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.
Integral Ad Science (IAS) released a guide for marketers focused on driving sales during summer retail events like Amazon Prime Day. The guide promotes IAS's Context Control Targeting and Audience Enhanced Targeting to improve ad placement and boost brand awareness. It aims to help brands reach high-intent shoppers more precisely amid increased competition.
A Rakuten TV survey shows 100% of European marketers are integrating CTV into their media mix, with 70% planning to increase investment in the next year. The study highlights a shift from traditional pre-roll/mid-roll ads to homescreen, pause, and display advertising, with homescreen ads projected for significant growth. Advertisers are prioritizing attention, memorability, and contextual alignment over sole delivery metrics, indicating a move towards viewer-first strategies in CTV advertising.
Magnite is strengthening its relationships with JioHotstar and Dentsu to advance its CTV and programmatic video advertising stack. This strategy involves the adoption of SpringServe 2.0 and new AI features aimed at driving future earnings through efficient, premium programmatic video advertising infrastructure. The article highlights that these integrations are expected to support higher quality, automated CTV infrastructure for advertisers.
Netflix's ad revenue is projected to double to $3 billion in 2026, reaching $8 billion and 10% of global CTV ad spend by 2030, according to WARC Media. This growth is attributed to strategies like integrating live sports, brand integrations, video podcasts, and gaming content. The company is actively targeting competitor ad share rather than solely relying on market expansion.
Pro Kabaddi League (PKL) Season 12 achieved 936 million video views, demonstrating the increasing commercial value of fragmented sports content in India's digital advertising ecosystem. This shift allows for monetizing various digital touchpoints beyond traditional linear TV ratings for rights holders and advertisers. The league operates on a hybrid model, combining linear television advertising on Star Sports with digital advertising across streaming platforms under JioHotstar infrastructure, expanding total ad yield.
Tom Patterson, Channel 4's Director of Commercial Operations, was recognized in Campaign UK's 40 Over 40 2026 winners list. He played a key role in developing the "All 4" data strategy and integrating digital commercial aspects to evolve revenue streams alongside changing viewing habits. His work focused on balancing commercial performance with social purpose through partnership initiatives.
YouTube Shorts is expanding its revenue sharing model to include music creators. This initiative aims to monetize music used in Shorts content, benefiting artists and publishers.
The article emphasizes that multi-channel activation is crucial for demonstrating Connected TV's (CTV) value to advertisers. This approach provides comprehensive cross-platform measurement, which helps validate ad spend and proves CTV's overall effectiveness in advertising.
IAS Media's Prasad Amin advises media planners in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to adopt an integrated video strategy combining linear TV, OTT, and CTV. This approach leverages linear for broad reach, OTT for precise targeting, and CTV to converge the big-screen experience with digital addressability for advertisers. The strategy emphasizes that linear TV, particularly in the GCC, still holds significant audience segments for specific demographics and live sports, and that many linear channels are now accessible via CTV platforms.
Apple has announced that App Store developers can now collaborate to offer subscription bundles, allowing users to access multiple apps at a discounted price. This strategy, inspired by streaming service bundles, aims to increase perceived value and customer retention. Developers can also create "Suites" that are not available as standalone purchases.
Rakuten TV Enterprise's research indicates a shift in European CTV advertising, with brands prioritizing viewer experience, attention, and contextual relevance over traditional reach metrics. The report, "Beyond the Break," suggests advertisers are moving beyond pre-roll/mid-roll formats, with homescreen advertising gaining significant interest. This trend highlights a broader industry move towards integrated and less disruptive ad strategies to engage audiences effectively.
Bauer Media Audio has partnered with Amazon's Fire TV Channels as a launch video content provider, bringing its UK and Irish radio brands and video podcasts to the ad-supported CTV platform for a 12-month pilot. This strategic move aims to expand Bauer's distribution into the growing CTV market and unlock new audiovisual advertising opportunities. The deal positions Bauer to tap into higher advertiser demand on CTV compared to traditional audio, while leveraging Fire TV's extensive device footprint and robust advertising ecosystem.
Advertising firm Nexxen reports that Tubi's free FIFA World Cup games are attracting 14 million new U.S. viewers, reflecting a broader trend where 86% of fans seek free viewing options due to rising costs, which highlights the increasing importance of FAST platforms for monetization. Nexxen predicts that this trend will accelerate broader adoption of free ad-supported streaming television services, boosting not only Tubi but also other FAST platforms and increasing the need for audience measurement and identity resolution tools for advertisers.
Cox has finalized a deal with Spectrum Reach to distribute Cox-owned TV channels. This agreement also includes an expansion of programmatic advertising sales between the two companies. (Note: The provided article is a stub, so details are inferred from the title.)
Nerissa Valdellon, SVP of Media Solutions at Channel Factory, discussed how brands need to rethink campaign strategies by focusing on the '4S' framework (scroll, stream, search, shop) rather than traditional funnel stages. She highlighted the inefficiency of solely targeting the 5% of consumers actively looking to buy, advocating for advertisers to engage the other 95% earlier in their fragmented digital journeys. Channel Factory assists brands in measuring ad performance through incrementality across social platforms.
Marketers are increasingly comfortable integrating AI into their ad campaigns, utilizing large language models and AI-driven platforms for streamlining operations. Specifically in Connected TV (CTV) advertising, AI is playing a significant role in enabling smaller advertisers to access streaming opportunities. The industry consensus is that AI serves as an assistant, with humans needing to remain in the lead for effective campaign management.
Independent advertising agencies face challenges meeting client demands for omnichannel campaigns due to fragmented workflows and manual processes. AI-powered intelligence platforms, such as AI Digital's Elevate, offer a solution by unifying research, planning, activation, optimization, and reporting to improve efficiency and decision-making in media buying. This approach helps agencies provide enterprise-level capabilities without the overhead of larger networks, showcasing a shift in ad tech from automation to orchestration.
Gigapay introduces a self-billing solution for creators that consolidates hundreds of individual creator invoices into a single payment for brands, significantly reducing manual processing costs and speeding up payment cycles. This system automates tax and compliance for creator payouts across over 65 countries, acting as the Merchant of Record for influencer marketing campaigns. The solution aims to remove financial bottlenecks for brands working with a large volume of micro-influencers, allowing them to scale their creator collaborations more effectively.
Google Ads has launched an NBA Sports line-up in beta, offering new advertising inventory for live NBA games on YouTube TV and VOD content on YouTube. This initiative provides brands with transparent reporting and unique audience reach, allowing advertisers to align with relevant content and simplify buying across formats and platforms. The line-up supports various ad formats, including bumper, skippable, and non-skippable ads, while restricting certain categories for advertising.
Osmos.ai published a detailed guide on retail media network monetization strategies for 2026, outlining four core revenue streams and best practices for pricing models, revenue share, and demand generation. The article highlights how retailers like Walmart are seeing significant profit shifts from advertising and membership, with Walmart's global ad revenue reaching $6.4 billion for FY26. It also compares various retail media platforms, emphasizing Osmos's full-stack OS approach for white-label deployment and direct retailer ownership.
Lalatendu Das, CEO of Publicis Media, will participate in a fireside chat at the e4m Connected TV Conference on June 11 in Mumbai. The discussion will focus on 'AI, Data & CTV: Building the Next Generation of Media Growth,' exploring how AI and data are transforming the media landscape by enabling personalized consumer experiences and driving advertising effectiveness on CTV platforms.
AWS Elemental MediaTailor documentation details the use of dynamic ad variables to pass viewing session data to Ad Decision Servers (ADS). This functionality enables streaming professionals to deliver relevant ads and supports use cases like A/B testing and time-shifted viewing. The document outlines session, player, domain, and configuration alias variable types.
Triton Digital published a practical guide on yield management for digital audio, outlining strategies for optimizing advertising inventory and maximizing revenue. The guide emphasizes balancing direct and programmatic sales, understanding metrics like eCPM and rCPM, and fostering cross-functional collaboration. It aims to help streaming professionals identify monetization inefficiencies and turn data into actionable strategies for sustainable revenue growth.
Amazon's Fall Prime Day generated $24.1 billion in online spending, as reported by TruAudience / TransUnion data. This event presents a significant opportunity for advertisers to engage with audiences across native, video, display, and CTV ad formats.
Digital ad fraud, exemplified by scams like Icebucket and ParrotTerra, costs advertisers $84 billion annually, with Connected TV (CTV) being disproportionately affected. The rise of AI-powered malware and agentic AI makes fraud detection more complex, as bot behavior becomes more human-like. Marketers are urged to implement advanced monitoring, data integration, and cross-platform analysis to combat fraudulent activities and wasted ad spend.
Zeta Global is attracting a bullish thesis for its growth in the advertising and marketing technology sector, leveraging first-party data and an AI-native architecture. The company's platform, powered by SuperGraph and Athena AI, aims to improve advertising returns and increase client wallet share by moving beyond marketing into broader enterprise intelligence. Strategic partnerships with OpenAI and Snowflake are cited as drivers for accelerating client engagement.
Analytics firm Antenna reports that ad-supported SVOD subscriptions now account for 48% of the U.S. market, totaling 110 million. These tiers represented 59% of gross additions and over 75% of net additions in Q1, indicating a significant shift towards AVOD as a key revenue driver for streaming providers. This growth highlights the increasing reliance on advertising by streaming services to attract and monetize subscribers.
Streaming platforms are evolving into "marketing juggernauts," treating content as products with personalized promotion and leveraging ad-supported tiers as key revenue drivers. This shift includes AI-driven personalization, TikTok-style discovery feeds, and a focus on lifecycle marketing to maximize user attention, retention, and monetization. Major platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are implementing AI advertising tools and TikTok-like content discovery to adapt to these new trends.
Amazon is rolling out ads to Amazon Music Prime subscribers in India and Australia, making ad-free listening and offline downloads features of the paid Music Unlimited tier. This change mirrors Amazon Prime Video's strategy of introducing ads and pushing for upgrades to ad-free tiers. The article notes a strong negative subscriber reaction and Amazon's prior success in court defending ad introduction in Prime Video as a "benefit modification."
Equative has unveiled an AI-powered end-to-end media platform designed to enhance advertising technology. The platform helps clients create, curate, measure, and optimize content, with the goal of driving outcomes in ad-tech.
TiVo Ads has partnered with Tunnl to integrate TiVo's viewership data into Tunnl's audience intelligence platform. This collaboration aims to provide advertisers and agencies with more granular local TV audience insights for media planning and campaign activation across linear and streaming television. The partnership emphasizes privacy-first data sharing to improve understanding of audience composition and spending decisions.
TikTok Shop has released its Creator Intelligence Series, a collection of 18 detailed playbooks outlining the LIVE selling tactics and operational mechanics of top US creators on its platform. This resource provides insights into product strategies, LIVE session frameworks, and tool usage (like Flash Sale, Pin, and Streamer Desktop) for brands, sellers, and media buyers leveraging social commerce. The initiative aims to codify best practices and offer a framework for evaluating creator selection beyond basic metrics, influencing how advertising budgets are allocated in creator-led commerce.
TikTok Shop's 2026 Deals for You Days campaign guide introduces a continuous creator eligibility scoring system with Creator Health Rating and daily-updated Promotion Performance Score, allowing for mid-campaign removal of creators. This framework aims to enforce content quality, product compliance, and intellectual property standards through algorithmic performance contracts. The system influences how creators select products and perform, impacting ad spend and brand suitability for marketers on the platform.
Disney Plus is rolling out new interactive ad formats, including 'Ad Selector', which allows viewers to choose their preferred advertisement. These initiatives, powered by the in-house Disney eXperience Composer, aim to increase streaming ad revenue through enhanced viewer engagement and less disruptive ad experiences. Other formats include Gateway Go, Pause Ads, and Pause Plus, with reported engagement rates exceeding industry benchmarks.
AdsWizz's Anne Frisbie believes agentic AI will significantly boost programmatic audio ad spend, potentially allowing audio to surpass connected TV in agentic buying due to its consolidated supply-side technology. AdsWizz is partnering with Apple to facilitate audio content distribution and monetization for publishers and creators within the open ecosystem. This aims to simplify the workflow and unlock new revenue opportunities for both creators and advertisers.
Index Exchange's John Tigg discusses how the rapid growth of streaming and AI in programmatic advertising is driving a critical need for greater transparency and control for brands. As programmatic encompasses a larger share of digital media spend across display, streaming, and CTV, advertisers are reassessing their strategies and demanding more accountability. He highlights that Connected TV is pushing higher-quality programmatic standards and that transparent platforms with direct publisher relationships, quality data, and infrastructure will differentiate trusted partners.
Disney has significantly expanded its interactive advertising formats on Disney+, leveraging its in-house Disney eXperience Composer (DXC) platform to develop and deploy new ad products. These include Gateway Go, Pause Ads, Pause+, and Ad Selector, which have shown high engagement rates and cater to a broader industry trend of streaming services increasing ad revenues through non-traditional formats.
Connected TV advertisers in India are facing a 'second-screen' challenge, with viewers frequently engaging with smartphones during ad breaks, which necessitates new cross-screen strategies. This behavior offers an opportunity for advertisers to leverage household-level data for targeted, coordinated cross-screen campaigns. The article emphasizes that effective CTV ad strategies must adapt to fragmented attention, proposing shorter formats and integrated mobile campaigns.
Gagan Uppal of Xapads Media highlights the significant growth of the MENA CTV advertising market, projected to reach $65.2 billion by 2031, necessitating a shift towards performance-led measurement frameworks. The article emphasizes the need for advertisers to focus on action-oriented metrics beyond traditional impressions and completion rates, as CTV viewers are increasingly interactive and multi-screen. It advocates for new measurement strategies that track QR scan rates, interaction dwell time, cross-device movement, and attention metrics to optimize campaigns for conversions.
Nielsen launched Four-Screen Ad Deduplication for YouTube campaigns in Italy, integrating linear TV measurement into Nielsen ONE Ads. This allows media buyers to see unique, deduplicated reach across computer, mobile, CTV, and linear TV, addressing fragmentation in video viewing measurement. The product is part of a wider international rollout planned by Nielsen.
Peer39 has acquired Adloox, consolidating contextual targeting, brand safety, and verification services into a unified framework. This move aims to provide advertisers with consistent quality signals across various platforms and address the demand for transparency in fragmented digital advertising environments.
Policybazaar, an insurance aggregator, partnered with Samsung Ads to precisely target incremental Connected TV (CTV) audiences in India. This collaboration allowed Policybazaar to leverage Samsung Ads' platform for advanced targeting based on demographics, content consumption, and screen size, enhancing ad relevance and campaign ROI for their high-consideration products. Policybazaar is shifting a significant portion of its TV budget to CTV due to its ability to reach exclusive streaming-only audiences.
Magnite's 'Streams & Screens: Hong Kong' study, based on a survey of over 900 streamers, details evolving viewing habits and ad engagement in Hong Kong. The report highlights the increasing importance of CTV for advertisers and viewer openness to new ad formats and generative AI in the region. These insights provide guidance for brands and advertisers seeking to effectively reach audiences in this expanding streaming market.
Lotame published a resource outlining how to build an effective data strategy for advertising, emphasizing structure and governance for integrating various data types. The guide aims to help streaming professionals navigate data fragmentation for better ad activation and collaboration. It highlights the importance of data quality, governance, and the role of data marketplaces in enriching datasets.
A coalition of free-market groups is lobbying U.S. lawmakers to preserve direct-to-consumer (D2C) drug advertising, which faces increasing regulatory scrutiny and potential restrictions. This push aims to protect the massive healthcare and pharma advertising market, estimated to top $33 billion this year. The outcome of this debate will impact ad revenues for both digital and traditional platforms, including streaming services.
Streaming platforms and social media are transforming sports content distribution and monetization models by moving from exclusive licenses to flexible digital passes and microtransactions. This shift is diversifying revenue streams for leagues and broadcasters, increasing analytical opportunities for advertisers, and changing fan engagement with real-time interactions and digital wallets. The article discusses how these trends impact the economics of sports coverage, highlighting the role of data analytics in redefining sponsorship value.
Soccer content is experiencing significant growth on FAST platforms, driven by advancements in ad-stitching technology and increased sponsor demand for streaming advertising inventory. Streaming platforms are now acquiring 38% more soccer rights, while broadcast networks' acquisition is down 15%, due to factors like improved monetization capabilities and the higher data value of streaming viewers. This shift is enabling soccer to be fully sustained on streaming through a multi-faceted digital revenue stack.
WMT Digital has launched WMT Fan Intelligence, a specialized Customer Data Platform (CDP) for sports and entertainment organizations. The platform aims to unify first-party fan data to enable personalized experiences and drive revenue, with early access partners including BYU, Texas A&M, and San Diego State athletics departments. It differentiates itself from general CDPs by focusing on unique behavioral signals in sports and live events, utilizing AI-powered recommendations and analytics.
The Qatar Football Association (QFA) has deployed Sponix's cloud-based virtual advertising technology for the first time during an international friendly match. This collaboration with broadcaster Alkass demonstrates QFA's commitment to innovation and creating new commercial opportunities through integrated sponsor placements. Sponix is expanding its partnerships across the Middle East, highlighting virtual advertising's growing role in sports sponsorship.
This Wurl article details the significant growth of Free Ad-supported Streaming TV (FAST), with viewing hours increasing 43% year-over-year and projected ad revenues exceeding $12 billion by 2027. It highlights how content investment, improved advertising capabilities like addressability and scene-level targeting, and a self-reinforcing cycle are driving this expansion, benefiting both advertisers and publishers.
