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.
Live sports advertising is projected to capture 31.8% of US TV ad spend by 2026, driven by record-breaking audiences and the migration of sports rights to streaming and FAST services. EMARKETER advises that advertisers should transition to a cross-channel strategy that synchronizes linear broadcasts with programmatic CTV and social-media engagement.
DoubleVerify has introduced a Clean Room Integration designed to help streaming providers share program-level ad performance data without disclosing personal user identifiers. The solution aims to address advertiser demand for transparency while maintaining compliance with privacy regulations like the Video Privacy Protection Act.
The IAB has released new guidance titled 'Measuring Visibility in the AI Era' to help publishers and advertisers track brand presence and traffic attribution in AI search interfaces like Google AI Overviews. The recommendations define a hierarchy of metrics—presence, prominence, portrayal, and persuasion—to standardize how industry participants analyze performance amidst the rise of generative AI search integrations.
IAB Tech Lab has released AAMP 2.3, an update to its agentic advertising protocols that introduces enterprise-grade governance, integration support for platforms like Amazon Bedrock and Databricks, and new transaction security features. The update enables the use of AI agents in programmatic workflows by implementing standardized controls for vendor authorization, pricing provenance, and audience matching via vector embeddings.
This article analyzes strategies for performance marketers to manage the decline of third-party cookies in streaming and digital advertising. Key recommendations include prioritizing first-party data, implementing server-side tracking, and leveraging AI for contextual targeting and measurement.
DoubleVerify has identified a fraudulent Android ad scheme called "AfterCall," which leverages system permissions to display intrusive ads immediately following phone calls. The tactic enables apps to generate hundreds of millions of impressions, creating significant brand safety and reputation risks for advertisers.
Integral Ad Science's 21st Media Quality Report finds that despite strong brand suitability controls in North America, the region faces the world's highest rates of invalid traffic (1.4%) and made-for-advertising inventory (1.5%). The data suggests that programmatic scale and the use of AI by fraudulent actors continue to present significant risks to campaign efficiency in the U.S. market.
Experian and cloud-native software provider Audiences have entered a partnership to integrate Experian’s signal-agnostic identity identifiers into the Audiences platform. The integration is designed to assist brands in activating first-party data for CTV and programmatic advertising while maintaining data control within their own cloud infrastructure.
A joint analysis from TAG, the ANA, and Fiducia indicates that 'AI slop'—low-value, AI-generated content produced for ad monetization—accounts for up to 2.4% of open web programmatic ad spend. The report highlights that this inventory frequently mirrors Made-for-Advertising characteristics and has a significant presence in social video, often escaping current quality detection tools.
Polymarket has secured exclusive U.S. streaming rights for approximately 20,000 ATP and Challenger Tour matches per season. The platform will integrate these live streams alongside real-time data and prediction markets, marking a strategic shift in how prediction markets monetize sports rights.
Roku is expanding the utility of its Roku City screensaver as a platform for interactive and shoppable advertising. The company integrates branded content and retail partnerships, such as Walmart, into the screensaver experience to reach its 100 million-viewer base.
WPP Media is embedding agency staff directly into client offices to act as consultative partners rather than traditional suppliers. The agency is also leveraging its proprietary 'WPP Open' platform to automate unique reach discovery across fragmented CTV and linear TV environments.
Deliveroo Media has integrated Google Ad Manager to enable programmatic buying for its Order Tracker page inventory in the UK, France, Italy, and the UAE. This move allows advertisers to reach consumers through Display & Video 360, The Trade Desk, and Amazon DSP, marking a strategic shift toward automated ad inventory management for the platform.
Major streaming services including Disney+, Paramount+, and Netflix are evaluating the introduction of free, ad-supported tiers to compete with YouTube and established FAST services. These platforms are weighing the benefits of increased user acquisition and ad inventory growth against the potential risks of cannibalizing existing subscription revenue.
Teads has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google in the Southern District of New York, alleging that Google's ad tech practices diverted 6.88 trillion impressions from competing exchanges between 2017 and 2023. The complaint leverages findings from previous antitrust rulings to pursue damages related to alleged monopolistic behaviors across Google's publisher ad server and exchange operations.
Wedbush Securities forecasts The Trade Desk will report Q2 revenue of $757 million, noting the company is navigating increased pressure for fee transparency. The firm also highlighted long-term risks as ad spend shifts from the open internet toward closed-loop ecosystems like Amazon.
Disney Advertising and BrightLine collaborated with State Farm to launch a custom 'Beat the Clock' interactive advergame within FX's The Bear on Hulu. The campaign achieved engagement rates four times higher than the vendor's standard benchmark, highlighting a growing trend in mid-funnel, interactive CTV ad formats that leverage tentpole IP.
An analysis by ad quality firm Deepsee.io of over 4,000 AI companion apps reveals significant discrepancies between app store age ratings and actual content suitability. The findings indicate that current industry-standard screening fields, such as age ratings and bundle identifiers, are unreliable signals for programmatic brand safety in mobile and CTV inventory.
StackAdapt has launched the Economic Impact Report, a self-service measurement tool integrated into its advertising platform. The tool utilizes transaction data from Affinity Solutions to enable advertisers to link media exposure to real-time consumer spending and ROAS.
Assertive Yield CTO Daniel Pedersen discusses the operational and revenue risks associated with legacy ad-tech infrastructure. He advises publishers to move toward unified, server-side, and machine-learning-driven platforms to improve performance and offset traffic shifts.
PubMatic and Optable have integrated their respective AI agent frameworks to automate the curation and activation of publisher first-party data for programmatic private marketplace (PMP) deals. This integration allows publishers to scale tailored audience targeting without manual intervention from ad operations or sales teams.
Optimon has released Optimon AI, an agentic tool designed to automate diagnostic analysis for programmatic advertising operations. The platform integrates with 26 data sources, including Google Ad Manager and Prebid, to provide automated reporting, floor price suggestions, and performance alerts.
Viant reports a 40% annual growth in Connected TV (CTV) advertising revenue driven by shifts toward attention-based measurement. The company is leveraging its acquisition of TVision to provide camera-based metrics that enable advertisers to optimize CPMs based on verified viewer engagement rather than traditional last-touch attribution.
The Video Futures Collective is working to develop a unified, privacy-safe measurement standard for cross-platform streaming in Australia. This initiative seeks to reconcile fragmented audience data from major platforms as industry projections indicate significant growth in streaming ad spend.
The addressable television advertising market is projected to grow to $14.33 billion by 2030, representing a 15.9% compound annual growth rate. This expansion is driven by the rise of streaming services, AI-powered ad optimization, and increased data-driven targeting across connected TV ecosystems.
New Zealand broadcaster TVNZ has transitioned its TVNZ+ platform to a hybrid streaming model using the Evergent monetization platform. The integration enables TVNZ to offer premium paid event passes alongside its existing ad-supported tier, as demonstrated by the platform's support for 20 million streams during the FIFA World Cup 2026.
The global Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 19.85% through 2031, reaching $12.02 billion. The industry is currently shifting toward privacy-centric edge processing and continuous recognition to support cross-platform audience measurement, ad verification, and compliance.
The FTC reported that $12.5 billion was lost to consumer scams in 2024, citing increased reliance on fraudulent social media ads and call spoofing. The report calls for improved ad verification standards and increased regulatory accountability for digital platforms and telecom intermediaries.
Tenetic CEO Chris Wilson discusses the industry-wide shift of linear television inventory from traditional reach-based measurement to outcome-based performance metrics. The commentary highlights how integrating data layers into linear workflows allows broadcasters to compete more effectively with CTV for performance-driven advertising budgets.
Adobe Advertising has integrated Eyeota’s audience data marketplace into its demand-side platform to enable demographic and interest-based targeting on Connected TV without third-party cookies. The integration maps CTV ad impressions to persistent identifiers, allowing advertisers to unify audience segments across CTV and digital channels.
Sports agency Deep Blue and analytics firm Mondo Metrics launched the Women's Sports Index to help advertisers track engagement and purchase intent in the growing women's sports market. Simultaneously, video advertising startup Atmosphere TV is expanding its sports-related ad inventory across digital out-of-home locations, targeting environments like sports bars.
PubMatic and ThinkResult have deployed the first agentic CTV campaign in India using the AgenticOS platform. The integration reportedly reduced campaign setup time by 90% and improved impression performance compared to traditional fixed-bid bidding methods.
FreeWheel has launched Video Content Report, an insights tool within its Buyer Cloud platform that provides advertisers with series-level transparency for programmatic CTV campaigns. The tool leverages publisher-sourced data from FreeWheel Streaming Hub to verify ad placements across major premium publishers.
VASTlint has launched a high-performance Rust-based validator designed to check ad tags against IAB Tech Lab VAST specifications from version 2.0 to 4.3. The tool provides native bindings for Go and Erlang and includes an MCP server, aiming to reduce ad impression loss and revenue discrepancies in CTV environments.
Universal Ads has integrated mobile measurement partners including Adjust, AppsFlyer, and Kochava into its self-serve CTV platform. The update enables advertisers to use familiar attribution tools for CTV campaigns alongside new audience segmentation partners like LiveRamp and TransUnion.
The IAB and IAB Tech Lab have released a draft of the Redefining Media Types (RMT) standard, aimed at standardizing video advertising signals within the OpenRTB protocol. The framework replaces broad, fragmented terminology with granular, experience-based attributes to improve programmatic buying accuracy for human and AI-driven platforms.
ShowHeroes and independent smart TV OS provider Whale TV have partnered to integrate homescreen advertising inventory into programmatic demand-side platform workflows. The deal enables automated ad buying across nine market groupings in Europe and Latin America, following a wider industry trend of TV OS providers opening homescreen surfaces to programmatic ad tech.
Amazon reported $19.8 billion in advertising revenue for Q2 2026, marking a 26% year-over-year increase. The growth is attributed to the company's closed-loop data capabilities and the conversion efficacy of AI-driven Sponsored Prompts within its shopping experiences.
SiriusXM reported Q2 2026 advertising revenue of $454 million, citing strong podcasting and programmatic performance, and raised its full-year guidance. The company clarified that its exclusive audio advertising partnership with YouTube is currently in a 'test and learn' phase, with meaningful revenue contributions expected only in the second half of 2027.
TikTok has launched the Agentic Hub, a marketplace built on the Model Context Protocol that enables the creation and deployment of AI agents for ad campaign workflows. The initiative signals a broader industry shift toward using agentic AI for automated campaign execution, performance analysis, and audience insights rather than just content generation.
Security researchers at Confiant have identified 'SourTrade,' a malvertising campaign that assembles malware directly within a user's browser memory to evade traditional hash-based detection. The campaign impersonates brands like TradingView and Solana across major advertising networks including Google, Meta, and X, highlighting critical structural weaknesses in programmatic ad-tech security.
Security researchers at Bitsight have uncovered a sophisticated ad fraud botnet called Fuyao that infects over 120,000 Android TV boxes to generate an estimated $40 million in annual revenue. The operation uses computer vision, AI-generated websites, and residential proxy services to simulate human interaction and spoof device identities, posing a direct threat to ad integrity in the connected TV ecosystem.
Meta reported $59.4 billion in Q2 advertising revenue, representing a 27% increase attributed to its Advantage+ AI ad suite and a new LLM-based Generative Recommender system. Despite revenue growth, the company's free cash flow declined 91% due to intensive capital expenditure on AI infrastructure.
A Forrester Consulting study of 620 marketing decision-makers reveals that CTV creative workflows are still hampered by legacy linear TV limitations. Advertisers report difficulty in testing and iterating CTV creative compared to social media, citing a lack of unified measurement and slower production cycles.
VideoAmp has announced a partnership with MediaRadar to integrate advertising intelligence with its television ratings data, aiming to provide a unified cross-platform measurement solution. The company is actively leveraging AI to process census-level streaming data in an effort to compete with Nielsen's market-dominant measurement services.
Minfo is deploying its AudioQR ultrasonic watermark technology to enable opt-in viewer interactions across broadcast, streaming, and creator-led platforms. The platform aims to bypass third-party data silos by linking content directly to measurable consumer actions like subscriptions, purchases, and audience engagement.
This technical analysis examines identity resolution ownership models in the context of agentic AI workflows for marketing and advertising. It highlights the importance of transparent logic and audit trails when using automated systems to manage budgets based on customer profile matching.
Prescient AI provides an overview of identity resolution, explaining the nuances between deterministic and probabilistic matching methodologies. The article outlines the operational trade-offs, maintenance requirements, and data privacy considerations for streaming and digital brands evaluating identity solutions.
TeqBlaze has updated its white-label SSP to include machine learning-based yield optimization and modular integration with DSP and exchange components. The company aims to provide publishers with an end-to-end proprietary ad tech stack to capture more revenue as global programmatic spending grows.
Sweetgreen utilized Atmosphere TV’s FAST infrastructure to target consumers at public venues during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, reporting a 113.9% increase in store visits among exposed audiences. The campaign highlights Atmosphere TV's strategy of positioning its location-based video service as a 'connected TV' performance marketing alternative to traditional digital out-of-home.
