Daily News Roundup

Social-native brands love microdramas; Free games will show you more ads if they think you’re worth more; And gambling ads are taking over ESPN.

Agencies are pitching AI directly to CEOS; Xandr under fire for sharing sexual orientation data sourced from Grindr; and Publicis says brands don’t need to sweat big holdcos working for their competitors.

Google is targeting scrapers; YouTube insists it’s not trying to replace traditional TV; and publishers are wary of agentic media buying.

Substack and behiiv are looking at programmatic; AI makes metadata more important than ever; and can Skydance compete with big tech?

Xbox gets into the TV biz; Meta is testing a new monetization model; and who wants to be a hold, anyway?

Walmart has big plans to foray into the TV ad market. Plus: Amazon knows the shape of your butt.

NBCU, FreeWheel, Carat and Newton Research join forces for agentic AI CTV buys; Monday Night Football gets flooded with Texas Senate ads; and justifying “preferred by cats” in pet food ads.

Food and beverage brands have gone off the rails with choosing trendy social marketing terms over truthfulness. Plus: Horizon Global, the joint venture between Horizon Media and Havas, is not gaining too much traction.

OpenWeb files for bankruptcy; consumers lean into agents buying; and there’s a new streaming service in town.

Why retail partnerships are so popular; advertisers aren’t satisfied with OpenAI’s ad measurement; and how US tax dollars ended up going toward pro-Trump ads.

Inside Google’s pay-per-value pilot program. And: Twitch’s latest AI offering is new technology that can contribute to an old problem.

AppLovin sues Unity over data leakage; Meta’s creator business faces an uphill battle in competing with YouTube; and AI search wrongly blames Converse’s old CMO for its current ad controversy.

Advertisers can now buy YouTube Shorts ads alongside open web inventory; Meta just wants to be wanted; and Meta’s Muse shows the danger of blindly trusting AI agents.

Why AI commoditizes publisher content; credit cards are incorporating brand deals at the expense of exclusivity; and McDonald’s launches a media network.

How legit is “annualized revenue run rate” as a metric?; YouTube discusses new creator marketplace tools; and AI agents keep bypassing safeguards.

Prompt Partners There’s a well-worn playbook for big media owners entering programmatic. First, they pick one exclusive or preferred platform partner. Think Walmart and The Trade Desk or Netflix and Microsoft Advertising (née AppNexus). Then, they branch out and add partners, sometimes whole partner programs for creative, measurement, media buying and analytics. Once they’re sophisticated […]

The ad industry added two new alternative IDs this week; Sony and Microsoft file patents that hint at new gaming ad ambitions; and OpenAI says its cookies are for analytics, not targeting.

Ad-free might not be free anymore; Amazon isn’t the only company hiding its transaction data; and the Paramount WBD merger continues.

OpenAi and Microsoft have known about the “doom loop” of content scraping all along; “Fortnite” has become a brand marketer’s nightmare; and Forrester thinks streamers are going to shed their subscription models.

It’s the end of an IPO era for ad tech; Business Insider looks for solutions to its cratering traffic; and Amazon and Walmart’s AI chatbots face criticism.

Perplexity and other LLMs are mounting massive social influencer marketing campaigns. Also: Xbox is not giving up on its advertising ambitions.

Sports leagues swimming in gambling ads cry foul over their players being harassed by gamblers; news publishers consider pivoting to bot audiences; how AI agents are already ruining the web.

Google tests out a “pay per value” AI licensing scheme; Netflix, Amazon and YouTube join forces; and Apple may soon launch integrations with third-party LLMs.

McDonalds is hiring humans again; Madison and Wall predicts “unusually rapid” growth; and families want tech out of their schools.

The IAB raises its forecast for ad spend growth; Google continues to develop Meridian, its open-source MMM tool; and Partiful is still learning how to monetize.

Google must rework search in Europe to comply with the bloc’s Digital Markets Act. Plus: Brands are still trying to figure out how to advertise in video games.

Shunned by streamers, cable news builds its own app bundles; Grindr pays $35 million to settle a UK lawsuit over selling data to advertisers; and LG TVs can be hacked to record audio.

AI needs a babysitter: Google was outbid on Spirit Airlines’ data; and AI-generated food makes for terrible ads.

TikTok users can now include polls and videos in comments; vertical video app Shortical introduces AI ads; and Meta’s upcoming personal agent may cause more problems than solutions.

AI is creating new problems for advertisers; Amazon Prime’s new privacy feature irks customers; and the Trump administration sides with OpenAI in the copyright lawsuit brought forth by the NYT.