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.
Connor Kernochan, Head of Apps and Games at Vibe, discusses strategies for measuring CTV as a performance channel for mobile app installs. The interview highlights the use of incrementality testing and integration with existing measurement tech stacks to attribute conversions to CTV campaigns.
Chief Media argues that the current CTV advertising landscape is hindered by direct-sales models and high costs, which exclude smaller performance-based brands. The firm advocates for the adoption of third-party self-serve platforms to aggregate inventory and lower barriers to entry for smaller advertisers.
Industry leaders at Advertising Week New York are advocating for the development of standardized measurement frameworks to unify performance data across Connected TV (CTV) advertising. The initiative aims to help advertisers justify increased budget allocations by providing clearer proof of business outcomes and attribution.
SiteLine has published a guide and mathematical formula to help operators estimate traffic discrepancies caused by consent-gated analytics scripts. The resource distinguishes between actual site traffic and measurable traffic lost due to cookie banners, while highlighting the role of cookieless tracking in mitigating these reporting gaps.
Carat, NBCUniversal, FreeWheel, and Newton have launched an agentic AI tool designed to automate upfront media planning and buying workflows. The solution integrates Dentsu audience insights with NBCUniversal’s ID graph via the FreeWheel Identity Network to streamline investment optimization.
FreeWheel has appointed Hamid Davari as Commercial Director for the MENA region to lead the company's strategic expansion in the area. Davari, formerly of OSN, will focus on providing local broadcasters and streaming platforms with access to FreeWheel's advertising technology stack.
The article analyzes how Meta could integrate advertising into its Muse AI agent by allowing the model to search existing ad catalogs within a secure virtual machine. This approach aims to enable personalized ad matching while maintaining user privacy by isolating personal data from Meta's broader ad systems.
Kroger, Vidmob, and MMA Global have released a study demonstrating that AI-driven predictive creative scoring can forecast ecommerce conversion rates with 81% accuracy. The research analyzed 1,934 creative assets across Meta and Google DV360, suggesting that data-driven creative optimization can significantly improve media spend efficiency.
TikTok has rebranded its Pangle ad network to the TikTok Ad Network, enabling advertisers to extend campaigns across approximately 400,000 third-party apps. The move aims to capture more advertising budget by offering reach beyond the TikTok platform, though industry experts emphasize that success depends on transparency and incremental audience value.
Spotify reported a 60% year-over-year increase in active advertisers for Q2 2026 and is updating its Ads Manager to improve performance measurement. The company is shifting its advertising strategy to focus on fandom-based engagement, leveraging its internal data signals to help brands earn relevance with listeners.
TiVo Ads reported a 54% year-on-year revenue increase and 6.3 million monthly active users, driven by growth in home screen advertising and FAST channel inventory. The company also expanded its audience intelligence capabilities in the US and UK to provide advertisers with enhanced measurement and attribution data.
AppLovin shares rose 5.81% following investor interest in its AXON AI advertising engine's expansion into the e-commerce sector. Despite the stock movement, the company continues to navigate legal challenges and increased compute costs associated with AI model training.
Research from the University of Canberra and Plan International highlights how social media algorithms create gender-segregated content feeds, prompting industry calls for advertisers to audit delivery data. Strategists are advocating for more balanced reach and transparency to mitigate the impact of algorithmic bias on audience fragmentation.
DoubleVerify has launched attribution measurement for ChatGPT ads through its Rockerbox platform, allowing advertisers to track return on ad spend. Additionally, the company is collaborating with OpenAI on a pilot program to develop brand suitability guardrails for conversational AI environments.
Podcast advertising is facing a measurement crisis as buyers increasingly question the reliability of impressions as a proxy for actual consumption. Industry experts are calling for greater platform transparency and standardized metrics to prevent a valuation bubble as consumption behaviors fragment across the ecosystem.
OpenX has launched a Child-Safe Marketplace designed to provide a vetted, programmatic path for child-directed CTV inventory. The platform utilizes PRIVO auditing and technical blocks to ensure compliance with COPPA and other privacy regulations.
Burt Intelligence CEO Shay Brog discusses the transition from fragmented, retrospective publisher reporting to unified, prescriptive decision intelligence. The conversation emphasizes the necessity of governed data and cross-channel visibility as foundational requirements for effectively integrating AI into revenue operations.
UK digital video ad spend grew 18% year-on-year to £5.1 billion in H1 2026, with the TV+ segment reaching £1.7 billion. Despite this growth, 42% of marketers cite supply chain complexity and transparency as the primary barriers to scaling CTV investment.
Netflix will launch its ad-supported subscription tier in nine European markets on March 1, 2027. The expansion utilizes the company's existing global advertising infrastructure to reach price-sensitive subscribers and scale its regional ad inventory.
VASTlint 0.14.0 introduces a new LineCursor parser that improves VAST validation speeds by 15x by optimizing XML location scanning. This performance enhancement is designed to allow ad servers and SSAI services to perform full VAST validation within the latency constraints of real-time ad auctions.
A report from Comcast Advertising and MediaScience, analyzing over 30,000 campaigns, finds that multiscreen advertising strategies deliver 36% more ad viewing time and 2.2 times higher brand recall than social media. The study also highlights that combining traditional TV and streaming increases website visits by 105% compared to single-channel approaches.
Samsung Ads is advocating for media planners to integrate gaming console usage into their CTV advertising strategies by leveraging ACR data. The firm suggests that identifying gaming sessions allows advertisers to reach highly engaged audiences during transitions between gaming and streaming content.
Nine Publishing reports a 49% year-over-year revenue increase following the adoption of Direct Pay Open Bidding and a shift in programmatic strategy. The article discusses how U.S. antitrust remedies against Google are enabling publishers to bypass legacy ad tech lock-ins and improve yield through independent supply-side platforms.
Skydeo, an audience intelligence platform, reports a 124% CAGR since its 2021 pivot to a data marketplace model. The company provides predictive audience segments for CTV and programmatic environments to help advertisers navigate the decline of traditional tracking identifiers.
EMARKETER analyst Max Willens projects that social video and CTV will capture 40% of total media spend by 2030, driven by a shift toward micro and nano creators. Brands are increasingly repurposing creator content across the full marketing funnel, necessitating more sophisticated, multi-frame measurement approaches.
Locala has launched CTV Planner, a tool designed to help advertisers optimize CTV and online video investments by using AI to analyze local market conditions and business signals. The platform aims to reduce ad spend waste by enabling granular, city-by-city strategy adjustments for media teams.
This article provides a comparative financial analysis of The Trade Desk and Alphabet, focusing on their respective positions in the digital advertising market. It highlights the trade-off between The Trade Desk's independent programmatic platform and Alphabet's integrated ecosystem, noting recent performance challenges for the former.
Google Ads has introduced six templates for video sequence campaigns, allowing advertisers to deliver a series of clips in a specific, predetermined order. The format requires target CPM bidding and mandatory frequency capping to manage viewer exposure across the sequence.
At the unBoxed 2026 conference, Amazon introduced the Amazon Ads Agent and the DVA+ platform to unify its advertising stack. These tools leverage agentic AI to automate media planning, campaign execution, and budget allocation across streaming, display, and audio inventory.
Digital Remedy has integrated its Echo measurement platform with the RemyAI assistant to provide cross-channel attribution and data analysis for programmatic media campaigns. The tools aim to help agencies and brands unify fragmented data across demand-side platforms to better understand the impact of multi-channel advertising.
A federal judge in Manhattan has cleared the way for a jury to hear $1.72 billion in damages claims against Google's ad-tech stack, citing evidence of anti-competitive auction mechanics. Separately, Apple has expanded its Safari blocklist to include hundreds of programmatic advertising and data companies, further restricting ad-tech operations on its platform.
VideoWeek hosted its fifth annual European Video Awards in London, recognizing industry leaders and technology providers across CTV, ad tech, and video campaign performance. The awards highlighted innovations from companies including FreeWheel, Wurl, LG Ad Solutions, and Dailymotion.
The European Programmatic TV Initiative (EPTVI) has released its Stage Two report, outlining six proposals to standardize programmatic TV operations across fragmented European markets. The recommendations focus on improving interoperability, reporting consistency, and creative identification to facilitate cross-border programmatic trading.
A federal judge has ruled that Google will not be forced to divest its adtech stack, instead ordering operational changes to its AdX and DFP platforms. This decision impacts the competitive landscape for The Trade Desk, which has historically positioned its neutral adtech solutions as an alternative to Google's integrated ecosystem.
Amazon Ads and Horizon Media released research indicating that streaming viewers are increasingly consolidating subscriptions into bundled services. The report highlights how AMC Networks utilized Amazon's interactive streaming TV ad formats to improve campaign reach efficiency by 18%.
Triton Digital released data indicating that 80% of APAC agencies are now purchasing programmatic audio inventory, with podcast consumption patterns showing strong engagement for new episode releases. The report highlights regional listening habits and genre preferences to assist publishers and advertisers in optimizing their programmatic monetization strategies.
Executives from the New York Post, Sports Illustrated, and Tastemade discussed strategies for leveraging first-party data to maintain CPMs and differentiate inventory in the competitive CTV market. The discussion highlighted the importance of combining data strategies with high-quality content and advanced ad formats to improve monetization across off-platform distribution.
Former General Motors CMO Norm de Greve has joined the advisory board of Pixability, an AI-focused YouTube marketing company. In an interview, de Greve discusses the need for brands to adopt a holistic strategy that integrates paid, owned, and creator-led content to better navigate YouTube's role in AI-driven search.
A report from Truthset estimates that inaccurate identity data in CTV will result in $7.4 billion of wasted programmatic ad spend in 2026. The article argues that the industry should shift away from IP-based inference toward leveraging consented OS-level household identity signals to improve measurement and ad performance.
Twitch reported 8.6 billion hours of viewership through September 2026, highlighting a 51% increase in indie game engagement. The platform is actively deploying AI-driven brand matching and interactive chat-based advertising tools to enhance creator monetization.
This technical guide details the architectural requirements for building a real-time ad serving system, focusing on latency-sensitive request paths and asynchronous event processing. It provides a framework for managing campaign targeting, budget enforcement, and impression tracking across distributed serving nodes.
Magnite advocates for a shift in CTV advertising measurement from traditional ROAS to incremental lifetime value (iLTV). The company argues that connecting CTV ad exposure to long-term business outcomes via closed-loop measurement is essential for proving campaign effectiveness.
Apparel brand Carve Designs conducted a 60-day test of connected TV advertising with a $20,000 monthly budget to evaluate performance and attribution. The study, conducted in partnership with marketing analytics firm Keen Decision Systems, highlights the importance of long-term attribution modeling for DTC brands.
A recent Apple iOS update has restricted The Trade Desk from serving advertisements on the Safari browser. This development underscores the ongoing friction between walled garden ecosystems and the open web, impacting programmatic advertising workflows.
OpenX has appointed former Roku executive John Rogers as senior vice president of global publisher development to lead its CTV and live-streaming expansion. Rogers will focus on scaling the company's supply-side targeting and programmatic monetization efforts as the platform integrates more AI and audience-based signals.
Starling has launched a new supply-side platform (SSP) specifically engineered for the connected television market, backed by MBL Partners. The platform aims to improve transparency and ad performance by leveraging program-level intelligence and audience signals for publishers and advertisers.
Netflix held its first UK upfront, announcing new ad-tech capabilities including demographic targeting, first-party data APIs, and a reach forecasting tool. The event marks the streamer's strategic push to align its ad-supported tier with traditional broadcast sales models and measurement standards.
Disney+ has updated its subscriber agreement to include broader language regarding advertising and sponsorships, mirroring similar policies at Netflix and Prime Video. While the change currently applies to live events and special programming, analysts note it reflects a broader industry shift toward redefining the value proposition of ad-free tiers as subscriber growth plateaus.
The European Programmatic TV Initiative (EPTVI) has published six proposals aimed at standardizing programmatic advertising across fragmented European markets. The initiative is now moving into a third stage focused on market testing and the development of shared technical and commercial frameworks.
Telekom Slovenije has deployed Synamedia Iris to enable local ad insertion on international linear channels like AMC and BBC. The solution allows the operator to monetize previously unavailable ad inventory within existing broadcast infrastructure without requiring set-top box updates.
James Varndell · Bitmovin
