across multiple streaming publishers and linear TV broadcasters in a single instance. The new approach relies on a Creative ID embedded by each publisher in the creative to track how often a specific ad is served, with the Acxiom identity infrastructure Omnicom gained through its IPG acquisition providing the connective tissue. The result is closed-loop attribution that can account for how frequency affects performance, a meaningful step toward solving one of CTV’s most persistent complaints from advertisers.

Source: AdExchanger, June 22, 2026 🔍

Omnicom and Netflix Strike the First Data Collaboration Deal in Streaming Advertising

Omnicom Media has launched a partnership with Netflix that integrates Acxiom audience intelligence directly into the Netflix Ads Suite, making Omnicom the first data collaboration partner for AI-powered advertising on the platform. The deal enables contextual ad relevance at the show level, allows brands to dynamically insert digital twin versions of their products into Netflix content as in-stream assets, and closes the loop with performance measurement across audiences and creative executions. The partnership is live in the US and scheduled to expand globally by year-end.

Source: Digiday, June 22, 2026 🔍

Omnicom and Disney Build Sequential Ad Storytelling Across Streaming and Live Programming

Omnicom Media and Disney Advertising have launched a connected TV solution that enables dynamic sequential storytelling across both video on demand and live programming, using technology from ad tech firm Innovid to add personalization. The solution replaces repetitive ad pods with coordinated creative messages that evolve across a viewing session, aiming to reduce ad fatigue while improving performance. It is currently live in the US, with European and Latin American rollouts planned later in 2026.

Source: Digiday, June 23, 2026 🔍

Analysts Weigh What Fox’s $22 Billion Roku Acquisition Means for CTV Advertising’s Power Structure

Following Fox Corporation’s June 15 announcement of its $22 billion acquisition of Roku, industry commentary published this week has focused on what the deal means for the economics and neutrality of the CTV supply chain. The combination of Fox’s content and Tubi with Roku’s 100 million-plus streaming households, first-party data, and direct publisher relationships gives the combined company significant leverage as both content owner and distribution platform. Analysts note that while the deal gives advertisers access to a scaled, unified data and inventory stack, it also raises questions about what happens to the open, neutral marketplace that premium CTV buyers have relied on.

Source: AdExchanger, June 22, 2026 🔍

Omnicom Completes Cannes Streaming Series with Contextual Deals at Paramount and NBCU

Omnicom Media wrapped its four-day Cannes Lions announcement series with two additional streaming partnerships. Its deal with Paramount enables dynamically adapted sponsor units in premiere episodes, the first time Paramount has introduced a dynamic insertion capability into its fixed streaming units, with a US launch planned for Q3. Its collaboration with NBCUniversal pairs Acxiom audience data with NBCU show-level metadata to optimize in-flight creative down to the episode and moment level; it is currently in beta testing in the US.

Source: Digiday, June 24-25, 2026 🔍

Programmatic

Cannes Lions 2026 Signals the Arrival of Agentic Ad Buying Across the Industry

Agentic advertising, where AI systems autonomously plan, execute, and optimize campaigns without human involvement at each step, was the defining theme of Cannes Lions 2026. Magnite launched Magnite Orchestration, a framework for buyer and seller agents to interact across premium inventory. WPP Media announced an agentic standards initiative for video buying alongside Disney, Netflix, Fox, NBCU, Paramount, Comcast, IAB Tech Lab, and Prebid.org. Horizon Media disclosed that its HorizonOS Blu platform already allows its buying agents to interact with agents from Innovid, Magnite, Vidmob, and media companies including Fox, Disney, TikTok, and NBCUniversal. PubMatic launched Creator Marketplace to bring programmatic buying into creator-led media environments.

Source: Adweek, June 25, 2026 🔍

Google Announces August 3 Deadline for Smart Campaign Creation via API

Google has confirmed that starting August 3, 2026, the Google Ads API will no longer support creating new Smart Campaigns, pushing advertisers and platform partners that rely on automated campaign creation toward Performance Max and other AI-native formats. Existing Smart Campaigns will continue to run and can still be updated via the API, but all new campaign creation workflows need to be migrated before the cutoff to avoid disruptions. The change accelerates Google’s multi-year effort to consolidate its advertising product line around its more capable, AI-driven campaign types.

Source: Search Engine Land, June 26, 2026 🔍

Commerce and Retail Media

Walmart Acquires Vibe.co for Roughly $1.4 Billion to Expand CTV Access for SMBs

Walmart has agreed to acquire Vibe.co, a self-serve connected TV advertising platform that serves more than 10,000 small and mid-sized advertisers, in a deal Fortune reported at approximately $1.4 billion. The acquisition brings Vibe’s self-serve activation tools, direct supply integrations, and performance-first measurement model into Walmart Connect, combining them with Walmart’s first-party shopper data and its VIZIO inventory to create a retail-anchored CTV advertising stack for SMBs that currently find the channel too complex or costly to buy without agency support. The transaction is subject to regulatory approval and expected to close by the end of Walmart’s fiscal 2027.

Source: Fortune, June 25, 2026 🔍

The Trade Desk Builds a Travel and Hospitality Commerce Media Network

The Trade Desk announced at Cannes Lions this week that it is expanding its relationships with travel, hospitality, and mobility partners to build what amounts to a commerce media network for the sector. New partners include Uber Advertising, Booking.com, United Airlines’ Kinective Media, and Marriott Media, each of which connects their first-party data and inventory to the Trade Desk’s DSP. The move positions The Trade Desk as a hub for brands wanting to reach travelers across intent-rich, transactional environments with closed-loop measurement tied to real travel and booking behavior.

Source: AdExchanger, June 2026 🔍

AI

Amazon Launches Alexa+ Agentic Ads, a Format That Closes the Gap Between Ad Exposure and Purchase

Amazon unveiled Alexa+ Agentic Ads at Cannes Lions this week, a format that allows customers to move from seeing an ad to completing a purchase entirely within an Alexa conversation, without leaving the interface. The format is live in beta on Echo Show devices with Papa Johns and The Orchard, a Sony Music subsidiary, as the first named partners, and Amazon plans to expand it to Fire TV. Executives described the format not as an experiment but as a live commercial product, with the company’s existing DSP, measurement infrastructure, and transaction-level data giving it structural advantages over newer entrants pitching similar concepts.

Source: Marketing Dive, June 25, 2026 🔍

OpenAI Makes Its Cannes Lions Debut, Pitching ChatGPT as a Third Advertising Gatekeeper

OpenAI appeared at Cannes Lions for the first time this week, with Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser declaring the company is “clearly in the advertising business now” and pitching ChatGPT’s ad platform to major brands and agencies as a new kind of intent surface. The company says roughly 20% of ChatGPT’s nearly one billion weekly queries carry direct commercial intent, and its internal data shows cross-out rates on ads have dropped 50 percent since launch in February. OpenAI is projecting $2.5 billion in ad revenue for 2026 and has targeted $100 billion by 2030, a trajectory that would require the platform to reach roughly 2.75 billion weekly active users and capture meaningful share from Google and Meta.

Source: Marketing Dive, June 23, 2026 🔍

TikTok Launches Symphony Agent at Cannes, Bringing Agentic AI to Campaign Creation

TikTok unveiled Symphony Agent at Cannes Lions on June 22, an agentic AI layer that runs across three existing products, Symphony Creative Studio, Content Suite, and TikTok One, enabling brands to move from a brief to finished video content and creator activation within a single coordinated workflow. Powered by ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 video model and available free through TikTok Ads Manager, the tool ships with built-in safeguards including AI labels, invisible watermarks, and content moderation filters. Starbucks is the first named brand partner through Custom Creator Networks, a related feature that lets companies build curated creator pools from employees and brand advocates.

Source: TikTok Newsroom, June 22, 2026 🔍

Meta Consolidates Creator and AI Ad Tools at Cannes Under One Platform

Meta used Cannes Lions to announce a new Creator Marketing Hub that consolidates Creator Marketplace and Partnership Ads Hub into a single destination for discovering, activating, and measuring creator partnerships, scheduled to launch later in 2026. The company also introduced an end-to-end AI creative tool within Ads Manager that allows brands to generate, test, and launch campaigns in formats calibrated to their existing content style, along with an updated Meta Business Agent that enables commerce interactions through WhatsApp, including product recommendations and transaction completion. According to Meta, analysis of more than one million ad campaigns found its platform currently generates $4.13 in revenue for every advertiser dollar spent, a 25 percent improvement since 2022.

Source: eMarketer, June 24, 2026 🔍

Corporate Strategy / M&A

Cannes Lions 2026 Closes as the Creator Economy, AI ROI, and Sports Shape the Week’s Conversation

Cannes Lions 2026 wrapped on Friday with creators, rather than AI or agencies, emerging as the dominant cultural and commercial force at the festival. Media analyst Scott Galloway noted that 500 creators attended this year, up from 400 in 2025, reflecting a structural shift in where advertising leverage resides. On the AI front, the conversation moved from experimentation to returns on investment, with many attendees less interested in what AI can theoretically do than in whether the costs are justifiable. AdExchanger reported separately that total Cannes Lions entries fell 25 percent in 2026 compared to the prior year, while the share of entries that used AI in production doubled from 20 to 40 percent.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter, June 26, 2026 🔍

Brand Safety / Legal

Meta’s AI Ad Auto-Enrollment Creates a Brand Safety Incident at REI

A story that crystallized the mood at Cannes this year originated on Instagram, where an AI-generated image of a deformed bicycle appeared in a REI ad and ran for a full week before it was caught. The incident was the result of Meta’s auto-enrollment of advertisers into its AI creative generation tools, which can produce and serve assets without explicit brand approval for each piece of creative. The episode is fueling broader industry debate about where human review checkpoints need to exist as AI automates more of the ad production and delivery workflow, and about what standards platforms should be required to meet before auto-enrolling brands into generative systems.

Source: ppc.land, June 26, 2026 🔍

Job Board

Roles updated as of late June 2026. Links go to each company’s career search page; individual posting URLs expire quickly.

Sales and Revenue

The Trade Desk Account Executive, Agency, Enterprise Sales, Director of Revenue roles careers.thetradedesk.com ~70 US openings

Magnite Account Executive, Director of Partnerships, Senior Sales Director CTV roles magnite.com/company/careers ~40 US openings

PubMatic Regional Vice President of Sales, Account Executive, Sales Director roles pubmatic.com/company/careers ~30 US openings

NBCUniversal Account Executive, Media Sales, Client Partnerships, Digital Sales Manager roles nbcunicareers.com ~90 US openings

Disney Advertising Account Executive, Director of Client Solutions, Sales Planner roles disneycareers.com ~60 US openings

Amazon Ads Enterprise Account Executive, Advertising Sales Representative, Principal PMM roles amazon.jobs ~200 US openings

Marketing and Growth

Netflix Manager of Marketing Analytics, Performance Marketing, Brand Strategy roles jobs.netflix.com ~40 US openings

TikTok Brand Partnerships Manager, SMB Marketing Manager, Performance Marketing Lead roles careers.tiktok.com ~80 US openings

Walmart Connect Senior Product Marketing Manager, Commerce Media Strategy, Partner Growth roles careers.walmart.com ~50 US openings

Google Ads Marketing Manager, YouTube Partnerships, gTech Ads Solutions roles careers.google.com ~150 US openings

Account Management and Client Success

Omnicom Media Group Associate Director of Client Partnerships, Media Supervisor, Programmatic Manager roles jobs.omnicommediagroup.com ~55 US openings

WPP Media Client Investment Manager, Director of Programmatic, Senior Business Analyst roles wpp.com/careers ~70 US openings

Business Development

OpenAI Business Development Manager (Advertising Partnerships), Enterprise Account Executive openai.com/careers ~20 US openings

Zeta Global Business Development Representative, Director of Strategic Partnerships roles zetaglobal.com/careers ~30 US openings

I recently attended the egta AI Forum in Brussels, where I ran three sessions for a room of senior European broadcasters and sales houses. The group included RTL AdAlliance, Goldbach, RMB, Sky Media, TF1 Pub, France Télévisions Publicité, and others.

The challenge with a room like that is that you can’t really explain what an LLM is—or what agentic buying means—using slides alone. So we used Haribo Dragibus (the closest thing to jelly beans I could find in Brussels) instead.

We worked through many of the AI terms that get thrown around in our industry—machine learning, RAG, agents, agentic buying, and more—and made each one tangible. The room sorted, tasted, invented, and traded its way through the entire AI stack.

The result was more interactive, more memorable, and ultimately more effective than anything I could have put on a screen.

One thing I’ve learned: the fastest way to remove the fear from AI is to make it physical. Put it in someone’s hand, let them experiment with it, and the concepts start to click.

I’m sharing the full deck below in case you’d like to borrow the exercise for your own team.

https://egta.stevengolus.com/

CTV

The Roku and Paramount-WBD deals pull broadcast and streaming into one stack

Linear and streaming were tied together this week by two large transactions. Fox has agreed to buy Roku for about 22 billion dollars, and the Justice Department closed its antitrust review of the Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery merger. The reporting framed both deals as a single shift: ownership of distribution, operating systems, and first-party data is now the prize, not content alone. Source: AdExchanger, June 18, 2026

The Trade Desk uses StreamTV to push Ventura as a neutral TV operating system

The Trade Desk made its case for Ventura OS at the StreamTV Show in Denver. The pitch to device makers is higher monetization, and the pitch to buyers and publishers is a TV operating system with no owned content service to favor. The subtext is the conflict-of-interest problem that surfaces when a smart TV maker also sells the ads. Source: AdExchanger, June 18, 2026

Fox closes its upfront and points to Tubi and sports for the gains

Fox said it has wrapped its upfront negotiations for the 2026 to 2027 season and described the results as strong. Executives cited single-digit volume growth on linear networks and double-digit volume growth for Tubi, with sports inventory doing much of the work. Fox did not release specific dollar figures. Source: MediaPost, June 18, 2026

Omnicom research argues CTV has to fix frequency and context before performance

Omnicom Media released research arguing that streaming advertising over-indexes on audience data and under-uses context and inventory data. The findings carry six recommendations, including sequential storytelling, earlier integration of media and creative teams, and creative that fits the viewing environment rather than repeating the same spot. The work sets up a series of partnership announcements Omnicom planned for Cannes. Source: Digiday, June 19, 2026

Spectrum Intelligence Ventures Introduces Latis: Household Intelligence Platform for the AI Era

Spectrum Intelligence Ventures, the new AI intelligence business unit of Spectrum, today announced Latis, a new privacy-forward household intelligence platform designed for the emerging era of AI models, agents and real-time decisioning systems. Built on Spectrum’s first-party data signals spanning digital engagement, TV viewership and connected device activity across approximately 30 million U.S. households, Latis provides a continuously evolving view of household state and intent. Source: Spectrum Intelligence Ventures, Jun 18, 2026

Programmatic

Goodway Group cuts its SSP partners to single digits through its own SPO program

Independent agency Goodway Group said its supply-path optimization program, Goodpath, has reduced its active SSP partners to single digits. The agency built the effort with Jounce Media and has been on the path since 2019. The takeaway is that SSPs remain the most expendable hop in the chain when an agency runs its own SPO policy. Source: AdExchanger, June 17, 2026

Yahoo positions its DSP as an open agent network rather than a closed box

Yahoo unveiled an Agent Network that connects advertisers to AI tools from 23 ad tech partners across targeting, activation, creative, and measurement. Yahoo is betting on interoperability while the holding companies push proprietary platforms. The launch is timed to the Cannes debate over who controls agentic media buying. Source: Digiday, June 18, 2026

Artificial Intelligence

Horizon Media builds an agentic layer that talks to seller agents at Fox, Disney, TikTok, and NBCUniversal

Horizon Media disclosed an agentic software layer that lets its buying agents interact directly with agents from Innovid, Magnite, Vidmob, and Smartly, plus seller agents built by Fox, Disney, TikTok, and NBCUniversal. SharkNinja is already running the layer in production. The move is one of the first concrete examples of buy-side and sell-side agents transacting rather than just planning. Source: Adweek, June 18, 2026

Fox launches what it calls TV’s first end-to-end agentic ad platform

Fox announced an agentic advertising platform built on Fox AdStudio. Buy-side and sell-side agents can now act on their own for audience access and media buying across Fox’s linear and digital inventory. Fox is describing it as the television industry’s first end-to-end agentic system. Source: Adweek, June 18, 2026

Stagwell extends its agentic platform into media with The Media Machine

Stagwell launched The Media Machine, a media-specific operating layer that extends The Machine, the agentic platform it formally launched in January. The system automates the media workflow from strategy through QA, with humans still approving final decisions for now. It connects into Stagwell’s Palantir audience data, which the firm says sets it apart from older closed agency operating systems. Source: Digiday, June 19, 2026

Data and Identity

WPP Media tests synthetic audiences built on charity-donation data

WPP Media partnered with Givsly to test synthetic audience segments that fold in charity-donation patterns for programmatic buys in the United States. Early tests across four beauty and fashion campaigns showed a 2 percent lift in video completion rates. The system, built on the Claude model, maps zip codes against census, election, and nonprofit donation data to infer disposable income and social values, and the test ran on CTV and online video inventory. Source: Let’s Data Science, June 17, 2026

Measurement

Pixalate launches a programmatic-native ranking of streaming shows

Pixalate introduced the OpenEPG Index, which ranks 5,108 streaming shows by open programmatic CTV ad spend and consumer reach across 210 US markets. It is positioned as the first benchmark for streaming content investment that is built on programmatic activity rather than panel-measured viewership. The index gives buyers a spend-based view of which shows actually carry open-market demand. Source: PPC Land, June 18, 2026

Commerce and Retail Media

Amazon and Walmart escalate the fight to be retail’s primary data broker

Amazon and Walmart spent the week reframing their rivalry around data and infrastructure rather than market share and delivery speed. Amazon leaned on Prime Day and its custom AI chip work, while Walmart expanded its retail media reach through a partnership with Google and YouTube. The pattern shows both giants treating first-party purchase data as the core asset. Source: PYMNTS, June 18, 2026

Koddi connects retail media campaigns to Google’s Search Ads 360

Koddi announced an integration with Search Ads 360 that lets advertisers activate and measure commerce media campaigns across Koddi’s retailer network inside existing SA360 workflows. It is the second major retail media integration with SA360 after Criteo’s partnership last September. The move continues the trend of retail media plugging into the buying tools agencies already run. Source: PPC Land, June 18, 2026

Brand Safety and Legal

DoubleVerify launches DV Neura to classify content and fight AI slop

DoubleVerify introduced DV Neura, an AI engine that runs across its DV Media AdVantage Platform and ties verification, content classification, optimization, and agentic execution together. The company said it has increased content classification output by nearly 300 times this year and has monitored or blocked more than 500 million impressions on AI slop and low-quality generative sites. An Insight Agent is available now through the Model Context Protocol, with an Activation Agent due in the third quarter. Source: Adweek, June 17, 2026

Google moves to use IP addresses for ad measurement across Europe

Google notified AdSense publisher accounts on June 17 that it will begin using IP addresses for ad measurement and personalization across the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. The change is a concrete compliance item for any publisher serving ads to European users. It lands separately from the week’s agentic news but affects the same publisher base. Source: PPC Land, June 17, 2026

Corporate Strategy

Cannes Lions entries fall more than 25 percent under stricter rules

Cannes Lions received almost 7,000 fewer entries this year after a revamped submission process. The new rules follow last year’s cheating scandal and tightened how work qualifies. The drop reframes the festival’s awards as a smaller and more controlled field. Source: Ad Age, June 18, 2026

Job Board

US-based roles across sales, business development, account management, and marketing. Links go to each company’s career search page so they stay live after individual postings expire.

Sales and Sales Strategy

• The Trade Desk: https://careers.thetradedesk.com/

• Magnite: https://www.magnite.com/careers/

• PubMatic: https://pubmatic.com/careers/

• Index Exchange: https://www.indexexchange.com/careers/

• Roku: https://www.weareroku.com/careers

• Amazon Ads: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/teams/advertising

• Spotify: https://www.lifeatspotify.com/jobs

Business Development and Partnerships

• LiveRamp: https://liveramp.com/careers/

• DoubleVerify: https://doubleverify.com/careers/

• Integral Ad Science: https://integralads.com/careers/

• Criteo: https://careers.criteo.com/

• Taboola: https://www.taboola.com/careers

• Kargo: https://kargo.com/careers

Account Management and Client Services

• NBCUniversal: https://www.nbcunicareers.com/

• Disney Advertising: https://jobs.disneycareers.com/

• Paramount: https://www.paramount.com/careers

• Warner Bros. Discovery: https://careers.wbd.com/

• Reddit: https://www.redditinc.com/careers

• Pinterest: https://www.pinterestcareers.com/

Marketing and Insights

• Yahoo: https://www.yahooinc.com/careers

• Nielsen: https://www.nielsen.com/careers/

• Comscore: https://www.comscore.com/About/Careers

• Innovid (Mediaocean): https://www.mediaocean.com/careers

• Samsung Ads: https://www.samsung.com/us/careers/

Spectrum Reach and Anoki AI Team Up to Achieve Improved Real-Time Transparency in Streaming TV

By integrating Anoki’s ContextIQ, Spectrum Reach can now deliver scene-level contextual advertising on live CTV broadcasts. This gives advertisers new clarity and confidence, knowing their ads are appearing alongside content that aligns with their goals. Source: Spectrum Reach, June 10, 2026

Samsung Opens Smart TV Home Screens to Programmatic Buyers

Samsung Ads announced Wednesday that its home screen ad inventory will become available programmatically for the first time, rolling out across all global regions in Q3 2026. The initial DSP access will run through The Trade Desk and Google DV360, with the sell-side transaction powered by Magnite’s SpringServe technology. Roku has also been refreshing its home screen personalization. Analyst Michael Morris of Guggenheim Securities estimates Roku will see significant advertising lift from the redesign, which is currently only about 20% deployed with full rollout expected in coming months. Home screen inventory has historically been the last major direct-sold category in CTV. Samsung’s move is the largest-scale opening of that inventory to automated buying to date. Source: AdExchanger, June 10, 2026

TV Upfront Marketplace Begins to Move, Sports Driving the Action

The 2026 upfront marketplace has begun to move, with both holding company media agencies and some independents cutting deals, principally with sellers that control both linear TV and streaming options. Sports inventory is the principal draw, but haggling over pricing for Super Bowl LXI in February has slowed some negotiations. The overall market is estimated to be about 10-15% complete at this point. Non-sports entertainment inventory remains sluggish, and sources indicate it is shaping up to be another buyer’s market outside of live sports. Source: Digiday, June 9, 2026

Roblox Expands Advertising to Users Under 13

Roblox is now showing ads to users under the age of 13. Kids who complete a new age verification system using facial recognition will see untargeted ads if they are under 13, while programmatic access remains off-limits for that age group. The platform is limiting under-13 advertising to direct deals only, with no programmatic access whatsoever for that cohort, and only banner ad formats on the Roblox platform itself. The move is significant as gaming platforms continue to expand their ad footprint into younger demographics. Source: AdExchanger, June 12, 2026

Programmatic

Independent Ad Tech Reframes Itself Around Cloud Infrastructure

A positioning split is emerging among independent programmatic vendors around cloud infrastructure. The distinction comes down to whether vendors own their own cloud infrastructure or rent bandwidth and computing capacity from public clouds such as Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure. SSPs in particular are carving differentiation strategies based on this divide. The framing has implications for latency, margin structure, and data sovereignty claims that buyers are beginning to factor into supply path decisions. Source: AdExchanger, June 8, 2026

Prebid Loses Three Senior Leaders in Quick Succession

Prebid President Mike Racic and Director of Product Management Christian Janelli are both departing for a Canadian tech investment firm called Knower Tech. Garrett McGrath is also stepping down as chairman of the Prebid board after a five-year stint, with his next move unannounced. Racic told AdExchanger the departures will not cause a brain drain, noting the working group chairs and engineers who manage Prebid’s codebase predate his tenure and are staying on. Still, the simultaneous exits of three senior figures mark a significant leadership reset for the open-source consortium at a moment when the header bidding ecosystem faces new pressures from AI-native buying architectures. Source: AdExchanger, June 3, 2026

Data / Identity

Marketers Embrace AI for Content Creation, Resist It for Media Buying

A Digiday survey of more than 100 marketers found that data analysis and content creation are the most popular AI use cases, with advertisers more willing to apply AI to social and retail media than to other channels. The closer a task is to media spend and actual performance outcomes, the less likely marketers are to rely on AI for it. Among marketers using AI for social campaigns, two-thirds use it for data analysis and 57% for content creation, but only 32% use it to buy ad placements. The figures are similar for retail media, where the same share of advertisers let AI buy placements. The findings suggest that trust, not access, is the primary constraint on AI adoption in media buying. Source: AdExchanger, June 11, 2026

Measurement

Adelaide Attention Targeting Goes Live Inside Amazon DSP

Attention measurement firm Adelaide announced that pre-bid targeting using its proprietary AU metric is now live inside Amazon DSP, allowing advertisers to target high- and medium-attention inventory while filtering out low-attention placements. The integration also includes Adelaide’s AU Quality Floor, which defaults to excluding inventory designated as made-for-advertising sites by supply chain measurement vendor Jounce Media. The AU Quality Floor is exclusive to Amazon DSP. Historically, advertisers could access impression-level visibility into attention quality only after a campaign had already run. Pre-bid targeting moves that signal to the moment of the buying decision. Source: AdExchanger / MediaPost, June 10, 2026

Commerce and Retail Media

Walmart Connect Brings First-Party Shopper Data into Google DV360 for YouTube

Walmart Connect announced a new partnership with Google on June 11 that connects Walmart’s shopper intelligence to campaigns running inside Display and Video 360. The integration allows advertisers to select Walmart Connect audience segments from within DV360, activate them on YouTube, and then measure whether those video exposures generated actual purchases at Walmart. The partnership launches with YouTube, with additional inventory types planned to follow. The broader effort from Walmart’s retail media division aims to make it easier for advertisers to target Walmart shoppers on streaming TV platforms. In May, Walmart also announced a deal with SSP Magnite that allowed it to sell ad inventory on Vizio smart TV. The move reflects a wider pattern of retail media networks decoupling their first-party data from proprietary DSPs and making it accessible across the programmatic ecosystem. Source: MediaPost, June 11, 2026

World Cup Kicks Off as a Retail Media Test Case

The 2026 FIFA World Cup opened June 11 with 48 teams, 16 host cities, and 104 matches. FIFA approved commercial insertions during three-minute water breaks built into all 104 matches, creating new programmatic inventory mid-match in live streaming environments. Streaming CPMs are hitting $120. The entire retail media industry, from retail media networks to agencies and tech platforms, is mobilized in full force around the tournament. WARC Media forecasts the tournament will add $10.5 billion to the global ad market in Q2 alone. Source: The Current / Digiday, June 12, 2026

Gopuff Upgrades Retail Media Targeting With GrowthLoop Partnership

Gopuff announced a partnership with GrowthLoop, a composable CDP that uses agentic AI tools to create custom audiences and enhance targeting capabilities for the instant-delivery platform’s retail media offering. A composable CDP connects directly to a marketer’s existing data warehouse rather than requiring data to be ported into a separate vendor environment. With the integration, Gopuff and BevMo advertising partners can now build audience segments based on geography, purchase history, and order frequency and activate those audiences through SSPs or DSPs. Within a few days of a request, a brand could launch an audience targeting frequent buyers of competitor products in specific markets. Source: AdExchanger, June 9, 2026

AI

Mediaocean Launches NIVO AI With Innovid Agents Claiming 90% Workflow Efficiency Gain

Mediaocean announced the launch of NIVO AI on June 11, with Innovid agents delivering workflow efficiency gains of up to 90% compared to manual campaign setup in pilot programs. Pilot participants included Canvas Worldwide, FanDuel, Optimum, Paddy Power, and Tailwind EMEA. NIVO connects multiple agents across different specializations, from predictive creative scoring to campaign reporting, through natural language prompts. The system is positioned as the intelligence layer above Innovid’s existing orchestration infrastructure. The efficiency claims come from a small set of pilot participants and warrant independent validation, but the launch signals that Mediaocean is betting on agentic campaign orchestration as its primary AI differentiation. Source: AdExchanger / Business Wire, June 11, 2026

Zefr Extends Brand Safety Measurement to YouTube Audio Ads

Zefr announced June 12 that it is expanding its brand safety and suitability measurement capabilities to cover YouTube Audio Ads campaigns. As an established YouTube Brand Safety and Suitability partner, Zefr will now provide independent measurement and transparency across both video and audio inventory on the platform, giving brands consistent suitability insights as they extend investment into audio formats. The expansion responds to growing advertiser appetite for audio inventory on YouTube, where brand safety tools have historically lagged behind video coverage. Source: Adweek Wire, June 12, 2026

Corporate Strategy / M&A

Bending Spoons Files for U.S. IPO Targeting $20 Billion Valuation

Bending Spoons filed for a Nasdaq IPO targeting a $20 billion valuation, nearly double the $11.7 billion it was valued at just eight months ago. The Milan-based company owns more than 50 acquired digital properties including AOL, Vimeo, Evernote, WeTransfer, Eventbrite, Harvest, and Brightcove. The company reported Q1 2026 revenue of $601 million with 500 million monthly active users and 9 million paying subscribers. AI-generated or co-generated code jumped from under 10% of software development last year to 90% in Q1 2026, which the company credits for driving revenue per full-time employee to $2.6 million. The filing is a notable test of whether an AI-powered digital roll-up model can sustain public market interest at a premium valuation. Source: Bloomberg / Fortune, June 8, 2026

Independent Agencies Claim Structural Advantage Over Holding Companies in Upfront

AdExchanger reported that for years, independent agencies won business by differentiating themselves from holding companies on agility, responsiveness, and flexibility with closer client relationships. That positioning is being tested as AI reshapes the competitive dynamics between scale and speed. The context matters as upfront negotiations extend through the summer. Agencies without sports rights leverage are searching for alternative pitches, and AI-driven workflow claims have become a recurring theme in new business conversations. Source: AdExchanger, June 9, 2026

Brand Safety / Legal

Reuters and Time Reverse Default Bot Access to Block AI Crawlers

Reuters and Time have both shifted to a default-block approach for AI bots, creating whitelists of approved crawlers as an alternative to the traditional approach of individually naming bots to exclude. Reuters head of Reuters Professional Josh London said the decision came from an imbalance between the value publishers create and the value they receive in return from AI companies. Reuters has since signed AI licensing agreements with Microsoft and Meta. The publishers are not relying on any single enforcement method -- Reuters uses robots.txt files as part of a broader friction strategy rather than as a hard wall, with the intent of pushing AI companies toward licensing conversations. Time reportedly allows roughly 70 bots on its site currently and is developing an AI visibility product that would monetize approved crawler access. Source: Digiday, June 9, 2026

Miscellaneous

Publishers Experiment With Paywalling Premium Video to Drive Subscriptions

The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and Bloomberg are testing putting premium video content behind their paywalls to drive and retain subscriptions. The New York Times now has 13.1 million total subscribers, including 3 million international. Zeteo, the Substack-based news site led by former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, has surpassed 50,000 paid U.S. subscribers and is launching in the U.K. this September. The shift reflects a broader publisher bet that video, historically used to attract ad-supported audiences, can also serve as a subscription driver when placed behind a paywall with sufficient brand authority. Source: Digiday, June 11-12, 2026

Job Board

Sales and Business Development

The Trade Desk -- Account Executive and Business Development roles across New York, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, and other markets. careers.thetradedesk.com

Disney Advertising -- Account roles across New York, Atlanta, and Burbank covering streaming and linear. disneycareers.com

Warner Bros. Discovery -- Ad sales and partnership roles across U.S. markets. careers.wbd.com

NBCUniversal -- Advertising Products and Solutions team hiring across product, operations, and sales. nbcunicareers.com

Paramount -- Ad sales and streaming partnership roles available. viacomcbscareers.com

Amazon Ads -- Business development and seller roles across Seattle and New York. amazon.jobs/en/teams/amazon-advertising

Account Management and Client Success

Walmart Connect -- Customer success and account management roles supporting retail media advertisers. careers.walmart.com

Innovid/Mediaocean -- Client and account roles supporting NIVO rollout and omnichannel ad platform clients. innovid.com/careers

Adelaide -- Customer success and partnerships roles tied to attention metric expansion. adelaide.ai/careers

Analytics, Data, and Measurement

The Trade Desk -- Inventory and Data Partnerships roles in New York and Chicago. careers.thetradedesk.com

Zefr -- Analytics and measurement roles tied to brand safety and suitability products. zefr.com/careers

Engineering and Product

The Trade Desk -- Software Engineering roles across Bellevue, Boston, Boulder, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle. careers.thetradedesk.com

Samsung Ads -- Product and engineering roles tied to programmatic expansion of home screen inventory. samsung.com/us/careers

Magnite -- Engineering and platform roles supporting SpringServe and SSP infrastructure. magnite.com/careers

Peacock confirms first-ever profitable quarter

NBCUniversal Media Chairman Matt Strauss said at the Evercore Global TMT Conference this week that Peacock will post its first operating profit in Q2 2026, six years after launch. He called it “a beginning to a validation” of a strategy built around live sports, a domestic-only focus, and an ad-heavy subscriber base — 80% of the service’s 46 million paid subscribers are on the ad tier. Q1 losses of $432 million were heavily inflated by NBA rights costs; Q2 benefits from a more favorable sports calendar including MLB, the PGA Tour, and Sunday Night Football. Peacock represented more than one-third of NBCU’s total upfront ad sales volume this cycle, the largest share in the company’s upfront history.

Source: Deadline, June 2, 2026

Five major sellers now pooling linear and streaming inventory for upfront deals

Digiday’s Future of TV Briefing this week reported that AMC Global Media, Disney, Paramount, TelevisaUnivision, and Warner Bros. Discovery are each offering what they call “fluidity” to upfront advertisers — the ability to move ad dollars across their linear TV and streaming inventory rather than treating them as separate buys. The approach gives buyers flexibility to shift spend based on actual audience delivery during a campaign flight, rather than being locked into a channel-specific commitment. The piece notes that programmatic access to these pooled inventory stacks is growing alongside the direct sales pitch.

Source: Digiday, June 3, 2026

MediaRadar expands CTV intelligence to live sports and local market inventory

MediaRadar announced a major expansion of its CTV capabilities, unifying advertiser, creative, occurrence, and local market visibility across both AVOD and live sports streaming in a single platform. The initiative, called “Video Everywhere,” connects CTV data with the company’s existing linear TV, digital, social, print, and audio intelligence — giving buyers a cross-channel view of advertiser activity. The move targets the growing share of CTV inventory tied to live sports programming, where visibility had historically lagged behind standard on-demand environments.

Source: MediaRadar, June 2, 2026

Programmatic

Amazon quietly uses third-party firms to sell some Twitch and Alexa ad inventory

The Information reported, surfaced by AdExchanger on June 3, that Amazon has contracted outside partners to sell ads on Twitch over the past year and has reached out to at least one external partner to help monetize the Alexa voice assistant. The disclosure complicates Amazon’s pitch as a seamless, unified media buy. Third-party ad sales arrangements are not new for Amazon — outside firms have handled sales for IMDb and Goodreads for years — but the Twitch piece specifically undercuts the premise of a fully self-sufficient walled garden that Amazon has leaned on at upfronts.

Source: AdExchanger, June 3, 2026

The Trade Desk names its fourth CFO in 14 months as leadership churn continues

The Trade Desk announced on June 1 that Nate Olmstead will become CFO effective July 9, making him the fourth person to hold or serve in the role at the company in just over 14 months. Olmstead comes from Penguin Solutions, an AI infrastructure company, and previously served as CFO of Logitech. His hire arrives at a fraught moment: agency relationships with WPP, Dentsu, Publicis, and Omnicom have all deteriorated visibly over the past several months over OpenPath fee disputes and audit results. A new Kokai product update released in May covering AI controls, CTV pause ads, and Deal Desk enhancements gave some investors reasons for optimism, but the leadership story remains the dominant headline.

Source: Adweek / ppc.land, June 1, 2026

The Trade Desk CRO exits after just seven months

Chief revenue officer Anders Mortensen is leaving The Trade Desk after joining from Google in October 2025, Adweek reported exclusively on June 7. COO Vivek Kundra will absorb Mortensen’s responsibilities in an expanded remit. The company said leadership transitions are “a natural part of scaling a global technology company.” Mortensen is the latest in a series of senior departures that has included three CFOs, multiple board members, and other executives. The exit follows by days the new CFO announcement, adding to a sense of ongoing instability at the top of the DSP.

Source: Adweek, June 7, 2026

Data / Identity

Peer39 acquires Adloox from Scope3, gaining walled garden ad verification

Peer39 completed the acquisition of Adloox on June 2, picking up MRC-accredited ad viewability measurement, invalid traffic detection, and brand safety classification inside Google’s DV360 and Meta’s ad platforms. Until now, Peer39 focused on contextual and brand safety tools for open web and CTV environments; the deal gives it the walled garden coverage needed to compete directly with DoubleVerify and the recently privatized IAS. Scope3, which acquired Adloox in 2024, is divesting as it narrows to Interchange, its agentic media buying platform — a pivot accompanied by two rounds of layoffs over the past year. Scope3 CEO Brian O’Kelley said the sale positions both companies to focus on their respective core strategies.

Source: Adweek, June 2, 2026

Publishers signing six-figure AI licensing deals through Snowflake’s Cortex platform

Digiday reported this week that 17 publishers — including The Washington Post, Associated Press, People Inc., and USA Today Network — have signed enterprise AI licensing agreements through Snowflake’s Cortex Knowledge Extensions. The platform lets enterprises query paywalled publisher content via retrieval-augmented generation inside Snowflake’s AI environment, without exposing raw data or granting model training rights. Several publishers have landed six-figure flat-fee or usage-based deals, primarily with financial services firms. Snowflake earns only on storage and compute; it takes no revenue share on the content deals themselves.

Source: Digiday, June 2026

Brand Safety / Legal

YouTube Shorts earns first-ever MRC brand safety accreditation for short-form video

The Media Rating Council awarded YouTube its sixth consecutive annual brand safety accreditation on June 3, extending coverage for the first time to include YouTube Shorts. The certification now spans in-stream and Shorts video ads across Maximum, Moderate, and Limited suitability tiers for campaigns purchased through Google Ads and DV360. Shorts averages 200 billion daily views globally, and YouTube is the first platform to hold MRC accreditation for the short-form format. For buyers, the credential provides an audited third-party signal on YouTube’s content classification and invalid traffic filtration processes.

Source: MediaPost, June 5, 2026

AI

ChatGPT ad minimum drops to $10,000 as OpenAI expands pilot to the UK

OpenAI confirmed on June 6 that its advertising pilot has launched in the United Kingdom, its first European market, following earlier rollouts in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Criteo, OpenAI’s first and still primary ad tech partner, simultaneously dropped its minimum ChatGPT campaign investment from $50,000 to $10,000 and said it will match client spend dollar-for-dollar on the platform. ChatGPT has surpassed 1 billion monthly active users. Criteo data from February showed ChatGPT-referred users converting at roughly 1.5x the rate of other referral channels, but buyers still cite limited transparency into placement and optimization as barriers to meaningful scale.

Source: AdExchanger / ppc.land, June 5–6, 2026

Google launches AI-mode performance reports inside Search Console

Google introduced its first generative AI performance reports within Search Console this week, covering AI Mode and AI Overviews, the generative answers displayed above traditional search results. Reports include five dimensions: impressions, pages, countries, devices, and dates. The move gives publishers and advertisers their first structured view into how their content performs within Google’s AI answer surfaces — a meaningful step given that, according to earlier research, top-10 Google rankers now account for only around 38% of AI Overview citations, down from 76% in mid-2025.

Source: AdExchanger, June 5, 2026

Corporate Strategy / M&A

LiveRamp SEC filing details neutrality commitments as Publicis deal moves forward

A detailed reading of the LiveRamp SEC filings this week by ppc.land found that Publicis has made specific contractual commitments to maintain LiveRamp’s interoperability and neutrality across the ecosystem post-acquisition. The $2.2 billion deal — announced in May at a 30% premium to LiveRamp’s closing price — is expected to close by end of 2026. The filing also revealed that Omnicom, which had a roughly net-zero financial relationship with LiveRamp through reciprocal Acxiom data arrangements, accelerated its planned 2028 exit from LiveRamp the day after the deal was announced, per Digiday reporting. Other holding companies with deeper technical dependencies face harder exits.

Source: ppc.land, June 5, 2026

Job Board

Sales and Business Development

• Netflix — Account Executive, Advertising Sales · Director, Ad Partnerships · Manager, Programmatic Sales | jobs.netflix.com

• NBCUniversal / Peacock — VP, Advertising Sales (Streaming) · Director, Brand Partnerships · Account Executive, Sports and Streaming | nbcunicareers.com

• Disney Advertising — Account Executive, Streaming Sales · Sr. Manager, Revenue Operations · Manager, Programmatic Strategy | jobs.disneycareers.com

• Fox Corporation — Account Executive, Digital and Streaming · Director, Tubi Ad Sales · Manager, Revenue Strategy | foxcorporation.com/careers

• Magnite — Director, Publisher Development · Sr. Account Executive, DSP Partnerships · Account Manager, CTV | magnite.com/careers

• Kargo — Account Manager, Brand Partnerships · Sr. Director, Brand Strategy | kargo.com/careers

Marketing and Account Management

• Criteo — Sr. Partner Success Manager · Director, Commerce Media Strategy · Customer Success Manager, Retail Media | criteo.com/careers

• DoubleVerify — Sr. Account Manager, CTV · Manager, Customer Success · Director, Strategic Accounts | doubleverify.com/careers

• Paramount Advertising — Director, Streaming Ad Sales · Sr. Manager, Programmatic Revenue · Account Executive, National Accounts | viacomcbscareers.com

• WBD Advertising — Director, Ad Tech and Measurement · Manager, Revenue Analytics | careers.wbd.com

Product, Data, and Operations

• Amazon Ads — Senior Product Manager, CTV Measurement · Data Scientist, Attribution · Ad Operations Manager | amazon.jobs

• The Trade Desk — Sr. Product Manager, Kokai Platform · Data Engineer, CTV Supply · Manager, Partner Operations | thetradedesk.com/careers

• LiveRamp — Enterprise Account Executive · Sr. Director, Partnerships | liveramp.com/careers

Roku overhauls its home screen for the first time in a decade

Roku unveiled the first major update to its home-screen user experience in a decade, featuring a new personalized AI-powered main screen designed to learn user habits and preferences. The layout will shift throughout the day based on who is watching. On the advertising side, Roku said it is using the same content personalization signals for the advertising space to ensure that ads feel relevant to the user. The rollout began May 27 across all Roku TVs and streaming devices in the U.S. and reaches over 100 million households.

Source: AdExchanger / Bloomberg, May 27

Sir Martin Sorrell backs Olyzon with $10 million to build an agentic CTV decisioning layer

Olyzon, the agentic decisioning layer for CTV advertising, announced a $10 million Series A funding round led by S4S Ventures, the firm co-founded by Sanja Partalo and Sir Martin Sorrell. Olyzon’s pitch is that while the delivery of TV has completed its digital transformation, buy-side decisioning hasn’t. The platform already counts Publicis, WPP, OMD, Mastercard, Audi, and McDonald’s among its clients. The funding will support U.S. expansion and a new London office ahead of Cannes Lions.

Source: PRNewswire / VideoWeek, May 27

Google positions YouTube as a two-click commerce destination on connected TV

Google sees an opportunity for an ecommerce do-over in the agentic AI era, with a strategy centered on shoppable YouTube and Gemini-powered shopping agents. At Google’s Brandcast event, the company announced a feature that lets viewers buy products directly on YouTube using Google Pay, with two clicks on a remote control. Soon, when brands integrate the Universal Commerce Protocol and run Shopping ads on YouTube with product feeds on Demand Gen campaigns, people can buy on the spot, with buy now, pay later options via Affirm and Klarna embedded directly into Google Pay.

Source: AdExchanger / Google Blog, May 26

Measurement

Measured plugs incrementality data directly into ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini

Media measurement provider Measured launched a Model Context Protocol server that allows brands to ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other AI platforms how their media is performing. The answers are based on aggregated and anonymized data from over 30,000 incrementality tests across more than 200 brand clients. With this integration, marketers can surface cross-channel performance data, including executive summaries and on-demand insights, directly inside the AI platforms they already use every day. It is part of a broader pattern of measurement vendors building MCP bridges to reduce friction between data dashboards and AI-native workflows.

Source: AdExchanger / Business Wire, May 28

Pirated sports streams are distorting the TV ratings used for ad buying

According to a new Adalytics report, illicit livestream services are distributing unauthorized individual streams of high-profile sporting events to hundreds of thousands of devices. In one example, a single stream of the Super Bowl on NBCU’s Peacock was distributed to more than 100,000 devices. The Super Bowl’s ratings were likely off by somewhere between one and two million total viewers as a result. The findings put Nielsen under fresh scrutiny, with the NFL having already placed the measurement firm on notice last fall over systematic undercounting.

Source: AdExchanger, May 26

Programmatic

Agencies are moving closer to supply -- and it is reshaping the middle layer

Publicis Groupe’s planned acquisition of LiveRamp has renewed attention on a broader shift underway across advertising, with agencies increasingly attempting to exert greater control over the infrastructure, identity layers, and orchestration systems underpinning how digital advertising works. Sources tell Digiday that for years the architecture relied on distinct layers -- publishers with SSPs, advertisers with DSPs, agencies connecting the pipes -- but 2026 developments suggest a redesign rather than an adjustment. The question is who ends up owning the programmatic middle.

Source: Digiday, May 25

AdCP and IAB Tech Lab are fighting for control of agentic advertising standards

The battle over infrastructure, interoperability, and operational control in agentic advertising is under way. Digiday reported that Ads Context Protocol, which launched about 100 days ago to industry fanfare, is now in direct competition with IAB Tech Lab’s AAMP framework. The two camps represent different visions of who governs the pipes: an open standards body versus a faster-moving, startup-led protocol. The outcome of this fight will have material downstream implications for every programmatic player choosing which standards to build against.

Source: Digiday, May 26

AI

OpenAI removes the ChatGPT ads minimum spend entirely -- and projects $2.5 billion in ad revenue

OpenAI removed the $50,000 minimum spend on its self-serve ChatGPT ad platform, and the pilot has expanded to the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and South Korea. OpenAI is projecting $2.5 billion in ChatGPT ad revenue this year. The minimum dropped progressively: from $250,000 at the February launch, to $50,000 in April, to nothing on May 5, when the self-serve Ads Manager opened to all U.S. businesses alongside CPC bidding and a Conversions API. The move significantly broadens access beyond enterprise pilots for the first time.

Source: Briefs.co / Averi, May 29-30

Brand Safety / Legal

EU finalizes a record DMA fine against Google for search self-preferencing

The European Commission is finalizing the largest fine ever imposed under the Digital Markets Act, targeting Google for systematically ranking its own shopping, flight, and hotel services above rival comparison platforms in Search -- a penalty in the “high triple-digit million euro” range, expected before the summer recess. The ruling would mark a turning point for EU tech regulation: after more than two years of proceedings, negotiations, and rejected remedy proposals, Europe’s most powerful tech watchdog is moving from compliance talks to financial punishment.

Source: TechTimes / Reuters, May 25-27

Job Board

Roles compiled from company career pages as of May 31, 2026. Links go to career search pages, not individual postings, which expire quickly.

Sales and Business Development

The Trade Desk -- Account Executive, Enterprise Sales; Director, Business Development (Retail Media) careers.thetradedesk.com

Magnite -- Account Executive, Publisher Development; Senior Director, Agency Sales magnite.com/careers

Index Exchange -- Senior Account Executive; Director, Publisher Partnerships indexexchange.com/careers

Kargo -- Account Executive, Brand Partnerships; Senior Manager, Agency Development kargo.com/careers

StackAdapt -- Account Executive, Mid-Market; Senior Account Executive, Enterprise stackadapt.com/careers

LiveRamp -- Enterprise Account Executive; Director, Strategic Accounts liveramp.com/careers

Marketing and Analytics

Nielsen -- Senior Director, Audience Measurement; Manager, Marketing Analytics nielsen.com/careers

Comscore -- Senior Marketing Manager; Director, Client Development comscore.com/About/Careers

IAS (Integral Ad Science) -- Senior Product Marketing Manager; Enterprise Solutions Consultant integralads.com/careers

Account Management and Client Success

Criteo -- Senior Account Manager; Strategic Customer Success Manager criteo.com/careers

Pubmatic -- Account Manager, Publisher Development; Senior Client Partner pubmatic.com/careers

Viant Technology -- Account Executive; Senior Solutions Consultant viantinc.com/careers

Streaming is about to win the upfront, not just the living room

For the first time, connected TV is on track to pull more prime-time upfront dollars than linear, a shift EMARKETER analysts framed as a genuine tipping point rather than a gradual drift. The call landed at the firm’s Ad Buyer event and reflects how far budgets have moved now that audiences have already gone. Source: EMARKETER, May 21, 2026

Roku’s free channel quietly becomes a top-tier network

The Roku Channel reached a 3 percent share of all US television viewing in Nielsen’s March reading, a milestone that puts a free, ad-supported service in the same conversation as established networks. The figure underscores how much leverage FAST inventory now carries as economic caution pushes viewers toward no-cost options. Source: Cord Cutters News, May 22, 2026

AI

Google hands the keys to Gemini at Marketing Live

At Google Marketing Live, the company reframed nearly its entire advertising suite around Gemini, introducing AI Search ad formats, an Asset Studio creative workflow, and a single unified agent called Ask Advisor that spans Ads, Analytics, Merchant Center and the Marketing Platform. The throughline was that execution is increasingly the machine’s job and the marketer’s role is shifting toward the quality of the inputs. Source: Marketing Dive, May 21, 2026

OpenAI gives its ChatGPT ads a makeover

OpenAI is testing a richer ad unit inside ChatGPT, adding a larger image and an optional, advertiser-customizable call-to-action button on top of its existing format. The move signals that after months building the ad plumbing, the company is now focused on how the units look and convert. Source: Digiday, May 25, 2026

Autonomous ad buying works, just not for the hard stuff

Speaking at AdExchanger’s Programmatic AI event, WPP Media’s group director of media optimization put a number on the hype: somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of campaigns are still too complex for an agent to run solo. Simple programmatic guaranteed buys with light targeting are fair game, but expecting agents to handle a full media plan, or anything in regulated categories like healthcare, remains unrealistic for now. Source: AdExchanger, May 21, 2026

📊 Programmatic

Generative AI starts rewiring the auction itself

Two decades after the first RTB auction, generative AI is beginning to reshape the millisecond decisioning that decides which ads appear across display, video, CTV and audio. The change touches every layer of the pipe, from how publishers generate bid requests to how DSPs decide whether and what to bid. Source: AdExchanger, May 21, 2026

PubMatic ships an agent that explains the auction

PubMatic introduced a Detailed Reasoning Agent that drops analytical summaries directly into programmatic dashboards, breaking down transaction paths, marketplace fees and auction dynamics. It is a transparency play aimed squarely at buyers who have been complaining that the supply chain is a black box. Source: The Agile Brand Guide, May 22, 2026

📏 Measurement

Snap blends its own data with mobile partners in new attribution tool

Snap rolled out Unified Attribution, an optimization and measurement product that combines Snapchat’s platform metrics with Mobile Measurement Partner data so app advertisers can evaluate and tune campaigns in something closer to real time. The pitch is a single, reconciled view of performance rather than competing numbers. Source: The Agile Brand Guide, May 22, 2026

DoubleVerify extends brand-safety coverage to Threads

DoubleVerify launched content verification for Meta’s Threads, using AI to classify the context around public posts and flag risk at the post level. The expansion brings the verification firm’s brand-safety tooling to one of the faster-growing social platforms as more ad budgets test the surface. Source: The Agile Brand Guide, May 22, 2026

Commerce & Retail Media

The agentic commerce land grab heats up

Google’s push to own the full shopper journey, from query to checkout, is escalating a fight against Amazon’s Alexa and challengers like TikTok Shop over who controls AI-driven buying. The contest is increasingly about whose agent sits between a consumer’s intent and the actual purchase. Source: Digiday, May 25, 2026

TikTok Shop posts a big small-business number

TikTok Shop says US small businesses on the platform grew sales 66 percent in 2025 over the prior year, a figure the company is leaning on as it presses its post-sale monetization story. The growth claim arrives as TikTok works to reassure advertisers that the rebuilt US operation is a durable place to spend. Source: Digiday, May 22, 2026

World Cup inventory is going for record sums

Ad inventory around the 2026 World Cup is commanding sponsorships near $50 million and sky-high CPMs for Fox and Telemundo, a reminder that scarce live-sports reach still sets the ceiling on pricing. The tournament is shaping up as one of the year’s defining tentpole events for marketers chasing mass attention. Source: Adweek, May 24, 2026

💼 Corporate Strategy

Microsoft’s ad chief steps down after two decades

Kya Sainsbury-Carter is leaving Microsoft after a 20-year run, most recently as the corporate vice president running its advertising business across search, display and retail media. LinkedIn’s Matt Derella will expand his remit to oversee LinkedIn Ads and Microsoft Advertising go-to-market, with the two units continuing to operate separately. Source: Adweek, May 19, 2026

Vox Media prepares to break itself in two

Vox Media is set to split into two companies, with CEO Jim Bankoff leading a newly acquired set of titles while president Ryan Pauley oversees the remainder. The restructuring is the latest sign of digital publishers reshaping themselves around tighter, more durable business lines. Source: Adweek, May 20, 2026

The Job Board

Sales & Account Management

• The Trade Desk, Client Services and Brand Partnerships, Chicago / New York / Los Angeles. Careers

• Roku, Account Executive and Ad Sales, New York / San Jose. Careers

• Netflix Advertising, Account Management and Sales, New York / Los Angeles. Careers

• Amazon Ads, Account Executive and Sales, New York / Seattle. Careers

• Disney Advertising, Ad Sales and Client Solutions, New York. Careers

• NBCUniversal, Ad Sales and Partnerships, New York. Careers

Business Development & Partnerships

• Magnite, Sales and Inventory Partnerships, New York / Remote. Careers

• PubMatic, Account Management and Partnerships, New York / Redwood City. Careers

• LiveRamp, Partnerships and Account Management, New York / Remote. Careers

• Samsung Ads, Sales and Business Development, New York. Careers

Marketing & Measurement

• Integral Ad Science, Marketing and Customer Success, New York. Careers

• DoubleVerify, Marketing and Account Management, New York. Careers

• Paramount, Ad Sales Marketing and Client Solutions, New York. Careers

• Warner Bros. Discovery, Ad Sales and Marketing, New York. Careers

I had coffee with Britt Wallace from Kargo last week, and she walked me through something they announced a few weeks back that I missed and wanted to share.

Kargo is one of the few platforms now integrated with ChatGPT. Advertisers can now activate ChatGPT alongside their existing Kargo campaigns through one IO, with unified reporting across the campaign. See below for an example.

Do I think ads in ChatGPT has legs? Yes.

The bigger question for me is whether ChatGPT, or any LLM, can accurately determine whether I’m in work mode, using it to help me in a business capacity, versus casual search mode, where I’m using ChatGPT more like a Google replacement. If the platform can understand that context switch and deliver ads accordingly, I think there’s tremendous opportunity.

-Steven

*Kargo is a client but - I’m not getting paid to mention this. I just thought it was worth flagging

Source: Kargo Press Release, May 5, 2026

Corporate Strategy / M&A

Publicis goes all-cash for LiveRamp at $2.2 billion Publicis Groupe agreed Sunday to acquire LiveRamp for $38.50 per share, a roughly 30% premium and an enterprise value of about $2.2 billion. Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun told Adweek the deal is a bet on “agentic transformation,” giving the holdco a data collaboration spine to compete with the biggest tech and consultancy players. LiveRamp will remain agnostic and serve non-Publicis clients post-close, which is expected by year-end. Source: Adweek, May 17, 2026 Source: AdTechRadar, May 17, 2026

CTV

NBCU opens upfront week leaning on performance and live contextual AI At Radio City Music Hall on May 11, Mark Marshall used NBCUniversal’s 100th anniversary stage to pivot the pitch from reach to measurable outcomes, with sports, AI and contextual targeting front and center. The company also previewed a Q4 launch of AI-powered live contextual advertising and detailed an agentic AI strategy for always-on interoperable buying. Source: Marketing Dive, May 12, 2026

Disney brings tentpoles to the Javits, with D’Amaro front and center Disney’s May 12 upfront marked Josh D’Amaro’s first as CEO, with Rita Ferro framing the pitch around fandom, four 2027 tentpoles within six weeks (Super Bowl, College Football Championship, Grammys, Oscars), and a unified portfolio across ESPN, ABC, Hulu, FX and Disney+. The presentation closed with Olivia Rodrigo and featured more than 100 talent appearances. Source: The Walt Disney Company, May 13, 2026

Warner Bros. Discovery makes performance the through-line, addresses the Ellison “elephant” Co-presidents Ryan Gould and Bobby Voltaggio opened WBD’s May 13 upfront by directly acknowledging the pending $110 billion Paramount Skydance acquisition, then pivoted to measurement and outcomes. The company unveiled a new in-flight measurement dashboard and announced it is joining an OpenAP-led conversion API initiative alongside NBCU, Fox, Paramount, AMC, A+E and Scripps. Source: AdExchanger, May 13, 2026

Fox puts its CTO on the upfront stage and bets the year on the World Cup Lachlan Murdoch reiterated Fox’s “we don’t chase scale” posture at New York City Center on May 11, then handed off to CTO Melody Hildebrandt, who detailed AI-native ad infrastructure including a contextual engine that plugs into brand AI agents, and an interactive Colin Cowherd on FS1. Tubi CEO Anjali Sud followed with claims of 100 million MAUs, 10 billion hours watched annually, and category lift figures ranging from 21% in retail to 37% in QSR. Source: Variety, May 11, 2026

Netflix tells advertisers it can now compete with anyone At its May 13 upfront, Netflix said its ad-supported tier reached 250 million monthly active viewers globally, up from 190 million in November, with over 80% watching weekly. The company will roll out programmatic pause ads and AI-powered buying agents in the US and Canada this summer, and will expand its ad-supported tier to 15 new countries starting in 2027 including Sweden, the Netherlands, Indonesia and the Philippines. Source: Variety, May 13, 2026

Amazon launches Dynamic TV Creative, plants flag on video podcasts Amazon used its Beacon Theatre upfront on May 11 to unveil Dynamic TV Creative, which adjusts interactive video ad elements based on a viewer’s shopping journey and is currently available across CPG, fashion and electronics on Prime Video. Amazon also brought Oprah Winfrey on stage to announce The Oprah Podcast joining Wondery, framing creator-led video podcasts as the next generation of TV networks. Source: Digiday, May 15, 2026

TelevisaUnivision pitches sports, streaming and culture in ‘We Get Hispanics’ upfront New ad sales chief John Kozack made his upfront debut on May 12 with rights to the 2027 Super Bowl in Spanish via ESPN, an extension on Mexican National Team coverage through 2034, and a new partnership with Apple on the Las Vegas F1 Grand Prix. The company also said it will produce 100 ViX MicrO short-form vertical titles in 2026, up from 40, after the format crossed 1 billion views. Source: Adweek, May 13, 2026

📊 Programmatic

PubMatic and Magnite post Q1 results as SSP narrative stays contested PubMatic reported 13% YoY revenue growth to $62.6 million in Q1, driven by 80% growth in its emerging revenue category and 18% growth in CTV, while flagging continued spend reductions from an unnamed major DSP. CEO Rajeev Goel said PubMatic has now run more than 30 fully autonomous agentic campaigns through its AgenticOS platform, on top of more than 1,000 direct publisher deals. Source: AdTechRadar, May 13, 2026

Jeff Green warns agentic A2A buying could spawn ‘hundreds of thousands of ad networks’ The Trade Desk CEO pushed back during last week’s earnings call on the agent-to-agent ad buying narrative being tested by Omnicom, Stagwell and Butler/Till, arguing the model recreates the inefficiencies of ad networks rather than removing intermediaries. Omnicom CEO John Wren countered to investors that agentic buying without ad tech fees is a real objective the holdco is testing. Source: AdExchanger, May 12, 2026

🧩 Data / Identity

TV publishers consolidate around a shared conversion API through OpenAP The CAPI initiative announced at WBD’s upfront on May 13 is designed to let advertisers connect outcomes data to their own first-party data across video campaigns running on NBCUniversal, Fox, Paramount, AMC, A+E, Scripps and WBD. The goal is to remove the patchwork of bespoke integrations buyers currently navigate to do closed-loop measurement across premium TV. Source: AdExchanger, May 13, 2026

📏 Measurement

Nielsen and Triton Digital partner to plug the podcast measurement gap Nielsen and Triton are integrating Triton’s podcast measurement into Nielsen’s media planning tool, which currently handles 3.5 million media plans annually across five of the six major holding companies. The rollout is targeted for later in 2026, with both teams focused on getting publishers, agencies and brands ready before launch. Source: Barrett Media, May 12, 2026

🤖 AI

TikTok consolidates its ad system around AI at TikTok World At its sixth annual TikTok World on May 13, the platform shipped Brand Consideration Ads optimizing for cost per consideration and six-second view-through, integrated ByteDance’s Dreamina Seedance 2.0 into Symphony Creative Studio, and launched a TikTok Ads MCP Server that lets external AI agents interact with the ad system through natural language. The company also opened Symphony Creative Studio to all logged-in TikTok for Business users. Source: TikTok Newsroom, May 13, 2026

Condé Nast CEO tells brands to plan for zero search traffic Speaking on TBPN, Roger Lynch said Condé Nast has now told every brand in its portfolio to operate as if Google search traffic eventually goes to zero, with AI Overviews and commerce-stuffed search results making the channel unsustainable. The comments mark one of the clearest public acknowledgements yet from a major publisher that the search-driven publishing model is breaking. Source: AdTechRadar, May 13, 2026

📰 Miscellaneous

MrBeast holds first advertiser upfront, debuts Vyro creator distribution engine Beast Industries staged its first public advertiser presentation on May 12, confirming a two-sided creator marketplace and highlighting Vyro, a distribution engine that spans more than 100,000 vetted microcreators. The move places MrBeast’s company in direct competition with traditional publishers and platform-owned creator marketplaces for video and creator budgets. Source: PPC Land, May 14, 2026

Roku Curate goes to market with Best Buy, Criteo, Fandango, Fetch, Instacart, Kroger Roku formally rolled out Curate this week, a packaged offering that pairs Roku’s first-party engagement data with purchase data from premium retail and commerce partners and is powered in part by Magnite’s SpringServe technology. Launch partners include closed-loop measurement back to in-store and online purchase for each data source, with Roku positioning the product as a shortcut around walled-garden activation. Source: Roku Newsroom (referenced in Adweek upfront coverage week of May 11), April 27, 2026 launch / May 11–15 sell-in

Job Board

A snapshot of open US roles across sales, business development, marketing and account management at major media and ad tech companies. Counts below approximate current US openings.

Sales & Business Development

• The Trade Desk: Senior Account Manager (Agency), Solutions Consulting Director, Sales Operations Director NAMER → careers.thetradedesk.com

• Netflix: Sales Partner UCAN (NY), Sales Solutions Specialist Emerging Business, Ad Ops Demand Management Specialist UCAN → jobs.netflix.com

• Roku: Senior Manager Partner Growth, Senior Account Executive, Senior Analyst Revenue Analytics → weareroku.com/careers

• Amazon Ads: Senior Account Executive CPG, Brand Innovation Lab Account Director, Senior Sales Account Executive Streaming → amazon.jobs

• NBCUniversal: Account Executive Advanced Advertising, Director Account Management Peacock, Senior Account Executive Versant → nbcunicareers.com

• The Walt Disney Company: Account Director Disney+/Hulu, Sales Director ABC, Senior Manager Disney Compass → jobs.disneycareers.com

• Paramount: Account Director Paramount+, Senior Account Executive CBS Sports, Director Streaming Sales → careers.paramount.com

• Warner Bros. Discovery: Director Ad Sales HBO Max, Account Director TNT Sports, Senior Director Streaming Revenue → careers.wbd.com

• Spotify Advertising: Account Director (NY), Manager Sales Development, Senior Client Partner → lifeatspotify.com

• TikTok for Business: Brand Partnerships Manager CPG, Client Solutions Manager Tech & Telco, Account Executive Mid-Market → careers.tiktok.com

• Pinterest: Sales Manager Mid-Market, Senior Manager Client Partner, Account Director Performance → pinterestcareers.com

• PubMatic: Senior Director Advertiser Solutions, Senior Account Director Agency → pubmatic.com/careers

• Magnite: Senior Account Manager CTV, Director Customer Success Streaming → magnite.com/careers

• DoubleVerify: Senior Sales Director, Account Manager Advertiser, Director Customer Success → doubleverify.com/careers

• Integral Ad Science: Senior Account Executive, Director Customer Success → integralads.com/careers

• LiveRamp: Senior Account Director Agency, Director Customer Success, Account Executive Brand → liveramp.com/careers

• Kargo: Senior Account Director, VP Sales Tier 1 Agencies → kargo.com/careers

• Cadent: Director Strategic Accounts CTV, Account Director Agency → cadent.tv/careers

• AMC Networks: Account Director Ad Sales, Director Account Management AMCN Streaming → amcnetworks.com/careers

Disney’s streaming margin breaks 10%, ad revenue grows double digits. Disney reported fiscal Q2 2026 results on May 6, with Disney+ and Hulu revenue accelerating to 13% growth and combined entertainment SVOD operating income jumping 88% year over year to $582 million. Entertainment segment SVOD ad revenue grew double digits, and the streaming margin crossed 10% for the first time. Source: Variety, May 6, 2026

HBO Max passes 140 million subscribers ahead of Paramount close. Warner Bros. Discovery reported Q1 2026 results on May 6, with streaming ad revenue up 19% on a constant-currency basis and HBO Max subscriber growth running ahead of internal forecasts. The company now expects to top 150 million subs by year end, even as a $2.8 billion Netflix termination fee drove a $2.9 billion net loss for the quarter. Source: The Wrap, May 6, 2026

LinkedIn audiences land on streaming TV through Amazon DSP. Amazon Ads and LinkedIn announced on May 8 that US advertisers can now buy CTV using LinkedIn’s first-party B2B audiences (job title, industry, seniority) directly in Amazon DSP, with deals running across premium streaming through Microsoft Monetize. The integration plugs LinkedIn signals into the same campaign workflows agencies already use for Amazon CTV inventory. Source: Advanced Television, May 8, 2026

Analytic Partners says CTV is delivering 30% more ROI than budgets reflect. A new Analytic Partners report covered on May 7 finds connected TV is producing about 30% higher return on investment than other channels, but media plans have not caught up to the consumer migration from pay TV to streaming. The firm argues the gap between viewing share and budget allocation is leaving meaningful incremental returns on the table. Source: Broadcast Media Africa, May 7, 2026

Programmatic

Trade Desk hits $689M in Q1, leans hard into UID2 and OpenPath. Jeff Green said on the May 7 earnings call that Q1 revenue grew 12% year over year with adjusted EBITDA of $206 million at a 30% margin, guiding Q2 to at least $750 million. The company highlighted Paramount adopting live in-game programmatic via TTD, Xumo becoming the first CTV publisher to integrate OpenPath through FreeWheel, and a partnership with MetaRouter to sync UID2 and conversion events in real time. Source: The Globe and Mail, May 8, 2026

Yahoo DSP becomes the first DSP to plug into Kochava’s agentic workspace. On May 5, Kochava launched a Yahoo DSP workspace inside its StationOne AI hub, the first of its kind for any DSP, bundling pre-built skills, agents, and an MCP connector that let traders run buys across display, video, native, CTV, audio, and DOOH from a third-party AI layer. Digiday’s read is that Yahoo is positioning the DSP as orchestration-friendly infrastructure rather than a destination UI, a contrast to the closed-system pitches from holding companies. Source: Digiday, May 5, 2026

AI

OpenAI opens ChatGPT ads to all US advertisers and adds CPC bidding. On May 5, OpenAI rolled out a beta self-serve Ads Manager, dropped the original $50,000 minimum spend requirement, and added cost-per-click bidding alongside the existing $60 CPM model. The company also launched a Conversions API and pixel-based measurement, with starting bid recommendations between $3 and $5 per click for the new performance buyers entering the platform. Source: PPC Land, May 5, 2026

Measurement

Google previews Meridian Studio and GeoX two weeks before Marketing Live. On May 5, Google teed up its big Marketing Live agenda with three measurement updates: a Map View in Data Manager that visualizes how first-party data flows from sources like BigQuery, HubSpot, and Shopify into Google Ads; Meridian GeoX, an open-source geo-incrementality testing layer; and Meridian Studio, a Google Cloud-powered enterprise platform for high-volume MMM. The pitch is that measurement should be a real-time growth engine, not a backward-looking report card. Source: AdExchanger, May 5, 2026

Viant closes the TVision deal, putting attention data inside the buy. Viant announced on May 5 that it had completed its $40 million acquisition of TVision Insights, integrating second-by-second eyes-on-screen attention data with its Household ID and IRIS_ID signals inside the Viant DSP. CEO Tim Vanderhook framed it as a way to free advertisers from platform self-attribution by combining content, identity, and verified human attention in one buying intelligence layer. Source: Viant via Business Wire, May 5, 2026

Commerce & Retail Media

Walmart Connect launches an API for sharing first-party data with agencies and ad tech partners. On May 6, Walmart introduced the Scintilla Media Data Feed, a new API from Walmart Data Ventures that lets advertisers in Walmart Connect securely share a pre-curated set of operational and retail data with their agencies and tech partners through scalable access. Walmart’s framing is that it reduces the silos between advertisers, media teams, and tech providers as the retail media network expands beyond on-site placements. Source: Inside Radio, May 6, 2026

Miscellaneous

Spotify takes the top spot in Edison’s Q1 2026 podcast network rankings. Edison Research released its Q1 2026 Top Podcast Networks rankings on May 7, with Spotify moving into the number-one position by reach, SiriusXM Podcast Network at number two, and iHeartPodcasts at number three. Red Seat Ventures debuted at number four, the only new entrant on the list, replacing Disney at the bottom of the top 10. Source: Edison Research, May 7, 2026

Eyes on Disney as Goodell, Schroeder push the NFL’s broadcast story. Front Office Sports reported on May 9 that NFL EVP of media distribution Hans Schroeder met with the FCC to defend the league’s continued use of broadcast TV as it faces multiple Washington probes into its growing relationships with Netflix and YouTube. The story matters for ad sellers heading into upfronts because the league’s distribution mix shapes inventory pricing across every NFL rights holder, from CBS and Fox to Amazon, Disney, NBCU, Netflix, and YouTube. Source: Front Office Sports, May 9, 2026

Job Board

A snapshot of US-based openings across sales, business development, account management, marketing, and adjacent roles at media and ad tech companies. Links go to company career hubs, not individual postings, since role URLs expire fast.

Sales and Business Development

• The Trade Desk (Careers): Account managers, business development, and brand partnerships across NY, LA, Boulder, and Chicago

• Amazon Ads (Careers): Sales, account management, and AdTech roles in Seattle, NYC, LA, and Austin

• Magnite (Careers): CTV publisher development, agency sales, and SpringServe roles in NYC and LA

• PubMatic (Careers): Sales, partnerships, and AgenticOS-focused product roles in NYC, LA, and Redwood City

• Roku (Careers): Brand and agency sales, ad platform partnerships in NYC and LA

• Disney Advertising (Careers): Sales, client solutions, and Hulu/ESPN/Disney+ ad roles in NYC and LA

• NBCUniversal Advertising (Careers): Sales, partnerships, and Versant-aligned roles in NYC, Chicago, and LA

• Warner Bros. Discovery (Careers): Streaming and linear ad sales, agency development across NYC, Atlanta, and LA

• Paramount Skydance (Careers): Pluto, CBS, and streaming ad sales in NYC and LA

• Tubi (Fox) (Careers): Brand partnerships and AVOD sales in NYC and LA

• Netflix (Careers): Ads sales, partnerships, and measurement roles in NYC and LA

• Yahoo (Careers): DSP sales, agency and brand partnerships in NYC, Chicago, and LA

• Pinterest (Careers): Sales, partnerships, and tvScientific-aligned CTV roles in NYC, Chicago, and SF

Account Management and Client Solutions

• DoubleVerify (Careers): Customer success, client services, and CTV solution roles in NYC

• Integral Ad Science (Careers): Customer success, sales engineering, and brand safety roles in NYC and Chicago

• LiveRamp (Careers): Account directors, customer success, and CTV identity roles in NYC and SF

• Comscore (Careers): Client services and measurement roles in NYC, Reston, and Chicago

Marketing and Product Marketing

• Spotify (Careers): Ad product, partner marketing, and podcast monetization roles in NYC and Boston

• Reddit (Careers): Ad product marketing and sales operations roles in NYC and SF

• TikTok (Careers): Brand partnerships, account management, and marketing science in NYC and LA

• Snap (Careers): Sales, partner marketing, and ad product roles in NYC, LA, and SF

Programmatic and Operations

• FreeWheel (Comcast) (Careers): Ad ops, customer success, and CTV programmatic roles in NYC and Boston

• Cadent (Careers): TV planning, programmatic, and account roles in NYC

• Innovid / Mediaocean (Careers): Ad ops, CTV solutions, and product marketing in NYC

Retail Media

• Walmart Connect (Careers): Sales, partner solutions, and Scintilla data product roles in NYC, Bentonville, and SF

• Instacart Ads (Careers): Brand partnerships, sales, and product marketing in NYC and Chicago

• Kroger Precision Marketing (Careers): Sales, partnerships, and analytics in Cincinnati, NYC, and Chicago

CTV

Roku raises full-year outlook as ads jump 27% and DSP spend rockets 40%

Roku’s Q1 2026 results, posted April 30, broke out advertising as a separate segment for the first time, with ad revenue of $613 million up 27% year-over-year and gross margin north of 60%. Third-party programmatic DSP spend on the platform grew more than 40%, and non-media-and-entertainment brands hit nearly 30% of Roku Experience ad revenue (an all-time high) as the company raised full-year platform guidance to roughly $5 billion. Source: Variety, April 30, 2026

FreeWheel opens its streaming hub to outside developers via new Partner Portal

Comcast’s FreeWheel announced Partner Portal on April 28, a centralized environment where approved partners can build, test, and deploy CTV-specific applications on top of FreeWheel’s Streaming Hub, with launch partners including DanAds, Operative, Placements AI, Swivel, and Watching That. The pitch is that publishers get standardized API access for things like yield optimization, agentic copilots, and pacing, and FreeWheel teased an MCP server release that would let AI agents talk to its tools without bespoke integrations. Source: ExchangeWire, April 28, 2026

Pinterest activates tvScientific audiences across CTV inventory

Following the close of its acquisition in February, Pinterest used POSSIBLE week to launch the first commercial product of the deal, exposing its high-intent audience signals for buying across CTV inventory like Hulu and Peacock through tvScientific’s platform. Early test data Pinterest shared showed a 27% lift in outcomes per $100 in spend and 65% lift in purchases when tvScientific’s models were enriched with Pinterest signals, with LG cited as an early adopter that drove a 73% increase in unique households reached. Source: Digiday, April 28, 2026

Programmatic

The Trade Desk’s DSP becomes a buying option inside Pacvue and Skai

On April 28, The Trade Desk said mutual clients can now use the TTD DSP natively inside Pacvue and Skai, a quiet but consequential break from a decade of holding the open programmatic and walled-garden retail buying motions apart. The integration is designed to let advertisers attribute open-web video, audio, and CTV alongside retail-media campaigns under a single planning and measurement view, and is broadly read as TTD trying to pull retail dollars into its pipes before Amazon Ads tightens its grip. Source: AdExchanger, April 28, 2026

X rebuilds its entire ad platform from the ground up with xAI

X announced on April 30 a full rebuild of its advertising platform, described as the most ambitious overhaul in the company’s twenty-year history, with the new Ads Manager rolling out in phases starting in April. The new stack replaces legacy retrieval and ranking with xAI-built systems aimed at semantic and contextual targeting, and it ties directly into X Money and the broader Musk “everything app” push as the company tries to claw back advertiser confidence after years of revenue erosion. Source: TechCrunch, April 30, 2026

Data / Identity

OpenAI rewrites its US privacy policy to formalize advertiser data flows

OpenAI updated its US privacy policy on April 30 to explicitly state that it receives purchase information from advertisers, shares limited identifiers with third-party “marketing partners,” and uses personal data to promote its own products. The company also turned marketing cookies on by default for free and Go users, prompting WIRED and others to note that users have to dig into settings to opt out, a move that sets up potential CPRA enforcement risk in California ahead of the company’s targeted late-2026 IPO. Source: Adweek, May 1, 2026

Walmart Data Ventures opens up Scintilla’s omnichannel data via API

Walmart told Digiday on April 28 it’s rolling out the Scintilla Media Data Feed, a new API that gives advertisers and their agency and tech partners scalable, secure access to roughly 500 retail metrics drawn from both online and in-store activity, well beyond traditional ad-attributed reporting. Omnicom’s Flywheel is among the early users, and the offering is being positioned as a move toward true total-store measurement rather than just media attribution. Source: Digiday, April 28, 2026

AI

Meta opens its ad stack to ChatGPT, Claude, and other MCP-capable agents

On April 29 Meta launched Meta Ads AI Connectors in open beta, the first time it has allowed third-party AI assistants (including Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT) to connect securely to Meta ad accounts and create, edit, and optimize campaigns through natural language. Critically, unlike Google and Amazon’s earlier MCP server releases, Meta’s connectors support full write access from day one, which makes a pretty serious bet that agentic buying is now durable enough to expose live campaign controls to outside agents. Source: Digiday, April 29, 2026

Meta’s business AI hits 10 million conversations a week as gen-AI ad tools scale

On its April 30 earnings call, Meta said its business AI tools were running about 10 million weekly conversations as of late March, up from a million at the start of the year, and that 8 million advertisers had used at least one of its generative-AI ad creative tools in the quarter. CFO Susan Li also said advertisers using Meta’s video-generation feature saw conversion rates more than 3% higher in tests, and Zuckerberg flagged that Meta will eventually monetize the business AI assistant currently free for SMBs. Source: TechCrunch, April 30, 2026

Alphabet’s Q1 spotlights an unmistakable AI gravity shift away from the open web

Alphabet posted Q1 revenue of $109.9 billion (up 22%) on April 29, with Search up 19% to $60.4 billion as AI Overviews and AI Mode drove queries to all-time highs. The shadow line: Google Network, the segment that pays open-web publishers, fell 4% to $6.97 billion, an acceleration of a multi-quarter decline that maps neatly onto the rise of agentic and zero-click answers absorbing traffic that used to leave Google. Source: CNBC, April 29, 2026

Commerce & Retail Media

Amazon Ads clears $70B trailing run-rate as Creative Agent and Rufus expand

Amazon’s April 29 results showed Q1 advertising revenue of $17.24 billion, up 24% year-over-year and ahead of the 21% Wall Street consensus, lifting trailing-twelve-month ad revenue past $70 billion (larger than the entirety of AWS in 2018). CEO Andy Jassy attributed the strength to Amazon’s full-funnel offering, the international expansion of Creative Agent (the agentic creative tool) into Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Spain, and the UK, and the rollout of Sponsored Product and Brand prompts inside the Rufus shopping assistant. Source: Variety, April 30, 2026

Brand Safety / Legal

Five more states join lawsuit to unwind the Nexstar-Tegna merger

A bipartisan coalition of thirteen state attorneys general (newly joined by Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Vermont) filed an amended complaint on April 30 to permanently unwind Nexstar’s $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna, which would otherwise reach roughly 80% of US TV households. A federal judge had already paused operational integration on April 17, and Nexstar’s appeal brief is due to the Ninth Circuit on May 20. Separately, Ohio AG Dave Yost cut a side deal preserving newsroom independence at Tegna’s Columbus and Cleveland stations rather than joining the suit. Source: Deadline, May 1, 2026

Corporate Strategy / M&A & Earnings

Meta posts 33% revenue growth, lifts capex outlook to $145B

Meta reported Q1 revenue of $56.31 billion (up 33% YoY) on April 29, the company’s fastest top-line quarter since 2021, with ad impressions across the family of apps up 19% and average price per ad up 12%. The company simultaneously raised its 2026 capex ceiling to $145 billion, citing AI infrastructure costs, while a one-time $8 billion tax benefit tied to the Trump administration’s tax bill flattered the bottom line. Source: CNBC, April 29, 2026

Reddit’s ad business grows 74% as the platform rides the AI traffic wave

Reddit posted Q1 revenue of $663 million (up 69% YoY) on April 30, with ad revenue alone up 74% to $625 million, the seventh consecutive quarter of north-of-60% growth, driven by gains in both impressions and pricing. Adjusted EBITDA margin came in at 40%, the company announced a Shopify integration designed to streamline advertiser onboarding, and shares spiked roughly 9% in extended trading. Source: CNBC, April 30, 2026

Spotify’s ad business slips 5% as the new ad stack works through transition

Spotify reported Q1 revenue of €4.53 billion on April 28, up 8% on a reported basis but with ad-supported revenue down 5% to €385 million (or up 3% in constant currency) as the company digests the rebuild of its ad stack. Co-CEO Alex Norström told analysts the stack rebuild is now complete and that automated sales channels were the largest contributor to ad growth in the quarter, with new formats including Sponsored Playlists and Carousel Ads aimed at fan-community advertisers. Source: Variety, April 28, 2026

WPP says its Elevate28 turnaround is on track even as Q1 declines 6.7%

WPP posted a 6.7% like-for-like decline in revenue less pass-through costs to £2.26 billion on April 28, with WPP Media down 8.5% on prior-year account losses, but the holding company said it’s still tracking to its February guidance of mid-to-high single-digit declines in the first half and a recovery in H2. CFO Joanne Wilson took the call in place of new CEO Cindy Rose, citing JP Morgan data showing WPP led the holdcos on net new business in Q1 with $0.8 billion in wins, ahead of Publicis and well ahead of Omnicom’s negative number. Source: MediaPost, April 28, 2026

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Job Board

Sales / Business Development

• The Trade Desk: multiple Sales and Business Development roles, US offices: Careers

• Roku: Account Executive and Sales roles, US: Careers

• Netflix: Ad Sales and Brand Partnerships, US: Careers

• Pinterest: Sales and Account Manager roles, US: Careers

• Reddit: Sales and Client Partner roles, US: Careers

• Spotify: Ad Sales and Account Director, US: Careers

• Disney Advertising: Sales and Account Executive roles, US: Careers

• NBCUniversal: Sales and Account Manager, US: Careers

• Paramount: Ad Sales and Account Executive, US: Careers

• Amazon Ads: Sales and Account Manager, US: Careers

Marketing

• Meta: Marketing Manager and Product Marketing roles, US: Careers

• Google / YouTube: Product Marketing and Ads Marketing, US: Careers

• TikTok: Marketing roles, US: Careers

• Magnite: Marketing roles, US: Careers

• PubMatic: Marketing Manager, US: Careers

Account Management / Customer Success

• IAS: Account Manager and CS roles, US: Careers

• DoubleVerify: Customer Success and Account Manager, US: Careers

• Kargo: Account Management and Sales, US: Careers

• LiveRamp: Customer Success roles, US: Careers

• Comscore: Account roles, US: Careers

Business Development / Strategy

• Stagwell: BD and Strategy roles across agency network, US: Careers

• Horizon Media: Strategy and BD roles, US: Careers

• Publicis Groupe: multiple BD and account roles, US: Careers

• WPP: BD and account roles, US: Careers

• MNTN: Sales and Business Development, US: Careers

• Vibe: Sales and BD roles, US: Careers

This weekend I decided I needed new clothes for spring. I started bouncing between sites, comparing, second-guessing - the usual. Then I caught myself.

That pause is the whole game. Most people reserve AI for “real” work and muscle through everyday decisions the old way. The mindset shift isn’t learning to use AI - it’s noticing the moments you’re not.

So I stopped and prompted Claude with my parameters: budget, what I needed, preferred fabrics, stores I shop at, and the use cases (client presentations, work, casual). Out came a wardrobe in seconds.

That’s level one: when you’re stuck, ask how AI can help you decide faster and better.

Level two is where the leverage compounds: productize it. I asked Claude to turn the prompt into an artifact - a mini app anyone can use. Five minutes later, my one-off prompt was a tool. Click the graphic below to try it.

Is it perfect? No. Bugs? Probably. It’s an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and it works.

If you’re building prompts or workflows inside any LLM, don’t keep them to yourself. Productize them. Share them. Become the AI go-to for your team - it pays dividends.

Reminder: I don’t code. No code was written here. I just prompted. You can too.

Got something repetitive you do every week? That’s the thing to build. Hit reply.

—Steven

Programmatic

The Trade Desk goes agentic with Koa Agents; Stagwell is first to plug in: The Trade Desk announced Koa Agents in alpha - its in-platform AI agents for media planning, buying, optimization, and measurement - with Stagwell as the first marketing network to adopt them via the new Open Agentic Kit integration framework. The launch lands while The Trade Desk is fending off audits from Publicis and Omnicom, so Stagwell’s vote of confidence matters strategically. Buyers describe campaign goals in natural language and the agents handle audience build, activation, and in-flight optimization. Source: AdExchanger, April 22, 2026

IAB Tech Lab forms Programmatic Governance Council to wrangle the $200B chaos The IAB Tech Lab announced a new Programmatic Governance Council co-chaired by OMD’s Ben Hovaness on the buy side and three sell-side execs split across web, in-app, and CTV. Founding members include Omnicom, WPP, Dentsu, Disney, Amazon Ads, The Trade Desk, Magnite, PubMatic, Hearst, News Corp, Yahoo, Raptive, and Mediavine. The mandate: shared ground rules for transparency in a market where, as AdExchanger put it, “everyone agrees it matters” but nobody agrees on the details. Source: AdExchanger, April 21, 2026

Microsoft pitches “agentic web” ad stack: AI Max for Search, Offer Highlights, Universal Commerce Protocol Microsoft rolled out a major refresh of its ad ecosystem aimed at a world where AI agents - not humans - drive discovery. AI Max for Search expands query matching and personalization across Copilot and Bing; Offer Highlights surfaces selling points inside AI conversations; new tools enable structured commerce and in-chat purchases. Microsoft also pushed Universal Commerce Protocol feeds into the Microsoft Merchant Center for general availability in the U.S., and added “term exclusions” and “messaging constraints” so brands can govern how AI describes their products. Source: MediaPost, April 22, 2026

AI

ChatGPT ads quietly start appearing for logged-out users After months of advertiser complaints that they couldn’t spend their budgets, OpenAI began showing ads to ChatGPT users who aren’t logged in - without a formal announcement, and contradicting its own help docs. AdExchanger sources confirmed seeing the ads, while OpenAI declined to comment. The expansion meaningfully grows inventory just as OpenAI cuts the spend minimum from $200K to $50K and shifts its model from CPM to a $3-$5 CPC. Source: AdExchanger, April 23, 2026

Partnerize launches industry standard to compensate publishers for AI-search influence Partnerize introduced the Influence Compensation Lighthouse Program - an invite-only coalition with Adobe, HubSpot, Profound, Away Travel, and Vox Media as charter participants. The program operationalizes the VantagePoint Fractional Compensation Standard (certified by the Alliance for Audited Media) to detect zero-click, AI-driven influence and route real payments to publishers whose content surfaced in LLM answers. Partnerize is temporarily underwriting commissions to remove the adoption barrier; brands take over funding after pilot. Source: AdExchanger, April 21, 2026

Trusted Media Brands leans on AI to stitch together a fragmented audience pitch TMB - parent of Reader’s Digest, Taste of Home, FailArmy, and The Pet Collective - is using AI to assemble cross-platform audiences for buyers across print, web, social, streaming, and newsletters. The story is a representative one: publishers with portfolios spanning legacy and emerging surfaces are increasingly pitching AI-organized first-party data segments instead of selling each property individually. Source: AdExchanger, April 22, 2026

CTV

Variety: Streaming upfront commitments rose 17.9% as broadcast and cable kept slipping A pre-upfront state-of-the-market piece pegged 2025 streaming commitments at $13.2 billion, up from $11.2 billion the year prior, while broadcast primetime fell 2.5% to roughly $9.1 billion and cable dropped 4.3% to about $8.68 billion. The article frames TV’s annual marketplace as no longer really being about TV - with Amazon, Roku, Tubi, and Netflix presenting alongside the legacy networks, and programmatic, retail media, and AI exchanges all elbowing for share of the same dollars. MoffettNathanson’s quote that Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft now capture 65% of all U.S. ad spend captures the gravity. Source: Variety, April 24, 2026

Audiences are channel-flipping more often - and brands aren’t keeping up Kantar’s global media director argued in The Drum that winning in CTV now means ditching repurposed linear ads and rethinking each screen’s role. The piece highlighted Domino’s gamified CTV ad that prompted trivia questions answered with the TV remote, and noted that more than half of marketers globally expect to grow online video and TV streaming spend this year. The takeaway for sellers: the format-as-extension-of-linear pitch is wearing thin. Source: The Drum, April 22, 2026 🔍

MediaPost takes coverage of Viant–TVision into the new week MediaPost’s writeup of the Viant Technology acquisition of TVision Insights for $40 million continued to circulate among industry buyers this week. The deal - $22.5M cash and $17.5M in stock - folds TVision’s eyes-on-screen attention measurement into Viant’s DSP, with Viant promising a first-of-its-kind “attention-adjusted CPM.” TVision’s data already reveals quirks like HBO Max delivering more attentive views than YouTube despite a higher CPM. Source: MediaPost / republished commentary week of April 21, 2026 🔍

Corporate Strategy / M&A

WBD shareholders bless the $111B Paramount Skydance deal - but reject Zaslav’s exit pay 🔍 Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders voted “overwhelmingly” to approve Paramount Skydance’s acquisition at $31 a share in cash, with roughly 1.74 billion shares for and only 16.3 million against. In the same meeting, however, investors voted down the executive compensation package tied to the deal - a non-binding “say on pay” rebuke of David Zaslav and other execs, who can still receive the payments at closing. With shareholder approval secured, the deal now needs European regulatory clearance to close. Source: Variety, April 23, 2026 🔍

Comcast Q1: Peacock crosses 46M subs and $2B in revenue, but losses widen on NBA costs Comcast reported overall Q1 revenue of $31.5 billion (up 5.3%), powered by what management called “Legendary February” - the Milan-Cortina Olympics and Super Bowl LX driving record advertising sales of about $2 billion. Peacock added 5 million paid subs year-over-year to reach 46 million and grew revenue 71% to $2.1 billion. Adjusted EBITDA losses for the streamer widened to $432 million, mostly from peak NBA rights amortization. CFO Jason Armstrong told analysts Peacock should approach profitability in Q2. Source: The Hollywood Reporter, April 23, 2026

SiriusXM lands exclusive U.S. ad rep deal for YouTube audio inventory 🔍 SiriusXM Media will be the exclusive U.S. ad sales partner for YouTube’s “audio-first” inventory - podcasts, music streams, and talk-format content where users are listening rather than watching. The deal kicks in this fall and gives advertisers guaranteed audio impressions across what Edison Research and SiriusXM peg at 212 million monthly U.S. audio listeners on YouTube. SiriusXM stock jumped roughly 16% on the news. The competitive framing: Spotify is doubling down on a walled garden of inventory, ad tech, and measurement; YouTube is opting to open the pipes through a third-party rep. Source: Variety, April 22, 2026

Commerce & Retail Media

Amazon ad boycott reframes the seller-economics question for ecommerce brands AdExchanger’s commerce roundup unpacked last week’s Amazon advertising boycott - first reported by CNBC - and argued the protest wasn’t really about Amazon’s ad platform but about evolving seller economics. The piece raises the existential question for ecommerce marketers: can you still build a brand on Amazon when fees, ad costs, and platform changes keep eating into margins? It’s the first major holdco-scale boycott of a walled garden since the 2020 Facebook campaign. Source: AdExchanger, April 23, 2026

Microsoft expands Copilot Checkout to 500K+ merchants and the mobile app 🔍 Microsoft pushed its agentic shopping experience further, rolling Copilot Checkout out to more than 500,000 merchants and dropping the full experience into the Copilot mobile app for U.S. users. Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, and Etsy sellers are live; PayPal, Shopify, and Stripe handle the payments behind the scenes. The expansion is one more datapoint in the growing consolidation of “discovery → decision → purchase” inside AI assistants - and a direct shot at how retail media networks intercept brand budgets. Source: The AI Marketers via Microsoft news, April 25, 2026

Measurement

California Delete Act: data brokers face $200/request/day fines starting Aug 1 🔍Davis+Gilbert’s Gary Kibel walked through what the Aug 1, 2026 enforcement deadline really means for ad tech. Once the DROP (Delete Request and Opt-out Platform) goes live, registered data brokers must pull deletion requests every 45 days; failure carries $200-per-request-per-day penalties, which Kibel notes could theoretically reach hundreds of millions for a single broker against a million Californian requests. The piece warns many ad tech companies don’t realize they meet the law’s broad “data broker” definition - pixel providers, lead generators, and audience curators included. Source: AdExchanger, April 22, 2026

PayPal jumps into the TV measurement fray AdExchanger’s Thursday news roundup flagged PayPal as a new entrant in TV measurement, joining the increasingly crowded field competing for Nielsen’s territory. Details are limited so far, but the move underscores how transaction data is being repositioned as outcome currency for TV advertising - and how non-traditional players keep finding ways into the measurement business. Source: AdExchanger, April 23, 2026

Miscellaneous

Digiday Future of Marketing: in the age of AI, “taste is the new competitive advantage” Digiday’s Future of Marketing briefing argued that as AI tools commoditize execution and outputs become indistinguishable, the differentiator that compounds is taste - judgment about what’s worth making in the first place. The piece pairs with a separate Digiday article on how marketing strategists are running into AI’s “predictability ceiling”: the very models that promise creative scale tend to converge on the same answers. Worth reading alongside the agentic ad announcements above as a counterweight. Source: Digiday, April 22, 2026

Job Board

Sales, Marketing, BD, and Account Management roles in the U.S. across ad tech, media, and CTV. Links go to careers pages because individual job URLs expire too fast.

Sales / Sales Leadership

• The Trade Desk — Careers — Account Director, Sales Lead, Trader roles across NYC, LA, Chicago

• Disney Advertising — Careers — Account Executive, Sales Strategy, NY/Chicago/LA

• NBCUniversal — Careers — Multiple ad sales roles in NYC + regional offices

• Paramount — Careers — Ad Sales, Streaming Sales (NYC, LA)

• Roku — Careers — Sales, Account Management, multiple US locations

• Comcast Advertising / FreeWheel / Effectv — Careers — Sales Director, Account Manager roles nationwide

• Netflix Ads — Careers — Brand Partnerships, Account Management (NYC, LA)

• Amazon Ads — Careers — Account Executive, AdTech Sales (NYC, Seattle)

• PubMatic — Careers — Sales Director, Account Manager

• Magnite — Careers — Sales, AM, BD across NYC + LA

Marketing / Marketing Leadership

• Disney Advertising — see above — Marketing Manager, Brand Marketing (NYC)

• NBCUniversal — see above — Brand Marketing, Audience Marketing (NYC)

• The Trade Desk — see above — Product Marketing, Field Marketing (NYC)

• Roku — see above — Brand Marketing, Product Marketing (San Jose, NYC)

• Netflix Ads — see above — Marketing roles (LA, NYC)

• Amazon Ads — see above — Senior Marketing Manager roles (Seattle, NYC)

• Paramount — see above — Marketing roles, multiple

Business Development / Strategic Partnerships

• Roku — see above — BD, Partnerships across CTV ecosystem

• The Trade Desk — see above — Partnership Manager, Strategic BD

• Amazon Ads — see above — Strategic Partnerships (Seattle, NYC)

• PubMatic — see above — BD lead roles

• NBCUniversal — see above — Strategic Partnerships (NYC)

• Comcast Advertising — see above — BD roles

• Netflix Ads — see above — BD / Strategic Partner roles

• Disney Advertising — see above — Strategic Partnerships (NYC, LA)

Account Management / Client Services

• The Trade Desk — see above — Account Manager, Client Services

• Disney Advertising — see above — Account Management (NYC)

• NBCUniversal — see above — Account Management (NYC, Chicago)

• PubMatic — see above — Customer Success / Account Management

• Magnite — see above — Account Management

• Paramount — see above — Account Manager roles

• Comcast Advertising — see above — Account Manager roles

• Roku — see above — Account Management, Customer Success

Rembrand - Rembrand has built an AI platform that inserts branded signage and products directly into existing video — streaming, social, and more — without reshoots, clunky overlays, or anything that makes viewers want to tune out. The brand simply appears naturally, in context. I highlighted this in my AI workshop a few weeks ago.

The engine behind it is called VISTA, and the AI Studio is where brands can actually build and place the units. The pitch is simple: high-attention impressions that do not get skipped because they are not interruptive — they are part of the content. In many ways, it is product placement at scale, automated by AI. I saw a demo last week, and it was very impressive.

To learn more, reach out to Karen Magnani directly at karen@rembrand.com.

Full disclosure: this is not a paid post. Karen was my first manager at my first job, J. Walter Thompson, in 1996. I have always been grateful for her guidance and friendship over the years, and I am happy to give her a shout-out.

Have something you want to share with our readers - email me.

CTV

Paramount Unifies Its Streaming Ad Tech Under One Roof Paramount is merging the ad tech stacks behind Paramount+, Pluto TV, and BET+ onto a single unified technology platform, with completion expected by mid-2026. The company also announced a new performance advertising product, expanded advertiser controls over ad placements, and dynamic ad insertion for live sports. CRO Jay Askinasi emphasized that the overhaul is designed to help advertisers plan and measure holistically across a deduplicated audience of more than 200 million viewers. The announcement was timed to Paramount’s upfront pitch. Source: AdExchanger, April 16, 2026 🔍

TelevisaUnivision Opens Streaming Inventory to Self-Serve Buyers TelevisaUnivision partnered with fullthrottle.ai to make its premium CTV and digital inventory — spanning Univision, TUDN, and ViX — available via a self-serve platform. The integration uses first-party data clean room matching and household-level targeting at the ZIP code level, with fullthrottle claiming a 90% match rate. The move reflects a broader CTV trend of publishers offering self-serve access to attract mid-market and SMB advertisers who demand performance accountability. Source: AdExchanger, April 15, 2026 🔍

StackAdapt Launches Dedicated Live Sports Workflow for CTV StackAdapt made generally available its new Live Events campaign workflow, purpose-built for programmatic buying during live sports. The tool was beta-tested during NBCU’s coverage of the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina and features event-based pacing controls, frequency management, and a centralized planning hub. With the FIFA World Cup approaching in June, the DSP is positioning the product to attract first-time live sports buyers — particularly mid-market brands — by removing rigid spend minimums and simplifying activation. Source: AdExchanger, April 14, 2026 🔍

Netflix Reports Q1 Earnings, Ad Revenue On Track to Hit $3B Netflix posted Q1 2026 revenue of $12.25 billion, up 16% year-over-year, and confirmed its ad business remains on pace to reach approximately $3 billion in annual revenue — doubling from 2025. The streamer now works with over 4,000 advertisers (up 70% YoY), and programmatic buying is approaching 50% of non-live ad inventory. Co-CEO Greg Peters signaled that scaling programmatic and broadening the advertiser base remain top priorities. Source: Variety / CNBC, April 16, 2026 🔍

Programmatic

Viant Acquires TVision for $40M to Add Attention Data to Its DSP Viant announced a definitive agreement to acquire attention measurement firm TVision Insights for $40 million ($22.5M cash, $17.5M in stock). The deal brings TVision’s second-by-second attention, co-viewership, and in-room presence data into Viant’s AI-powered programmatic buying platform. CEO Tim Vanderhook framed the acquisition as providing advertisers an independent, market-wide view of TV performance free from platform self-attribution bias. The transaction is expected to close in Q2 2026. Source: TV Tech / BusinessWire, April 15, 2026 🔍

Hearst Launches Unified Programmatic Marketplace Across Its News Properties Hearst debuted “Hearst News,” a proprietary programmatic marketplace that consolidates inventory from its 30 daily and 50 weekly newspapers and 35 television digital sites into a single buying point. The unified marketplace is designed to simplify omnichannel buying for advertisers seeking local and national news environments, while shoring up Hearst’s digital ad business amid broader market shifts away from fragmented publisher-by-publisher buying. Source: AdExchanger / Editor & Publisher, April 13, 2026 🔍

Data / Identity

Meta Simplifies CAPI With One-Click Setup and AI-Powered Pixel Enrichment Meta rolled out two measurement infrastructure updates: a one-click Conversions API setup that eliminates the technical complexity of server-side tracking, and an AI-powered Pixel enrichment feature that automatically pulls product and page data from advertisers’ websites. The company said advertisers who adopted CAPI for web events saw an average 17.8% lower cost per result. The timing parallels Google’s own enhanced conversions unification announcement from the same week. Source: AdExchanger, April 15, 2026 🔍

Freecash App Pulled From App Store Over Data Broker Allegations Rewards app Freecash, which rocketed to No. 2 in the App Store via viral TikTok marketing, was removed by Apple after cybersecurity firm Malwarebytes alleged it was extracting sensitive consumer data — including health status, sexual orientation, race, and religion — essentially functioning as a data broker connecting advertisers to high-intent mobile gamers. Freecash denied the allegations, claiming compliance with App Store policies and blaming third-party affiliates for problematic ads. Source: AdExchanger, April 16, 2026 🔍

Measurement

IPA Bellwether: UK Marketing Budgets Hit Strongest Growth in Two Years The Q1 2026 IPA Bellwether Report showed UK marketing budgets revised upward by a net balance of +7.3%, the strongest increase in nearly two years and a sharp rebound from Q4 2025’s flatline. Main media advertising budgets also returned to growth (+4.5%) for the first time in four quarters. Full-year UK ad spend is now forecast to grow 2.5%, up from an earlier 1.5% forecast, despite ongoing geopolitical uncertainty around the Iran stalemate. Source: IPA / ExchangeWire, April 16, 2026 🔍

Commerce & Retail Media

IAB Connected Commerce Summit Signals Retail Media’s “Awkward Adolescence” At its 2026 Connected Commerce Summit in New York (April 14), the IAB released a new industry guide — Building a Competitive Commerce Media Ecosystem — and warned that the sector’s breakout growth phase is giving way to harder questions about standards, incrementality, and differentiation. IAB VP Collin Colburn compared the moment to “day two of potty training” — past the breakthrough, into the uncomfortable phase where discipline and transparency matter more than momentum. The event drew speakers from Best Buy, Instacart, Moloco, 7-Eleven, and more. Source: AdExchanger / IAB, April 16, 2026 🔍

AI

OpenAI’s Self-Serve Ads Manager Surfaces — And Has a Long Way to Go Digiday reported that OpenAI has built a self-serve ads manager for its ChatGPT advertising pilot, an unusual move for a company that hasn’t yet fully launched its ad business. The dashboard resembles Google’s ad tools and was shared with pilot advertisers last week. However, critical capabilities — user profile building, conversion tracking, and advanced reporting — are still missing. OpenAI also lowered the barrier to join the ChatGPT ads test. Projected 2026 ad revenue: $2.5 billion. Source: Digiday, April 15, 2026 🔍

Apple Launches “Apple Business” Platform and Prepares Maps Ads Apple launched Apple Business on April 14, consolidating its device management, employee productivity, and advertising tools into a single platform available in 200+ countries. Most significantly, Apple confirmed that local search ads are coming to Apple Maps this summer in the U.S. and Canada. The ads will appear next to relevant search results with clear labeling. Apple’s ad business — already estimated at $8.5 billion — is positioning for SMB growth beyond the App Store. Source: AdExchanger / TechCrunch, April 16, 2026 🔍

Corporate Strategy / M&A

The Trade Desk Loses Three More Senior Executives Amid Ongoing Turbulence Three senior Trade Desk executives departed in early April: CMO Ian Colley, SVP of Consumer Products Matthew Henick (who led Ventura, the company’s CTV operating system), and VP of Communications Melinda Zurich. TTD characterized the moves as a “changing of the guard,” naming interim replacements. The exits come after audits by Publicis and Omnicom, TTD’s CFO dismissal in January, and multiple board departures — all against a backdrop of a 71% stock decline over five years. Source: Adweek / Digiday, April 7-14, 2026 🔍

MiQ Acquires Rocket Lab, Its Second Deal in Weeks UK-founded programmatic media company MiQ announced its acquisition of Rocket Lab, an AI-powered app growth platform, just weeks after buying AdsMovil’s Latin America business. The deals — MiQ’s fourth and fifth since its 2022 private equity takeover by Bridgepoint — are aimed at deepening in-app capabilities and expanding Latin American reach. Financial terms were not disclosed. Source: Digiday, April 14, 2026 🔍

Brand Safety / Legal

Law Firm Launches Mass Arbitration Against Google for Advertiser Overcharges Chicago law firm Keller Postman is leading mass arbitration suits against Google on behalf of advertisers, seeking damages for alleged monopoly-driven overpricing in Google’s ad exchange. The firm is leveraging the April 2025 federal court ruling that found Google illegally monopolized the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets. The total available damages pool is estimated at a quarter-trillion dollars. The approach exploits mandatory arbitration clauses in Google’s advertiser contracts. Source: AdExchanger, April 15, 2026 🔍

Miscellaneous

Publicis CEO Rules Out Building a Rival Ad Tech Stack In remarks covered by Digiday (April 14), Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun made clear the holding company won’t build a proprietary ad tech platform to compete with the likes of Google or The Trade Desk. Sadoun said that path would pull Publicis too far from its current strategic roadmap, which centers on AI-driven services and data infrastructure rather than media trading technology. Source: Digiday, April 14, 2026 🔍

World Cup Ad Inventory Premiums Loom as June Approaches Digiday reported that forecasts suggest late-stage bids for 2026 FIFA World Cup ad inventory could force marketers to pay steep premiums. With the tournament co-hosted by the U.S., Canada, and Mexico this June, demand for premium live sports placements across CTV and linear is expected to intensify — particularly for brands that haven’t yet locked in upfront commitments. Source: Digiday, April 13, 2026 🔍

PubMatic & Amnet Launch First Agentic Advertising Campaign Using Claude LLM ExchangeWire reported that PubMatic and Amnet (Dentsu) launched what they’re calling the first agentic advertising campaign in France powered by Anthropic’s Claude large language model. The campaign represents an early real-world test of AI agents autonomously executing elements of the media buying workflow on behalf of advertisers — a concept the industry has been building toward but few have deployed live. Source: ExchangeWire, April 15, 2026 🔍

JOB BOARD

Sales & Business Development

• The Trade Desk — Multiple US roles across sales and partnerships → Careers

• PubMatic — Account Executive, DSP Partnerships; Account Executive, Advertiser Solutions → Careers

• Magnite — Sales roles across CTV and programmatic → Careers

• Viant — Sales and partnership roles post-TVision acquisition → Careers

• StackAdapt — Multiple sales and partnerships roles (US, remote) → Careers

• LiveRamp — Sales, business development, and partnerships → Careers

Account Management & Customer Success

• PubMatic — Senior Customer Success Manager, CTV & Video → Careers

• DoubleVerify — Customer Success and Account Management roles → Careers

• Innovid — Account Management and client services → Careers

Marketing & Product Marketing

• PubMatic — Senior Manager, Product Marketing; VP, Product Marketing → Careers

• OpenAI — Ads Integrity Software Engineers ($230K–$385K + equity) → Careers

• Netflix — Ad product and marketing roles → Careers

Product & Engineering

• PubMatic — VP, Product Management, CTV; Director, Product Management → Careers

• Amazon Ads — Product and engineering roles across DSP and streaming → Careers

• Disney Advertising — Ad tech engineering and product roles → Careers

• Roku — Ad product and platform engineering → Careers

Data, Analytics & Ad Operations

• Criteo — Data, analytics, and commerce media roles → Careers

• IAS (Integral Ad Science) — Ad ops and analytics roles → Careers

• Moloco — Commerce media and data roles → Careers

• Pixalate — Customer Success and ad fraud analytics → Careers

A quick note: I’ll be in the Europe and The UK from June 10–19 for client meetings and training sessions. If any of our readers in Europe and The UK would like to meet for a coffee, a tea, or a training session, please reach out — I’d love to connect in person. Just reply to this email.

-Steven

📺 CTV

Disney and Mediaocean Team Up to Streamline Direct Ad Buying

Disney and Mediaocean unveiled Prisma Direct, a new workflow layer within Mediaocean’s Prisma system designed to automate direct transactions across Disney’s CTV and streaming inventory. Built on the same technology behind Disney Campaign Manager, the integration collapses manual steps across planning, trafficking, and financial reconciliation into a single interface. The product is scheduled for a Q3 rollout and signals what some see as the beginning of the end for the traditional insertion order. Source: Digiday, April 7, 2026 🔍

Upfront Season Looms With Measurement and Performance Dominating the Agenda

With upfront presentations approaching, measurement and performance are expected to overshadow the typical parade of new streaming titles and live sports rights. Nielsen’s ongoing Gauge controversy — including delayed reports and postponed DASH data integration — has injected fresh uncertainty into how buyers and sellers will negotiate this cycle. Combined with the lack of measurement standardization, buyers are putting proof of performance at the top of their wish lists. Source: AdExchanger, April 10, 2026 🔍

Hulu, Amazon, and Peacock Lead Streaming Ad Spend Rankings

EMARKETER released its latest streaming ad spend projections, with Hulu, Amazon, and Peacock topping the rankings among ad-supported platforms. Ad revenue has become table stakes for every premium streamer, and the report underscores how the competitive landscape is shifting as platforms fight for share of the growing streaming ad market. The data reinforces that scale, measurement capabilities, and programmatic access are the key differentiators for advertisers choosing where to allocate CTV budgets. Source: AdTechRadar, April 7, 2026 🔍

YouTube, CBS Sports, and Disney Win Digiday Video and TV Awards

YouTube was named Best Digital Video Platform, CBS Sports HQ won Best FAST Channel, and Disney’s ESPN took Best Streaming Service at the 2026 Digiday Video and TV Awards. The awards highlighted how brands are reshaping video and TV through creator partnerships, emotional storytelling, and advances in ad tech integration. Other winners included LTK for Best Shoppable Content Strategy and Alison.ai for Best Use of AI in video advertising. Source: Digiday, April 8, 2026 🔍

📊 Programmatic

Kargo Launches Project KERA, an Agentic AI Media Buying Platform

Kargo unveiled the closed beta of Project KERA, a chat-based agentic media buying engine that turns a campaign brief into a fully executed media plan across CTV, social, mobile, and open web. Early partners testing the system include The Hershey Company, travel media network Navigator, and independent agency Wpromote. Buyers log into the chatbot interface, describe campaign goals, upload assets, and the platform generates recommended creative formats and channel allocations. Wpromote is piloting KERA alongside other agentic tools from PubMatic and its own internal AI tool, Polaris IQ. Source: AdExchanger, April 7, 2026 🔍

Epic Games Weighs Ad Revenue as Fortnite Engagement Declines

Epic Games, which laid off over 1,000 employees two weeks ago citing lower Fortnite engagement, is facing growing questions about whether it should finally embrace advertising within its flagship property. Unlike competitor Roblox, which actively pursues in-game ads and sponsorships, Epic has resisted bringing ads to Fortnite. A federal court setback in its Apple App Store fees battle adds further financial pressure. Industry observers say the broader AAA games market is struggling as console publishers continue to play “will they, won’t they” with in-game advertising. Source: AdExchanger, April 8, 2026 🔍

Agentic Marketplace Takes Shape as Swivel and Olyzon Partner

Swivel and Olyzon announced a partnership that brings buy-side and sell-side AI agents together in one of the earliest examples of an agentic marketplace for programmatic advertising. The integration positions autonomous AI agents to negotiate and transact media on behalf of advertisers and publishers, representing a step toward the agent-to-agent trading models that major holding companies have started to explore for possible implementation in 2027. Source: AdExchanger, April 10, 2026 🔍

🧩 Data / Identity

Ozone Launches AI Simulation Platform to Help Publishers Navigate AI Answer Engines

Publisher alliance Ozone launched Ozone Labs, an R&D initiative including a simulation platform that lets publishers model how their content would surface in AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity. The platform shows how content is structured, retrieved, and cited in AI-generated summaries, giving publishers data to optimize for AI visibility. Two unnamed publishing executives told Digiday that click-through rates from AI search tools hover around 0.3%, making it hard to justify heavy investment. Ozone members include CNN, the Wall Street Journal, BBC, and the New York Post. Source: Digiday, April 7, 2026 🔍

NIQ and Adsquare Partner to Bring Purchase-Based Targeting to Programmatic

NIQ, the consumer intelligence company, expanded its purchase data targeting capabilities through a new collaboration with location and data platform Adsquare. The partnership brings NIQ’s GeoPurchase segments — built on real-world shopping behavior — into programmatic buying environments, allowing advertisers to target audiences based on what they actually buy and where they buy it. The integration is designed to close the gap between offline purchase signals and digital ad targeting at a time when first-party data and purchase-based audiences are becoming critical currency in post-cookie planning. Source: AdTechRadar, April 8, 2026 🔍

📏 Measurement

Northbeam Launches Automated Incrementality Testing to Complete Its “Measurement Trifecta”

Attribution company Northbeam released a fully automated incrementality testing product, completing what it calls the “trifecta of digital attribution” alongside multi-touch attribution and media mix modeling. The system automates end-to-end test design, execution, and validation, monitoring experiments in real-time and self-correcting for spend anomalies. Initial coverage includes Meta channel-level testing with Google and additional platforms planned. AdExchanger profiled personal care brand Carpe and beverage brand Liquid Death as early users of the system. Source: AdExchanger, April 8, 2026 🔍

🛒 Commerce & Retail Media

Instagram Adds Product Tagging to Reels, Meta Declares “The Era of Link in Bio Is Over”

Meta is bringing product tagging to Instagram Reels, allowing eligible creators to link up to 30 products from business catalogs or affiliate links directly within their videos. The feature is being tested in five markets and rolling out this spring. Creators can also earn commissions from affiliate partnerships with Amazon, eBay, and Temu in the U.S. For publishers that relied on “link in bio” as a traffic driver, the shift represents another step toward keeping commerce entirely within the platform. Source: Retail Dive, April 7, 2026 🔍

CPG Brands Face the Ad Spend-Price Squeeze as Pepsi Cuts Back

Major CPG brands are navigating a painful tradeoff between advertising budgets and product pricing. During Pepsi’s recent earnings call, analysts flagged an estimated $500 million decrease in ad spend in 2025 as the company prioritized price hikes over marketing investment. Now, with consumer pushback mounting and market share eroding, Pepsi and peers are being forced to reverse course — cutting prices and ramping ad spending simultaneously. The dynamic underscores the tension between short-term margin protection and long-term brand investment. Source: AdExchanger, April 9, 2026 🔍

Mondelez Overhauls Its $3.5 Billion Digital Commerce Strategy for an AI-First Future

When Mondelez learned its retail partners were expecting 30% of site traffic to come from AI agents by 2028, the CPG giant overhauled its entire digital presence. The company unblocked bot crawlers, restructured brand.com experiences for machine readability, and is building an agentic commerce strategy with AI search at the foundation. For specific cookie-based queries, Oreo now surfaces in AI answers roughly 70% of the time; for broader snacking topics, that figure is closer to 30%. Mondelez’s VP of digital commerce told Digiday the company expects 20–30% of product purchases to happen via AI agents within the next year. Source: Digiday, April 7, 2026 🔍

🤖 AI

OpenAI Rolls Out Ads Manager Dashboard, Explores Conversion-Based Ad Formats

OpenAI has launched an ads manager dashboard with a small group of pilot advertisers, giving them real-time access to monitor campaign performance and optimize against impressions and clicks directly — without going through OpenAI or an agency intermediary. Digiday reported that the tool resembles Google Ads in layout and function. The company is also exploring conversion-based ad formats beyond the current sponsored-result placements, signaling that ChatGPT’s advertising system is maturing from experiment to full-fledged platform faster than many expected. Source: AdTechRadar, April 10, 2026 🔍

Medvi Telehealth Scandal Exposes AI-Powered Deceptive Advertising at Scale

Days after The New York Times profiled telehealth startup Medvi as a model of AI efficiency — projecting $1.8 billion in revenue with just two employees — Futurism and others revealed that the company used AI-generated fake doctor profiles, deepfaked before-and-after photos, and more than 800 fabricated social media accounts to promote weight-loss drugs. The FDA had already issued a warning letter to Medvi six weeks before the NYT piece. The case has become a cautionary tale for how generative AI can supercharge deceptive marketing at scale, raising questions about platform accountability and brand safety. Source: AdExchanger, April 7, 2026 🔍

💼 Corporate Strategy / M&A

The Trade Desk Shakes Up Its Executive Ranks

The Trade Desk underwent significant leadership changes this week, with Adweek first reporting and confirming a reshuffle of senior executives. The moves come amid a turbulent stretch for the company, which has faced scrutiny from Publicis and Omnicom over transparency and fees, and is navigating the integration of its OpenAds initiative. The changes signal a strategic reset at the top of the world’s largest independent DSP as it heads into upfront season. Source: AdTechRadar, April 7, 2026 🔍

📰 Miscellaneous

Delta and The New York Times Strike Loyalty-Tied Content Access Deal

Delta’s SkyMiles loyalty members who log into a flight’s Wi-Fi can now unlock 24 hours of free access to the NYT portfolio, including games, recipes, news, and sports. AdExchanger framed the partnership as a sign of where retail media is headed — into environments where attention is already captive. It follows an earlier Instacart-NYT partnership and signals that news publishers are finding new distribution paths through membership and loyalty program integrations rather than traditional advertising. Source: AdExchanger, April 7, 2026 🔍

💼 Job Board

Sales & Business Development

• The Trade Desk — Account Executive, Business Development (Agency) – NY; Senior AE, Business Development (Agency) – London; GM, Global Sales Learning and Effectiveness – NY. 11 sales roles, 152 total openings across the company. Careers

• Magnite — Senior Account Executive, Brand Partnerships – NY, GA; Associate AE, Brand Partnerships – GA; Director, Political Demand Facilitation – VA; Account Director, Revenue Strategy, Streaming Supply Partnerships – LA. ~30 total openings. Careers

• Disney Advertising — Sales Planner, Revenue Management – NY; Senior Business Analyst, Sports Revenue Management – NY; Addressable Associate Account Manager – NY; Analyst, Revenue Analytics – NY; Sr Mgr, Entertainment Brand Solutions – NY; Manager, CTV Paid Media – NY. 100+ ad sales & marketing roles company-wide. Careers

• Spotify — Multiple advertising sales and partnerships roles across NY, LA, and London; programmatic and measurement positions tied to the Spotify Ad Exchange expansion. ~150 US openings across all functions. Careers

• Kargo — Sales and account roles tied to the Project KERA rollout and CTV/retail media expansion. Careers

• Nexxen — Multiple sales, account management, and ad tech engineering roles in NY. Careers

Account Management & Client Services

• The Trade Desk — 25 Client Services roles across NY, Chicago, LA, SF, and Bellevue; Business Strategy and Activation Director – NY. Careers

• Magnite — Account Manager, Client Success, Demand Facilitation – Broomfield, CO; Senior Technical Operations Manager, Streaming – NY; Account Executive, DV+ Platform – NY. Careers

• NBCUniversal / Comcast Advertising — Ad tech, ad operations, and sales roles across NY, Philadelphia, and remote. FreeWheel engineering and product roles also available. Careers

• DoubleVerify — Account management, sales, and verification product roles across NY and remote. Careers

• GumGum — Sales Director (agencies and brands), Customer Success Manager – Chicago and remote. Careers

Ad Operations & Product

• FreeWheel (Comcast) — Engineering and product roles in programmatic and CTV ad tech, NY and Philadelphia. Careers

• PubMatic — Account management, technical operations, and engineering roles across NY and remote. Careers

• Cadent — Ad tech roles spanning CTV platform, operations, and client services. Careers

• LiveRamp — Data connectivity and identity roles; account management and enterprise sales positions across SF and NY. Careers

Engineering & Data Science

• The Trade Desk — 31 Software Engineering roles across Bellevue, Irvine, San Jose, NY, and LA; 6 Data Science positions; 4 Business Intelligence roles; 3 Ventura OS (next-gen TV operating system) roles. Careers

• Magnite — Staff Java Engineer – NY, LA; Senior Database Engineer – Sydney; Engineer II, Demand Tech – Boston; Staff Engineer, Rust/Go – remote; Data Scientist – LA. Careers

• OpenX — Engineering and data roles focused on programmatic marketplace infrastructure. Careers

• Madhive — CTV ad tech engineering roles in NY. Careers

• Smartly — AI-powered creative and campaign optimization engineering roles; Customer Success Managers. Careers

Media Agencies & Strategy

• Horizon Media — Multiple roles across planning, buying, data/analytics, and the new Horizon OS orchestration initiative. ~50 US openings. Careers

• Dentsu — Media planning, buying, data science, and CTV strategy roles across NY, Chicago, and remote. ~100 US openings. Careers

• Omnicom Media Group — Programmatic, investment, and analytics roles across holding company agencies. ~150 US openings. Careers

• Publicis Media — Performance, data, and media investment roles across Starcom, Zenith, and Spark. ~100 US openings. Careers

Measurement & Analytics

• Nielsen — Multiple measurement, data science, and client-facing roles. Key hires in the wake of the Gauge methodology controversy and Big Data + Panel integration. ~75 US openings. Careers

• Northbeam — Roles tied to the new incrementality product launch; engineering, data science, and GTM positions. Careers

• Comscore — Analytics, measurement, and client services roles across the digital and TV measurement portfolio. Careers