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.
The article notes that YouTube has become the most-watched video provider on TV sets, with viewers consuming over a billion hours of YouTube content on televisions. It explores how this shift in viewing behavior contrasts with the allocation of traditional TV advertising budgets and questions why ad spend has not fully followed audiences to YouTube on connected TVs.
The article examines why ad measurement has become critical to OTT and CTV advertising, especially in the context of dynamic ad insertion (CSAI, SSAI, SGAI) and fragmented devices, players, and stakeholders. It outlines standard and enhanced measurement needs (impressions, quartiles, completions, viewability, audio status) and highlights emerging industry standards such as SVTA Ad Creative Signalling, CTA’s CMCDv2, and the IAB’s Open Measurement SDK as tools to deliver trusted, comparable metrics. The piece argues that broadcasters who adopt robust, standards-based measurement will be better positioned to secure ad spend and grow revenue.
The article discusses how advertising budgets on YouTube, despite it being a highly watched platform, often trail the amounts brands still allocate to traditional television. It highlights a disconnect between YouTube’s audience scale and the level of ad spending it attracts from marketers.
PubMatic has launched AI Insights, an AI-powered analytics and benchmarking tool integrated into its platform to help publishers understand real-time demand dynamics and optimize monetization. The product surfaces channel, advertiser, inventory, and buyer behavior insights via dashboards and natural language queries, with use cases highlighted for CTV and online video publishers, including large streaming clients. Early results indicate material eCPM uplift opportunities for CTV and online video inventory when benchmarked against peer cohorts.
Wurl and TVision released a study showing that emotionally relevant contextual ad placements in CTV can significantly increase attention duration from 30% to 70%. This approach provides marketers with a method to enhance ad performance without requiring larger budgets, emphasizing smarter placements over higher spend. The study highlights contextual targeting as a key driver for ad engagement and better outcomes across the marketing funnel.
Prebid.org announced the Prebid Sales Agent, an open-source software solution for agentic advertising, developed in collaboration with AgenticAdvertising.org (AAO). This initiative aims to provide publishers with scalable agentic advertising capabilities without requiring proprietary solutions, enabling them to connect to programmatic and agentic buyers through a unified stack. The Prebid Sales Agent leverages the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) under AAO's governance framework and will be maintained by Prebid.org's developer community.
eMarketer predicts that generative AI (GenAI) will become standard in programmatic advertising by 2026, automating bidding, targeting, creative generation, and measurement. The report anticipates that agentic AI will follow, automating end-to-end campaign workflows, with new protocols like UCP, AdCP, and ARTF accelerating adoption. Marketers are advised to prioritize data integration, AI literacy, and a shift to live feedback systems for measurement.
DataFusion outlines how its programmatic DSP is making connected TV (CTV) advertising smarter, more targeted, and easier to measure. The company highlights its use of first and third-party data for audience targeting, verifiable reach, and real-time measurement in the shifting landscape from linear TV to CTV. DataFusion also provides an overview of the CTV ecosystem, programmatic buying types, and creative best practices for advertisers.
Innovid and Wurl collaborated on a QSR advertising campaign, leveraging Wurl's emotional content targeting and Innovid's dynamic creative optimization to achieve improved results. The initiative highlighted a shift towards using context as a creative input in CTV advertising, not just a targeting parameter. Innovid emphasizes that creative drives about 50% of campaign performance, utilizing AI for scene-level insights.
The article discusses how connected TV (CTV) advertising will evolve by 2026, focusing on the growing maturity of measurement capabilities and the rising importance of curated inventory and audiences. It also examines how AI-driven optimization will shape buying and selling strategies in the CTV ecosystem.
Magnite has developed a 'Seller Agent' to interface with the early-stage open standard Advertising Context Protocol (AdCP). AdCP aims to standardize communication among advertising platforms, publishers, data providers, and AI agents, building upon the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The purpose of the Seller Agent is to provide a shared language for buyer and seller-side AI agents to interpret campaign goals, inventory, and audience signals.
AdExchanger is hosting "Programmatic AI," a conference in May 2026 at the Park MGM in Las Vegas focusing on the application of AI in programmatic advertising. The event covers topics such as AI in media planning, creative optimization, workflow optimization, data privacy, and measurement. The agenda includes keynote speakers and sessions from various companies and industry leaders discussing how AI is reshaping programmatic advertising workflows and strategies.
The article critiques the lack of transparency in Connected TV (CTV) programmatic advertising, asserting it is less transparent than YouTube and hindering advertiser spend and performance. It highlights that CTV publishers often sell inventory without providing program-level data, which contrasts with traditional linear TV models and limits buyers' ability to optimize campaigns. The piece advocates for greater transparency, citing companies like Amazon, Olyzon, Iris TV, Spectrum, and Peer39 as examples making progress in providing more detailed reporting.
This article discusses two newly released AI advertising standards, ARTF (Agentic RTB Framework) and AdCP (Ad Context Protocol), clarifying their distinct purposes to advertisers. ARTF focuses on modernizing programmatic ad auction plumbing for faster transactions, while AdCP aims to be a universal language for AI agents to plan, buy, and measure ad campaigns across platforms. Both standards are designed to integrate AI into advertising workflows and are backed by various industry entities.
This article discusses how "Total TV" integrates linear and digital ad sales to address fragmentation in advertising. It aims to improve measurement accuracy and enhance audience value across different viewing platforms. The content focuses on convergence and collaboration within the TV advertising ecosystem.
The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) released its Q2 2025 Programmatic Transparency Benchmark report, indicating that $26.8 billion in global media value is unrealized due to programmatic inefficiencies and a decline in the TrueCPM Index. Concurrently, ANA launched the ANA Online Benchmark, a free, interactive platform providing real-time programmatic supply chain data to all ANA and TAG members across CTV, web, and mobile in-app environments. The report highlighted increased CTV spending as a percentage of total programmatic spend and continued challenges with log-level data access for marketers.
Wurl, in partnership with TVision, published a study across 50+ CTV campaigns, finding that emotional alignment between ads and content significantly increases viewer attention and watch time. Wurl's BrandDiscovery product, which uses GenAI to match ads to the emotional tone of content, is highlighted as a solution to drive stronger brand outcomes. The report details how emotionally aligned ads lead to higher attention scores, reduced cognitive friction, and improved brand metrics such as favorability and purchase intent.
FanDuel Sports Network has achieved a 25% year-over-year increase in impressions served through Magnite's SpringServe video platform, according to a recent announcement. This growth highlights FanDuel Sports Network's strategy to enhance live sports monetization through Magnite's ad serving and programmatic capabilities, leveraging increased digital consumption of live sports.
Hydrolix has introduced new capabilities to provide streaming ad publishers with end-to-end visibility. This development aims to assist publishers in optimizing their revenue opportunities within the streaming advertising ecosystem.
IAB Tech Lab has formed a Containerization Project Working Group to develop standards for interoperability in the programmatic advertising ecosystem using containerized environments. This initiative aims to improve flexibility, consistency, and scalability for ad tech companies processing programmatic ad auctions. The project seeks industry collaboration to define standard interfaces, service definitions, reference architectures, and best practices for integrating containers.
Google's Campaign Manager 360 (CM360) is enhancing its capabilities through new integrations and updates. These include partnerships with generative AI platforms Adobe GenStudio and Typeface to accelerate creative workflows, expanded automated tracking for YouTube ad formats and via The Trade Desk, and deeper cross-channel insights for CTV and digital video platforms.
eMarketer reports that ad-supported streaming tiers are now the primary driver of new subscriber growth in the US, with 71% of net new SVOD subscribers over the past nine quarters coming from ad-supported plans. Nearly half of all US streaming subscribers (46%) now pay for ad-supported tiers, demonstrating consumer willingness to accept ads for lower costs and high platform retention for these plans.
This article discusses the shift in advertising towards outcome-oriented models, driven by Google and Meta, which presents an opportunity for open web ad tech companies. It highlights Taboola's pivot to a "Performance beyond search and social" message as an example of embracing this 'Outcomes Era.' The analysis suggests open web ad tech can compete by offering transparent outcomes, independent verification, and data control, differentiating themselves from walled gardens.
The in-game advertising market is projected to reach $27.4 billion by 2035, driven by various formats like static, dynamic, and gamevertising across mobile, PC, and console platforms. This article from Avenga provides a guide on how IGA works, its ad-serving mechanisms, measurement techniques including IAB’s OM SDK, and the benefits it offers over traditional marketing for brands and advertisers.
TVNZ has enhanced its ad revenue capabilities by integrating Imagine Communications' SureFire ad management solution. This integration aims to bridge linear and digital ad sales to maximize inventory utilization and improve Total TV monetization for the New Zealand broadcaster.
This article explains various monetization strategies for Over-the-Top (OTT) platforms, detailing five primary methods for generating revenue in the streaming industry. It covers subscription video on-demand (SVOD), advertising video on-demand (AVOD), and transactional video on-demand (TVOD), along with hybrid models and different ad formats like pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll. The piece also discusses technical aspects of ad insertion, such as SSAI and CSAI, highlighting the projected growth of the global OTT market to $434.5 billion by 2027.
Titan OS has selected ThinkAdvertising to enhance its `Titan Audience Segments` offering, enabling targeted CTV ads across millions of European households. ThinkAdvertising will utilize AI and machine learning to process viewership data from Titan OS TVs for audience segmentation. This partnership aims to provide advertisers with more precise targeting capabilities across Titan OS's growing Connected TV ecosystem, including its FAST channels.
Meta has developed Andromeda, a personalized ads retrieval engine leveraging NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchip and Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) hardware, to enhance its Advantage+ automation for ad recommendations. This system utilizes deep neural networks and hierarchical indexing to improve personalization and ad performance, achieving a +6% recall improvement and +8% ads quality improvement on selected segments within Instagram and Facebook applications. Andromeda is designed to scale with the exponential growth of ad creatives generated by generative AI tools, increasing efficiency and return on ad spend for advertisers.
Google's VP and GM of Search Ads, Shashi Thakur, discussed the rollout of AI Overviews in the US and its implications for advertisers. He stated that ads would appear alongside AI answers, sometimes above or below, complementing content with commercial intent. Thakur also addressed concerns from publishers about potential revenue loss, asserting that user engagement with commercial queries and embedded links would continue to drive clicks.
Media companies including Netflix, Disney, NBCUniversal, and Warner Bros. Discovery are hosting annual Upfronts events to woo advertisers, as ad spending continues to shift significantly from traditional TV to digital and streaming platforms. While traditional TV ad buying is projected to see a slight increase of 1% to $18.79 billion, digital advertising spend for Upfronts and Newfronts is expected to jump by nearly 32% to $16.45 billion this year. Streaming advertising revenue across media companies increased by 22% and now accounts for 18% of total advertising revenue.
The article discusses the challenges streaming operators face with Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) measurement, particularly for live and FAST services. It highlights that SSAI aims to provide a broadcast-like ad experience by stitching ads into the stream in real-time.
Wurl has introduced BrandDiscovery, a new GenAI-powered contextual targeting solution for CTV advertisers. This platform leverages AI to analyze content streams in real-time, identifying content genres, brand safety elements, and emotional sentiment at a scene level to improve ad relevance and performance. Wurl is making BrandDiscovery available at no additional cost across over 60 billion CTV impressions per month in the US.
Roku is expanding its home-screen advertising with new interactive and shoppable ad formats, reaching beyond entertainment to industries like automotive and travel. This shift aligns with a broader industry-wide trend where smart TV operating systems, including Samsung's Tizen and LG's webOS, are increasing ad loads to enhance monetization.
This article details the operational and financial distinctions between Video on Demand (VOD) and Pay Per View (PPV) models. It outlines how VOD relies on content libraries monetized through subscriptions or advertising, while PPV focuses on single-transaction access to time-sensitive or exclusive content. The analysis covers the benefits and working mechanisms of each model for content owners and viewers.
VPlayed's blog post examines the dynamics of SVOD (Subscription Video on Demand) and AVOD (Advertising Video on Demand) models for VOD businesses, analyzing their benefits, challenges, and suitability based on content type, audience, and financial goals. The article highlights the projected growth of the SVOD market to $32.3 billion by 2025 and positions VPlayed as a platform for building video monetization services. It provides guidance for businesses on choosing the right monetization strategy and pricing models, emphasizing the importance of a well-integrated revenue model for streaming success.
This article from VPlayed outlines eight strategies for making money with live streaming by 2026, including building owned platforms, pay-per-view events, ad placements, and selling merchandise. It emphasizes moving away from third-party platforms to gain control over data, pricing, and monetization models. The piece forecasts the global live streaming market to reach $756.5 billion by 2031, driven by diversified monetization and direct platform ownership.
Google's "Think with Google APAC" details how advertisers can utilize AI-powered ad solutions on YouTube to enhance marketing efforts and drive consumer purchase confidence, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. The article highlights new ad solutions like Video Reach Campaigns, Video View Campaigns, and Demand Gen, all leveraging Google AI to optimize ad delivery across YouTube's various formats, including Shorts and Connected TV.
This article discusses the evolving relevance of music videos, particularly focusing on the debate around music video directors receiving a percentage of streaming income, initiated by Nigerian director TG Omori's proposal for 10% royalties. It explores the historical context of music videos, their current artistic importance, and the financial challenges faced by directors, highlighting a similar agreement in France by SACEM to provide fixed streaming rates to collaborators including video directors.
The article reports that Yahoo expanded its partnership with AVOD provider Glewed TV, making Glewed a preferred partner in Yahoo’s supply-side platform and adopting Yahoo’s cookieless identity solution, ConnectID, for identity resolution. It also highlights broader CTV/AVOD advertising trends, citing forecasts that AVOD represents over half of U.S. digital video viewers and that global AVOD ad spend could reach $47B of the CTV market by 2023, with additional targeting potential via ACR data.
This article discusses the "buffering problem" in AdTech, where video ads fail to load properly or are served incomplete, leading to wasted ad spend. It identifies the issue as a significant cost for advertisers, potentially totaling millions of dollars annually.
This article from VPlayed outlines various OTT monetization models including AVOD, TVOD, SVOD, and less common strategies like coupons and catch-up TV. It emphasizes the importance of secure video delivery and discusses Server-side Ad Integration (SSAI) for cross-platform monetization and bypassing ad blockers. The piece is framed as evergreen advice for choosing optimal revenue models and implementing best practices.
