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.
Sensor Tower reports that mobile games generated $12 billion in ad revenue across 19 markets in 2025, with ad-supported titles accounting for 84.1% of downloads by May 2026. The data highlights a market shift toward hybrid monetization models, led by dominating ad networks like AppLovin and Google AdMob.
The podcasting industry is increasingly integrating video and programmatic ad-delivery workflows, reflected in the IAB Tech Lab's updated measurement standards and Comscore's deployment of transcript-level ad targeting. Concurrently, streaming-adjacent companies like Acast and Lalal.AI are expanding their technical stacks to handle video distribution and automated audio refinement respectively.
Walmart Connect is extending retail media data to the open internet via its Connect Select marketplace, developed in collaboration with Index Exchange. The initiative leverages Vizio TV inventory to allow advertisers to link streaming ad campaigns with in-store and online sales data for closed-loop measurement.
Yahoo DSP has integrated Truthset’s Data Rated Audiences into its ConnectID platform to improve targeting accuracy and reduce media waste in CTV campaigns. Concurrently, Charter’s Spectrum Reach announced the dissolution of the New York Interconnect joint venture, taking over local ad sales for Comcast and Optimum inventory in the New York market.
Media publishers are increasingly using 'match spending' tactics to bundle marquee sports inventory with non-sports content commitments during upfront negotiations. Meanwhile, major publishers are evaluating blocking AI crawlers like Google's, weighing the risk of lost referral traffic against the value of their data for AI training models.
Dstillery and agency partner Canvas Worldwide have launched an in-flight agentic AI optimization capability for programmatic advertising campaigns. The DS-1 platform automates campaign monitoring and refinement, aiming to reduce manual labor for media traders while maintaining human control over investment decisions.
Pharmaceutical brands are increasingly shifting advertising budgets from connected TV to social vertical video platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Industry experts and data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau suggest that success requires social-native content strategies, such as creator partnerships, rather than repurposing traditional TV commercials.
Programmatic advertising platform Screencore is scaling its operations in the APAC region to capture growing demand for CTV and AI-optimized ad infrastructure. The company plans to utilize the ChinaJoy 2026 event to deepen partnerships with local publishers and streaming technology entities.
Fubo and The Athletic have launched a dedicated video hub for connected television, enabling the publisher to distribute editorial content directly to Fubo's vMVPD platform. The hub provides Fubo with new premium sports editorial inventory for its existing home screen and interactive ad formats.
A report from digital privacy firm Proton highlights the pervasive use of Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) at the chipset level in modern smart TVs. This technology tracks viewer behavior across streaming, linear, and external HDMI-connected devices, facilitating data collection that remains active even when smart features are unused.
Disney has launched a closed beta for 'Disney Ad Creative Studio,' a feature within its Campaign Manager platform that utilizes AI to automate the production of CTV video ad assets for small and mid-sized businesses. The tool enables advertisers to generate multiple creative variations from existing brand assets, aiming to lower the barrier to entry for programmatic CTV advertising.
Bauer Media France has transferred its entire advertising sales operation and staff to Azerion, making the Amsterdam-listed platform the exclusive ad sales house for its French magazine and digital brands. This move follows a strategic multi-month partnership and aligns with Bauer's ongoing restructuring efforts to mitigate costs and declining search traffic.
Opti Digital has launched its Ad Experience Hub, a suite of monetization tools for publishers that includes new ad formats and an AI-driven context alignment tool. The platform aims to help publishers increase revenue per visit and viewability while minimizing ad density and operational burden.
Cadent President Doug Rozen argues that current agency silos and display-centric ad tech architecture are causing excessive frequency and poor viewer experiences in CTV. He calls for a unified 'total video' buying strategy that integrates linear, streaming, and YouTube metrics into a single planning framework.
Yospace reported delivering 11.57 billion addressable ads across 14 broadcasters during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, marking a 41% daily increase in ad volume compared to the Paris 2024 Olympics. The company cited increased connected TV viewership and its Advanced Prefetch technology as primary drivers for maintaining fill rates during high-demand live sporting events.
Google and The Trade Desk have allowed their Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) anti-fraud certifications to expire, reflecting a broader trend toward skepticism regarding static, process-based audit standards in the face of modern AI-driven programmatic ad fraud. The move suggests a shift in industry preference from annual compliance stamps toward real-time, evidence-based ad verification methodologies.
Cloudflare data indicating that bot traffic now exceeds human web traffic has prompted industry attention on how ad tech must distinguish between fraudulent activity and legitimate AI agents. AdExchanger and DoubleVerify emphasize the need for new measurement standards to account for these agents as intermediaries in the consumer purchasing funnel.
Walmart Connect has expanded its retail media reach by partnering with Magnite and Yahoo DSP to enable programmatic purchasing of Vizio connected television inventory. The integration aims to bridge the gap between CTV viewing, search engagement, and in-store purchases through a unified omnichannel measurement framework.
Analyst data on rising zero-click search rates suggests that open-web advertising inventory is becoming less effective, leading brands to reconsider mobile gaming as a premium environment. The piece argues that mobile gaming offers higher viewability and verified human attention, with vendors like SE7EN promoting pre-bid cognitive engines to validate traffic quality.
Google has updated its Display & Video 360 (DV360) platform to include household-level frequency management and an Overlap Reach Report for CTV and YouTube. These features provide tools for advertisers to track and limit ad exposure across multiple devices within a single household.
Shoppable has released a Universal Checkout plugin for ChatGPT in the U.S., enabling users to build multi-retailer carts through AI discovery. The technology acts as a middleware transaction layer that connects conversational AI platforms to merchant-controlled fulfillment systems.
Comscore has expanded its Proximic transcript-level intelligence tools to integrate with streaming platforms including Spotify, SiriusXM, Triton Digital, Acast, and Libsyn. The integration allows advertisers to perform episode-level ad targeting and brand safety analysis by moving beyond traditional genre metadata to evaluate actual audio content.
Comscore has expanded its Proximic contextual targeting tool to include automated episode-level transcription for major audio platforms, including Spotify and SiriusXM. This integration provides advertisers with standardized brand safety and programmatic targeting capabilities across podcast inventory, similar to CTV and display channels.
A report from Media Dynamics indicates that creator-led video content now commands 26% of total time spent with video, attracting a significantly younger audience than linear television. Advertiser interest in this segment is growing rapidly, with spending estimated to hit $44 billion in 2026.
Jamloop has integrated new household-level holdout measurement into its CTV advertising platform and established a partnership with Recast to provide geographic-based lift testing. These tools allow performance marketers to validate incremental business outcomes like subscriptions and revenue by comparing exposed treatment groups against suppressed holdout groups directly within the bidding workflow.
Media agencies are shifting away from viewing creator content as experimental influencer marketing toward integrating it into formal paid media infrastructure. Supported by new measurement tools and projected spending growth to reach $24 billion by 2026, brands are increasingly utilizing creators as strategic partners for cross-channel distribution and performance-based advertising.
Tangoo executives presented a case study at MAD//Fest London describing how lastminute.com integrated first-party retail data into its Connected TV campaigns. The strategy combined CTV inventory with retail shopper profiles to improve conversion tracking and achieve a 40% year-over-year increase in bookings.
The IAB Tech Lab has finalized new signaling standards for the CTV Ad Portfolio through updates to OpenRTB, AdCOM, and VAST protocols. These updates aim to standardize the programmatic signaling of emergent CTV ad formats, such as pause and home-screen ads, to improve inventory transparency and reporting consistency.
Cineverse has integrated its recently acquired Indiqu and Giant Worldwide technology stacks into its MatchPoint platform, launching a new SSAI dashboard to improve ad infrastructure control and transparency. The company also announced Vaudeville, a new product aimed at automating infrastructure and monetization for audio-visual podcast content.
Google has implemented new transparency features allowing users to identify generative AI usage in advertisements through its "how this ad was made" panel. The system uses SynthID digital watermarking and C2PA metadata standards to automatically verify and label AI-generated content, while providing manual controls for advertisers using third-party tools.
Major media agencies have committed 75-80% of upfront advertising spend to top streaming sellers, prioritizing bundles of sports inventory and entertainment content. While total dollar amounts remain slightly down, media sellers are successfully utilizing package-based demand strategies to maintain stable pricing in a complex market.
Epsilon has launched 'Brand Pages,' a self-serve platform feature that allows brands to build customizable, shoppable templates for retail media sites. The service aims to improve onsite campaign measurement and provide structured data to influence offsite AI-driven shopping and search responses.
Nexxen has expanded its partnership with Acxiom to integrate third-party household and purchase data into the Nexxen Discovery planning tool. This integration aims to help media planners combat signal loss in programmatic advertising by combining deterministic consumer insights with Nexxen's internal automatic content recognition (ACR) and behavioral viewership data.
SiriusXM has signed a three-year exclusive agreement for distribution and advertising sales rights across the audio and video editions of the "The Bald and the Beautiful" podcast. This deal allows SiriusXM Media to incorporate the show's existing YouTube inventory and RSS downloads into its broader programmatic and direct sales pipelines.
Comscore has integrated Spotify, SiriusXM, Triton Digital, Acast, and Libsyn into its Proximic contextual targeting platform, using AI-based transcription to enable episode-level ad targeting. This integration allows advertisers to purchase podcast inventory programmatically using the same standardized brand safety and semantic targeting tools applied to CTV and display campaigns.
Broadsign and the agency Draft Digital have deployed a fully autonomous agentic AI system to manage an end-to-end out-of-home advertising campaign for the charity Lot of Happiness. Utilizing the AdCP protocol, the agents automated audience targeting, media selection, creative workflow, and execution on the Global Netherlands network.
Seattle-based startup MediaPact has raised $200,000 to launch an AI-driven marketplace designed to automate flat-fee direct media buying, including newsletters and sponsored podcast reads. The platform aims to replace manual email and spreadsheet workflows with a standardized, searchable marketplace for publishers and advertisers.
Media platforms and sportsbooks are increasingly integrating betting markets directly into streaming interfaces to create unified user experiences and combat latency. These integrations leverage technologies like account linking and low-latency streaming to move beyond passive ad banners toward interactive betting ecosystems.
Amazon has expanded its location-based interactive video ad capabilities to Canada, Mexico, and Brazil, allowing advertisers to localize creative elements based on postal codes. The suite works across Prime Video and Amazon Studios content, providing Managed Service and Self-Service advertisers with tools to automate regionalized ad experiences.
Increased complexity in the ad tech stack, driven by fragmented identity tools and measurement layers, is compelling marketers to shift budgets toward opaque, end-to-end ecosystems managed by major platforms. This trend highlights a decline in trust and adoption of independent stacks in favor of simplified, albeit closed, advertising solutions from Google and Amazon.
Brands on TikTok Shop are increasingly using AI-generated influencers to create low-cost, scalable shoppable video content to reduce commissions and production costs. Platforms like TikTok are facilitating this transition through automated ad tools like GMV Max and Symphony Agent, though content quality and regulatory compliance regarding synthetic testimonials remain significant hurdles.
Google has updated its Google Ads platform to allow reach and frequency settings at the video campaign group level rather than at individual campaign levels. This change aims to simplify multi-part campaign management, automate frequency capping, and improve ROI through centralized performance reporting.
Amazon has faced pushback from the Million Dollar Sellers group over policy changes, including the removal of credit card-based ad payments and the mandatory introduction of automated ad settings for off-platform and AI-driven networks. While Amazon has granted some concessions, the company continues to push toward increased campaign automation and AI integration within its advertising platform.
Fox Corporation's Red Seat Ventures has integrated its portfolio of over 40 podcast and video creators into Amazon DSP, enabling programmatic ad buying using Amazon's first-party data. This move reflects a broader trend of independent creator networks bypassing traditional intermediaries to plug inventory directly into major ad-buying infrastructures.
Ofcom experts are recommending that ad platforms provide trusted third parties with access to representative random samples of active ads to combat fraud and verify integrity. The report also suggests that platforms should proactively flag fraudulent ad activity to users rather than treating it as a solely user-reported issue.
The Video Advertising Bureau has expanded its measurement directory to 20 partners by adding Comcast Advertising, Infinitum, and PurpleLab. The update provides a resource for the ecosystem to navigate fragmented viewership, identity, and outcomes measurement during a period of market-wide debate over TV currency standards.
Jamloop has launched a household-level holdout methodology and a geographic lift testing partnership with Recast to provide CTV advertisers with causal incrementality measurement. The platform claims a successful test for a major streaming client that measured 3,224 incremental subscriptions with an estimated 365% ROAS.
RZR, formerly known as Aarki, has launched a new platform tool called Audience Builder that integrates user acquisition, retargeting, and CTV advertising into a single management system. Leveraging deterministic signals from partners like LG Ads, the platform claims to identify high-value users at risk of churning and optimize campaign performance to improve long-term value.
Adstra has launched ID Connection Strength, a scoring framework designed to verify identity link quality for programmatic CTV campaigns. The initiative aims to reduce budget waste by evaluating identifiers like HEMs, UID2s, and CTV IDs based on signal stability metrics instead of standard match rates.
A market report from Omdia and MiQ projects that Brazil will become the world's second-largest international FAST market by 2029 with $14.4 billion in annual online video revenue. The data highlights a strong consumer shift toward ad-supported models and increasing complexity in cross-platform measurement for Connected TV.
