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.
Global social media ad spend is projected to reach $480 billion by 2030, with Facebook remaining the platform marketers rate highest for importance and ROI. Despite this, marketers plan significant budget increases for Connected TV (CTV) advertising in 2026, leading all other ad channels, reflecting a shift in ad spending. The report also highlights Meta's ad pixel deployment on over 2 million websites and the growing role of AI in social advertising workflows.
Beet.TV has announced its series of industry events and content partnerships for 2026, which will cover key topics relevant to streaming professionals. Highlighted events include the AI Media Summit, IAB NewFronts, and CES, focusing on areas like AI, commerce media, and advertising. The series features collaborations with companies such as Criteo, DeepIntent, Cuebiq, Equativ, Tatari, Swoop, Seedtag, The Trade Desk, Channel Factory, FreeWheel, Future Today, Intuit SMB MediaLabs, and Best Buy Ads.
iSpot.tv offers various advertising measurement solutions for Peterson Custom Solutions LLC, encompassing creative assessment, audience measurement, and business outcomes. These tools provide insights into ad effectiveness, media optimization, and campaign attribution crucial for streaming professionals to analyze their advertising spend and performance across different platforms, including streaming publishers.
The 2026 Audio Advertising Awards recognized campaigns by British Airways Holidays, Netflix, and Topps, highlighting creative audio advertising and brand partnerships. Key categories included creative direction, host-read ads, and campaign launches, with winners leveraging platforms like podcasts and radio to reach target audiences. The awards also featured an "Audio AdTech Solution" category for Goodstuff and Azerion's work for Fever-Tree, demonstrating effective attribution and ROI in audio advertising.
Free smart TV applications are reportedly transforming connected TVs into web-scraping proxies for AI data collection, raising concerns about user privacy and data security. This practice impacts the CTV ecosystem and presents compliance challenges for streaming professionals. The article highlights how AI is being covertly used to gather data through installed apps.
Performance by TBWA has developed Adirect, an AI-powered platform that automates TV ad buying, and ITV, an AI service for video ad production, to reduce costs and increase accessibility for small and medium-sized businesses. The company aims to level the playing field for digital marketing through TV advertising by leveraging AI and data. These platforms streamline the process from ad campaign setup to video creation and distribution, including to global streaming channels via Google and Amazon networks.
YouTube Shorts has achieved the first MRC brand safety accreditation for short-form video advertising, providing audited controls and measurement processes for advertisers. This allows media buyers to use pre-bid risk filters and suitability tiers for campaigns, although some placement-level exclusions are still unavailable for Shorts ads. The accreditation establishes a new benchmark for brand safety in the short-form video ad market.
Andrew Gazdecki reported that a SaaS platform designed for YouTube A/B testing and optimization achieved $206,000 profit on $211,000 annual recurring revenue, demonstrating over 85% profit margins. This platform helps creators grow their channels through optimization tools. The report highlights the profitability of specialized tools for creator monetization within streaming ecosystems.
PlayBox Technology has released a new white paper detailing the convergence of SCTE-104/35, VAST, AI, and 6G technologies in broadcast monetization, particularly in enabling addressable TV advertising. The paper highlights projected global CTV ad spend reaching $52 billion by 2029 and how these technologies facilitate a shift from mass-reach to precision ad delivery. It also explores the role of AI in markerless SCTE generation and emotional contextual targeting, alongside the importance of privacy compliance through Data Clean Rooms for the evolving advertising landscape.
Sportradar Group AG has extended its exclusive data and audiovisual betting rights deal with the All England Club for Wimbledon. This agreement provides real-time data feeds and low-latency video streams to global sportsbook partners, enhancing live markets and micro betting capabilities. Sportradar will also supply integrity services and distribute over 40,000 tennis matches annually to its clients.
Amazon Prime Video will offer a pay-per-view live stream of the Portugal vs Chile friendly match in the UK for £2.99, while US audiences can watch on Fox Sports 2, Fox Deportes, or Fubo. This highlights diverse content monetization and distribution strategies for live sports globally.
The article analyzes the fragmented and expensive current streaming landscape in New Zealand, particularly for sports, leading to increased piracy and consumer dissatisfaction. It highlights how streaming services like Sky Sport Now and DAZN are "double-dipping" by charging high subscription fees while aggressively forcing users to watch unskippable advertisements. The analysis argues that the focus on Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) by media giants, coupled with limited content options for sports fans, is driving consumers toward illegal IPTV services.
Bigg Boss personality Bandagi Kalra criticized JioHotstar for an excessive number of ads and poor audio during her streaming of 'Dhurandhar 2: Revenge.' Her social media post highlighted rising user frustration with the increasing presence of advertisements on streaming platforms. This incident reflects broader user sentiment against ad-supported streaming models being adopted by various platforms.
The article explains why premium OTT platforms still include ads during live sports streaming, despite offering ad-free tiers for other content. This is attributed to the high cost of sports rights, the deep integration of sponsorship into broadcast production, and the significant engineering challenges of delivering ad-free streams to millions of concurrent users during live events.
After Party Studios plans to produce fast-turnaround scripted content for YouTube, following its acquisition of Sister. This move signals a focus on ad-supported streaming and leveraging IP for rapid content creation within the industry. The strategy aims to capitalize on advertiser demand for accessible, high-volume content.
This article discusses the perception and future of retail media, highlighting concerns that it could become 'mid' due to over-reliance on sponsored products and Amazon's dominance. Industry experts, however, argue that non-Amazon and offsite retail media markets are substantial and growing, with potential for omnichannel reach, and that retailers need to invest seriously to capitalize on the opportunity. Major companies like Amazon, Walmart, and Target are generating significant ad revenues, indicating retail media is becoming a key profit center.
Blueface Ltd. is seeking a Senior Product Manager in New York to join its FreeWheel Streaming Hub Team, focusing on programmatic advertising and AI model implementation. This role emphasizes advanced ad-decisioning and machine learning integration within streaming workflows. The position highlights the industry's ongoing demand for expertise at the intersection of ad tech and AI.
This article discusses the challenges B2B SaaS marketers face with programmatic advertising attribution due to fragmented data and long sales cycles. It details how to implement robust tracking infrastructure, multi-touch attribution models, and integrate DSP data with CRM outcomes, positioning platforms like Cometly as solutions. The piece emphasizes moving away from last-click attribution to models that better reflect programmatic's role in the buyer's journey and addresses issues like third-party cookie deprecation with server-side tracking.
TikTok is developing "Smart Symphony," an AI-powered ad tool targeting a 2026 release. This tool aims to automate ad generation, potentially reshaping creative workflows and ad production efficiency in CTV advertising.
First-party data adoption is rapidly growing among brands, with 71% increasing their datasets, driven by privacy regulations and 2.9x revenue lift. Despite increasing adoption of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) by marketers, an execution gap persists, as 52% of marketing teams lack ownership of their data strategy. The global CDP market is projected to reach $10.3 billion by 2026, indicating continued investment in this infrastructure.
Google has paused its plan to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome until 2025, instead implementing new user privacy controls. This shift reinforces the industry's move toward privacy-first, identity-driven marketing, with companies like Experian offering solutions to help marketers adapt to a cookieless future. The change is significant for marketers, including those in streaming, who rely on targeting and measurement.
The Trade Desk is seeking a Senior Manager, Inventory Development, to cultivate publisher relationships and bolster its presence in transparent access and addressability across the open internet. The role focuses on driving the adoption of identity strategies, including Unified ID 2.0, and supporting clean supply initiatives through IAB standards. This position is key to growing programmatic inventory access and value for The Trade Desk.
Fox Corporation is seeking a Senior Product Manager for Emerging Technology (Ad Tech) to lead the development of AI capabilities, including LLMs and generative AI, for its ad sales and operations. This role focuses on leveraging intelligent systems to enhance media planning, sales enablement, campaign execution, and yield optimization within the ad tech ecosystem. The position requires translating AI advancements into scalable, production-ready advertising products that improve revenue performance and operational efficiency.
Nielsen and Mediaocean announced a collaboration to integrate advanced audience measurement for data-driven linear TV campaigns into Mediaocean's Prisma platform. This partnership aims to provide marketers with consistent audience definitions across ad planning and measurement workflows. The integration will officially launch in September 2026.
This article provides a foundational guide to ad servers, explaining their history, function, and types (first-party and third-party) in managing and delivering online advertising campaigns. It details how ad servers work from a technical perspective and lists several popular ad server providers in the industry. The piece highlights the ongoing strategic importance of ad servers in the evolving AdTech landscape, including programmatic, retail media, and CTV.
Fox Corporation is seeking a VP of Ad Sales Strategy for its new direct-to-consumer subscription streaming platform, "FOX One," within Tubi Media Group. This role will be responsible for defining and scaling the advertising business, monetization strategy, and go-to-market approach for the new service.
This article from Chief Marketer highlights the evolving landscape of ad technology, focusing on the potential for agentic measurement to redefine the ad market and the problem of pirated sports streams distorting TV ratings. It also touches on how bots affect content owners and the use of 'wrapped' insights for audience segmentation.
Osmos has published an analysis providing a decision framework for Retail Media Networks (RMNs) on whether to build, buy, or hybridize their ad tech stack by 2026. The guide outlines five deployment models, a weighted scoring rubric, a total-cost-of-ownership model, and a vendor comparison to help RMN operators meet IAB's 2026 commerce media network differentiation demands.
Roku is hiring a Senior Machine Learning Engineer for its Ad Engineering team in Bengaluru, India. The role involves developing a generative AI-powered video creative platform to enable advertisers to create high-quality video ads at scale. This new platform aims to improve the speed and scalability of CTV advertising on Roku.
Meta reportedly generated $14.3 million from Medicare scam ads that targeted seniors 215 million times through Facebook's platform, according to a CCDH investigation. The report highlights how digital advertising tools were exploited for fraud, with many ads featuring AI-generated deepfakes of public figures.
Investigative journalist Craig Silverman details his process for uncovering a Nigerian scammer who runs fake obituary websites to generate revenue through digital ad fraud. The scammer uses a real-time auction system for programmatic advertising, often employing aggressive and malicious ad campaigns that redirect users to affiliate sites. Silverman highlights the ease with which these fraudulent sites can operate and exploit the digital advertising ecosystem's scale and lack of transparency.
YouTube is rolling out new monetization features for creators on Shorts, including affiliate marketing, fan funding, and product tagging. These additions aim to provide creators with more diverse revenue streams within the short-form video ecosystem. This development signifies YouTube's effort to enhance creator monetization tools on its platform.
mFilterIt details the evolution of click fraud, which now includes AI-powered bots and full-funnel attacks across various ad platforms. The company offers solutions for advanced fraud detection and prevention, citing client savings up to $1.9M. The article provides a guide for marketers on what to look for in a click fraud protection tool in 2026, including proactive click validation, multi-channel compatibility, full-funnel traffic scoring, and AI-powered detection engines.
Specificity Inc. highlights the urgency of addressing ad fraud, projected to reach over $100 billion by 2026, with 20.6% of programmatic traffic being invalid. The article advocates for a shift from algorithmic reliance to human-verified intent data to prevent financial losses and data corruption in advertising campaigns, particularly in areas like Connected TV (CTV) advertising.
Anura.io CEO Rich Kahn discusses the substantial financial losses digital ad fraud causes, estimated at $160 billion annually, and how his SaaS platform identifies fake leads. The discussion highlights the platform's role in detecting ad fraud, including sophisticated AI-driven methods, which directly impacts streaming ad revenues and the need for robust fraud detection in CTV campaigns.
The Trade Desk is seeking a Business Development Director to manage and grow its strategic partnership with Procter & Gamble, one of its largest clients. This role focuses on driving new revenue and deepening relationships within programmatic advertising, specifically across CTV, identity, retail media, and measurement. The position highlights The Trade Desk's emphasis on high-value client accounts and expanding its platform capabilities for major advertisers.
Experian Audiences, offering over 3,500 audience segments, are now integrated into the Adobe Advertising DSP. This integration aims to accelerate audience strategy to activation for advertisers and agencies, improving campaign performance across various channels, including CTV, display, and audio.
Adduro offers a platform that coordinates streaming TV, audio, and display ad delivery, applying a single frequency cap and unified reporting across these channels. This approach aims to reduce ad fatigue for consumers and provides comprehensive campaign insights for advertisers. The service allows advertisers to plan or audit their coordinated streaming advertising strategies.
Magnite has expanded its partnership with dentsu in Sweden to enhance programmatic CTV advertising capabilities. This collaboration aims to streamline CTV activation for dentsu's AMX Premium Video solution, boosting reach and efficiency in the Swedish market.
The VAB (Video Advertising Bureau) provides a collection of glossaries and overviews focused on advertising, marketing, media, and television, aiming to clarify key concepts for streaming industry professionals. These resources cover technical and business aspects of ad tech, including addressable TV, CTV, digital video supply chain, FAST ecosystems, programmatic TV, and video measurement terminology. The platform acts as an educational resource to help navigate the complex ad tech landscape within the streaming industry.
Magnite and Tubi are collaborating to enable small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to access CTV advertising through programmatic placement and AI-powered creative production, showcased at the recent L26 event. This initiative aims to lower the historical barriers of high cost and complex production for SMBs to advertise on television. Factors enabling this include generative AI reducing creative costs and programmatic distribution leveraging extensive CTV inventory for precise targeting.
WURL CEO Dave Bernath discusses the evolution of CTV advertising from show-level to scene-level contextual targeting. This advancement uses AI to analyze content in real-time, improving ad relevance and viewer engagement. The shift aims to provide a more premium advertising experience and drive better campaign performance.
Josie Koenigs of the University of Northern Iowa conducted an experimental evaluation of AI video generators specifically for advertising applications. This academic research investigates the intersection of advanced AI technology and its practical use in advertising. The study provides insights relevant to professionals involved in ad tech and streaming monetization.
US soccer leagues and clubs, including MLS and NWSL, are prioritizing first-party fan data collection using platforms like Jump and internal tools such as Fan Genome. This initiative aims to improve fan experience, personalization, and engagement. Tools like Jump help unify backend systems for ticketing and retail, enabling better targeting for ad campaigns and understanding fan ROI.
Zuora Inc. has launched its new AI Monetization Suite and AI Pricing Simulator, designed to help companies price and monetize AI products effectively. These tools enable flexible pricing models and accurate revenue recognition for various AI usage scenarios before product launch. The suite aims to simplify complex monetization challenges as AI drives more variable pricing and usage-based models.
Social media platforms Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube are increasingly becoming digital shopping malls, with short-form video and algorithms driving product discovery and purchase decisions. This shift, particularly significant in India, is changing advertiser spending patterns and the roles of content creators, brands, and traditional e-commerce platforms. The article highlights the rise of 'discovery commerce' where content and algorithms influence purchasing within social feeds.
Disney's entertainment streaming arm achieved a 10.6% operating margin, with operating income surging 88% to $582 million in the quarter ending March 28, 2026. This significant growth was primarily driven by advertising and price hikes, signaling a strategic shift towards ad-supported models for streaming monetization. The company's President of Global Advertising, Rita Ferro, is highlighted for building the underlying ad technology across Disney's platforms.
Poland's streaming market is maturing, with subscription growth slowing and piracy, particularly torrent use, rebounding significantly to 13% for internet users. Operators are becoming crucial distribution partners, handling nearly four in ten subscriptions. Streamers, including Netflix, are increasingly exploring ad-supported tiers to generate new revenue streams amidst slowing subscriber acquisition.
Capitalize Media Limited (CML) is a South African company specializing in the commercialization of sports and entertainment properties, notably expanding SuperSport Schools' youth sports media ecosystem. CML focuses on brand integration, content integration, and commercial strategies to connect brands with audiences through meaningful storytelling and sustainable partnerships. The company helps brands utilize streaming, linear TV, VOD, and social media platforms for advertising in youth sports.
Connected TV (CTV) advertising is shifting from audience growth to measurable business outcomes, driven by AI automation, retail media networks, and live sports. Advertisers now demand that CTV campaigns deliver performance data rather than just impressions. The future of CTV advertising emphasizes accountability, automation, and governance, with agentic AI playing a significant role in media buying decisions.
James Varndell · Bitmovin
