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.
Brian O'Kelley is proposing a new standard, `adagents.json`, to serve as a replacement for `ads.txt`. The proposal argues that `ads.txt` is unable to express the commercial complexity of Connected TV (CTV) advertising. The new `adagents.json` standard would add features such as placement IDs, delegation types, and country scoping.
Comscore has signed agreements with Sinclair and more than 14 other broadcast stations to provide local TV measurement services. The deals are driven by demand from national advertisers for cross-platform planning and measurement across linear broadcast and connected TV (CTV).
Stagwell has become the first partner to adopt The Trade Desk's new AI product, Koa agents. The integration connects the Stagwell Media Platform with The Trade Desk, using new 'agentic capabilities' to automate advertising planning, activation, and optimization.
Australian retailer JB Hi-Fi is the latest major retailer in the country creating its own in-house advertising network, part of a broader trend threatening traditional media. These retailers are leveraging their technology and customer data to compete directly for advertising dollars that have historically gone to free-to-air television networks.
SiriusXM will become the exclusive U.S. advertising sales representative for audio content on YouTube. The partnership enables advertisers to purchase guaranteed audio ads at scale across YouTube's podcasts, music, and other listening-focused content.
Amagi announced AdFlow Orchestrator at the NAB Show, a new product designed to manage ad break compliance and monetization for FAST channels. The solution targets issues where platforms reject traditional 4-8 minute linear ad pods, which can lead to ad server timeouts and reduced revenue.
Bell Media has launched its 2026 Upfront Digital Offer, providing preferred rates and discounts on advertising inventory across its digital portfolio, including Crave, Tubi, TSN, RDS, and its Connected TV footprint. Available until June 4, 2026, the offer includes discounts of up to 35% on digital investments, with fixed rates for platforms like Tubi ($20 ROS). Advertisers with a minimum spend of $100,000 receive a complimentary outcomes measurement report, created in partnership with Environics Analytics and Loblaw Advance™, to track sales lift and ROAS.
Amazon Web Services has expanded the availability of its AWS Elemental MediaTailor service to the Europe (London) AWS Region. The expansion allows video providers serving Northern Europe to run ad insertion workloads closer to their audience, aiming to reduce ad decisioning latency and improve ad fill rates. The London region also provides an additional option for redundancy and capacity for customers already using the service in the Europe (Ireland) region.
Expedia Group has partnered with adtech platform Magnite, enabling brands and agencies to use Expedia's first-party travel data for audience targeting. The agreement allows for targeting across streaming TV, online video, display, and audio, leveraging data from Expedia's approximately 200 petabytes. This marks an expansion of Expedia Group Advertising, the company's media network that launched in 2024 to include offsite ad buys.
FreeWheel is marketing its Buyer Cloud product, a demand-side platform (DSP) formerly known as Beeswax. The product, part of the FreeWheel Advertiser Suite, is designed for programmatic ad buying with features including access to premium CTV inventory, flexible turnkey or customizable buying environments, and integrated identity resolution. The platform also offers transparent analytics with log-level data for measurement and optimization.
Expedia Group Advertising and Magnite have formed a partnership to integrate Expedia's 200 petabytes of traveler intent data into programmatic advertising channels. The data will be available for targeting across streaming, video, display, and audio inventory via Magnite's platform.
At a TVNewsCheck panel at NAB, executives from NBCUniversal, LG, Nielsen, and Chronicle Studios discussed the industry's shift from viewership metrics towards measuring audience attention, engagement, and advertiser outcomes. Nielsen detailed its plan to move to a one-minute viewing qualifier for local TV measurement, down from five minutes, aiming to align with digital standards. The panel also covered challenges in content discovery, with Chronicle Studios presenting agentic AI as a solution for finding audiences on large platforms like YouTube.
Ad tech firms Clinch and OpenGlass have partnered, certifying Clinch's ad-serving tags to run within OpenGlass's Advanced CTV Formats, starting with pause ads. The integration provides a single path for advertisers to deliver personalized, AI-driven creative programmatically across a publisher network that includes Paramount, Tubi, TiVo, and Xumo. This certification aims to solve the operational fragmentation that previously limited creative personalization for the pause ad format at scale, enabling attributes like cross-device attribution and real-time optimization.
PubMatic has partnered with media buying consortium Untapped Growth to integrate its member agencies with the AgenticOS platform. The collaboration enables agencies to use proprietary buyer agents within PubMatic's advertising infrastructure to run campaigns across connected TV, mobile, and online video. Initial trials reportedly yielded a 40-50% reduction in supply chain costs, an 87% increase in campaign setup speed, and a 30% decrease in eCPM.
Ad-tech company Seedtag has launched NeuroX, a neuro-contextual advertising exchange for agencies, publishers, and brands. The product uses Seedtag's proprietary AI, Liz, to analyze web and connected television content for interest, emotion, and intent before an ad impression is traded. The platform is positioned as a cookieless alternative to identity-based targeting and offers multiple activation methods including managed service and open marketplace buying.
According to a report from IMARC Group, the Indian advertising market is projected to grow from INR 994 billion in 2025 to INR 2,157.71 billion by 2034, representing a 9.00% CAGR. The analysis states that digital advertising has surpassed traditional channels, now holding 44% of total expenditure, with mobile platforms driving 78% of that digital spend. The report highlights the growth of programmatic advertising, Connected TV (CTV), Retail Media Networks (RMNs), and the impact of the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act as key market drivers.
An analysis piece from Luquire's Nichole Maggio argues that programmatic ad budgets are inefficient due to hidden fees from intermediaries, data surcharges for niche targeting, and fraudulent Made-for-Advertising (MFA) sites. Citing an ANA study that found only 36% of programmatic spend becomes "effective working media," the author advises advertisers to demand transparency from agencies on fee structures, ad placements, and brand safety measures. The article also notes the rise of AI-generated content used to create MFA sites that siphon ad budgets.
AMC Global Media is expanding its partnership with Magnite, making its unified linear and streaming ad inventory programmatically available via a single access point powered by Magnite's ClearLine. AMC is also using Magnite’s Live Scheduler to optimize live linear addressable inventory across its linear networks, FAST channels, and AMC+. The partnership aims to streamline media buying workflows and simplify access to AMC's content.
A report from ad agency Ad Results Media analyzes the migration of video podcasts to Netflix, identifying a trend toward a more premium but fragmented advertising landscape. The analysis details divergent monetization strategies from podcast networks like Spotify, iHeartMedia, and Barstool Sports, including hybrid ad models and licensing-first approaches. ARM's report also warns that Netflix's "walled garden" platform currently lacks the granular data needed for podcast attribution, creating measurement challenges for advertisers.
Netflix is planning to offer dynamic ad insertion (DAI) for its anticipated broadcast of the 2027 Women's World Cup, aiming to increase its advertising revenue. However, advertising agencies express caution, citing concerns over high CPMs and scalability issues observed in previous live event broadcasts on the platform. While strategies are being devised to target viewers, high costs have so far prevented live advertising deals from being finalized.
Setplex announced it has won an NAB Show Project of the Year Award for its deployment with UVOtv, a free, ad-supported streaming platform for diaspora audiences in North America. The platform, built on Setplex's Zapflex technology, offers over 700 live channels. It uses a proprietary AI ad-detection system to replace original ad breaks with localized North American inventory in real time with a reported 98% accuracy.
Belgian telecommunications provider Mobile Vikings has launched a new subscription management platform powered by Bango's Digital Vending Machine. The platform, integrated into the 'My Vikings' customer portal, enables subscribers to bundle, manage, and pay for third-party digital services, including a streaming service implied to be Disney Plus, on a single bill. The partnership aims to reduce subscription complexity for Mobile Vikings' digitally-native customer base.
Amazon is reportedly planning to launch an ad-supported tier for its Prime Video streaming service, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Discussions for the new tier have been ongoing for several weeks. The report also states Amazon is in talks with Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Global to offer ad-supported versions of their streaming services through Prime Video Channels.
AI ad tech companies Olyzon and Swivel have partnered to facilitate 'agent-to-agent' media buying, with connected TV (CTV) as the initial focus. The system connects Olyzon's buyer agents with Swivel's seller agents, using the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) to automate the process of finding and negotiating ad placements, bypassing traditional programmatic workflows. French pharmaceutical company Pierre Fabre Group is an early adopter, testing the technology for a US-based CTV campaign for its Eau Thermale Avène skincare line.
TriCoast Media announced the expansion of its unified SSP and DSP platform, which originated from its own needs as a content library owner. The company claims its model, which combines buy-side and sell-side functions rooted in content ownership, can deliver CTV advertising CPMs that are 30-50% lower than traditional programmatic buying. The platform has direct partnerships with over 250 CTV publishers, including VIZIO, Samsung, and Paramount, and operates on a fully managed service model.
Fox has launched Fox AdStudio, an AI-based advertising platform focused on outcomes-based measurement and cross-property reach, including Tubi. Concurrently, Tubi has released a native ChatGPT app to enable conversational discovery, combining large language models with its deep-learning recommendation systems. Tubi's initiative leverages data from its 100 million monthly users and over 1 billion monthly viewing hours.
Disney is planning for its Super Bowl LXI broadcast in 2027, which will be telecast on ABC and ESPN, with a separate "alterna-cast" on ESPN2 led by Peyton and Eli Manning. According to sources, Disney is seeking $10 million for a 30-second ad and is looking for advertisers to commit to matching their Super Bowl spending elsewhere in its media portfolio. This asking price is reportedly meeting resistance.
Blavity Media Group has entered a channel sales partnership with OTTera, allowing Blavity to sell connected TV advertising inventory from OTTera's network. The agreement marks Blavity's first expansion into CTV, enabling its brand partners to distribute campaigns across more than 600 live streaming apps and 2,000 FAST channels. The partnership is focused on extending advertisers' reach into Black households across the U.S.
YouTube is testing a new 'side-by-side' ad format for live streams which has been observed by users. The format presents ads in a separate video player below the active stream, intended to be less interruptive than traditional ad breaks. According to user reports cited in the article, the ads currently have autoplaying audio, which can disrupt the viewing experience.
Untapped Growth and Grain Group are leveraging Magnite's platform to manage live sports advertising campaigns. This collaboration aims to enhance measurable campaign performance for advertisers seeking to reach audiences during live sports events.
India's Connected TV (CTV) market is experiencing rapid growth, with over 129 million users and projected ad investments reaching ₹2,800 crore to ₹3,000 crore by FY26. Despite this expansion, marketers are facing challenges related to audience fragmentation and inefficient measurement, leading to issues like ad frequency control and audience duplication. The industry is shifting towards audience-first strategies and unified measurement to optimize ad spend and leverage CTV as a performance channel, even in Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets.
IAB Tech Lab has released AAMP 2.0, introducing transaction-ready Buyer and Seller Agent SDKs that facilitate automated negotiation and deal execution within guardrails of existing standards. The update also includes an Agentic Audiences OpenRTB extension, Prebid module, and open-source scorer to enable the use of vector embeddings in programmatic advertising. The SDKs are designed for real-world deployment, supporting various storage backends and deployment options, with a focus on scaling, reliability, and security.
FreeWheel has launched a new Partner Portal, a centralized hub for technology partners to integrate with its FreeWheel Streaming Hub for CTV advertising. The portal offers a single dashboard for API access, sandbox testing, and production rollouts, aiming to streamline onboarding and accelerate the deployment of third-party tools for publishers.
Amagi announced an integration between its CTV ad marketplace, Amagi ADS PLUS, and The Trade Desk via The Trade Desk’s OpenPath to enable more direct access to Amagi-supplied premium CTV inventory within The Trade Desk buying platform. The companies position the connection as a way to simplify the programmatic CTV supply chain and improve pricing transparency and efficiency for advertisers and publishers. The announcement was dated March 25, 2025, and notes Amagi will present related capabilities at NAB 2025.
AgenticAdvertising.org (AAO) announces the publication of Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) 3.0, expanding the protocol from media buying/signals into a broader advertising lifecycle scope including discovery, planning, execution, governance, identity, and creative workflows. The article describes new elements such as governance checks with audit trails, a machine-readable brand identity file (brand.json), a “Sponsored Intelligence Protocol” for brand sessions in conversational AI, and a creative workflow intended to generate and distribute multi-format assets from a single brief. It also states AdCP 3.0 expands supported channels from 9 to 20 (including linear TV and streaming-related channels) and notes reference implementation governance (Prebid) and planned future work like third-party auditing for AdCP Verified.
PubMatic features an interview with DIRECTV Advertising’s Tyler DeNicola on efforts to unify linear and streaming ad inventory, with an emphasis on live sports aggregation and programmatic buying. DIRECTV Advertising cites internal data claiming its streaming capabilities have enabled about 40% more live sports impressions versus linear satellite alone, and highlights newer ad formats such as pause ads with addressable and interactive features. The discussion also covers using AI and analytics for inventory packaging, pricing, targeting, yield optimization, and measurement transparency in an authenticated, partner-agnostic programmatic ecosystem.
Disney+ announced it will introduce a new ad-supported subscription tier, “Standard with Ads,” in Australia and New Zealand in the coming months, alongside its existing Standard and Premium plans. The company lists pricing and feature differences, including 1080p video, two concurrent streams, no downloads on the ad tier, and notes that launch timing has not yet been specified.
Live streaming is expected to generate an additional $4 billion in programmatic CTV ad spend globally by 2028, according to estimates from BCG and Google. The article, sponsored by Google Ad Manager, highlights the technical challenges of delivering ads to massive, simultaneous global audiences for live events, advocating for a globally distributed or edge-based ad serving architecture to minimize latency and ensure seamless ad delivery.
FreeWheel announced the launch of Context Engine, an AI-driven feature within FreeWheel’s Streaming Hub designed to enable scaled contextual ad targeting across premium video. The product uses Comcast Technology Solutions’ VideoAI, combining computer vision, machine learning, and generative AI to analyze video content and derive contextual segments and keywords from closed captions and visual signals.
This report details programmatic advertising statistics for 2026, projecting global spend to reach $821 billion with 90% of digital display and 71% of CTV inventory being programmatic. It covers key trends including CTV programmatic spend reaching $36 billion, the dominance of DV360 and Trade Desk among DSPs, and the impact of cookieless programmatic advertising. The report also highlights shifts towards private marketplaces, header bidding configurations, and ad fraud rates across channels.
Netflix said advertising is a key growth driver, projecting $3bn in ad revenue in 2026 (about double 2025) and reporting more than 4,000 advertisers after a 70%+ year-on-year increase in 2025. On its Q1 earnings call, Netflix reported quarterly revenue up 16% to $12.3bn, noted ad-supported plans represented over 60% of Q1 sign-ups where available, and highlighted increased use of its Netflix Ads Suite with programmatic expected to exceed 50% of non-live ads. The company also confirmed co-founder Reed Hastings is stepping down as chairman and reiterated a standalone strategy after withdrawing from a potential Warner Bros. Discovery assets deal.
Viant Technology announced a definitive agreement to acquire TVision Insights, aiming to integrate TVision’s second-by-second “eyes-on-screen” attention measurement signals directly into Viant’s AI-powered programmatic buying platform. The combined offering is positioned to add attention, co-viewing, and in-room presence signals alongside Viant’s identity capabilities to support planning and optimization across linear TV and streaming/CTV inventory, including a proposed “attention-adjusted CPM” metric. The transaction is expected to close in Q2 2026, subject to customary conditions.
As part of its 2026 upfront pitch, Paramount announced several ad-tech initiatives, including the complete merger of the ad tech stacks for Paramount+ and Pluto TV over the summer. The company is also launching Precision+, a new performance advertising tool, offering 'streaming fixed units' for guaranteed ad pod placement, and extending dynamic ad insertion (DAI) to more live sporting events within the CBS Sports digital portfolio.
Expedia Group Advertising has partnered with Magnite to expand its off-platform and curated ad offering. This collaboration aims to provide advertising partners with broader off-platform reach and a more targeted, brand-safe approach to reaching consumers. Magnite is identified as the largest independent sell-side advertising company.
Amazon has launched Prime Video Ultra in the US, replacing the prior ad-free plan and increasing the add-on price for Prime subscribers to $4.99/month from $2.99 (about a 67% increase). The new tier bundles ad-free viewing with additional features, including making 4K/Ultra HD streaming exclusive to Ultra, increasing simultaneous streams from three to five, and raising offline download limits from 25 to 100.
Magnite announced a strategic collaboration with AMC Global Media to make AMC's content available to buyers via Magnite's programmatic platform. This partnership enables programmatic purchasing of unified linear and streaming inventory from AMC Global Media through a single access point.
The article argues that FAST (free ad-supported streaming TV) platforms such as Tubi, Pluto TV, The Roku Channel, and Samsung TV Plus are growing into large, data-driven advertising ecosystems, citing metrics including 100M+ monthly active users for Tubi, 80M+ for Pluto TV, and a U.S. FAST ad market estimate of $12.26B in 2025 with a projection to $27B by 2030. It describes how targeting is enabled by smart TV data (including ACR) and dynamic ad insertion, and outlines buying paths via direct sales and programmatic DSPs (e.g., The Trade Desk, Google DV360) including Roku’s self-serve political ad tools. It also notes that political/issue advertising rules vary by platform and that streaming is not regulated like broadcast by the FCC, with federal requirements mainly tied to FEC disclosures.
Simon-Kucher’s Global Streaming Study 2025 (surveying 12,000+ streamers across 11 countries) reports that streaming usage is stable (88% same or more than last year) and intended churn declined to 35% over the next 12 months, while 42% say they spend too much on streaming. The study highlights rapid adoption of ad-supported tiers—reported at 34% of Netflix and 31% of Disney+ subscriptions—alongside growing demand for live content (30% want more live) and mainstream bundling (51% using bundles, often via telecoms). It also notes increasing competition for attention from social platforms, with 49% of under-40s viewing social media as a substitute for streaming.
This article discusses 'agentic advertising,' an AI-driven approach for executing and optimizing ad transactions, and posits Connected TV (CTV) as its first real testing ground. It highlights how existing CTV ad execution models struggle with complexity and customization, leading to operational bottlenecks for publishers. Agentic systems aim to address these by encoding publisher-defined business rules into seller agents, enabling continuous, automated monetization without constant manual intervention.
Research from subscription bundling platform Bango, based on a survey of 2,500 US consumers, found that 36% of Americans would tolerate twice as many ads in streaming/subscription services in exchange for a lower monthly price, rising to 46% of Millennials and 49% of Gen Z. The report says US consumers pay for an average of 5.2 subscriptions costing about $69 per month, with 23% saying they spend more than they can afford (41% among Gen Z). Willingness to accept more ads was reported as highest among Apple TV users (52%), followed by Disney+ (48%), HBO/Max (47%), Netflix (44%) and Amazon Prime Video (40%).
