Ad tech rebuilt itself around identity resolution and clean rooms once third-party cookies disappeared. Coverage here spans SSAI, programmatic CTV, ad-supported tier economics, frequency capping, and the measurement approaches replacing the old playbook.
Connected TV performance marketing platform MNTN has launched a new integration with HubSpot CRM, allowing B2B marketers to track individual-level CTV ad exposure directly in their CRM workflows. Concurrently, financial firm Raymond James raised MNTN's stock price target to $15, citing solid first-quarter revenue and improving hosting efficiencies.
iHeartMedia has launched AudioGraph, a new advertising suite providing digital-style targeting, identity-based planning, and attribution across broadcast radio, streaming, and podcasts. The technology is developed and powered by audio ad-tech vendor Triton Digital, with integrations from TransUnion, Yahoo DSP, Magellan AI, and others.
Meta is launching global live video ads on Instagram and Facebook, partnering with live commerce platforms like CommentSold and Firework to help creators and merchants turn livestreams into ad placements. The social giant is also introducing virtual bank cards for faster checkout, expanding creator affiliate partnerships globally, and leveraging AI to automatically serve optimized ad formats in real time.
Gracenote and PubMatic have partnered to integrate content intelligence and live sports schedule data directly into PubMatic's programmatic CTV platform. Operating on the IAB Tech Lab's Agentic Real-Time Framework (ARTF), the integration allows advertisers to access show-level metadata at the speed of the bidstream to target premium streaming inventory.
Panelists at the StreamTV Show, including representatives from Nielsen and DirecTV, highlighted the urgent need for consistent, cross-platform measurement standards in Free Ad-supported Streaming Television (FAST). Speakers discussed operational friction caused by fragmented platform reporting, the importance of channel-level metadata, and the ongoing transition of measurement tools from platform-level tracking to program-specific metrics.
Warner Bros. Discovery is building a next-generation unified advertising platform on Amazon Web Services using AWS's agentic AI capabilities. This new stack automates media planning, audience forecasting, and campaign optimization across linear and digital channels. Key AWS integrations powering the platform include Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, and ECS, with underlying data stored on Amazon S3 using the Apache Iceberg format.
Smartly has integrated its AI-powered advertising platform with Roku Ads Manager via a direct API, enabling performance marketers to launch, manage, and measure CTV campaigns from their existing social media workflows. The partnership also introduces Smartly's AI Studio to help advertisers automatically convert horizontal and vertical social video assets for streaming television. This integration connects Smartly's active advertiser base to Roku's extensive US footprint of over 125 million daily home screen users.
WPP Media partnered with tech firm Givsly to test programmatic CTV and online video ad targeting using synthetic audiences modeled via the Claude LLM. The system overlays donation data from non-profits with geographic and demographic data to build targeting segments based on viewer values. Early tests across beauty and fashion campaigns delivered a 2% lift in video completion rates, prompting WPP to plan a broader US rollout.
Ad-measurement firm VideoAmp has introduced an AI-powered reporting capability that allows media buyers and sellers to query census-level campaign data using natural language. Built with a structured semantic layer inside its measurement architecture to prevent hallucinations, the tool aims to eliminate manual data-export and reporting workflows. Omnicom Media has signed on as the first adopter for the beta program.
Tatari CEO Philip Inghelbrecht argues that DSP-based programmatic buying only reaches a $17-18 billion sliver of the $80 billion US TV market. He highlights the hidden fees of the programmatic ad-tech tax and high invalid traffic rates, advocating for a broader TV strategy that utilizes direct server-level integrations with publishers.
Integral Ad Science (IAS) has launched Quality Connect, a transparency and optimization tool within the IAS Pulse publisher platform. The solution provides publishers with real-time visibility into advertiser campaign preferences, including brand safety, suitability, and fraud prevention settings. This integration aims to reduce wasted impressions, improve campaign delivery, and enhance reporting efficiency for ad-supported media and streaming platforms.
Warner Bros. Discovery is upgrading its custom ad-tech stack to group linear and digital ad inventory under a unified programmatic framework driven by agentic AI. Developed in deep partnership with Amazon Web Services, the system leverages cloud-native AI tools to automate media planning, real-time campaign optimization, and advanced target forecasting.
YouTube has officially joined the Alliance for Measurement in Podcasting (AMP), aligning itself with Spotify and other industry leaders to help standardize podcast measurement. The move signals broad platform alignment on a 30-second play definition, while AMP also revised its official standard to remove session length constraints.
Smartly has partnered with Roku to integrate its advertising technology platform directly with Roku Ads Manager via API. The partnership enables digital marketers to run and optimize CTV campaigns on Roku using existing social media ad workflows and creative assets.
WPP Media has announced a prototype for a new "buyer agent" standard for CTV and video advertising, partnering with major publishers including Comcast, Disney, Fox, NBCUniversal, Netflix, and Paramount. Heavily aligned with the IAB Tech Lab's Agentic Ad Management Protocols (AAMP) framework, the initiative aims to establish interoperable standards for how AI-driven buyer and seller agents execute programmatic transactions. Initial alpha and beta testing is underway, with a formal proposed standard targeted for early 2027.
ITV has introduced Lead Gen Pause Ads on its ITVX streaming service, allowing viewers to pause content to interact with brands and request offers via remote control. The broadcaster also highlighted the adoption of its ITV GenAI Ads Manager, which utilizes Magnite's streamr.ai technology to help small-and-medium enterprises generate television ads rapidly from their online presence.
This industry roundup covers YouTube's evolution to smart TV screens and the demand for better ad transparency, along with OpenAI's challenges in establishing an ad inventory. Additionally, it highlights Sinclair's investment in AI vision startup IRCODE to test interactive TV commercials.
Philo has rolled out programmatic and direct-insertion pause ads across its ad-supported streaming service, leveraging its own direct ad tech stack instead of third-party SDKs. To support the technical rollout and develop unified programmatic delivery specifications for the format, the vMVPD partnered with several major ad-tech firms including Magnite, Kargo, Nexxen, and Index Exchange.
Wurl's CTV Trends Report reveals that 35.7% of news scenes on FAST platforms are brand safe, challenging broad genre-level exclusions by advertisers. The report shows news represents 8.6% of total FAST viewing hours, arguing that scene-level contextual targeting can unlock this premium, highly engaged inventory.
An AlixPartners report analyzed by eMarketer identifies a significant shift in the ad tech landscape toward buying control, transparency, and data quality over sheer network scale. Key drivers include AI evolving into a portfolio orchestrator, the consolidation of programmatic supply paths, and the operational convergence of CTV and digital streaming media.
FOX Advertising and animation studio Toonstar have entered a strategic partnership to bring creator-led digital animation into mainstream advertising workflows. The deal leverages FOX's sales infrastructure alongside Toonstar's proprietary production and audience analytics technologies, 'Ink & Pixel' and 'SPOT,' to let brands sponsor shows or co-produce branded original content.
At the StreamTV Show, The Trade Desk detailed the market positioning for its Ventura TV OS, pitching it as a neutral alternative to operating systems from Google, Amazon, and Roku. The company aims to address neutrality concerns by passing ad engagement data one-way to its DSP without managing inventory partnerships directly. To gain scale in a saturated market, Ventura is pursuing custom integrations with partners like DirecTV, Nexxen, and V (formerly VIDAA).
Databricks has launched CustomerLake, an AI-agentic Customer Data Platform embedded within its Lakehouse platform to unify automated marketing and data operations. This solution challenges standalone CDP giants like Salesforce, Adobe, and Twilio Segment by enabling native data governance and eliminating the need for data duplication. The platform aims to streamline complex customer data workflows, which are critical for streaming media personalization and ad-targeting strategies.
At the Cannes Lions 2026 festival, the advertising and media industry is shifting its focus from generative AI experimentation to demanding measurable ROI and practical workflow orchestration. Major holding companies like Publicis and WPP are working to monetize their massive AI infrastructure investments, while ad-tech vendors navigate identity resolution, signal loss, and the preservation of platform neutrality.
Adobe has partnered with The Trade Desk to integrate Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform with The Trade Desk's Raw Event Data Stream. This collaboration enables brands to enrich their first-party profiles with impression-level programmatic advertising signals and automate audience activation using Unified ID 2.0 framework across CTV and other digital channels.
MNTN has integrated its Connected TV advertising platform with HubSpot, allowing B2B marketers to feed TV ad interaction data directly into CRM workflows. The integration enables tracking of TV ad exposure down to individual contacts to provide search- and social-style performance attribution for video campaigns.
A survey by subscription bundling platform Bango reveals that roughly half of young US sports fans are increasingly replacing live games with highlights, clips, and social updates. The study highlights significant subscription fatigue, with over 70% of viewers aged 18-34 needing multiple paid services to follow their teams and nearly 40% viewing piracy as the best access method.
Executives from Xperi/TiVo, Stingray, and Magnite speaking at the StreamTV Show's TVREV Summit highlighted automotive screens and autonomous vehicles as the next major growth sector for video distribution and ad monetization. The discussion emphasized early rollouts with automakers like BMW and Mercedes-Benz, alongside development in alternative formats like ambient TV programming and interactive home-screen ads.
The Audio Measurement Protocol (AMP) task force has proposed a new cross-platform measurement framework designed to standardize podcast ad-performance tracking across publishers. While the standard aims to unlock programmatic ad spend, industry analysis suggests it may exacerbate a margin squeeze for independent creators facing high multi-format production costs. The shift highlights a growing divide where the top 10 percent of network-backed shows capture over 95 percent of total podcast ad revenue.
Sell-side ad platform Magnite has partnered with Viasat Aviation to introduce programmatic video advertising capabilities to Viasat's in-flight entertainment and Wi-Fi networks. The collaboration allows real-time dynamic ad targeting across 60 airlines and approximately 4,000 aircraft worldwide, opening a premium captive-audience inventory channel.
TelevisaUnivision is addressing a projected 50% undercount of Hispanic audiences by third-party measurement systems by building its own proprietary U.S. Hispanic household graph. The first-party database merges internal and external data signals to give advertisers more precise targeting capabilities across its streaming platforms and live sports broadcasts.
Smartly has partnered with Roku to integrate its creative advertising and campaign management platform with Roku Ads Manager via a direct API connection. The partnership enables advertisers to easily extend existing social media advertising assets and performance strategies directly onto the Roku CTV platform. This integration aims to streamline hybrid social-CTV creative workflows and performance measurement.
NBCUniversal and Target have launched 'Shop What Happens,' a weekly shoppable digital series streaming on Peacock, YouTube, and TikTok. The initiative integrates interactive shopping features, utilizing QR codes for CTV screens and text-to-shop or click-to-shop functionality for mobile viewers to purchase featured Target products.
Independent agency Goodway Group reduced its programmatic SSP partners from around 20 to single digits through its Goodpath supply-path optimization (SPO) initiative, developed alongside Jounce Media. The strategic consolidation, which integrates direct paths like The Trade Desk's OpenPath and Yahoo DSP's Backstage, shifted 28% more ad spend to working media and lowered CTV, online video, and audio CPMs by up to 40%.
Video advertising platform Pixability has launched a Model Context Protocol (MCP)-enabled agent for YouTube ads, allowing clients to integrate its proprietary video intelligence data into their own AI platforms. Tested by advertising agency PMG, the integration allows natural language queries to bypass traditional, manual API steps, reportedly reducing campaign planning time by 25% to 30%.
JioStar CEO Kevin Vaz announced plans to build interactive commerce as a third core revenue stream to supplement advertising and subscriptions in the Indian market. The strategy leverages integrations with third-party apps during live sports and on-screen shopping features. Vaz also highlighted JioStar's technology investments, including an OpenAI partnership, AI-driven discovery, and its integrated microdrama tab Tadka.
Yahoo DSP has launched its Agent Network with 23 initial ad tech partners to integrate AI-powered tools across audience targeting, creative, and measurement workflows. This initiative leverages Yahoo's \"Yours, Mine and Ours\" AI strategy, prioritizing interoperability and open integrations over closed-loop proprietary tools.
Claritas has partnered with Comcast Advertising to integrate its demographic and behavioral audience segments into Comcast's AI-powered Outcomes+ solution. This integration allows marketers to build, activate, and measure campaigns across premium video within a single streamlined workflow, utilizing Claritas' identity graph of over 600 million connected devices.
The ad tech industry is witnessing the emergence of 'direct' demand-side platforms (DSPs) or Direct Booking Engines (DBEs), such as Magnite ClearLine and PubMatic Activate. These streamlined buying platforms integrate directly with the publisher SSP layer to reduce programmatic margins and provide agencies with more transparent, direct access to premium CTV inventory.
Chalice AI is integrating its containerized AI bidding models directly into Equativ's platform to enable real-time impression scoring and programmatic bid optimization. The partnership expands adoption of the IAB Tech Lab's Agentic Real-Time Framework (ARTF), helping advertisers deploy custom AI models without platform lock-in.
Telemundo's 2026 World Cup coverage has driven record Spanish-language advertising sales, with combined revenues for Fox and NBCUniversal projected to reach $850 million. To capture this demand, Telemundo has enabled programmatic ad buying for the tournament for the first time while prioritizing stream integrity by refusing to cut to commercials during hydration breaks.
Nano Interactive's Chief Revenue Officer Niall Moody highlights the effectiveness of real-time contextual ad targeting over traditional user-identity profiles during major events like the World Cup. This privacy-first approach analyzes active user behavior, device, and viewing environments to help brands like McDonald's and Coca-Cola run tailored campaigns based on temporary consumer moments.
DoubleVerify has launched DV Neura, a cognitive AI engine designed to unify ad verification, fraud detection, and bidding optimization across its Media AdVantage Platform. The system integrates the Open-Source Model Context Protocol to support real-time campaign queries and autonomous execution agents. This launch aims to dramatically scale content classification to combat the proliferation of low-quality, AI-generated content across digital and streaming media.
AWS and NVIDIA have released a joint technical reference implementation for programmatic advertising, enabling real-time AI agents to run within the auction path using NVIDIA GPU-accelerated containers on AWS. Built around the IAB Tech Lab's Agentic Real-Time Framework (ARTF) and NVIDIA Triton Inference Server, the solution enables DSPs and SSPs to run neural network models for bid price optimization and audience targeting without violating strict auction latency budgets.
Ad-tech measurement platform Pixalate has launched its OpenEPG Index, a monthly ranking tracking programmatic ad spend and reach across over 5,000 streaming TV shows in the U.S. The initial data shows a surprising skew, with mobile (small screens) accounting for approximately 70% of both audience reach and programmatic ad spend compared to 30% for connected TVs.
Ad-tech startup Precise.ai has secured $7 million in seed funding to commercialize its "decisioning economics" platform. Led by CTV ad-tech veterans, the company aims to ingest log-level programmatic data to help buyers audit the specific performance and cost contribution of individual targeting elements, bid modifiers, and supply paths.
Sinclair has made a strategic investment in computer-vision AI startup IRCODE to deploy dynamic interactive and shoppable TV capabilities across its local stations. The rollout begins in Salt Lake City and Austin in July 2026, allowing viewers to scan on-screen broadcast content and ads using their smartphones to retrieve info, purchase products, and provide advertisers with first-party attribution data without QR codes.
Ionic Studios and Questar Entertainment Group have formed Ionic Questar Holdings, a joint venture to operate GoTraveler, North America's largest travel FAST channel. The partnership leverages Ionic's ad operations and distribution infrastructure with Questar's content library and brand to expand platform reach and attract direct travel advertisers. This move aims to capitalize on projected growth in US FAST audiences and digital travel ad spend.
Gracenote and PubMatic have announced a strategic partnership to integrate Gracenote's content metadata and real-time live sports scheduler data into PubMatic's programmatic platform. Running on the IAB Tech Lab's Agentic Real-Time Framework, the integration aims to bridge the CTV content signal gap by enabling advertiser-selected inventory to be matched with verified episode-level data at-auction.
The Free Ad-supported Streaming TV (FAST) business is growing rapidly, but many channels attract fewer than 6,000 viewers per hour, leading to over-inventory and repetitive advertising. This issue, termed "zombies" by Fastmaster, negatively impacts viewer perception of both ads (76%) and platforms (70%). The article suggests advertisers should prioritize quality over quantity in ad placements.
